Archive for the ‘career’ Category

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Hello IT Manager: You’re In Politics Now!

Thursday, March 1st, 2012
Image Credit No matter where you stand, you are now in politics

No matter where you stand, you are now in politics

Can’t an IT manager just rise above all of the politics? I mean really, with all of the technology leadership decisions that need to be made along with the business processes that need to be streamlined, can’t we all just skip the politics and get down to business? It turns out that we can’t and that means that as an IT manager you’re going to have to show some management and make sure that your dream team is good at playing the office politics game…

Why Politics Matter

So let’s get to the heart of the matter right off the bat: the political skills that your IT department members have will be key to their ability to build successful IT careers. You didn’t become IT manager by chance, but rather by skillfully navigating the political maze that is your company. Your IT team needs to learn how to do the same.

Office politics has a bad name – it’s often viewed as using deception to get things done. Nothing could be further from the truth. What’s really going on here is that your IT team is combining their knowledge of what the IT department needs them to do with an ability to actually get things accomplished. When they can do this, your team will benefit.

Politics And Your Staff’s Careers

Having political skills means that your team will spend their time building personal networks (not the IT kind!) so that they can get both the information the help that they need, when they need it. It also means that they need to be smart enough to not pick fights that just don’t matter. They need to be able to decide if they want to always be right, or they want to get something done.

All too often we IT folks don’t exactly know how to maintain the support of both the folks who work for us and for whom we work. A lot of what it takes to be successful in the world of office politics is for IT team members to find ways to inspire confidence in others and to build support for their ideas. This means that they need to project self-confidence and a certain amount of force behind their ideas. The last thing that anyone wants to do is to come across as being remorseful – nobody is going to support you if you do.

Sending Signals

Finally, winning the office politics game often comes down to how other perceive you. It turns out that if others are able to view your IT team as being very focused and clear about what they want to accomplish, then they’ll be successful. They won’t be successful if they seem tentative or unclear about what they are trying to do.

I almost hate to pass this final bit of advice along, but studies have shown one key characteristic of how IT team members can project power. Those who interrupt signal to others that they have power. Those people who allow themselves to be interrupted are signaling that they don’t have power.

What All Of This Means For You

As an IT manager, you are going to need to become politically savvy as well as taking steps to make your team politically savvy. Don’t think for a moment that this will be an easy job. You’ve got to do it right or else you risk losing staff.

There are points in an IT team member’s career where having political skills becomes very important. If they’ve taken the time to develop their political skills, then they’ll be able to continue to rise in the company. If not, then they’ll find their careers being derailed.

IT managers need to take the time to teach their staff how to negotiate the political challenges that every IT department faces in a modern company. Only by doing this can you ensure that they’ll be able to accomplish the things that you need them to get done. IT managers who can teach their IT teams how to use politics to their advantage will become successful IT managers.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that formal training on office politics is needed or just constant on-the-job training?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

There you are, an IT manager trying to run an efficient IT team. All of sudden — wham! One of your key team members comes and tells you that he or she is leaving. Time to go back the bus up because you’ve got another soon-to-be-former team member who deserves to be thrown under it. Or maybe not. What’s the best way to deal with team members who break up with you?

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Do You Have Enough Personal Energy To Be An IT Manager?

Thursday, October 27th, 2011
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Do You Know How To Manage Your IT Manager Energy?

Do You Know How To Manage Your IT Manager Energy?

So what’s it going to take to make you a successful IT manager? Is it going to be your understanding of a wide variety of emerging technologies? Is it your ability to understand where the company stands in the marketplace and where it wants to go? Or is it your business skills that allow you to seamlessly network with the rest of the company in order to lead your IT team?

Turns out that these are all good to have; however, what it’s going to take to get you to the finish line is something much more valuable: personal energy.

Why You Are Doing A Poor Job Of Being An IT Manager

How would you be able to tell if you were doing a poor job of being IT manager? I guess one way would be to determine that you were not getting things done – more and more tasks were just sitting around waiting for you to get to them. Is this happening? Maybe we should take a look at your email inbox – is it getting rather full?

So what’s going on here? You’ve probably read that “Getting Things Done” book, you’ve studied the 7 habits of effective people, how much more time can you spend managing your time? Tony Schwartz has looked into what is going on here and he believes that we are all experiencing what he calls a “personal energy crisis”.

