Archive for October, 2008

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How IT Managers Can Make Time Work For Them

Friday, October 31st, 2008
Product Mangers Can Turn Time Into Their Friend

IT Mangers Can Turn Time Into Their Friend

Just where does the time seem to go? I don’t know about you but as of late I seem to be running out of time or just simply running behind more often than in the past. I’d like to blame the current turmoil in the financial markets; however, that’s not the problem. There are many, many more people who are better qualified than I talk about time management (I’m sorta a fan of GTD myself), but I do have one secret that I’d like to share with you. No promises, but if you believe what I’m going to share with you and if you take the time to implement it, then there is a pretty good chance that you’ll become the best IT manager in the world. Sound interesting? Then read on…

If you think back a bit, you might remember that there was a book called The Secret that was very popular awhile ago. In a nutshell, the secret was that if you can imagine something, then you can make it happen. This applies to making others believe that you have control over your time. However, I’m going get just a bit more specific here and give you one single change that if you implement it will have a dramatic and positive impact on your life: start showing up early.

What this means in the day-to-day life of a IT manager is that you need to start to show up for meeting early (5-10 minutes will do) and even more importantly, you need to start to jump on call bridges early (5 minutes will do here). I don’t know about you, but up until just recently I was a constantly late shower-upper. I would slide into calls 5 minutes late and hope that whoever was running the meeting would not stop the call and ask who had just joined when they heard the “beep” that announced my arrival. I’d slug through the call and then slink off when it was over no better or worse for the time spent on the call.

A few weeks ago, I accidentally showed up for a call early. You can imagine how surprised I was when there was nobody on the bridge when I joined (there was that moment where I felt that I needed to check to make sure that I had the right call-in numbers). What happened next really caught my attention: other people started to join. These just happened to be people that I had been trying with no luck to get in touch with. I had very quick, very short conversations with three of them as they joined and got commitments from them to send me answers and materials that I desperately needed. As others joined I exchanged small talk with them and reconnected with people that I knew but had not seen in a long time. When the call’s leader joined he fumbled around for a bit and this gave me time to ask a very good, penetrating question about what he wanted to accomplish on this call and that got everyone involved in a discussion. Man, it was almost like I was running the show!

Based on the success of this accidental event, I started showing up early for all of my meetings that week and found that the same sequence of events repeated itself. Others looked at me as though I was in charge, I connected with other people who were in the meeting, and I was able to make face-to-face requests for support and materials that were never turned down. Wow – who knew that getting what you wanted could be so easy?

Yes, I realize that showing up early for meetings and calls won’t solve all of life’s problems. However, it sure seems to make a lot of little things run much easier. When you couple that with the fact that it’s so very easy to do, why not give it a try and see what it does for you?

When do you show up for meetings & calls – early or late? When you are the one who is running the meeting do you show up early or do you still come late? Have you always been this way or did something cause you to be an early/late person? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in 40 hour week | 6 Comments »

5 Steps To Help An IT Manager Find A Mentor

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
Find Single Mentor No Longer IT Manager Can

Find Single Mentor No Longer IT Manager Can

Mentoring is sorta like that networking thing. You know that it’s probably a good thing to be doing. However, you’re not quite sure how to get started with it and so it seems to always end up on your “should do” list where, of course, it never gets done. Whenever you read about someone’s success in business, they always seem to give credit to their mentor. Man, I guess having a mentor can help one succeed in business, I really should get one of those…

A traditional mentoring relationship was when an older colleague would talk a younger colleague under their wing and they would show you the ropes and maybe even open some doors for you along the way. Bad news: those days are pretty much over at this point in time. Today mentors need their own mentors in order to keep up with all the changes that are occurring in technology, globalization, workplace diversity, etc. Since the old way of mentoring is now officially broken, IT managers need a new way of getting the guidance that mentoring used to provide.

A clever solution to this problem is instead of limiting yourself to one mentor, instead develop a small network of mentors – each having a particular area of speciality. Keep in mind that mentors for this “personal board of directors” do not need to come from where you work: professional societies, university, friends, all are potential candidates. Here are 5 steps that will help you build your mentor network:

  1. First Look In The Mirror: How can you ask others to help you unless you know what kind of career help you need? Spending time listing out your strengths and weaknesses is the best way to decide what kind of mentors you need.
  2. Determine What Your Needs Are: Once you know what your strengths and weaknesses are, then you are ready to decide what steps you need to take in order to achieve your goal. If you want to be CIO, then you probably need to first be a Director, next an Executive Director, and so on. Knowing this type of information will help you to understand what types of mentors can give you the coaching that you’ll need in order to get promoted.
  3. Pick Your Mentors: Instead of waiting around for a kindly Sr. Executive to reach out and offer to coach you (just like in the movies), you need to select those whom you will invite to be your mentors. Remember that mentoring has to be a two way street so make sure that you have something to give back to the people that you ask to mentor you.
  4. Weed & Sow Constantly: As time goes by, your mentoring needs will change. This means that you need to be constantly re-evaluating who is currently in your mentoring network. Over time your needs will change and you will need to gracefully swap out board members.
  5. Give More Than You Receive: Keep in mind that mentoring is a two-way street. Ultimately you will want to be sought out by others to be their mentor so that you can learn from the best and the brightest. The only way to make sure that this happens is to develop a reputation for being a great mentor yourself.

