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If you are considering the step up to management, IMechE’s Essential Management Skills event could be for you. The three-day conference is designed to help you build the confidence, capability and mindset you’ll need for the next stage of your career.
Leadership trainer and coach Andy Webber is one of the workshop leaders. Here are his four tips to prepare for a management role.
Know who you are
Self-awareness is key; it’s a foundational thing. Good leaders, good managers, are themselves – it’s no good trying to pretend to be someone you’re not.
One of the activities we often do in workshops is to bring to mind a leader or manager you admire, and then talk about what they did and how they did it. It’s not about trying to become them – it’s about understanding the things they did, and how you can do those things in your own way.
In order to be yourself, you need to know yourself. It’s your strengths that got you to where you are today, so let’s use those to make progress.
Be flexible
While it is important to understand yourself and use your strengths, it is also key to develop flexibility in a whole range of different ways. We need to be flexible in the way we communicate messages, to make sure we get them across to different audiences.
We need to be flexible enough to understand all the different people we are working with. They will all require a slightly different approach – what motivates one person is not the same as what motivates another.
Shift your perspective
If you were to ask me the key difference between being an engineer and being a manager, the thing that changes is you’re no longer just responsible for what you do. Your performance is measured on what other people do, so your task changes from an engineering task to a ‘managed people’ task.
The biggest challenge engineers face is looking away from the technical thing they’ve spent their life training and developing – and, in most cases, loving – to actually let that go and really refocus on people.
It’s a very different challenge – if you’re working with an engineering system, you press a button and the same thing should happen, regardless of whether it’s working properly or not. With people, you ‘press a button’ with one person and one thing happens, and with another person another thing happens – then the next day, the same button does something else. The task is much less predictable; people are endlessly changeable.
Provide purpose
Purpose is the key to leadership. People can do things in the dark, and they can do the same thing over and over with no real idea of the reason why if you reward them. They’ll do that – but they won’t be happy. They won’t enjoy it; it’ll just be a monotonous, mundane grind.
What makes things interesting is to understand the bigger picture – what happened before your task and what happens after. Even on a production line, loads of studies have shown that understanding the reason for the work makes people more productive. Give them a reason for doing the things they do.
Essential Management Skills runs at the University of Warwick from 8-10 April. Find out more and book.
At an earlier stage in your journey? IMechE’s Early Career Development Programme can give you the knowledge and skills you need to succeed. The next cohort runs from April 2026 to September 2027. Find out more and book.
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.