46. Technical Management is Not Real Management – Tech Field Day Podcast

The world of technology is complicated, but when you add the layer of management above it, it gets even more complicated. What does it take to be a good technical manager? Do you just have to know what you're doing?

Or are you going to have to relearn things that you never thought you needed to know? In this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast, it Tech Management isn't real management. Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast, where each episode we bring together a group of influential IT experts to discuss a singular topic in the enterprise IT industry.

Tech Field Day is a part of the future and group, and we often record this podcast in association with one of our tech field day events. We're at Cisco Live EMEA 2025, and I would like to take a moment for our guests to introduce themselves before we jump into the premise for today's podcast starting with Zoe. Hello, my name is Zoe Ez, and I'm a security operations manager.

Hey, I'm Dominic Picard, uh, out of Berlin Security, uh, is my passion since the last two decades. Hello, I'm David Penalosa. I'm a consulting engineer working on SD one and a CI mostly on a daily basis.

And I'm Tom Hollingsworth, event lead and practice lead here at Tech Field Day, part of the Futureum group. Let's jump into the premise for today's episode. We all know that eventually when you do well in your role, you're gonna get promoted into management.

That doesn't matter whether you're an individual contributor or technical. However, being a technical manager has a different spin on things, and there's a lot of other concerns that you have to think about, including the fact that you could find yourself hitting a very high ceiling before you know it. The premise for this episode is that tech management isn't real management.

Uh, hopefully you're not already trying to type out a a comment saying that I'm wrong, but I just want to, I want to open this up to our wonderful panel here because one of the things that I think we we lose sight of is the fact that when technical people are promoted into leadership and management roles, they often have to wear different hats. I mean, I can say by show of hands, just because I am now a managing people doesn't mean I also don't get phone calls to go fix the really hard problems. It's just now I have to figure out how my team's supposed to work when we do that.

Is that something that you guys have, have encountered in your roles, whether you are in a leadership role or you work for someone who's been moved into a leadership role as a technical person? Yeah, I mean, I think the hardest is actually being, having to deal with the difficult, the very challenging tasks that are technical when I'm not as hands-on day to day as well. So I may not know the tooling as well as I used to.

So I think wearing all those different hats, but not having the in-depth knowledge of all the different areas makes it a little bit stressful. Um, I I also like the term of you're hired up until you're incompetent. So I, hopefully I'm not incompetent, but I'm not as skilled at my current job that I was at my last job.

I mean, I'm a tech, I'm, my, my experience with technology was I got to do all the things and now I have to tell people to do all the things. So yeah, I would say it's pretty accurate. Peter principle at work, you're promoted to your level of incompetence.

Yeah, I, I, I get that. And as, as funny as it sounds, it's, it really does feel like sometimes people who are even above me on the chain are less impacted by the individual pieces of the job. Mm-hmm.

They, they have more of a strategic thinking around things. So maybe they don't know why the router's important, but they understand why the line of business that it creates is critical. But that's what the feedback I always get is always, Zoe, you're going too in depth.

Mm-hmm. Like, take a step back. I don't care about how it works day to day, what do you need to do?

And so I have to put that different hat on of, okay, I'm not the tech at the moment. How could I plan this in a way that a tech didn't? Let's come back to that idea in just a minute.

I wanna give David and Dominic a chance to Jump in. It doesn't make sense though, to completely move yourself or, or abstract yourself away from, from the trenches. Not not mean in a bad way, but when you're in management, you have to look at things with a different, well, simply with, with different eyes.

But at the same time, forgetting about the people you're managing is, I think is also going into the other extreme, you know, towards the other extreme. Oh, I agree. Because I, it's common that, okay, fine, we're gonna be strategic.

Everything looks wonderful in Excel until it doesn't. And then, oh my God, I forget, I'm actually managing humans. Not, I don't know, Lego boxes or turtles or whatever.

I actually like turtles. Okay, that was in a video before, right? So let's leave it at Legos.

I don't know. What do you think? Yeah.

Also, the promise, you have a classical management background, not the tech background. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

You're looking for KPIs. How many tickets have been solved over time and so on. But often in technology we are discovering new frontiers.

So ai, when it was a new technology, everybody was on the discovery phase. Yeah. There was no KPI, no, no maintenance of business actions that you could measure.

And and often I see technologies changing all the time. We have this hype cycle. There's always coming new things.

And it's hard for the management to, let's say, embrace this constant change, constant developing something new. Sometimes this is not measurable. It's really hard.

Let's say somebody is doing a major cloud migration. Yeah. And they do everything different than they did before on, on-premise.

Yeah. How do you measure all that? Yeah.

And to have a manager that is embracing that and is saying, my team was effective because they made this fundamental change. They embraced new technology, they were going forward, maybe non KPI was showing green and you solved a lot of tickets, but this was still the right thing. And it's kind of against the classical management approach.

So how do you measure success then? Yeah. But that, that's a good point because we have metrics for everything, right?

