The Engineering Leadership Gap: Where Will the Next Generation of MDs Come From?
I started my career as an Engineer in aerospace. Like many Engineers, my focus was on becoming better at what I did: understanding the technology, solving problems and developing my technical knowledge.
My career later took me into international sales, product management and special-purpose machinery before eventually moving into executive search.
That journey has given me an interesting perspective on a question I believe more Engineering and manufacturing businesses need to be asking:
Where will our next generation of Managing Directors come from?
Technical excellence doesn't automatically create great leaders
Engineering and manufacturing businesses are very good at developing technical expertise.
We train Engineers, develop specialists and create people with exceptional knowledge of products, processes and applications.
But developing a future MD requires something different.
As people progress into senior leadership, the problems change. Can they build and lead a senior team? Can they make difficult commercial decisions? Can they communicate a strategy people believe in? Can they lead an organisation through change?
Perhaps most importantly, can they move from being the person who solves problems to the person who enables others to solve them?
That's a significant transition.
Are we developing leaders early enough?
I regularly encounter engineering and manufacturing businesses with extremely capable management teams.
But ask, "Who could run this business in five years?", and the answer can become less certain.
Succession planning is easy to leave until tomorrow. The problem is that leadership succession rarely works to a convenient timetable.
A Managing Director retires. A senior leader is approached by another organisation. Growth accelerates. An acquisition changes the structure of the business.
Suddenly, tomorrow's leadership challenge becomes today's recruitment problem.
That's why I believe businesses need to identify leadership potential much earlier.
If somebody could conceivably become your MD in five years, what experiences do they need between now and then?
Perhaps an Engineering Director needs greater commercial exposure. An Operations Director may need experience of international markets. A high-potential manager might need the opportunity to lead a major transformation programme.
Simply waiting for somebody to become "ready" isn't succession planning.
Your next MD may not follow the traditional route
There's another assumption I think we should challenge: that tomorrow's engineering and manufacturing leaders will all follow similar career paths to today's.
They may come through engineering or operations, but they could equally come through sales, supply chain, finance or another commercial discipline.
What matters is whether talented people are being given enough breadth of experience to understand the whole business.
And sometimes the person required won't exist internally at all.
If a manufacturer is entering international markets, investing heavily in automation, professionalising a founder-led business or attempting to double in size, it may need leadership experience that simply doesn't exist within the organisation.
That's when looking externally becomes important.
Rather than starting with a job title, I prefer to start with the business challenge:
What needs to be different in three years because this person joined the organisation?
Answer that properly and the leadership requirement becomes considerably clearer.
The conversation needs to start now
Engineering and manufacturing have spent decades discussing technical skills shortages. I think we need to give the leadership pipeline the same attention.
I'd encourage every board to consider three questions:
Who could lead this organisation in five years?
What experience do they still need to gain?
And if that person isn't currently inside the business, do we understand what we'll eventually need to find outside it?
Leadership shortages don't begin when an MD hands in their notice. They begin years earlier, when businesses fail to identify and develop the people they'll eventually need.
If you're starting to think about succession, strengthening your senior leadership team or understanding what leadership talent exists in the market, I'd be very happy to have a conversation.
Get in touch with me at ATA Search to discuss your leadership plans and the talent you'll need to achieve them