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If you draw a Venn Diagram, with one circle being technical skills and the other circle being leadership skills, the intersection is engineering management. Unfortunately this is not a natural combination for most people, and it’s why there are so many bad engineering managers out there.

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How is that different if you replace "engineering" with anything else? _x_ management is _x_ plus leadership for all _x_.

It's not really. Good management is really hard. That being said, lots of other functions (sales especially) have a bunch of senior people who want to manage, so it's easier to pick the good ones.

In engineering/more technical fields there are less people who actually want to manage, so you end up picking from a smaller pool.

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