Expert management

As in, management of experts. What skills are required to manage people doing technical work? I am interested because

• faculty are effectively managers of technical workers (graduate students)
• anyone herding AI agents is a manager of technical workers (agents)

So if the management scientists have anything to say about this, it could be very relevant.

• Goodall, A. H., & Bäker, A. (2014). A theory exploring how expert leaders influence performance in knowledge-intensive organizations. In Incentives and performance (pp. 49–67). Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-09785-5_4

  Goodall has made a career arguing that “Experts and professionals need to be led by other experts and professionals, those who have a deep understanding of and high ability in the core-business of their organization”. Proposes several mechanisms:

  • Expert leaders make better strategic choices “because their preferences align with what is best for the organization”, as a result of their long training and experience in the domain
  • “Expert leaders are intrinsically motivated by the core-business activity, which we believe makes it more likely that experts will adopt the long view”; that is, only intrinsically motivated people will put in the time and effort to become experts, and they will be interested in long-term success, not shortcuts to short-term profits. (I suppose this is the “it was all McDonnell Douglas’s fault” theory.)
  • Expert leaders understand their technical staff better and better support their needs, such as by giving better feedback, setting attainable goals, understanding causes of performance (instead of blaming staff for failures of technically risky projects, for instance), and providing good working conditions
  • Expert leaders are good at hiring experts like themselves as staff
  • Expert leaders are more credible in the eyes of their underlings, so they are better respected

  The human aspects of this are less relevant to managing AI (your AI agent doesn’t care about your credibility), but the other parts are interesting to think about.

• Mumford, M. D., Scott, G. M., Gaddis, B., & Strange, J. M. (2002). Leading creative people: Orchestrating expertise and relationships. The Leadership Quarterly, 13(6), 705–750. doi:10.1016/S1048-9843(02)00158-3

  Argues that “the available evidence indicates that technical expertise and creative problem-solving skills are essential if one is to lead creative people both because they provide a basis for structuring an inherently ill-defined task and because they provide the credibility needed to exercise influence.” Reviews an assortment of papers showing correlation between the technical skill of leaders and the performance of their organizations (although I’m not sure if any of these address reverse causality or confounding). Much of the proposed mechanism is about the need for expertise in planning and evaluating work, although there’s a major social component in motivating and guiding staff.