Engineering the Engineers
Rolls-Royce Corp. recruits and employs some of the brightest engineering minds in the world. Constantly challenging them to acquire even more knowledge is a linchpin of its competitive strategy.
By Garry Kranz
n the production floor at Rolls-Royce Corp.’s Indianapolis plant are some of the world’s most advanced engine-propulsion systems. In one way or another, most of the 4,500 people who work here help engineer and build turbines that are at once more compact and more powerful than the current state of the art. The high-tech engines contribute a sizable share of the $4 billion in North American revenue posted by Rolls-Royce Group, the Indianapolis firm’s British parent.
And the turbines also are a manifestation of the company’s chief assets: innovation and know-how that is nurtured and preserved by employees. The company sustains its finely honed competitive edge by viewing training as indistinguishable from recruiting and hiring, says Michael Trusty, the company’s director of talent management for North America.
At first glance, specialized corporate training for engineers might seem like overkill. Engineers are, after all, highly inquisitive and thrive on figuring new ways of doing things. How could any company improve on that?
It is, however, not that simple. Roughly 60 percent to 70 percent of all hiring in Indianapolis centers on recruitment of engineers, but not every person who holds an engineering degree meets Rolls-Royce’s exacting standards.
“We have to recruit the right types of people who can come in and do the work,” Trusty says. There aren’t many places that the company can find engineers familiar with building gas turbines.
Job candidates obviously need to display a mastery of engineering theories and practices, including strong “cognitive ability and the education to back it up,” Trusty says. But the company also has its antennae out for engineers who are leadership material.
“What we’re focusing on from a development standpoint is some of the softer stuff: the ability to lead, to work effectively in groups, and to create an environment that facilitates innovation,” Trusty says.
The focus on learning in Indianapolis mirrors Rolls-Royce Group’s global commitment to employee development. The British conglomerate spans four lines of business and employs nearly 40,000 people globally. Investments in training, education and professional development topped $58.4 million in 2006, the most recent year for which figures were available. According to a company financial statement released in February, Rolls-Royce Group has spent nearly $2.9 billion on assorted training regimens since 1998.
The Indianapolis operation is Rolls-Royce Group’s largest manufacturing site in North America. Although heavily populated with engineers, Rolls-Royce also employs certified electricians, millwrights, pipe fitters, tool and die makers, airframe mechanics and support staff. And while some large U.S. manufacturers are curtailing operations, Rolls-Royce is gearing up for accelerated demand, thanks largely to the buildup of America’s war machine.
The Department of Defense, already the company’s largest customer, is sending more business its way. The U.S. Air Force last summer awarded Rolls-Royce a pair of contracts worth a combined $315 million for research and development of “next-generation” aircraft engines. One $296 million contract is to design and develop a six-cylinder aerospace turbine that runs on a variable cycle: Some of its six cylinders can be removed when conserving fuel is an issue, but they can be reinserted when the aircraft needs an additional jolt of power.
Another $700 million in production work is headed to Indianapolis as part of a contract to produce engines for the V-22 aircraft used by the both the Air Force and U.S. Marine Corps. And 2008 also marks the final year of a $66 million maintenance contract to provide engine services for the U.S. Navy’s F405 engines.
Selection: vigorous and rigorous
Fulfilling those obligations, along with other contracts currently in hand, requires additional brainpower. Rolls-Royce has been on a hiring binge, adding about 200 newly minted engineers in recent months. Although Rolls-Royce does some midcareer recruiting of working engineers, most of the emphasis is on recent college graduates or undergraduates soon expected to join the labor force.
“It’s really all about taking somebody who has a good, solid engineering background and building on that foundation from an experiential standpoint. That’s how we develop their competencies,” Trusty says.
Up-and-coming engineers are targeted for “summer jobs” as part of cooperative agreements with top engineering colleges. Undergraduates and even grad students receive credit in exchange for tackling rotational assignments at Rolls-Royce.
The select group of “co-ops,” which is Rolls-Royce’s term for apprentices, takes time off from school to earn credits for on-the-job experience. Coaching is a keystone for success. To help them succeed, Rolls-Royce pairs budding engineers with veteran engine designers who serve as mentors and provide constructive feedback.
