Archive for September, 2008

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IT Leaders’ Secret Techniques For Motivating Staff

Friday, September 26th, 2008
Secrets IT Leaders Can Use To Motivate Their Staff

Secrets IT Leaders Can Use To Motivate Their Staff

Now that we’ve discovered that all humans, including those in in your IT department / on your IT team, respond to four basic drives, we are now faced with the really big question: how does an IT leader use this knowledge to motivate his/her staff? It turns out that there are actually a number of possible levers that you can pull…

The Drive To Acquire Is Handled By How You Handle Rewards: This is, of course, a classic staff driving lever. How well your IT department sorts out the good performers from the poor ones, how it matches the rewards that it hands out to performance delivered, and how easily it permits talented staff to advance in the organization determines how well you are meeting your employee’s drive to acquire.

The Drive To Bond Is Handled By Your Department’s Culture: Put simply, this comes down to how much camaraderie exists within the department. Does your staff work well together? Is there openness, teamwork, and genuine friendship amont the people who work for you?

The Drive To Comprehend Is Handled By How You Design Jobs: Are the IT jobs in your department both meaningful, interesting, while at the the same time challanging? These are all critical to meeting the needs of this drive.

The Drive To Defend Is Handled By Your Performance Review Process: If the annual performance review process is seen as being fair and trustworthy by all, and if resources are allocated in a transparent way then this will meet your staff’s drive to defend.

The key take-away for you regarding all of this drive stuff, is that in survey after survey, IT employees reported that when there was even a small enhancement to their ability to fulfill any one of these four drives, then their overall motivation shot up. However, (this is also a key point) all four drives have to be met – missing even one can significantly dampen an employee’s motivation.

Finally, employees have said that the statements and actions that their immediate IT managers make are just as important to their overall productivity as all of the company’s policies and rules. Now that’s food for IT leaders to spend some time thinking about…!

How many of these four drives do you try to satisfy in your employees? Do you feel that you are currently being successful? Why/why not? What is blocking you from doing a better job of meeting these basic drivers of your employees? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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4 Drivers Of Employee Motivation That All IT Leaders Must Know

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
The Four Drivers Of IT Staff Motivation

The Four Drivers Of IT Staff Motivation

We’ve talked about the fact that sometimes employee motivation can be a lot like performing brain surgery – you’ve got to be careful or you’ll end up doing a lot of damage. If an IT manager can realize that their staff (indeed all humans) have four fundamental emotional drivers that need to be met, then they are well on their way to maximizing employee satisfaction and maximizing productivity. So what are these four drivers that we all respond to?

  • The Drive To Acquire: More! More! More! As human beings we are all programmed to go out and get scarce goods (iPhone?) that make us feel better about ourselves. I think that we can all agree that we feel “happy” when we are successful and we feel “sad” when we fail. It’s not just physical things that we desire, but also experiences and improvements in our social status. This drive is relative – we are always comparing what we have to what those around us have. Oh, and it’s insatiable – we always want more, more, more!
  • The Drive To Bond: We all know about how we bond with our parents, siblings, etc. However, the human creature is amazing because we have the additional ability to extend who we bond with to associations, organizations, and even countries. This is a big one – when we are successful in bonding, then we fell loved. When we are not successful in bonding, then we fell loneliness. For your IT workers, bonding at work is a critical part of who they are. When staff feel proud to be part of an organization (Starbucks?) this can be a big boost to their motivation. It also explains why we get so depressed when we get fired or laid off – we feel that the organization has betrayed us.
  • The Drive To Comprehend: We are creatures that really want to understand the world in which we live. We are constantly using scientific, cultural, and even religious theories to try to make sense of it all. Our reason for doing this is that we want to be able to come up with reasonable responses to things that happen in our environment and to be able to determine what actions we should take next.
  • The Drive To Defend: You knew that this one had to be on the list! When external threats show up, we humans naturally defend ourselves, our family & friends, our property and things, etc. Remember that “flight or flight” thing? Fulfilling this drive leads employees to feel secure, failing to fulfill it leads to strong emotions like fear and resentment. This drive is one reason why mergers or buyouts can be so devastating for staff.

