Engineers or MBAs - Who make better CEOs?
In the 2017 list of the 100 best performing chief executive officers (CEOs) by the Harvard Business review, 32 of them had engineering degrees while 29 had Master’s in Business Administration (MBA). In 2014 and 2016 also, engineers made a good showing with 24 candidates in the respective years.
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Does this make managers with engineering background better pre-disposed to leading corporate organisations than their colleagues who read MBA?
Proponents of engineering contend that engineering gives them a pragmatic orientation and a culture of execution, efficiency, reliability and safety that enables them to become better leaders.
MBA champions on the other hand, argue that business management is a specialised discipline that needs to be studied and appreciated with all its complexities.
They cite reports such as the Development Dimension International (DDI), a US-based management consultancy firm that suggests that engineers are inadequately grounded in six out of the 10 critical management skills.
It is for this reason that the Springboard, Your Virtual University, a radio programme on Joy FM had two resource persons to debate on which of these two academic disciplines prepared people adequately for management positions.
Arguing for engineering was the Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Telecoms Chamber, Mr Ken Ashigbey, while the Vice-President of Imani Ghana, Mr Kofi Bentil, argued for the MBAs.
Mr Bentil said there was a fundamental flaw in the assertion that engineers made better managers than MBAs.
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He said the successful managers who had engineering background became successful because they topped it up with management courses.
“At the point where you are calling that person an engineer, he is not an engineer because most of these people have a background in engineering but go and do a top-up in management and they go into leadership.
“These people we are calling engineers are managers as some of them have not even done a day of engineering. They just went through engineering school, picked up the skills, then went to top up with management skills, mostly learnt from an MBA and combined the skills,” he added.
Mr Bentil, however, pointed out that the academic background of a leader could matter but that would not necessarily make the person better.
“To be a good manager, you need to be able to crunch numbers, you need to be quantitatively comfortable and some of these things predispose engineers but it doesn’t necessarily make them better leaders,” he mentioned.
“Skills in engineering and mathematics specifically are very useful, but the engineers who have become successful managers base it on what they learnt in management and not engineering,” he added.
What it takes to be an excellent manager
Touching on what one needs to become a good manager, Mr Bentil said a good manager must have the ability to define his/her challenges.
After defining the challenges, he said, a good manager must be able to disassemble the parts of those challenges and find the resources to deal and re-assemble them as a solution.
“In this process you have to work with people and through people to achieve that, and this is where MBAs have the advantage,” he argued.
He added that the MBAs had the advantage here because they learnt about human resources, operations, marketing, finance and administration roles that were very key in solving work-related challenges.