Do you currently have a mentor? How did you get your mentor – did you select them or were they assigned to you? If you developed a mentor network, how many people would you need to have on it? Where would you find people to be part of your mentor network? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What Should An IT Manager Look For When Hiring Employees?

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
CIOs Are Looking For Technicality Passionate Folks Who Are Enthusiastic

CIOs Are Looking For Technicality Passionate Folks Who Are Enthusiastic

Talk about confusing! IT managers are responsible for bringing the best and brightest into your organization. However, in the field of IT, just exactly what this means is difficult to pin down – we keep changing our minds! IT departments today look nothing like the IT departments of the 80′s, 90′s, and even early 2000. Once upon a time the best IT workers were those with the sharpest tech skills. Then they were told to become more like the business side of the business. Next IT certifications were all the rage (I blame Cisco for this), next they were told to get really good at one technology, oh, but don’t allow yourself to be pigeon-holed into just one technology. What’s a nerd to do?

In a recent set of interviews with CIOs that Deb Perelman over at eWeek did, she discovered that they weren’t really looking for specific skills such as SAP, Oracle Financials, or certain business skills when they did IT hiring. Rather they were looking for more of that touchy-feely stuff: enthusiasm, the ability to be flexible, and of course the ability to get things done.

What makes an IT worker different from workers in other departments at a company is that they need to be passionate about technology. Since technology is such a large part of the IT world, if an employee doesn’t love it and want to be constantly finding out more about what can be done with it, then there is a good chance that burnout will occur sooner than later. A love of technology does not mean that CIOs are looking for the classic “put ‘em in the closet” techie. The ability to relate to others and share information is now recognized as being just as important as technology skills.

If CIOs ran the world (and they don’t), then they’d be able to hire IT staffers who had lots of experience. What they are really looking for are folks who have done something over and over again so many times that it has become second nature to them. What would make such a person an even better find would be if they had good industry experience in the industries that a particular company works. A key marker of this type of IT employee is that they often move in and out of the IT department to other departments such as marketing.

We all know that IT departments at most companys have taken a number of hits over the past several years. Downsizing, offshoring, and other events have taken a toll on IT worker morale. CIOs realize this; however, they want / need their IT departments to be full of enthusiastic workers. It’s important to note here that this is not a discussion about having a more youthful department – young folks can be just as glum as older ones. Rather, CIOs want elements of flexibility and excitement to come back into their departments.

What about all those certifications that were supposed to be our ticket to lifetime employment? It turns out that CIOs don’t think that much of them these days. Instead, what they are looking for is experience and a history of executing projects successfully. These days it’s really all about your ability to get the job done.

CIOs realize that the job market for IT professionals will keep growing through 2016. Things are going to get tricky because the Baby Boomers are getting ready to leave the market and the Gen X/Y folks don’t have the numbers needed to make up for the exodus. What this means for CIOs is that they are going to have to start growing their own talent internally. All of a sudden that enthusiasm stuff starts to become a lot more important.

Do you feel that your department is filled with enthusiastic people? Do the people in your department have good IT instincts? Are you still thinking about getting more certifications? If so, what one? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in career, it, Uncategorized | No Comments »

How Can An IT Leader Change An Engineer Into A Team Player?

Monday, October 20th, 2008
IT Leaders Need To Be Able To Change Engineers Into Team Players

IT Leaders Need To Be Able To Change Engineers Into Team Players

At my core, I am an engineer. I recognize this, I accept this, I am proud of this. However, during my career many mentors have been kind enough to hold up that damning mirror of self-vision and have allowed me to see myself as I was: an engineer’s engineer. One key characteristic of this part of an engineer’s personality is that everything in the world is seen as falling into one of two buckets: right or wrong. Oh, and an another characteristic of the engineer’s personality is that we’ll have no problem speaking up and letting you know just exactly where we think something falls. That might be why an engineer’s life is so hard.

It took me 20+ years to develop a “wrapper” to put around my engineering personality. This wrapper helped my career progress, made difficult tasks much easier, and just all around simplified my life. I was reminded just how important this evolution of my personality was today when a younger version of myself asked to talk with me. He’s involved in the electrical power generation industry and he’s been having a tough time of it lately. He told me that he felt that he was just “banging his head against the wall” and that he was finding it really hard to get anything done at work. He described himself as a “guns ‘a blazing” sorta of guy who feared no conversation. Read this as classic engineer talk for “I’ll tell you when you’re wrong.” Clearly this was a social / political career crash that was just waiting to happen. What could I tell him that would help him to save himself?