Now that you know what the four drivers of your staff are, the big question is how can you use these drivers to make sure that they are motivated to work hard. We’ll talk about that next time…

How many of these drivers do you see driving your own behaviors? Which one do you think is strongest in you? When managing a team, have you come up with ways to make sure that these drivers are being satisfied? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking!

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A Quick Note Of Thanks To The Folks At Alltop.com

Sunday, September 21st, 2008
Alltop.com is a web site that lists the best blogs in different areas.

Alltop.com is a web site that lists the best blogs in different areas.

As those of you with sharp eyes may have noticed, this blog is now sporting a shiny new badge over there on the right-hand side from the good folks at Alltop.com. They have added us to their listings of blogs and so I wanted to thank them for doing so and, of course, let you know a little bit about them. They actually describe what they do better than I could so allow me to quote them:

Alltop is an “online magazine rack” of popular topics. Tell us what you’re interested in, and we’ll bring you stories from the best websites and blogs on the topic. All the topics, all the time.

I greatly appreaciate the publicity that they’ve agreed to give this humble little bog and hopefully you’ll take the time to check out their list of other blogs all neatly grouped by topic!

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IT Management Challenge: Breaking In A New Boss

Friday, September 19th, 2008
IT Managers Need Tips On How To Handle A New Boss

IT Managers Need Tips On How To Handle A New Boss

A great deal has been written on how IT workers can deal with getting a new boss. For that matter, a lot has been written on what you need to do if you become the boss of a collection of IT workers. Shucks, I’ve even written a lot about how to find out what you’re CIO wants you to do. However, what’s been missing (up until now) is what an IT manager should do if he/she gets a new boss. The challenge here is that it’s not just you that will be evaluated by the new boss as they go about setting up shop, but rather it will be your team that the new boss will be evaluating. What’s an IT manager to do?

Let’s get something out of the way first. As an IT manager your new boss can broadly be placed into one of three categories: fantastic & almost god-like, average, and horriable tyrant. If your new boss falls into the fantastic / tyrant buckets, then you’ve got a whole other set of issues. However, since most bosses fall into the “average” bucket, let’s spent our time talking about what to do with just this type.

There are some interesting questions about why you have a new boss in the first place – what happened to your old boss? Oh, and by the way, why didn’t YOU get your old bosses job instead of this new person? Once again, just to keep things simple let’s push those items off to the side for now. Let’s assume that you’ve never met your new boss before – the hardest scenario.

It can appear to be a daunting task if you try to determine how to win you new boss’ favor before you meet them. In today’s era of a distributed workforce, there’s a good chance that you and your new boss may not be in the same town. This means that meeting them face-to-face should be one of your highest priorities. No matter how good you are at email or how engagaing you may be over the phone, there is no substiture for a face-to-face meeting in order to allow your new boss to size you up. Travel to meet them or have them come visit you.

When you meet them, what will you talk about? The key here is to let them do most of the talking. Your value to your new boss rests on the type and quantity of problems that you can make go away. It really is that simple. The worst situation that you can find yourself in is if your team is in charge of solving problems that your new boss doesn’t really view as being problems! This is why it’s critital for you to let your new boss tell you what he/she thinks their most critical problems are.

Remember the first day of school back in elementary school? Everyone in class was trying to show off for the teacher so that they would gain her affection from the get-go. Things are very similar when you get a new boss, everyone will be trying to get on his/her good side starting on day one. You can improve your odds of doing this if you take a moment and think like a chess master. Your new boss is dealing with exactly the same issues that you are – he/she despertatly wants to “look good” for their boss who put them in this new positon. Your long-term value will be in what you and your team can do to make your new boss look good to his/her boss.

