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11.08

Why Companies Don’t Train Engineers

By Gary Perman

Beyond your own initiatives, are you being prepared for the next step in your career? Probably not.

Engineers say the number-one reason they want to leave their current company is because they don’t see management making any effort to advance their careers. Companies lure top engineering talent with the promise of training them for career advancement; once there, those engineers are often disappointed when it becomes obvious that there is no such plan. When a company fails to make good, talented employees stagnate, morale declines, and with it, production and innovation falter. Under these circumstances, it doesn’t take long for a discouraged employee to begin looking for another job.

Succession management refers to the identification and development of potential successors within a company. The key to succession management is creating a match between the company’s future needs and the aspirations of individual employees. And remember: employee training is only a part of succession management — in and of itself, training is not succession management.

A well-developed succession management process boosts retention rates of superior employees because they recognize the fact that their company is investing in their career. When management continues to challenge and reward talented employees, it eliminates their need to seek opportunities elsewhere.

Developing leadership talent — a long-term investment of time and resources — is something many companies ignore. Why? Such decisions are often based on misconceptions and misinformation about succession management. When companies allow themselves to be pressured by the demands for immediate returns on investments from stockholders, investors and short-sighted executives, high turnover rates result in increased recruitment and re-training costs, production and innovation delays, and time lost as new employees get acclimated to a new corporate culture.

A succession system succeeds by having more than one good person available for key positions; real success requires choices between two or more qualified people. In order to have choices, supervisors need to identify individuals who are ready now, and what it will take to make others ready when they’re needed. Having such options seems like common sense; so, why aren’t all companies buying into succession management?

Obstacles to Succession Planning

PermanTech conducted an Internet survey among technology executives in July 2008. The results reflected responses often expressed by the employees with whom PermanTech consults. Common characteristics of companies that do not practice succession management include:

• A lack of vision at the top

• Fear of replacement — a lack of trust within management, fearing they would be replaced if they trained a successor

• Company leaders who want to stick with the status quo — It’s worked this way for twenty years, why change anything now?

• The attitude that succession management is time consuming, and requires financial resources and proactive planning

• An emphasis on short-term thinking, including executive focus on company revenue and profits

• The perception that the employee — especially the engineer — is “disposable”

• The belief that smaller companies are product-centered rather than people-centered, thus less time and resources are invested and available for succession management

Erika McDaneld, human resources manager at QL2, a software as a service (SaaS) firm in Seattle, echoes an overwhelming sentiment common of smaller companies: “I believe in our case it's a lack of executive support due to the fact that we're still a small company under 100 employees, as well as the perceived costs. Not only money, but the time involved in succession planning. It's not considered to be an added value at this point ... or in this stage of our company's growth cycle.”

Nick Murphy, IT director at EthicsPoint, a software development company in Portland, Oregon, believes succession management fails due to management’s misplaced attitudes and fallacious beliefs. Murphy thinks that two kinds of managers contribute to the problem: those intimidated by people they perceive as smart (or smarter than them), and thus a threat to their own job; and those that have no clout within their company.

For the intimidated managers, Murphy asks, “When, in reality, have you ever heard of someone getting fired because they hired someone too great? I try to find people who I perceive as being able to fill in my shoes if anything were to happen to me, and my company has thoroughly enjoyed the success of my staff.”

Then there are the managers with no organizational influence. Some companies don’t value IT, and therefore don’t see the value in training IT workers. And if the manager lacks sufficient clout, there’s little hope for putting a successful plan in place. “If the company is not willing to accept IT, and their employees, as not only integral but critical to their business, you will never have succession management,” Murphy says.

Risks of Not Training Engineers

If succession management is not implemented, especially in many small to mid-sized companies, what do companies have to lose?

Death of a company leader or the CEO/founder decides to depart the company. PermanTech recently interviewed a Denver-based IT manager who had been with the same high-tech manufacturer for the past 11 years. The president of the company decided to step down last year — giving six months notice — to pursue other interests. During those six months, no successors were chosen. He left anyway, leaving a gap of knowledge and no leadership in place. Then three of the firm’s five vice presidents decided to leave the company at the same time to pursue other interests. Eventually, a new executive team was recruited, bringing with them new philosophies, new cultures, and a new environment foreign to the remaining leadership. This manager is no longer happy in the new culture and is actively looking for a new position as are other remaining staffers.

Lack of vision at the top executive level. This condition covers a gamut of misconceptions, fables and fallacies, such as:

• “If every employee is trained to advance, companies would run out of the little guys...”

• “Professional development is the responsibility of the employee, not the company…”

• “We are now turning into an economy of free agents, so if you are not branding yourself and managing your own career, it’s easy to get left behind…”

• “It’s not my job — that’s the job of the HR department.”

When executives rely on such copouts, they run the risk of losing star employees to competitors who embrace succession planning.

The fear of replacement. Executives and managers who fear that training subordinates will produce competitors within the company demonstrate a basic insecurity in themselves and their company. Yet a corporate culture that does not encourage succession management means those potential competitors will eventually leave the company for competitive endeavors.

“Many executives and managers live in fear these days that they are one e-mail away from being replaced,” says Gary Feather, vice president for consumer systems and technology at Sharp Laboratories of America. “They want the perception to exist that what they know and who they know is their security blanket, that they must be retained, even in very hard times. They focus on getting ahead and holding their ground at all costs. If a replacement is identified, trained, qualified and certified, then how can they feel safe?”

Company short-sightedness. Many companies labor under short-sighted attitudes, finding comfort in the day-to-day stability of their IT operations to the point where they delay initiating succession programs. “Mid-level people in IT watch for leadership, strength and guidance from our executives. When we don't find it, we leave,” says Noah Murphy, senior systems engineer at U.S. Digital. “Not caring for the needs of mid-level IT employees to cross-train and plan for advancement is the mind of the short sighted.” Murphy says he’s worked for several IT leaders with a short-sighted perspective throughout his career, and has seen many IT pros come and go as a result.

“IT operates from two perspectives of corporate executives: a driver perspective and a support perspective,” says Arthur Langer, director of the technology management master’s program at Columbia University in New York. “Most senior executives view IT as a support role to the company rather than a driver. If you have a supporter mentality, you are more reactive, governed more by reactivity versus a long-term planning perspective. Succession management is a strategic behavior.”

If succession planning is a low priority, Langer says, executives will take the support view of engineering. If it’s a high priority, they’ll have the driver perspective, which has the added bonus of less turnover challenges.

Changing Employment climate. Skilled talent is becoming more difficult to find. Too many executives believe that employees are disposable and can be replaced at a moment’s notice. Of course, they couldn’t be further from the truth. According to the U.S. Department of Labor — and assuming only half their numbers are correct, which is unlikely — the skilled employment gap will continue to widen, creating ever-growing stress on companies to recruit talent and implement succession management strategies to retain the top talent they have. As Baby Boomers retire, creating further gaps in skilled talent, succession management will become even more critical as employers discover finding and recruiting talent is becoming increasingly challenging and costly. Expect the future to bring longer periods for search and recruitment, as well as increased costs in talent acquisition, not to mention lost revenues from delays in innovation, production and down time. When employees discover that a company lacks a succession management plan, they believe their chances for career advancement are limited with that employer, and they will eventually leave and try to advance somewhere else.

If companies are to be successful in their growth and profitability, even as a small or mid-sized company, succession management need to be top priority among the company’s board of directors and top leadership.

Gary Perman is a certified recruiting professional and owner PermanTech, which specializes in recruiting technology executives, managers and engineers. He also hosts a technology employment blog. Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.

Opinions expressed are the author's.