Is Technical Competence Important for Leaders?

How many team leaders have you worked with who do not know the stuff you are working on? I would think most of these leaders don’t have the technical knowledge to understand what you’re doing and rely solely to what you tell them before hand to create project timelines and deliverables.

Is it important for a leader to be technically competent?

Leaders who do not have the technical knowledge and skills would tell you they don’t need to know the stuff to become a good team leader and help with the success of the team. On the other hand, leaders who possess both the technical knowledge and the passion to continuously learn stuff would tell you otherwise.

I belong to those leaders who have the passion for learning the technical stuff and I am biased towards leaders not having the knowledge I possess. I have been handled by people who do not have the same knowledge and passion that I have and often I feel shortchanged for getting a lower salary than a team leader who only does the plotting of the timeline and follow-ups for deadlines for which I feel are dumb tasks that could be accomplished by people fresh out of college. Please excuse me for being rude but I must say I have no respect for such leaders and being the technical guy that I am, I would always find members of my team and on another team feeling the same way towards their non-technical leader or manager whom they would never be able to rely upon for help on difficult problems and still get all the perks and benefits on simple tasks of disturbing your from time to time for project timelines easily plotted in a spreadsheet or Ms project.

How technically competent should a leader be?

Being fair to all leaders and managers, it would be impossible for them to keep up with the nitty and gritty stuff of the technical guys but a leader should be technically competent enough to point the members of the team in the right direction to solving problems. Fair enough.

Experience In Point

My senior manager talked to me a while back and told me that my technical involvement would become less as I go up the ladder, but it doesn’t mean inferior. He told me that I would still be doing programming tasks around ten percent of the time but often this ten percent of the time shall be used to write the most difficult and hardest codes for the team. True enough, in every project I worked on, the most technically challenging tasks ended up with me and this enabled me to stay sharp and competent with the task that allowed me to bail out the team in difficult times over and over again. This kind of technical competence have helped me earn their trust, confidence and have always looked up to me during difficult times.

Conclusion

A lot of people would not agree with me, but one thing I know is that technically superior people doing all the hard work, feel shortchanged and have little respect for superiors and leaders who comfortably sit on their paychecks for simple task monitoring and timeline plotting whether they show it or not. For leaders, at least give your extra effort for the huge paychecks you receive and try to learn as much as you can, to be of help to your people, and understand the difficult tasks they are facing.