Archive for January, 2009

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Your Next IT Manager Challenge: Girl Fight!

Friday, January 30th, 2009

On Top Of Everything Else, IT Managers Need To Put A Stop To Girl Fighting At Work

On Top Of Everything Else, IT Managers Need To Put A Stop To Girl Fighting At Work

By this time in the 21st Century, I’m hoping that we’ve all got the diversity message: gender, race, age, sexual orientation (you too California) don’t matter when hiring people for jobs or when managing them. However, it turns out that there’s been a pink elephant lurking in the room that many of us (males) may have not noticed: girl fights!

I’m not talking about “I’ll see you out in the parking lot after work” types of fights. Rather, it turns out that there is a sneaky thing going on in the workplace. Women are actively treating each other badly. Hmm, where did this come from?

Peggy Klaus wrote a telling article in the New York Times a while back in which she pointed out the issue that has been there all along. Peggy is a leadership coach who has truly been there, done that. This has allowed her to spill the dirt on this dirty little secret…

So what are women doing to each other at work? This can be a long list. How about: limiting access to important committees and meetings, holding back on critical information, giving assignments and promotions to others, even blocking access to people who could be mentors or senior management.

Most of these bullying actions can be placed into one of four buckets of bad behaviors: verbal abuse, job sabotage, misuse of authority, or relationship destroying. Who knew that so much bad stuff was going on at work?

The folks over at the Workplace Bullying Institute have done  a study that showed that women bullies target their abuse towards women an amazing 70% of the time. On the other hand, men who are bullies seem to split their bullying equally between the sexes. This leads to the big question: why bully in the first place?

It turns out that there are a lot of theories for why women treat women badly in the workplace (no – this is not a Jerry Springer moment):

  1. Scarcity Breeds Bullies: since promotion spots are so few these days, women at upper levels are unwilling to help women at lower levels advance for fear that promotion spots will go to those that they help.
  2. Go Bootstrap Yourself: This is a familiar one – I had to get to where I am with no help from anyone, so you should have to do the same.
  3. Avoiding Favoritism: in today’s hype-PC work environments, women don’t want to create an appearance that they are favoring females over males.
  4. Hyper-emotionality: Everyone agrees that women are generally more sensitive to emotions than men are. Some also believe that women more easily take offense and can quickly start to hold a grudge. This means that they can start to overreact when they feel slighted by someone.

So what’s an IT Leader to do with all of this girl-fight knowledge? No matter if the IT Leader is male or female, the steps that need to be taken are the same. The first step is create a true “open door” policy so that when girl fighting goes on behind your back, the victims will feel free to come to you and report what is going on.

The second is that you need to call the bully on their actions. Depending on the IT Leader’s gender (like if you are a guy), you need to be careful here. However, mistreating any employee is unacceptable and the bully needs to be told that this will not be accepted.

The nice thing about bullies is that generally when they get caught, they back down and shape up quickly. Yet one more 21st Century task for an IT Leader to master!

Have you ever witnessed any girl fighting going on in your department? Was it a senior female employee bullying a more junior employee? Did anyone tell the bully to stop? What was the final result of the bully’s actions? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Is An IT Manager Really An Artist?

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
IT Leaders Are In Charge Of A Bunch Of Artists - Can We Get Them To Create Great Art?

IT Leaders Are In Charge Of A Bunch Of Artists - Can We Get Them To Create Great Art?

Here’s an interesting question that I like to whip out every so often and run through my mind: is IT a science or an art? For that matter, are we all engineers or are we really artists? If you think about it, our jobs consist of taking basic elements (colors) combining them (painting) and creating networks, servers, and applications (works of art). Is one among us the next IT Michelangelo?

Ed Catmull is one of the founders of Pixar and he is currently the president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios (they merged just awhile ago). He wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review in which he discussed how Pixar deals with the mix of art and technology that they use to create their films. His thoughts hold some interesting points for us IT Leaders.

One of the first points that Catamull makes is that Disney and Pixar are not just about great artists (Walt Disney being one of them). Rather, what makes them stand out is that they have learned to take technology and bend it in such a way as to help their artists do more. Sure seems like what an IT department is supposed to be doing!

At Pixar they have a saying “Technology inspires art, and art challenges the technology”. No matter what market your business operates in, this saying should apply to you also.

At Pixar they have developed several principles that they use to capture this saying and implement it in how they do work. Because every team in the department is not created equal, Pixar has implemented the following principles to guide their teams:

  1. Communication Is Key And Unrestricted: In order to ensure that silos of information don’t develop, they have separated the decision making hierarchy from the communications hierarchy. There needs to be no such thing as going through “proper channels” to get information. This means that Leaders have to get comfortable with the fact that they won’t know everything and others may know more than they do.
  2. New Ideas Must Be Safe: Nothing can kill innovation like an environment in which new ideas are laughed at or shot down. Everyone needs to get two-sided feedback: tell them what you liked and tell them what you didn’t like.
  3. Good Ideas Start In School: Oh the arrogance of those of us who have been out of school for many years. We forget where the next generation of workers will come from and where new ideas often spring from. We need to encourage our workers to publish their results, challenges, and solutions. Yes, you may end up giving away some competitive advantage but you’ll get so much more back in reader feedback and attracting new talent that it will all be worth it.