The company puts a lot of effort into onboarding so that co-ops get the right development and training, Trusty says. “Since they’re taking a quarter off from school to work for us, we want to make sure that each person is aligned with the right mentor or supervisor.”
Participants are on a fast track for development that often leads to job offers once the apprenticeship is complete. But they first have to pass through a tough vetting process.
As part of the multi-year assignment, an apprentice typically rotates to different jobs within the company. Aspiring engineers spend time gaining exposure to the individual components that make up the engine, including compressors, combustion systems, engine controls and materials. The “action learning” includes a stint in manufacturing, which enables them to understand how the various engine components are designed to function as an interdependent system, Trusty says.
All the while, the co-ops are being evaluated on their learning and performance. Although most apprenticeships extend over multiple years, candidates still have to prove they deserve to be invited back. In particular, each candidate must make an oral presentation summing up their experiences to an audience of top managers and design engineers.
“It’s not as formal as defending a thesis or dissertation, but it’s also not a layup,” Trusty says.
The veteran engineers, who are among the world’s foremost designers of aerospace engines, prod and challenge the co-ops to buttress any research claims with hard-and-fast analytical data. How well—or poorly—a person performs weighs heavily into whether they receive an invitation to continue their apprenticeship.
Yearning for learning
Engineers in Indianapolis also have a chance to pursue specialized research leading to fellowships. Run through the corporation’s functional leadership group in Great Britain, the program is aimed at engineers who want to immerse themselves in technical work rather than management.
Other programs are centered on those engineering professionals with an inclination toward leadership. Like many large companies, Rolls-Royce is preparing to deal with a rash of retirements during the next two decades. Trusty says finding engineers with leadership and managerial potential is important in staying abreast of the competition.
David E. Goldberg, the author of Life Skills and Leadership for Engineers, says the profession has been stereotyped as being full of people ill-suited to make the transition to business roles. He argues that the rapid pace of global business often blurs the lines between the roles that an engineer must play.
In fact, Goldberg says more and more engineers are deciding to buttress their technical training by pursuing master’s degrees in business.
Non-technical skills are increasingly important in a world made up of interdisciplinary teams, says Goldberg, an engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Through efforts such as the Early Career High Potential program, Rolls-Royce engineers like Michael Bredhold are expanding their professional horizons. Bredhold, a program manager for an engine-development program, says the training helped him to identify the skills he needs and sketch out a plan to improve his performance.
He polishes his managerial skills and learns how to galvanize teams of different workers. Taking on assignments beyond his job description taught him the importance of empathy—a trait considered crucial for managerial success.
“I enjoy the challenge of motivating a team to achieve a common objective. It is rewarding to help people identify their development needs or to help them solve difficult problems,” Bredhold says. “Being a manager requires an ability to recognize the needs of others, which makes me feel like I am contributing to something beyond my own career aspirations.”
Companies often grow frustrated when trying to coax leadership skills from engineers, says Elizabeth Lions, a Portland, Oregon-based recruiter and career consultant. Instead of trying to shoehorn free-thinking introverts into uncomfortable roles, Lions says it makes sense to recruit younger engineers from college who have “a lot of drive and good ideas” and groom them as leaders.
“Engineers are not natural business people and often don’t understand the correlation between product development and profits, which typically rears its ugly head midway through a project,” Lions says.
It is an observation not lost on Trusty, who says Rolls-Royce is investing time and resources to help engineers—particularly those newly hired out of college—understand the career paths available to them. To aid their managers, Rolls-Royce provides coaching resources that prescribe specific activities that enhance a person’s development.
Interviews with experienced engineers have pointed up some key development trends. One key finding thus far: There is no surer path to advancement than spending a few years as a test engineer. That job serves as a soup-to-nuts proving ground for learning about aerospace turbines.
“Whether they’re chief engineers, engineering fellow, or if they’ve moved into customer-facing leadership and program-director roles, many of them say their experience as a test engineer was a critical differentiator” for career advancement, Trusty says.
