The Two Responsibilities of a Vice President of Engineering/R&D
Bob Jordan, PE
April 2007
A Vice President (VP) of an organization typically has two principle responsibilities: (1) their department, and (2) the health of the business as a whole.
The Engineering Department
The VP is the leader, not the ground worker. However, to be an effective leader there is a component of ground-level work that is necessary to build the leader’s credibility. Working in the trenches should only be a part-time, occasional activity, one that keeps the VP engaged, credible, and in touch with what is going on technically in the department. The VPs chief responsibility, and where he should be spending most of his time, is in the building of the engineering team, ensuring all bases are covered, administering budgets, casting vision, setting policy, recruiting talent, setting goals, providing resources, and guiding product development activities and creating and implementing systems, processes, methods and procedures to allow efficient use of the departments talents and resources.
The VP is also the buffer for the department. It is a fact of life within manufacturing organizations that other departments and other department leaders do no fully understand all that it takes to make an engineering department run successfully, nor do they understand the mindset of engineers and technical people, nor do they themselves have product development experience. It is up to the VP to engage these attitudes and correct them. Sometimes this can even appear confrontational, depending on the vigor of the approach of persons outside the engineering organization. The VP should build engineers, and let the engineers build product. The VP needs to created and maintain the environment for the engineers to succeed. He needs to go to bat for them when required.
In return the VP must achieve results through his staff. If he is given the reigns of the department, he must execute the will of the president or board of directors. This takes some political savvy to balance the needs of the department with the desires of the senior leadership.
The following areas can fall within the responsibility of an engineering directorate:
| New Product Development | CAD Administration |
| Engineering Sustaining | Document Control |
| Technical Support | Warranty Administration |
| Quality Management Systems | Manufacturing Engineering |
| Quality Engineering | Test Engineering |
| Design Engineering | Materials Engineering |
|
Software Engineering |
Automated Test Equipment |
| Intellectual Property | Materials Review Board |
| Prototype Laboratory | Engineering Laboratory |
| Chemistry Laboratory | Annual Staff Goals |
| Annual Staff Training | Writing Position Descriptions |
| Writing Performance Appraisals | Establishing Staff Compensation |
The Business
The VP of Engineering must also have strong business acumen and be able to participate in the overall vision and direction of the organization. The vision comes from the President and/or the Board of Directors. Yet the VP staff is responsible for running the day-to-day operations. Every VP must be able to read financial statements, understand financial ratios, prepare annual budgets, prepare annual directorate plans, be very capable in HR issues, especially legal issues, and be able to train other company managers in the creation and implementation of systems from the which the company can build on and thus prosper.
The VP should understand the process of Strategic Planning and be able to contribute to the creation, execution, and maintenance of the corporate Strategic Plan.
Each VP should give account of their ongoing budget results and describe anomalies, issues, and provide mitigation plans to get back on course. Further, every VP should be regularly working “on” the department versus working “in” the department. The VP has to guide the team, not just do grunt work in the department. To that end the VP must also provide constructive comments to other departments as to their management effectiveness. Non-performers must be corrected if behavior or department issues are apparent.
The following are typical of a VPs business responsibilities:
| Staffing | Vision Casting |
| Directorate Planning | Strategic Planning |
| Financial Review | Financial Analysis |
| Department Budget | Sales Performance Review |
| Goals and Direction, Corp. | Debt Management |
| Mergers and Acquisitions | Legal Affairs |
| Partnerships | Trade Shows |
| Mentoring Middle Management | Reporting Department Issues |
| Asset Management | Corporate Citizenship |
The VP needs to be able to provide options, counsel on opportunities, and address business issues pertinent to the health and well-being of the company. It is not acceptable for the VP to focus only on his department, or only on the business of the corporation, rather, both have to be managed and led and made to prosper. If a company is not prospering, then it’s a leadership issue, pure and simple. It not corrected, the company will at best not grow at the rate it is capable of, and at worst it will go out of business. The VP has a fiduciary responsibility to be bold, to address issues, and to provide options to achieve corporate growth.
Leading a department is one thing, leading a corporation is another. One takes technical ability, the other takes business acumen. In the latter, the VP puts his job on the line when confrontation is necessary. If you don’t want to do that, don’t be a VP.
_________________
Benjamin Esty wrote an article about Harvard's executive education program entitled "Making the Move to General Manager." Esty states that managers face a critical transition when they rise from functional expert to general manager (there are some parallels for the VP with broader business responsibilities than just their own department). The challenge of the GM with new responsibilities is learning to see linkages and interconnections across the organization (VPs who see this have the intuition to be a GM). Also, the GM has to transition from the role of "doer" to the role of managing people through other people - and that's a big change (note that a VP who is a "doer" will have a hard time being a manager - look within a company's VP staff and the one who manages people well could be a candidate for GM, or to succeed the current GM).
A VP with both department and business direction responsibilities has to learn to manage people, delegate, train, analyze, motivate, and make a long string of good decisions. They should be hitting goals and targets. They should have a capable staff and have good influence with other VPs, managers, and individual contributors.