Catmull took the time to point out a few additional things that Pixar has done to keep their workers communicating with each other:

  • The Pixar building has been designed with the cafeteria, mailboxes, meeting rooms, and bathrooms are located in a common atrium. This was done to maximize chance encounters between coworkers. It goes without saying that this is how breakthroughs and solutions just “happen”.
  • When a company is successful, the ability to create a way to systematically ward off complacency while at the same time finding ways to uncover problems are probably the two most difficult issues facing a Leader.
  • Postmortems are the key to your company’s long term success. Nobody likes to do them, but everyone learns from them. Catmull suggests changing the format of the postmortem meeting so that people don’t become complacent. He also suggests that you ask each group involved in the postmortem to create a list of the 5 things that they would do again and the 5 things that they would not do again. This creates a safer environment.

I guess at the end of the day, just like the teams at Pixar, we are all artists down deep. The tools that we use and the artwork that we create may be different from what we traditionally think of artists creating, but isn’t that what art is all about?

Do you think of yourself as an artist or as an engineer? Do you think that the most creative IT folks do the best work? Is your work environment a safe place to offer new ideas? Do you do postmortems and are they valuable? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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IT Manager Breakthroughs: The Power Of A Peer Culture

Friday, January 23rd, 2009
IT Leaders Need To Use Peer Review As A Problem Solving Tool

IT Leaders Need To Use Peer Review As A Problem Solving Tool

So where should creativity live in an IT department? We use creativity to solve problems, create designs, and to determine what projects to pursue. IT Managers need to be the ones who have creative control within the IT department in order to ensure that projects get done correctly. However, this is often easier said than done…

Ed Catmull is one of the founders of Pixar and he is currently the president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios (they merged just awhile ago). He wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review in which he discussed how Pixar has learned to deal with managing all that creativity.

As an IT manager, your job is to get creative IT people on  a team, make their task very clear to them, bet on them big time, ensure that they have a way to get honest feedback, and then give them a lot of leeway to make decisions and the support that they’ll need to keep on going.

If that wasn’t enough to make an IT Leader’s job difficult, then the next part should just about do it. As an IT Leader, one of your main jobs is to observe your team. What you are looking for is how they work to solve problems and if they are able to make progress. In essence, you are trying to observe the social dynamics that are in play within the team – no changes needed if everything is working. It’s when it’s not working that things start to get fun…

Catmull has seen his share of both successful and unsuccessful leaders. He points out that he believes that good leaders, of course, have great analytical skills. However, he goes farther and says that they also have to be able to find a way to harness the analytical skills and work experience of those people who are on the team. I guess that’s the difference between an IT Leader and an “individual contributor”, eh?

Catmull believes that there are too few truly great leaders. These leaders have the ability to do a great job of listening to their team. Additionally, while they are listening, they are trying to gain an understanding of just what kind of thinking has gone into the speaker’s suggestion. Great leaders appreciate each and every contribution and in turn they feel free to use the best ideas no matter from where they came.

One of Pixar’s breakthrough management techniques is that they use what they call a “brain trust” to solve problems. When a team gets itself in trouble (and we all do at sometime or another), it can request the assembly of a brain trust.

A brain trust is a collection of Pixar’s most creative people. The team with the problem presentes their issues and then a two hour back and forth discussion ensues. During this discussion, there is no ego and nobody holds back on their comments / suggestions.

Through experimentation, Pixar has discovered that it is critical to NOT give the brain trust any authority over how the team solves its problems. This will screw up the dynamic of the brain trust session. Instead, make it a pure peer feedback session and watch the ideas flow…

Does your team use peer feedback techniques to solve problems today? Does the peer team have any authority? Do you feel that this technique works for your team? Why? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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The IT Manager’s Dilemma: Smart People Or Good Ideas?

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
Pixar Can Teach IT Leaders A Lot About Selecting Staff For Teams

Pixar Can Teach IT Leaders A Lot About Selecting Staff For Teams

When an IT manager is given an assignment to complete a project, who should he/she want to have on their team? Within the world of IT, there are many different types of people that you can choose from, but all too often it comes down choosing people who are as smart as (or less) that you or choosing people who are smarter than you are. What should an IT manager do?

Ed Catmull is one of the founders of Pixar and he is currently the president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios (they merged just awhile ago). He wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review in which he discussed how managers at Pixar deal with this problem.

Catmull is a firm believer that you really need to have the smartest people possible on your team – even if they are smarter than you are. In fact, Catmull is a firm believer that smart people are even more important than good ideas.