So what DON’T you want to do when you have a new boss? Probably the worst thing in the world you can do is to overwhelm them. Email is easy to send and all too often IT managers start to CC their new boss on every email to show the boss how important the IT manager is. A much better approach is to show your value by creating a condensed summary of what your team is currently working on. Even here there are some dangers: us IT managers like to list each and every little accomplishment so much so that our summary often turns out to be equavalant to  “War & Peace” in length. Keep it short – one computer screen of information should do the trick. Write it in such a way that your new boss now has useful informtation that they could pass on to their boss.

The rough rule-of-thumb is that a new manager has about 90 days to show his/her stuff. You need to be tracking these first 90 days and doing everything that you and your team can to make your new boss shine in that time. Investing in your new boss now will result in a rich payout later on…

How did things go last time you got a new boss? Were you able to clearly communicate the value of both you and your team? Were there any misunderstandings? Did other IT managers steal your spotlight? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Neuroscience Can Make You A Better IT Leader

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
A Good IT Leader Needs A Healthy Brain

A Good IT Leader Needs A Healthy Brain

Dr. John Median is a developmental molecular biologist who recently sat down with the Harvard Business Review and had a talk about what we’ve recently found out about how the brain works and what this can tell us about being better IT leaders.

The key question that IT leaders want to get an answer to is to find how how relevant neuroscience discoveries are to the day-to-day job of management. Dr. Median says that he thinks that one of the reasons that we are all so fascinated by brain research these days is because it truly is the most interesting and complicated processing tool that we have ever seen. How’s this for a fascinating fact: there are as many neurons in your brain as there are stars in a typical galaxy. Despite having this level of knowledge about the brain, we still know very little that can be related to the real world.

One thing that science has learned is that stress is very, very bad for our brains. Since it hurts our brains, it also decreases our productivity. The reasoning behind this is pretty simple. Evolution has wired our brains to help us to survive. What this means in practical terms is that our brains were originally set up to deal with stress for short periods of time: 30-60 seconds. Remember “fight or flight?” However, in today’s modern IT workplace everyone is under stress almost all the time. Our brains were never set up to deal with stress all the time. This can lead to other problems with things like a lack of motivation, poor sleep and immune system issues.

So what happens when we have too much stress in our lives? Dr. Median says that stress can mess with our hormones. When this happens, the connections between brain cells that help us remember things can start to fray and weaken. Unfortuantly, the hormones associated with stress seem to like to prey on the part of the brain that is called the hippocampus - where our memories are kept. Some studies have guessed that the total cost of lost productivity due to stress is somewhere around $200 billion/year. What does this mean for IT managers? Simply put, anything that you can do to lower the stress level that is being experienced by your team will pay back rich dividends.

One very interesting point that Dr.Median makes is that our memory is NOT like a Xerox machine. Our brains and our memory were always designed to help with one thing only: our survival. We really have no idea HOW we remember things, but what we do know is that it seems to take a long time for memories to become permanent. The best way to remember something is to constantly re-expose yourself to it. Once again. for IT managers this means that if you want your team to remember the company’s mission statement, then you’re going to have to start every meeting off by reading it to the team.

The good news out of all of this is that our brains will continue to grow and change throughout our entire lives. If you want to have a better shot at having a healthy, growing brain for your entire career, then the #1 thing that you’ve got to do is to exercise. Exercise in any form and aerobic exercise in particular helps your brain. Dr. Median points out that people who exercise are 50% less likely to get Alzheimer’s disease. From an IT leader point-of-view, this goes along nicely with the idea that a healthy team is a more productive team. Anything that you can do to make it easier for your team to stay in top shape will once again help your team to perform that much better.

What are you doing today to lower the stress level of your team? What is the primary cause of their stress? Is your team able to stay healthy or are they “under the weather” all the time? Do you think stress plays a role in your team’s physical health? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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