For too long the TEMS organization has been too inwardly focused. We were focused on who we were, what we have done, what we are doing and how people could get involved. While that was OK, I believe that our readers need to know about our values and what we consider important. We want to be your partners in your engineering management careers. We want to help you with the difficult transition from being an excellent engineer to becoming an excellent engineering manager. We need to recognize and try to address the educational and development needs of our readers. Many of our readers are engineers and technologists. They may be entering management and leadership roles for the first time in their lives. They may have had little or no training or formal preparation for their roles and it is important to acknowledge this and help address the implicit needs that our readers have.
Our goal is to restructure our publications and our resources to help address these needs. We need, for example, to acknowledge the tremendous shifts that are occurring in the workplace and to acknowledge the different ways that this next generation of engineers expect to be led and need to be led and to acknowledge the new ways they will find to manage and lead people in the future. How do you manage people that aren’t in the office every day? How do you manage people that are 6000 miles away and living in a culture you don’t really understand? What happens when people from other departments need to be managed? What is the best way to manage a client and their ever changing expectations?
We will be developing workshops, webinars and other content to help address some of these questions. One of the first webinars will focus on the needs of the first time manager. Considerations, checklists and questions that all first time managers should consider as they take on a new management challenge. I hope you all find this worthwhile. If any of you are interested in such content and want to learn more, feel free to send me a quick note at m-werwath@northwestern.edu. There will obviously be much more to come in the months ahead. Stay tuned!
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