The first thing that I realized is that I wasn’t going to be able to help him until he wanted to be helped. Right now he just wanted to complain about how wrong everyone else was. I let him vent for awhile and then asked him a few questions. It turns out that he’s had a number of projects (both work and social) that he’s been the leader for. In the past, a number of them have flat out failed. This is classic engineer talk: “they just didn’t get what I wanted them to do!” Recently he did organize a successful gathering and I probed to find out more about why that one worked. It turns out that others helped him out with that one. This was a bit of an eye opener – he had not realized that he had always failed when he tried to do everything by himself.

Next we talked about that whole “guns ‘a blazing” thing. He had just gotten off of a call that had started badly and he’d gone in shooting the meeting leader for not being clear about the purpose of the meeting. After he got a few shots off, he basically tuned out of the whole meeting. Clearly, this had been a showdown in the OK Corral that had turned out badly for everyone. My big challenge here was to find a way to make him see himself as the world sees him. My first try, “what do you think the other person though of you” didn’t go very far – he was too fixated on the fact that the other guy was “wrong” to consider this. I then asked him if the call had been successful – he admitted that it had not been. I then asked him that if it had been his assignment to make sure that the call was a success, while still playing the subordinate role that he had played, what would he have done differently? This question floored him. He didn’t have an answer – an engineer hates it when he doesn’t know the answer.

Having gotten his attention and partially getting him to understand that his actions had not moved the call closer to a successful ending, I then went in for the kill. I suggested that the only way to accomplish his goal of making sure that the call was successful, would have been to understand what the call leader was feeling and then persuade him to move in a direction that would make the call successful. My young friend considered this for a bit and agreed. Hey, it’s sorta like a control system problem back in school. I finished by pointing out the the “guns ‘a blazing” approach would never persuade anyone to move in the direction that you wanted them to move. He agreed. Now all I have to do is teach him how to be successful when interacting with others and I will have changed an engineer into a team player!

Do you have any classic engineering personalities on your team? Do they hurt your ability to solve team problems more than they help? What have you tried to get them to temper their engineering personality in order to create more teamwork? Has it worked? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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How An IT Leader Can Manage Competitive Arousal In Their Team

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
Competition Can Change IT Workers Into Bad Decision Makers

Competition Can Change IT Workers Into Bad Decision Makers

It’s great to have an IT team that is full of go-getters. However, as with everything in life, sometimes teammates can be too competitive. When we let the heat of battle overcome our better judgement, then we’ve got a real problem. When this happens, we stand a very good chance of starting to make very bad decisions. Long after the competition has been resolved, we’ll still be living with the effects of those decisions and that can come back to haunt us over and over again.

Last time we discussed that rivalry, time pressure, and a bright spotlight of public attention can all contribute to making us become competitively arroused. This is how we start to make bad decisons. Given all of this, now lets spend some time talking about what can be done by IT leaders to manage competative arousal within their teams.

An IT leader can work to prevent problems by minimizing the potential for competitive arousal to occur in the first place by doing two things: avoiding the certain types of interaction that can lead to competition among teammates, and working to defuse the common risk factors that can lead to excessively competitive behavior.

In the first case, an IT leader needs to have the ability to think like a chess master and look into the future. He/she is looking to identify those interpersonal dynamic conditions that could lead to competitive arousal within their team. Once an IT leader has spotted these potentially volatile conditions, then they can step in and can work to restructure the deal making process into one that they believe will still lead to a successful outcome while not leading to a overly competitive situation.

Additionally, an IT leader needs to be constantly working to defuse the risk factors that may lead their teammates to enter into competitive arousal. There are three ways that this can be done:

  • Reduce Potential Rivalry: Luke Skywalker was motivated to overthrow the Empire at all costs because he saw it as being “evil”. When IT workers start to view rivals as being “bad”, or “evil” they can start to view winning as being required no matter what the cost. When this happens, the IT leader needs to identify who is feeling the greatest amount of rivalry and then limit their role. Another helpful approach is to do your homework before the competition begins. Clearly lay out how much you are willing to “lose” in order to “win”. Doing this before competitive arousal kicks in ensures a more rational decision will be reached.
  • Slow Down The Clock: In order to reduce the pressure that a ticking clock brings to the table, an IT leader needs to search for ways to stop the clock or at least to extend its window of time. Deadlines are almost always too short in which to complete the work. Extending or eliminating them is a key IT leader job.
  • Dimming The Public Spotlight: A great way to take the burden of meeting public expectations off the shoulder of individual IT staffers is to spread the decision making responsibility across multiple members. This isn’t a perfect solution, but it go a long way towards reducing the stress felt by individual team members.

Although it’s not often that the IT leader is the one who is getting caught up in a competitive situation, he/she does play a key role. The ability to anticipate that a member of the department is going to enter into a rivalry situation, come under time pressure, or get caught in a spotlight is part of an IT leader’s job. In the end, we all overestimate just how rational, careful, and even logical that we are in high pressure situation. It’s the role of an IT leader to save us from making bad decisions when we find ourselves there.

Have you ever had to diffuse a rivalry situation within your department? Did you see it before it became a problem or did you have to react after things started to get bad? Have you ever been able to remove a deadline that was causing your team to start to make bad decisions? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in IT manager | 2 Comments »

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