Look, for years and years we have all been finding ways to do more in a fixed amount of time – thank you smart phones and laptops. However, we’ve just about used up all of our available time no matter how hard we try to free up more time to do stuff. We are out of time. Going forward it’s not going to be so much about finding more time to get things done, rather it’s all going to be about finding the personal energy to get things done.

How To Find Your Personal Power

The concept of having enough personal power to get the important work done seems straightforward enough. But how does one actually go about doing this? Here’s what we are all missing: we are human beings and that means that at a biological level we are programmed to work for a while and then to take a rest. We are not computers sitting in some data center somewhere that can be plugged in and run for months or years without stopping.

Ooops, did I say rest? Doesn’t that go against just about everything that you are currently doing? Didn’t you get to the position of being an IT manager by working harder than everyone else? Getting in early, staying late, working weekends is what it takes to succeed, right?

Bad / Good news – turns out that we’ve got it all wrong. Because we are human beings, we do need rest. But the good thing about rest is that after we get some, we have the ability to do more work than before. Studies of pilots have shown this to be true: a short half-hour nap boosted their reaction times by 16% while pilots who didn’t nap had their reaction times drop by 34%. I suspect that most of us are in the 34% crowd.

A sleep researcher names Nathaniel Kleitman came up with the concept of the “basic rest activity cycle”. What this means is that during the day we all cycle through a 90-minute cycle where we go from high alertness to low alertness. Clearly your body wants you to stop and take a break every 90 minutes or so.

To become a more effective IT manager you need to make some changes in how you run your day. You need to schedule your work so that you are running at a higher focus for a shorter period of time. After this period is over, you need to take the time to rest and allow your body to renew itself. By doing this you will find that you really can get more work done in less time!

What All Of This Means For You

In order to be an effective IT manager you are going to have to be able to get an awful lot of work done. The question that should be smacking you in the face right about now is just exactly how are you going to get all of that work done? It turns out that time management is only going to get you so far. You are eventually going to run out of time.

This means that you need to become a strong leader, not one that runs out of steam. You are going to have to switch from managing your time to managing your personal energy. We humans are designed to work in 90 minute cycles. What this means that is that we’ll go from being very alert to being not so alert every hour and a half. Understanding that you have this cycle and designing your work schedule around it will be the key to becoming and remaining effective.

p>You can become the IT manager that everyone turns to because they know that you can get it done. However, the only way that you’re going to be able to do this is to make sure that your personal energy is up to powering you through day after day of charting your company’s technological future. Start living your work days 90 minutes at a time and you’ll be the IT manager that everyone looks up to.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: What’s the best way to make sure that you can divide your day up into 90 minute blocks?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As an IT manager, one of the biggest management challenges that you’ll ever face is setting an effective strategy that your entire team can rally behind. As though this wasn’t difficult enough, there’s a little secret about IT strategies that nobody probably ever took the time to tell you about. They don’t last.

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Now What? When IT Managers Make The Wrong Job Move…

Thursday, May 12th, 2011
Image Credit Oops -- That Job Change Was Wrong, Now What?

Oops -- That Job Change Was Wrong, Now What?

Sure you did all of the research, you talked with all of the right people, shucks you even followed up on every Google link that you could find on the company that you were thinking about going to work for before making the jump. However, now that you’ve made the jump you are finding out that perhaps you’ve made a mistake. Now what do you do?

How Did This Happen?

IT managers are supposed to be smart people, how come we can end up making mistakes when it comes time to switch jobs? The good news is that we are smart; however, what can happen is that we can find ourselves under a great deal of pressure and this can adversely affect how we make decisions.

One such type of pressure is mental pressure – how do we see ourselves? When we are considering making a job change, we tend to make up our minds about how we think the next job is going to be and then we only pay attention to the information that we encounter that confirms this view. Researchers call this thinking “confirmation bias”.

In order to counter this kind of thinking we need to be constantly asking ourselves one question: what happens if I am wrong? Only by doing this will you be able to make yourself aware of information that might not fit the way that you want the world to be.

Another type of pressure you need to deal with when you are considering changing jobs is social pressure. This is most often evident when you have become so unhappy with your current job that you’d almost rather be anywhere else.

Far too often these types of situations could be dealt with if you would only find the courage to sit down and talk things over with someone at your current company. However, all too often we are so resistant to having this kind of discussion that we’re willing to leave the firm and run to a new job.

Finally, the ever present specter of time pressure is always a factor when it comes to considering moving to a new job. When we don’t feel that we have very much time to make a decision, what happens is that we end up hastily making a bad decision.