Ultimately, the responsibility for improvements rests with the engineers themselves. They are expected to identify their areas of weakness and meet periodically with their managers to hammer out “behavioral, prescriptive and actionable” learning plans.
Workforce Management Online, February 2008
URL: http://www.workforce.com/section/11/feature/25/38/03/index.html
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Podcast of Workforce.com on various Human Resource topics
The Workforce Management Podcast
The staff of Workforce Management brings you interviews with leading figures and experts in the human resources and workforce management.
PODCAST: Shareholder activist Robert Monks talks with Workforce Management's New York bureau chief Jessica Marquez about why sky-high executive pay and excessive dedication to profitability are harming America
PODCAST: Tig Gilliam, CEO of Adecco, North America, spoke to Workforce Management staff writer Jeremy Smerd in New York City. In this podcast, Gilliam explains why he thinks companies, especially HR executives, need to place a greater emphasis on relational capital.
URL: http://www.workforce.com/section/01/article/24/88/83.html
The staff of Workforce Management brings you interviews with leading figures and experts in the human resources and workforce management.
PODCAST: Shareholder activist Robert Monks talks with Workforce Management's New York bureau chief Jessica Marquez about why sky-high executive pay and excessive dedication to profitability are harming America
PODCAST: Tig Gilliam, CEO of Adecco, North America, spoke to Workforce Management staff writer Jeremy Smerd in New York City. In this podcast, Gilliam explains why he thinks companies, especially HR executives, need to place a greater emphasis on relational capital.
URL: http://www.workforce.com/section/01/article/24/88/83.html
Blog: HUman Capital: http://humancapitalist.com/
Featured blogger Jason Corsello is the Vice President of the Center of Excellence at the respected consulting firm Knowledge Infusion. He's one of the leading experts on human capital management, workforce transformation, and business process outsourcing.
Jason Corsello is the Vice President of the Center of Excellence at Knowledge Infusion. In this role, Corsello is responsible for create an open community of information, intelligence, sharing and best-in-class guidance for those companies dedicated to creating a business impact with human capital. Previous to Knowledge Infusion, Corsello was an industry analyst and research director for Enterprise Software and Service Delivery Strategies at Yankee Group, where he was responsible for leading the firm’s advisory and consulting services as it relates to enterprise applications such as human capital management (HCM), services delivery strategies such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and business process outsourcing (BPO) and emergent technologies including web 2.0, collaboration and productivity solutions.
Prior to joining Yankee Group, Corsello was the director of marketing and business development at Commendo Software, a leading virtual infrastructure company and senior product manager at WorldChain, a Sequoia Capital-backed company now Illinois Tool Works [NYSE: ITW], where he developed the first on-demand supply chain solution, deployed at leading Fortune 1000 companies such as Dell and Network Appliance. Corsello’s background also includes more than 6 years of industry experience in operations, business and corporate development at Solectron Corporation [NYSE: SLR], a Fortune 200 company, where he worked with Global 2000 customers in developing and implementing their outsourced manufacturing and global supply chain strategies.
Corsello is a recognized thought leader in human capital management, workforce transformation, and business process outsourcing and his research has been featured in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and CFO Magazine. Corsello is a graduate of the School of Business Administration at the University of San Diego.
Collaboration and My Work
IMHO, most employees work in silo. Clock in and out and do their jobs. Web 2.0 and the advance of Knowledge Management provide the platform, ideas and tools to connect the people.
At work, I am mobilizing people through many collaborative ways:
- Operation review (monthly meeting with the whole department)
- Internal Blogging
- Job Function Review (New) - Wiki
- Sharing big picture, vision and strategies
At work, I am mobilizing people through many collaborative ways:
- Operation review (monthly meeting with the whole department)
- Internal Blogging
- Job Function Review (New) - Wiki
- Sharing big picture, vision and strategies
Saturday, March 1, 2008
CLO feature: Engineering and Technical Leadership Development
Features
Published February 2008
Engineering and Technical Leadership Development: Challenges in a Rapidly Changing Global Market
Carl S. Vieth & Thomas W. Smith
Weblink: http://www.clomedia.com/features/2008/February/2072/index.php
A great deal of attention has been focused on the engineering and technical talent pool. Depending on the source and how the supply and demand of the talent is measured, we are either facing a severe deficiency or no shortage at all.
