Professional Characteristics: Manager vs. Engineer/Scientist
June 18, 2008 by Scott Wolcott , John Morelli , and admin | Filed under: Competencies of the Environmental Manager [2, 3, 4],Overview
Greetings,
Our task is to determine the optimum skill set for a successful environmental manager. Should he or she share more of the characteristics of a manager or a engineer/scientist? Or, perhaps more accurately, which of these characteristics and skills should the environmental manager have?
Attached are two documents. The first is a summary of the professional characteristics of business managers and engineer/scientists. Included in this document are generalized personality traits of people who tend to become either business managers or engineers/scientists. The personality traits are based on work by Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss Psychiatrist. I’m not certain that this information is particularly relevant to our discussion, but I found it interesting.
The second document is a simple worksheet that we might use at the symposium to list the skill sets that define the manager and engineer/scientist.
Cheers,
Scott
Professional Characteristics – Worksheet
I believe that they must have an equal sharing of scientist and engineer. Not only do environmental managers need to understand the implecations of a corporations behavior on the environment, but they need to understand the reasoning behind that decision. An environmental manager must balance the knowledge in both fields to adequately relay and illustrate the problem, solution, and issues in between that may arise with a project. Not only do they have to understand the mechanisms, but they must be able to accurately illustrate these mechanisms to people working in other disciplines.