The lack of time forces us to focus on the short-term gains that we’ll make by switching jobs. What happens is that we forget to take a look at the long-term impacts of making the switch. A good way of countering this tendency is to ask yourself questions such as “if the salaries & benefits were the same, would I make the job switch?”

What Do You Do Now?

Despite having taken the time to carefully consider all of the issues and to try to counter the pressures that will be driving your decision, sometimes we still end up making poor job change choices. The question then comes up: what should we do now?

The experts all agree on the answer to this one. You need to cut your losses and move on once again. However, this time around you need to do a better job. Don’t just flee a bad job and jump yet again into another poor position. Take the time to understand why you made a bad job change decision and make sure that you don’t repeat this mistake.

Ultimately the best way to protect yourself from making another bad career decision is to become more self-aware. You want to be able to understand your strengths and weaknesses so that you can evaluate your next job opportunity in a way that will reveal if it is really the right career move for you.

What All Of This Means For You

Despite our best efforts, sometimes we make mistakes when we are switching product management jobs. There can be a number of different reasons that we make this kind of mistake but more often than not they all come back to the different types of pressures that we are under: mental, social, or time.

If you find yourself having made the wrong choice in switching jobs, your next step is very clear. You need to cut your losses and move on to your next job. You need to be careful and make sure that you leave your new job carefully so that it doesn’t look like you are running away from it.

None of us is perfect – we all have the ability to make the wrong decision at some point in time. What can make us a great IT manager is the ability to be aware that we’ve made a poor decision and then the ability to react and make the right decision.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: : How long do you think that you should stay at a job that you know is the wrong job for you?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

First the bad news: it turns out that 25% of the best workers in the IT department are planning on leaving within the next 12 months. Do I have your attention now? Not to depress you even more, but it turns out that those internal job change programs that are intended to develop the next generation of IT leaders don’t work – 40% of the internal rotations that are made by IT “high-pots” (high potential) employees end up in failure. Let’s take a look at what problems you need to solve …

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Only An IT Manager Could Screw Up A Job Change!

Thursday, May 5th, 2011
Image Credit It Can Be Easy To Take A Wrong Step When Changing Jobs

It Can Be Easy To Take A Wrong Step When Changing Jobs

The global economy is roaring back again and it sure seems like everyone is starting to take stock of their job and decide if they want to stay where they are or move on to greener pastures. IT managers are no exception. Perhaps you’ve grown as far as you can or perhaps you feel that you’ve done everything that you’re going to be allowed to do where you are at. If you are thinking about moving on, you had better be careful that you don’t screw up your job change…

Failing To Do Enough Research On Where You Are Going

Considering the fact that doing research, collecting data, and then making the best possible decision is such a key part of the job of being a IT manager, you’d think that we’d all do this well when it comes to looking for our next job. Well, guess again.

The folks who know such things, search consultants, say that IT managers are dropping the ball in several areas. The first is that they don’t do a good job of sizing up the market for their skills. What this means is that IT managers don’t have valid assumptions for how long it’s going to take to find their next job.

Next, IT managers somewhat surprisingly don’t do a good job of checking out the financial health of the company that they are thinking about jumping to. Sure they may check out the salary, but not the bottom line situation.

Additionally, the culture of the new company is rarely considered. If an IT manager is coming in from a free-wheeling Silicon Valley company and is considering going to work for a 100-year old insurance firm, culture becomes a big deal.

Finally, all too often IT managers assume that they are getting what’s being advertised – that the job title matches the job. Just because the new company calls the job “IT manager” does not mean that you’ll have the same level of control that you had in your old job.

Going When They Show You The Money

Hey, I like money, you like money. However, as hard as it is for both of us to understand, you can’t leave one job and go to another just because the new job pays more. This is a sure recipe for disaster.

When IT managers were asked to rank what they were looking for in a new job, pay came in at the fourth or fifth place on the list. However, all too often IT managers bump this factor up to first place when it comes time to make a decision — bad move.

Deciding To Go “From” Rather Than “To”

Just like everyone else out there, IT managers can become dissatisfied with their jobs. When this happens, they can start to make poor career decisions.

When a IT manager decides to switch jobs, it should be a carefully planned career move. However, if they are really upset with their current position, then all too often it becomes just a desperate jump to the nearest lifeboat. Since this often happens with little or no serious research into the firm that the IT manager is fleeing to, these new positions rarely last for long.