No matter which side you’re on, there is one critical factor often missing from the discussion — the increasing need for engineering and technical leaders. Myriad factors are affecting the growing shortage of qualified engineering and technical managers, including workforce demographics, globalization of the engineering enterprise, the acceleration of technology and organizational and business demands.
Engineering managers tend to be five years older than the average. Looking forward, the replacement rate for engineering managers will increase from an annual rate of 6.2 percent in 2003 to near 20 percent in 2014, which means there will be about 15,000 engineering managerial vacancies annually by 2014.
Compounding these demographics is the changing nature of the work. Engineering managers are challenged by significant organizational changes. Engineering or engineering-related occupations represent more than a third of the 40 professions identified by BLS as highly susceptible to outsourcing. This means that leading a corporate engineering enterprise will require management skills that extend well beyond an organization’s boundaries.
Similarly, the rapid rate of technological change requires engineering managers to have an ever-increasing breadth of technical competency. As organizations compete in the “knowledge economy,” the role of the technical leader will have increasing importance to an organization’s vitality.
The engineering enterprise also has changed significantly in recent years. Engineering leaders must lead organizations that are geographically distributed around the world. Engineering activities are performed in cross-functional teams rather than as individual projects.
Matrix corporate structures require technical leaders to include professionals from varying disciplines on engineering teams, as well as assigning their engineers to teams where duties are not traditional engineering. Engineers and technical professionals demand their leaders demonstrate a high level of technical competency — “street cred” is crucial to success.
Finally, organizations continually strive to be “lean,” which often translates to having fewer resources and putting a greater focus on day-to-day productivity. Today’s engineering organization provides tremendous technical leadership challenges, yet it is more dependent than ever on its leadership for success.
The State of Technical Leadership
Technical leadership is defined differently depending on the role of engineering within an organization. Titles such as “chief engineer,” “lead program manager” and “senior project manager” are used to identify managers and leaders of engineering and technical functions within an enterprise, though actual job descriptions vary widely.
Today’s technical leaders, almost without exception, lack formal management training. Rather, their skills are in the engineering and science disciplines. In addition, their performance expectations vary widely, as well as their roles and responsibilities, depending on the organization. Therefore, it’s not surprising that technical leadership development activities vary greatly.
However, one thing is common to all successful technical leadership development programs — the close alignment of program design with an organization’s mission, vision and values, as well as the strategic imperatives of the organization. Without this alignment, executive support and resource allocation, program sustainability is unlikely.
In benchmark organizations like Rockwell Automation and GE Healthcare, the identification and development of the next generation of technical leaders is a strategic imperative for the global enterprises. Leading technology companies in Asia and the Pacific Rim also have recognized this best practice.
In contrast to these structured rotational programs, many organizations promote technical leaders from the ranks, with little or no attention to a formalized development plan. Given the demographics and increasing demands on engineering and technical functions, attention to technical leadership development is critical to the future organizational performance and productivity.
Developing Technical Leaders
While many organizations pay attention to the development of key managerial talent, they often overlook the development of their technical leaders. Leadership at the team and project levels is as critical as leadership activities at the program and business-unit levels. Yet in most organizations, these needs go unmet.
The chief learning officer is in the unique position to embrace and advance a vertically scalable leadership development program that accommodates individual development needs within the context of organizational performance requirements.
At the team and project level, engineers must be able to incorporate leadership and managerial concepts into their work to enhance the performance of their work group. Development activities might be directed at improving performance in leading global project teams, employing effective communications tools and techniques for these teams, managing drawings and documents, planning and project management, and use of IT systems and structures.
At the mid- to upper-management levels within an engineering or technical organization, leadership development activities incorporate greater attention to management capabilities. Topics such as managing people and resources, business management and business development play a greater role in developing an effective leader.
As candidates climb the organizational ladder, technical leadership development requires a more substantial investment in formal training. The plan should result in the systematic development of a broader application of management and interpersonal skills, business acumen and technical depth. Professional development objectives can be satisfied through a series of internal short courses or external certificate and master’s degree programs.