And anybody who's ever, uh, watched like, uh, Moneyball with Brad Pitt knows that you can just invent metrics for anything, because there's always something that you need to measure. And the problem is, is that people at different levels measure things differently. And I love the fact that you guys bring up trouble tickets because trouble tickets is actually one of those weird metrics that different people see differently as technical people.

We look at a solve trouble ticket as success, right? The customer had a problem, I fixed the problem, the ticket is closed. That means that that will not be a problem anymore.

But for someone who's at a high level of management, they see that as resources spent. So if I can reduce the number of tickets in my system, that means that my resources are more available to do things. However, as technical people and technical managers, we know that unreported problems are not opened.

Tickets that are festering in the network, which lead to things like our users saying, well, the network doesn't work, or the wireless is down, or something like that. Whereas we would rather have the ticket to know that that's a problem. But management would love it if maybe we reduced our tickets by 10% this quarter because it makes us look more efficient.

And that's a hard problem to solve for people because I have to have a foot in both worlds. Right. And, and I, coming back to the point you made, Zoe, it's, it's like we're almost, we're code switching at times where it's like, I'm a technical person who has to solve this problem and make sure that the team is, is, is getting the job done.

But I am also a manager who has to sit in a meeting and explain why we did these things. Mm-hmm. And dancing back and forth with those two things can be very difficult.

So is it a problem that technical people have that they can't unlearn what they've learned before in order to be able to move up? Because that's the other thing that I think is important to note. Most of the people who are in the C-suite didn't start off on that tech path.

Most of them have what we would consider to be a classical education in the other aspects of the business, whether it's finance or human resources or things like that. But I think from my perspective, I'm a woman working in security, it's pretty rare to see a woman working in a senior position in security. Mm-hmm.

Thankfully that's changing and it's getting better, but it's not 50 50. So I think it's also how do we measure the success of the manager as well? Because I don't think, I don't think there's any situation where I can fully be a non-technical person that will never exist.

I'm always going to view from that perspective. So maybe there is a limit to how senior I can get, probably. Um, but also it would be very detrimental if I did get to that point because I'm then going to get to a point where I start assigning tasks that I don't know the impact to the end team member is.

And so I say, well, why didn't you finish that yet? Or Why didn't you investigate this hugely complex incident yet? I have to know what the impact to them is, Or what's a DA Yeah.

Yeah. But, but I can't, I can't, I can't do that effectively as a manager if I don't know what I'm asking them. My management has to trust that I know what I'm talking about.

And I think to be an effective technical manager is you have to be able to build the business relationship with senior leadership as well as understand the tech. Maybe not having as much hands-on day to day, but still understanding what you're asking. And that's a bloody hard position to be in.

It is. And also it has some its own limitations. Uh, but because in many cases you get stopped being mid-management, you cannot get to a senior position because simply the, the points of view are completely different.

And then, then you would hit some sort of ceiling and then, oh, you get stuck there. But One thing I will say is my current position, I'm a manager, I'm a people manager, therefore the company said, well, you have to take this people management training. And I said, management training.

I've been a manager for a long time. And they said, just take it. And actually it was really beneficial.

Um, some of it was stuff I'd learned before, but I did like, um, specifically the bit about receiving feedback was very beneficial for me. 'cause I am not very good at getting positive feedback. But, um, I, uh, I found that beneficial and it helped me view from other people's perspectives.

And I enjoyed that. If I wanna go to a more senior position, I probably need that traditional training that I never took. Mm-hmm.

So business training, as boring as it sounds, probably would benefit me and maybe I wouldn't hate it. Yeah. But to your point, the word is split on trust to other managers, to your team members.

Mm-hmm. Everybody, if you trust each other, then you can be effective in, in the thing you do. Where I'm struggling often is the different tech tribes have to be treated differently.

Mm. And often upper management just treat this as one technology. They don't see the difference.

I make a practical example. I'm working in user support. A ticket comes in, I want to solve this as fast as possible to make the user happy.

And there is an ETA and an SLA how fast can you solve it? And you can measure this. Yeah.

Let's look at security completely different stories. If you have a low number of tickets, maybe your visibility into your security, uh, let's say aspect is not very good because a lot of the things you just don't get tickets for. Yeah.

So actually it's the other way around. It's better to have more tickets with more qualified things, and then it's totally fine if a soc engineer spends a whole day on a serious deep dive investigation, which would be kind of not nice for user problem resolution. So, and this needs to be understand from management that I have to treat this differently.

These are two different things. Yeah. Mm.

And something that you brought up, kind of talking about that traditional management training that a lot of people go through, it not only teaches you how to be a person who can manage people, but it also focuses the way that you react to certain situations. In a way it makes you predictable. And that is one of the things to kind of point to Dominic's point, upper management sees technology as like a department like accounting or hr, when in fact we're a bunch of little departments.