All of Pixar’s films have been big commercial successes. However, there have been projects that have almost caused the company to fail. It’s from these stories that Catmull has become convinced that having smart people on your team is a necessity.

Pixar’s first big successful film was called Toy Story. After this hit, the creative team that made it got busy on Pixar’s next film that was to be called A Bug’s Life. Pixar also wanted to make a follow-up film to Toy Story which would be called Toy Story 2. Because the original creative team was busy, a second creative team was assembled to mange this project.

Originally Disney who was distributing Pixar’s films at the time wanted Toy Story 2 to be a direct-to-video release which meant that both the cost and the quality could be lower. However, Pixar decided that having two different standards for quality would be bad for the studio’s morale and so Disney was convinced to make it a full theatrical release.

The way that you make an animated movie is to create storyboards which are crude pencil sketches of the movie’s action and mate them with dialogue and temporary music. The result of this is called a story reel. As the team worked on Toy Story 2, these story reels were not improving like they should have been.

The reasons for this were many. The Directors and the Producers were not able to work together in order to meet the challenges that they were facing. One key point to realize is that there was nothing wrong with the story – everyone was very happy with the initial story. It’s just that the team was having problems turning it into a compelling movie.

In the end, Toy Story 2 was saved and went on to be a big commercial success for Pixar. How was this done? The original creative team was able to wrap up their work on A Bug’s Life and they swooped in to save the day. The specific things that they did changed it from a ho-hum movie to an interesting one.

All Disney released movies have a happy ending; so this was never in doubt in the work that the original creative team had put together. The new creative team took this, tore it apart, and inserted several points in which a happy outcome was by no means guaranteed. This made the movie much more interesting.

Pixar’s lessons from this project should resonate with IT leaders everywhere. Catmull says that the most important of these lessons “…is that if you give a good idea to a mediocre team, then they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.”

The other lesson that IT Leaders need to learn from Pixar is that every IT department needs to have only one quality bar by which to measure each project. You need to be able to communicate to the entire department that it is unacceptable to have some ok projects as well as great projects. This is how you move beyond lip service for quality…

When you are pulling together a team for a project, are you willing to choose the best people for the project? How do you feel about having people who are smarter than you on a project? Does this cause friction? Does your IT department grade every project when it’s done? Are all projects of the same quality? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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3 IT Manager Secrets From The Folks At Pixar

Friday, January 16th, 2009

Pixar Makes Great Movies And Has A Lot To Teach IT About Manging Creativity

Pixar Makes Great Movies And Has A Lot To Teach IT About Manging Creativity

Toy Story, Cars, Finding Nemo, Wall-E – who hasn’t been amazed at the movies that Pixar has created over the past few years? I think that we can all agree that clearly Pixar has found a way to foster and grow creativity within their organization. What if IT Leaders could find out how to do the same for our departments and teams…

Ed Catmull is one of the founders of Pixar and he is currently the president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios (they merged just awhile ago). He wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review in which he discussed just what makes Pixar work so well.

Catmull make the point that he was once talking with a studio executive who lamented the fact that his biggest problem was not finding good people, but rather finding good ideas.

Catmull flat out disagrees with this thinking – he thinks that it reflects a misunderstanding of creativity. He also thinks that it places way too much importance on the initial idea in creating a new product.

Since the release of Toy Story in 1995, Pixar has released eight other films which have all been blockbusters. The real interesting point is that Pixar has never bought a script or movie idea from the outside. The ingredients that make their movies magic, the stories, the characters, and the worlds in which they live, have all been created internally by Pixar employees.

Here’s where the real learning for IT Leaders comes:

Catmull believes that Pixar’s adherence to a basic set of principles and ways of managing creative talent and risk is done responsibly. At Pixar, the job of management is NOT to prevent risk but rather to build in the capability to recover when failures occur (and, of course, they do occur).

In order for this type of environment to exist, it must be safe to tell the truth. In order for the organization to grow and improve, it must constantly challenge all of its assumptions and be searching for any flaws that could ultimately search for any flaws that could destroy the organization.

IT Leaders, just like Pixar management, need to find a way to resist our built-in tendencies to try to either avoid or at least minimize risks. I realize that this is easy to say, and very hard to do.

If an IT Leader can’t overcome his/her desire to avoid risk, then each project that they are in charge of will be an imperfect copy of a previous project that they worked on. This will result in many copies of what was never a perfect process with no hope of achieving a break through.

To have a break through in how a project is done, IT Leaders need to be able to find a way to live with uncertainty. This of course means that you also need to make sure that your department or team has the built-in ability to recover when you’ve taken a big risk and it ends up failing.

The key to being able to recover lies in the people that you have on your team, but we’ll have to talk about how you do that next time…

What’s your favorite Pixar movie? Why? Do you feel that your IT department manages creativity well? Do you have a plan for how to recover if you take a risk and it ends up failing? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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