There are benefits to your supervisor or manager not having a lot of technical knowledge about a project. Rather than getting caught up in the technical details when communicating with management and stakeholders, the supervisor / manager can look at all of the different pieces that the cross-functional team is working on and assess how they each contribute to the success of the project. The supervisor / manager can bring on the right team members—with their differing areas of expertise—and trust them to be able to focus on the technical aspects of the project. The job of the supervisor / manager is to handle the communication, documentation, and organization necessary to get projects successfully to the finish line.
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Great …
But in practice this ends up as a supervisor constantly saying ‘both those ideas have merit, do both the good idea and the stupid idea, because it won’t be me working unpaid overtime on the id--ts idea that doesn’t pan out, and I don’t want to shoot down the id--ts idea because I can’t tell which is which’
OP’s statement can be found in nearly every project management and org structure textbook. Amazing to see such resistance to best practice.
The problem is most sups that I know are poor at human resource issues from hiring, managing growth, firing, etc. They’ve stagnated for so long that in addition to not being technical they’re just poor people managers. Passive aggressive is the only game they know how to play. And that game is a good indicator of the culture.
That’s just smoke and mirror sh-t. The supervisor and manager is supposed to manage their area. I don’t know of any manager that has cross functional technical team. There are specific technical people who are designated cross-discipline who are suppose to do that.
I ran across these types of “Manager” who are out try to get more visibility as go-between as cross functional rather than to help grow and broaden careers of the people they manage. They get in there to make decision when they shouldn’t and create messes. What a troll. Go back to school to learn some engineering and people management skills.
@1vnx+1jGHDyOm got it right.
Too late for me. I got frustrated working for too many mediocre to bad managers. Not good for my career or my health to be working in place. So I left recently.
In the affiliates most senior managers have come up through the ranks as in normal companies and know the business technical and commercial. Many are good managers who can manage the business with leverage from their technical days to get a complete job. I have never seen that at EMHC or on many projects. We still have a box ticking management wannabe mentality. This has to go, been too long
Seriously? You got to be joking. Most supervisors, managers, and DH don’t even know the expertise of the people they manage. I don’t expect them to be experts, but they should know fundamentals of the technology and discern who has the right skills to be pulled in.
My experience is that they simply get in the way, creating more confusion and work just to justify their existence.
Never once I expect my supervisor knows down to the fine details of what I do, but I DO expect them to know the general direction so that they can help secure the proper resource based on the value of work. They are also the one defending your PDS each year, imagine if they have no idea what you do, how would they come to defend you?
Interesting to see these replies when the OP's statements are literally best practice in not only oil and gas but also tech.
Is this a joke?
We all know what an ideal supervisor could do for his/her team, regardless of how knowledgeable or not is in the team's domain.
The problem with EM supervisors is not if they are technically competent or not, although it would help so they don't speak from their a$$es so often or rely on the the team-leads to speak from their a$$es.
The problem with EM supervisors is that THEY MANAGE UPWARDS!!!!!
They spent 99% of their time focusing in their bosses as opposed to focusing 99% focusing in their team and the team member development.
Who writes this 1d1ot1c posts?
Do you work in EM??????
Have you every experienced an EM supervisor in your life????
And then move jobs every 18 mon so their “non-informed” technical opinions on how their teams should be performing tasks never catch up with them right???
This is an example of how a once great corporation declines and becomes incompetent