Depending on the candidate’s development path, degree choices might include an MBA, or, for those committed to leading technical organizations, a master’s degree in technical leadership or a technical discipline.
A major challenge facing smaller companies is the ability to sustain a comprehensive technical leadership development program. The resource investment required is difficult to justify with what is typically a small number of candidates. One strategy is to develop a comprehensive initiative relying on external resources to supply continuing education experiences supporting an individual’s development plan. External offerings can be combined with internal, organization-specific training activities that make learning events relevant to the corporate culture and practice patterns of the enterprise.
Learning organizations can form partnerships with university-based providers or professional societies that are effective in providing a portfolio of continuing education offerings to satisfy the organization’s technical leadership learning needs. Such partnerships must be well designed and support the strategic objectives of the organization, in addition to the tactical requirements of the learning function.
At the strategic level, the learning objectives and curricular approach must support the organizational strategy and culture. At the tactical level, course offerings must support the requirements of the learner and the learning organization. Tactical requirements such as accessibility delivery mode and the inclusion of international standards and global considerations in the course content are equally important to program success.
Chief learning officers are central to the partnering strategy. CLOs might source continuing education services from a variety of vendors or choose to limit their vendor community to one or two strategic partnerships. In making this decision, the CLO must consider the organizational and learner requirements, as well as the vendor’s capability and expertise.
At a minimum, the vendor assessment should include an in-depth understanding of instructional design, delivery and support processes, technical depth, business model, instructional capacity and ability to meet evolving needs. Employing a tool such as a Pugh Matrix or “House of Quality” (quality function deployment) is very effective in understanding the “match” between the organizational requirements and the vendor capabilities.
In addition to strategic partnerships, smaller organizations can create “virtual rotation programs” to achieve the breadth of experience found in the programs of large companies. The CLO and the functional manager can plan stretch and cross-functional job assignments that provide practical experience in functional areas, such as operations, manufacturing, finance and marketing.
Membership on cross-functional project teams can provide rich experiences supporting leadership development objectives. Management must provide the candidate relief from regular assignments so they can give development the attention required to deliver value.
Formal mentoring also is effective in technical leadership development. Keys to success include creating a quality experience and preparing mentors and managers to develop crucial technical leadership competencies.
Key Competencies
Successful technical leadership development programs feature close linkage of development activities to a technical leadership competency model. Leadership development activities, including candidate selection, content, individual development, evaluation and continuous-improvement activities, should all employ the competency model as the gauge for program development and oversight. The CLO plays a central role in the research and development of the competency model and managing its ongoing relevance to the enterprise.
Academic and corporate technical leadership programs should consider an engineering leadership competency model that frames competency within a productivity framework. Such a model could quantify engineering productivity and performance using a set of core attributes common to engineering and technical leaders. These attributes, which create the foundation of development activities, can include:
• Integrity and professionalism, which include community service, social responsibility and advancing the body of engineering practice and technical knowledge.
• Global mindset, defined as the incorporation of national culture, cross-cultural considerations, international policy and regulatory compliance into the engineering enterprise. • Collaboration and communication, which involve relating to and communicating with others across a wide band of functional and organizational disciplines to build effective problem-solving organizations.
• Intellectual breadth and depth, or the ability to harness a deep “discipline-specific” knowledge with a wide range of cognitive skills that span a broad range of technical, sociocultural and scientific disciplines.
• Curiosity and creativity, which include a strong desire to learn and engage the imagination to invent novel products or solve challenging problems.
• Organizational aptitude and systems thinking, or the ability to understand and engage organizational systems and structures to achieve business goals, manage knowledge and apply technologies and processes to efficiently achieve engineering objectives.
Within the next 10 years, we will experience a greater than threefold increase in leadership turnover in engineering and technical organizations, increasing the competition for an increasingly scarce resource. To remain competitive globally, technical enterprises will have to
develop leaders internally.
CLOs in these organizations can create “virtual” programs by combining internal training offerings and ad hoc stretch assignments with external continuing education courses. Success depends on aligning goals and objectives to enterprise strategic and tactical imperatives and designing a well-defined competency model
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