Managing engineers well comes down to seven practices: hand over the problem, keep firefighting off their project days, explain your decisions, and four more. Each one comes with a check, so you can tell whether it’s working.
Illustrative split for one process engineer
Attuned motivator data runs inside 300+ companies, including manufacturers Hitachi and Autoliv
Managing engineers means setting the problem, the constraints and the priorities, then protecting the time and room they need to solve it. These seven practices apply to process, quality, controls and design engineers in a plant, and most of them to software teams too.
Give the goal, the limits and the date: scrap on line 3 under 2% by the end of the quarter, no capital spend. Then stay out of the how. If you also hand over the method, you’ve hired an engineer to do a drafter’s job. Agree on two or three checkpoints and leave the rest alone.
In a plant the line always wins. A press faults, someone calls the engineer, and the improvement project slips another week. Let that happen every week and you have very well-paid maintenance techs. Put one engineer on line support each week, send every call to them, and give the rest whole days on their projects.
Engineers accept a decision they disagree with far more easily than one they can’t follow. When you overrule a design or cut a project, show the numbers you used. If the real reason is a customer relationship or a budget fight, say so. People can work with a reason they don’t like. They stop trusting you over one they never hear.
“Good work on line 2” tells an engineer you didn’t look. “Your fixture change took changeover from 40 minutes to 25” tells them you did. Gallup found people who don’t feel recognized are twice as likely to say they’ll quit within a year. Say it in front of the operators who use the fix. Corrections go in private, and our guide to giving difficult feedback covers the hard ones.
The usual reward for a strong engineer is a team to manage. Sometimes that works. Often it costs you a good engineer and gives you a reluctant boss. Ask each person which way they want to grow, and give the technical route real steps: owning a process, leading the engineering on a launch, a certification the plant pays for.
Status belongs in the project tracker. Spend 20 minutes every two weeks on what’s in their way, what they want to learn next, and what you could take off their plate. Many engineers raise a problem only after they’ve tried everything else, so ask directly. Our list of one-on-one meeting questions has prompts that work with quieter people.
One engineer wants a new problem every month and gets bored by the second run of anything. Another wants a stable process, clear specs and no surprises. A third wants a number that moves. Manage all three the same way and two of them drift, and that drift is where employee flight risk starts. An intrinsic motivation assessment tells you which is which.
Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement.
Gallup, 2015, across business units. Source
Everyone ranks 11 intrinsic motivators in one 10-minute assessment.
A team high in Innovation wants the hardest open problem first. One high in Security wants the spec settled before anyone starts. That is practice 7, written down before the next project kicks off.
Illustrative team profile
Only team-level results, and only once three people answer.
Every two weeks, each person rates how satisfied they are on their own top motivators. Attuned’s pulse survey plots each team’s trend, so a dip during a month of all-hands firefighting shows up while you can still do something about it.
Nobody is singled out, so a quiet engineer can answer without it coming back to them.
Illustrative data
Bring one team list. We’ll map that team’s motivators and show its manager what each engineer runs on.
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