But the opposite is actually true too, because we see the C-suite as this weird council on high that makes decisions that sometimes don't impact us. And when you are on the outside of that group trying to get in as a management team member, that political culture inside of an organization can be challenging. And a perfect example of this is Pat Gelsinger.

Pat Gelsinger, former CEO at Intel is a technical person. Pat is one of the most technical people in the management suite anywhere. And he replaced a traditional CEO who was a finance person.

He made his attempt to change intel. And he was effectively run off by the finance people because Pat's technical background did not mesh well with their financial outlook. Now, but that's a political decision, right?

We need somebody who's not you, who does things differently than you to do this. And I feel like, is that the case that you run into where when you get to a certain point that creates the, the upper bound of where you can go because you don't know how to play the political game because you haven't been to the classes and built the business relationships and spent time, I don't know, on the golf course or something like that. 'cause like, we make fun of that, right?

Like, where are we going out to play golf when we could be over here fixing broken servers and stuff like that. But to them, the golf course is as much about the networking and business relationships as anything else. And to me, it's a waste of time in stupid shorts.

But to some people as that, they haven't been trained in that. But some others are not even interested in learning it. I don't wanna know how to play golf.

No, not golf. But the, the, the political discussions, I, I, I have a bunch of colleagues who when they got promoted to a management position, then they said, dude, the politics are horrible. Mm-hmm.

I spend most of my time just discussing about things that, in most cases make no sense. Mm-hmm. But they had to be discussed because, But it's a skill.

It's a skill that you can learn, but maybe you don't want to. Mm-hmm. Like I, I, as a people manager, I ask people that I'm managing, what is your career path?

Would you, where do you want to go? And if they say management, I say, well, what experience do you have there? When have you ever managed anyone, not to be condescending, but to understand, do you understand what you are saying?

Because what I found is I'll then give them some tasks that are not the sexiest part, but a very vital part. For example, I always have interns, could you manage this intern? I'll support you, but can you do that?

And then maybe they realize, no, I hate it. So maybe the path I actually want is a subject, um, subject matter expert. And so I wanna go down the more technical path.

And that's valid. I mean, if you don't wanna go to senior leadership, don't bloody go. 'cause you're gonna be miserable.

But if you don't, if you've never done those tasks, you won't know. Um, and if you do wanna go in that journey, then you need to talk to your manager and they need to support you to get there. Maybe it's training, maybe it's shadowing, maybe it's doing some tasks together.

Maybe that's the right way. I don't know, With all these layer nine political shenanigans. Yeah.

So I think the good manager versus a bad management is kind of, you have to understand all these layers. Yeah. From technical to political, all these streams to understand if we want to go there, we want a fast, secure system.

Yeah. It's kind of this skill that you need to have to balance all these out financial, you need to have the budget to achieve something. You need to have the people to achieve something.

You need to have the political backing to get there. And all this together then makes good management. Yeah.

But I will say they do say that diverse, um, senior leadership makes a more successful business. So not only does the person have to have these skills, but the people that they are then working with have to respect their differences. A lot of times feedback I get is that I am not assertive enough.

I I'm not loud enough, I'm not vocal enough. I'm a petite woman. I have quiet voice.

I'm not physically that big. Yeah. So it's very difficult for me to change who I am and the way that I work.

I am also a mum. So when I get into a situation when people are all very angry, I revert to my mum features, I suppose. And I kind of react in that way.

And so if people don't respect me because I act differently, they will never see me as a senior person. So if they can't view a diverse team, they, I'll never be in that position. So I think it's both, I need to want to go there and they need to adjust their expectations as well.

But, but it's a bit kind of, they have their style and they want you to follow their style, but at the end of the day, the outcome is the thing. There are many ways to be successful and this is, uh, not only a one pass situation. So yeah, I think this is also a management thing.

You have to acknowledge that not only one style is bringing you to success. You need a team. You need diversity sometimes Yeah.

To, to get something solved. Yeah. A hundred percent.

But we're all biased people. So until you acknowledge your unconscious bias, you're just going to see me as a petite woman that's not a very good manager potentially. I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit.

I have great support at my business, but, but I'm saying like if you do get in the position where you want to go to senior leadership, you have the skills, you have the training, but you're still slightly different than what they're expecting. Even if you can achieve the same things, you are not gonna succeed. So that business relationship is still going to be important.

Yeah. Being a technical person means understanding that problems occur and that solutions are simple to fix. But when you become a manager, you realize that people are not problems.

People have to be dealt with differently. And not every solution has a potential outcome that is clear to you. And feelings matter and metrics that you may not even know about are having an impact on what you do.

And for the technically minded people that can cause a big problem. If you are someone who believes that you can be a good technical manager, remember that you need to do both of those things. You need to be technical to understand the challenges that the business faces, but you also have to be a manager of the people who are addressing those challenges.

If you can't do both, then maybe you weren't cut out for real management. After all, that'll just about do it for this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast. I want to thank everyone out there for joining us.

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