As a IT manager bounces from firm to firm, you can quickly develop a reputation as a job hopper and it will become that much harder to get your next job. No matter how bad your current job is, take the time to plan out what your next career step should be before you do anything.

What All Of This Means For You

IT managers are like everyone else: when the opportunity to move to a new job comes along, they can decide to make the jump for all of the wrong reasons. If you are aware of the most common mistakes that other IT managers have made, then you’ll have a chance to avoid them.

The mistakes that IT managers make are easily avoidable. The most common mistakes include not doing enough research on the company that they’ll be joining, being seduced by an offer of more money, and focusing on leaving the firm where they are and not taking a careful look at just exactly where they’ll be going.

Ultimately, being aware of the most common mistakes that IT managers make is the first step in avoiding them. You can switch jobs smoothly and end up in a better place, just make sure that you’re switching for all the right reasons! /p>

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that going to a company in trouble for a lot more money would be worth it?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Sure you did all of the research, you talked with all of the right people, shucks you even followed up on every Google link that you could find on the company that you were thinking about going to work for before making the jump. However, now that you’ve made the jump you are finding out that perhaps you’ve made a mistake. Now what do you do?

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You Need To Love Yourself In Order To Have A Great IT Manager Career

Thursday, April 21st, 2011
Image Credit
To Be Successful, IT Managers Need To Know Themselves…

To Be Successful, IT Managers Need To Know Themselves…

Once you become an IT manager, you’d think that you’d pretty much made it – what more could you want? However, it’s really just the start of another journey, not the end. What makes this part of your career potentially different from the parts that came before is that you are the one who is in charge of it. How do you want things to turn out?

First Figure Out What You Want To Do

In order to be a successful IT manager, you need to be doing what you love. I know that this may sound fairly strange to most of you, perhaps just a bit too “huggy – feely”, but it turns out that it is true. In the world of IT, all too often we end up doing what we’ve fallen into and over time that can lead to burn-out and discontent with our lot in life.

A much better way of doing things is to take control of your career. This statement sounds bold, but saying it is not enough — it’s going to require you to take action. Specifically, you are going to have to ask yourself some tough questions and you’re going to have to be strong enough to take action once you discover what the answers are.

In the world of business, what interests you the most? Based on the work that you’ve done so far in your career, what did you value the most? Do you know what you are really good at?

As an IT manager, you want to take the time to fully understand what you are looking for in the rest of your IT career. This means taking the time to understand exactly what kind of work you like to do. Not every company is the same, that’s why you also have to spend time studying exactly what kind of work environments most appeal to you. Finally, what types of people do you like to work with?

Get Input From Outsiders

A great deal of the information about yourself that you are going to need in order to answer the questions that you are asking won’t come from you. The reason for this is fairly simple: we’re too close to the subject (us!) .

Because of this, we’re going to need extra help. We have three sets of people that we can reach out to: people that you work with, friends & family, and yourself.

What you are going to want to do is to collect information that will build on your understanding of yourself. Specifically, you’re looking for information on what others think that your value, work interests, and skills are. This is going to require you to reach out to everyone around you and ask them some pointed questions.

Once you’ve collected your inputs, sit down and review what you’ve been told. No one answer should dominate your thinking. Rather, you should be looking for themes that you hear from multiple people. These are going to be the clues that you are going to need in order to better understand how you should be shaping your career going forward.

What All Of This Means For You

If you really want to have an IT manager career that you will be satisfied with, then you are going to have to take charge of managing it. Your career won’t just develop on its own – you are going to have to guide it.

This means that you’re going to have to sit down and ask yourself some hard questions. You need to find out both what you enjoy doing and what you really don’t like to do. Additionally, you are going to have to ask your family, friends, and coworkers how you are perceived by others. Find out what others think your true talents (and faults) are.

Once you’ve collected this information, you’ll be well set to start to map out the kind of IT career that you really want. Ultimately you are the one who will be responsible for how it all turns out. Make sure that you take charge of your career right now!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. It’s your career, make the most of it. Subscribe now: Click Here!

Question For You: Do you think that creating a formal career plan would help you to stay focused and stay on track?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Congratulations, you are finally an IT manager. Does that mean that you are also an IT leader? Turns out that the answer to that question is no. So what’s the difference? Employees do what a manager tells them to do because they have to. Employees do what a leader tells them to do because they want to. Clearly we all need to find out what we need to do in order to become leaders…

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