Malawians seem obsessed with the status of being a boss. Perhaps this derives from the traditional workplace hierarchy, in which the most powerful and best-remunerated person commands others and controls resources.
Many consequently believe success in employment means becoming a boss of some description. Technical work is often regarded as less prestigious than administration, as though importance were measured by the number of people under one’s authority. Occupy an office, spend much of the day writing memoranda or issuing instructions and you are considered somebody of consequence.
Our system does not adequately recognise or reward technical expertise. A machine operator, for instance, may secure a substantial salary increase only by becoming a supervisor or manager. To earn more, the operator must apparently leave the machine behind, move into a comfortable office and perhaps acquire a personal secretary. Above all, he or she must be seen to occupy an important position.
Some bosses are treated as exceptionally important. A few even have parking spaces reserved exclusively for them. When such a person goes on holiday, perhaps for several weeks, nobody dares to use the vacant space. To do so would almost be regarded as sacrilege. This little workplace ritual says much about our reverence for titles and status.
We need to look honestly at ourselves and find better ways of organising our institutions. Technical people should be allowed to develop their abilities fully in their specialist fields. They should advance professionally and enjoy higher remuneration without being compelled to exchange technical work for administrative responsibilities. Promotion should recognise expertise, not merely confer authority over others.
Where a technical professional takes up an administrative appointment, appropriate preparation is essential. It should never be assumed that an excellent engineer will automatically become an effective leader of engineers. Managing people requires different skills: planning, communication, delegation, decision-making and the ability to motivate a team. These capabilities must be learnt, just as technical competence is acquired through study and practice.
Organisations repeatedly suffer a familiar misfortune. In promoting a gifted technician into management, they lose an accomplished practitioner and sometimes gain an inadequate administrator. It is a double tragedy: the organisation forfeits valuable technical expertise while placing someone in a role for which he or she may be ill-prepared. The answer is to create technical career structures alongside those in administration and finance. These grades should extend to senior management, allowing specialists to rise without abandoning their chosen professions.
The technological advancement of the West, and increasingly of the East too, owes much to the recognition and reward of technical expertise. Consider Karl Benz, the engineering pioneer credited with developing the motor car. Although extraordinarily gifted as an engineer, he was reportedly a poor administrator and an ineffective marketer. Fortunately, his wife, Bertha, complemented his talents with the organisational and promotional abilities he lacked.
Benz was a perfectionist. He hesitated to publicise his three-wheeled, ligroin-powered Benz Patent Motorwagen until he had worked on it repeatedly and considered it sufficiently refined. Bertha understood, however, that an invention also needed to be demonstrated. In 1888, without informing her husband, she embarked on a 106-kilometre journey from Mannheim to Pforzheim to visit her mother. She drove the Motorwagen with their two teenage sons aboard. The journey is widely recognised as the first long-distance trip by a motorised vehicle.
The undertaking was not without difficulties. The fuel pipe became blocked, and Bertha cleared it with her hairpin. When the brakes proved inadequate, she asked a local shoemaker to fit leather to the braking surfaces, effectively creating history’s first brake lining. Her journey attracted considerable attention. Some onlookers were fascinated by the self-propelled machine; others were terrified to see a woman driving such a contraption.
The publicity generated by Bertha’s expedition brought the Benz Patent Motorwagen to the wider world’s attention. It was a remarkably successful marketing exercise, conceived and executed not by the inventor, but by his wife. Karl Benz remained devoted to engineering, the discipline in which his genius flourished. His legacy was the motor car, an invention that transformed human mobility. Mercedes-Benz, whose heritage is associated with the pioneering work of Benz and his compatriot Gottlieb Daimler, remains one of the world’s most prestigious automotive marques.
We should not insist that gifted specialists become administrators before acknowledging their worth. Had Karl Benz abandoned engineering for administration, the world might have been deprived of his remarkable contribution. Our organisations must value people for what they do best and allow technical excellence to flourish. Such recognition would strengthen institutions and benefit everyone.
