Evolving leadership in engineering firms – where will the next leaders come from?
- Growth and acquisitions have reshaped leadership roles in engineering firms – from deep technical expert-leaders to leaders of complex businesses.
- Deep sector expertise remains important, but at the top levels the decisive factors are increasingly the ability to lead people, change and the business as a whole.
- Over-emphasising technical expertise keeps the leadership pipeline narrow and can obscure genuine leadership potential.
- Leadership needs to be recognised and developed as a capability distinct from technical expertise – opening strong specialist career paths and creating space for new types of leadership profiles.
Leadership built on deep technical expertise
In engineering firms, leadership has traditionally been built on strong technical expertise – as in many other expert-driven sectors. Deep knowledge of the field has given leaders credibility both inside the organization and with clients, and enabled realistic judgement of technical solutions and project feasibility.
These foundations have helped ensure that decisions are grounded in a real understanding of the sector’s requirements and practical constraints.
A changing environment raises new demands on leadership
Today, the context is shifting. Engineering firms have grown significantly through mergers and acquisitions, creating larger and more complex organizational structures. At the same time, retirements in key disciplines have increased the need to rethink leadership pathways.
A narrow leadership layer and long individual careers at the top have meant that relatively few new leaders have emerged.
This raises important questions: how essential is deep technical expertise as a prerequisite for leadership? How does it compare with the ability to lead people, build coherent structures and steer an organization through continuous change? These capabilities are not mutually exclusive. But in today’s larger and more complex organizations, broad leadership capability, strategic decision-making and the ability to guide a diverse expert organization are increasingly the factors that make the critical difference.
Diverse career paths support renewal in the sector
The discussion about the balance between technical depth and leadership capability also opens new career paths. When leadership is no longer seen as the automatic next step for the best project manager, organizations can intentionally build both specialist and leadership tracks. Not everyone needs to aim for a people leadership role. At the same time, it becomes possible to identify leaders who have the capability and interest to lead a broader whole – even beyond their original technical specialism. This creates room for new backgrounds and profiles. Ultimately, this is about updating our assumptions about leadership: recognizing what kind of leadership current and future business truly requires. When broad leadership capability is recognized alongside technical depth, engineering firms can build leadership pipelines that better support growth, renewal and the increasingly complex needs of their clients.