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When Competence Stops at the Clipboard: How Manufacturing Breeds Accidental Managers

David Philip Scutter

Many small and mid-sized manufacturers confuse administrative reliability with true leadership.

Over time, this breeds a culture of reactive management — where planners and coordinators evolve into “accidental managers” without ever learning to manage people, only processes.

They insert themselves as bottlenecks, acting as gatekeepers because trust is scarce. Directors often mistake this for diligence, when in truth it’s dependency — a fragile model that collapses when that single gatekeeper is unavailable.

Succession planning often reveals how few true leaders exist within such systems. As automation and AI continue to embed into manufacturing, it’s crucial these flaws aren’t reinforced by the very systems we build.

How do we prevent that — and what does effective leadership development really look like at the small-business level?

#leadership #manufacturing #management #systems #engineeringmanagement #careerdevelopment

  • Oh gosh yes, and in my experience one large part of this is that so much management training is focussed on project management - which is of course important, but as you say a long way from being the whole story. Another issue, again in my experience, is that those from an engineering background in particular can imagine to be a task based, numerical, logical rules based process - which again some of it is and some most definitely is not.

    One thing I would strongly recommend is promoting the path to Chartered Manager as much as Chartered Engineer. I'm not sure that the CMI resources are quite as good as they were when I was a developing manager, but they are still extremely useful. They not only give useful advice and guidance, but also make clear the range of challenges a manager / leader should be considering - identifying the things they don't know they don't know.

    It is perhaps slightly unfortunate that the IETs partnership with the CMI is to give a fast track to CMgr for "engineers with 5 years management experience", because I completely agree that the important step is the one just before that, of gaining competent management knowledge and understanding. So it may be that we should be encouraging those in these positions to join CMI first, as this will give them the links into that knowledge.

    https://www.theiet.org/career/professional-registration/chartered-manager

    https://www.managers.org.uk/

    David Philip Scutter said:
    what does effective leadership development really look like at the small-business level?

    That specific question would take a book to answer it, and of course there are many (of varying quality). However, I'd say the key points are:

    • Ability to drive and manage change. It's a myth that small businesses have to grow to stay alive, but they do need to constantly change and adapt. And with limited resources this can be a big challenge.
    • Being clear and honest about what the USP of the business is.
    • Being clear and honest about what the market is doing. There's no point continuing to make the best product in the world if it's no longer the product your customers want.
    • Keeping your workforce on side.
    • Keeping your customers on side. Neither of those two should take precedence over the other - again a difficult juggling act.
    • Managing quality.
    • Managing the numbers. Again the fact that I've put that last shouldn't be considered an order of precedence - if you don't do this you won't manage all the rest.
    • Having an appreciation of H&S law, commercial law and employment law.
    • Accepting that no one human being is brilliant at doing all the above, that's why even a small business has a management team if it is to be sustainable.

    What it's not about:

    • Telling people what to do. You want people to think, if you order people around the good ones will leave and you'll be left with the ones with no initiative.
    • Being so proud of your business that you are blind to any criticism.
    • Deciding that any one KPI must be maintained at all costs. Really difficult this as of course you must maintain profit and of course you must maintain cashflow, but to maintain these into the future you must also be aware of everything else.
    • Sticking to processes and ignoring thoughts as to whether it's the right process for the right situation.
    • Doing anything the last manager did without at least thinking about why they did it that way.
    • Changing anything the last manager did without at least thinking about why they did it that way.

    I could probably go on and on, but that'll do for starters!

  • How Manufacturing Breeds Accidental Managers

    It's not just in manufacturing. I see the same issues in most other sectors too.

    I suspect one of the underlying problem is that those that know how to do the job actually like doing the job and achieving things ... whereas a move to management is rather seen as a rather less satisfying counting beans and herding cats. Maybe that's come about by even higher management lacking the ability to directly evaluate the work being done so need to be fed checklists and spreadsheets to correspond with targets as a proxy for the real thing.

       - Andy.

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