[HeyLaughingBoy]

There's an alternative: put them in management and enforce mandatory management training.

A former employer of mine had a rule that anyone at a "management level" (including engineers of a certain rank, even if they weren't actually managing anyone) had to complete a set of training courses within a certain period of being promoted. As an engineer entering management, I found the courses to be surprisingly useful in terms of understanding and managing people and so did others. Classes like communication, negotiation, basic finance, employment law, etc.

Then HR decided they were useless and stopped offering them. And they went back to the state the GP is complaining about...

[omouse]

I would highly recommend this. I didn't understand why a WBS made sense to do or how to keep a list of risks, but after attending a project management class it made sense. Not only that, but as we worked through a project in the class, it enforced how tasks and communication work properly for projects.

Basic finance and negotation are a must.

It's amazing how many people don't have much training in these skills.

[voidlogic]

>There's an alternative: put them in management and enforce mandatory management training.

IMHO, I think your faulty assumption here is every good engineer can be trained into a good manager, and I think thats just not realistic...

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I'm not assuming anything: I'm saying that there's an answer to the question of how you put an untrained person into an unfamiliar environment: train them.

Whether or not a good/bad X can be retrained into a bad/good Y is a wholly different question.