Interpersonal skills and business skills vary from one company to another specially in medical device fields where it’s not so easy to do everything yourself with all the ISO & FDA regulations. I’ve seen and heard about companies that take care of the sales portion for many medical devices. Those guys have the engineering background as well as business oriented for the technical specs.

First of all, any team leader’s responsibilities are to manage his/her team to make sure all the tasks are performed on time. Coming from a big company where I see billions of dollars are being spent on goods and then regained in sales, I believe the best situation is to split the roles of interpersonal skills and the business skills but have both knowledge and background of both.

Smaller companies maybe with one or two products but with huge companies, it would take years for any team leader to manage the functionality of the product and manage the sales as well. That is why there is always many teams; product development, research & development, production, process engineering, manufacturing, quality, procurement, & Marketing. Each team takes a role to fulfill the business need. But with small companies that just produce one or two products, it can be done if it’s with multiple vendors.