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Leadership in High-Tech Companies: Table of Contents
- Requirements for managers
- Common deficiencies
- Style, attitude, culture
- Generation Y
- Recruiting
- Promotion and development
The target audience of this trend guide
This document addresses typical questions that arise regarding leadership in companies. For example, to what extent leadership skills can be learned, how relevant positions should be filled, and how the requirements and tasks of leaders change over time and with experience of carrying out this responsibility. This trend guide is intended for anyone involved in or interested in leadership roles.
What exactly is a leader?
The Gabler Business Dictionary defines the term "leadership" as follows: "...the alignment of the actions of individuals and groups toward the realization of predetermined goals, mediated through interaction; it involves an asymmetrical social relationship of superiority and subordination." This includes leading other managers as well as leading employees without managerial responsibilities. In project work within matrix organizations, there is a special form of leadership: leadership without disciplinary authority. In this case, the project manager's task is to lead a project team. However, their team members report to line managers, for example, if a project team consists of representatives from the mechanical engineering, electronics, software, and controlling departments. Very often, the project manager position serves as a stepping stone to disciplinary leadership responsibility within middle management. Therefore, it is advisable to pay particular attention to project managers, especially with regard to developing future leaders.
Leadership in high-tech companies
What are the typical requirements for managers?
Theresia Volk: Technical expertise alone (from technical training) is not sufficient qualification for becoming a manager. The demands within a company are too complex to be satisfactorily met with this 'classic' understanding of task completion, and the requirements for managers are different from those for technical experts.
This is a statement by Theresia Volk. It can be further specified as follows:
Upon assuming a leadership position, employees face different priorities than those required for their previous, purely technical responsibilities. While the focus was previously on factual and detailed issues, it is now increasingly important to consider and maintain strategies and people. In addition to the requirements for technical qualifications (in our case, technical), "interdisciplinary" skills, the so-called soft skills, become crucial. Specifically, these include social competencies such as motivation, communication skills, conflict resolution, and team development. Looking at the pyramid (Fig.), which represents a leadership hierarchy within a company, it becomes very clear that soft skills are increasingly decisive for success the higher a manager is positioned in the hierarchy. Ultimately, above the first management level, the focus shifts significantly to winning people over to shared goals and utilizing the available resources in the best possible way to achieve those goals. Simultaneously, the perspective shifts from the detailed technical level to a more strategic, overarching view.
Peter Siwon: The annual ESE Congress (ESE = Embedded Software Engineering), with over 800 attendees, offers a wide range of technical presentations as well as sessions on soft skills. The number of participants in the soft skills sessions is comparable to that in the technical sessions, demonstrating the strong interest in this topic among highly technically oriented individuals. Unfortunately, this interest is not reflected in the investment in training and development for lower and middle management.
This does not mean that the specialist knowledge and professional experience acquired up to that point are useless. They are not only an important basis for the acceptance of the manager, but also a helpful prerequisite for effective communication with and management of specialists. The concept of specialist skills (hard skills) should therefore not be disregarded.
However, the usefulness of this knowledge and the way in which it is applied change when assuming a leadership role. Now, for example, it's about translating company goals into the world of those who are to implement them technically, and translating the technical results into the language of top management.
The soft skills mentioned at the beginning (motivation, conflict resolution, etc.) become hard skills here, because these abilities are necessary to achieve the goals of a manager.
The gap
Unfortunately, reality often looks different: Managers struggle to adopt this new perspective on technical content. They tend to take matters into their own hands (the technical aspects). At the same time, they are hesitant to venture into the unfamiliar territory of social skills and actual leadership work.
Peter Siwon: In my seminars and coaching sessions, it repeatedly becomes clear that there is a great need for improvement, particularly in communication, especially in difficult situations. These include objections, resistance, conflicts, high time or cost pressures, and motivational problems.
Ingo Pohle, MicroConsult: Communication between top management and executives, especially the "lower" executives, often works poorly.
This deficiency becomes a significant business risk, particularly with highly trained, specialized employees. The result is often frustration on the part of both managers and employees. Thus, in many companies, a gap exists between the aspiration for successful leadership and reality, because the transition from technical to managerial responsibility is underestimated and therefore insufficiently supported. There is a prevailing misconception that people who know how to handle a technical task are also capable of leading others who take on that task.
Furthermore, the benefits of soft skills and the effort required to develop them to a professional level are underestimated. Consequently, there is little willingness to prepare employees for leadership roles through professional training and coaching, and to support their further development.
Therefore, many companies lack both a recognizable leadership culture or guiding principles for managers and managers with sound methodological knowledge for the practical implementation of such a culture. This includes, for example, methods of communication, motivation, and conflict resolution that are based on a fundamental leadership philosophy. A fundamental leadership philosophy might be, for instance, that employee self-responsibility, potential development, and loyalty are of the highest priority.
The most important soft skills
Professionally relevant |
Concerning the personality |
General (character-shaping) |
| Communication skills | empathy | Human nature |
| Cooperation skills | Assertiveness | self-consciousness |
| Coordination skills | sensitivity | creativity |
| Conflict resolution skills | Interpersonal flexibility | empathy |
| Teamwork skills | Willingness to take initiative | Assertiveness |
| Integration ability | expressiveness | trustworthiness |
| Strategic thinking | intuition | Ability to accept criticism |
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