Archive for the ‘career development’ Category

You Don’t Do A Good Job At Multitasking IT Leader, Get Over It

Thursday, October 8th, 2009
People Who Multitask Think That They Can Do It Well, But They Can't! (c) - 2009

People Who Multitask Think That They Can Do It Well, But They Can't! (c) - 2009

Too little time, too much to do. Does that adequately describe your IT leader job? I don’t know about you, but often is the time that I’ve looked with envy at my peers who are great multitaskers and wished that I could be more like them. It turns out that I was wishing for the wrong thing – multitaskers actually do a lousy job at just about everything.

The Study

Ruth Pennenaker reports that some researchers at Stanford University have just completed a groundbreaking study on people who multitask. You know who you are – you’re talking on the phone even as you are answering emails and zipping off text messages on you iPhone all at the same time. Oh how I have so wanted to be you!

The researchers found that most persistent multitaskers actually performed badly in a variety of tasks that they were asked to do. As the researchers dove deeper to find out why the multitaskers were doing so badly, what they found was that they don’t do a very good job of focusing on what they are trying to do. This also means that they are much more likely to get distracted while they are trying to perform a task. On top of all this, the study showed that they are actually weaker than non-multitaskers at shifting between tasks and organizing the information that they collect.

Results Of The Study

My favorite part of the study is where the researchers discovered that people who are always multitasking are actually worse at multitasking than those of us who ordinarily don’t multitask!

When the study was started, the researchers started with the idea that multitaskers have some characteristic that makes them better at multitasking than regular folks. What they discovered is that multitaskers are just pretty much lousy at doing everything.

One of the researchers was quoted as saying “We kept looking for multitaskers’ advantages in this study. But we kept finding only disadvantages. We thought multitaskers were very much in control of information. It turns out, they were just getting it all confused.”

However, doesn’t it LOOK like multitaskers are always busy? Shouldn’t that mean that they must be getting more done than the rest of us who just can’t do that much all at the same time? It turns out that high multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy“. Simply put, sure they are doing things, but what they are working on more often than not really doesn’t matter.

A Personal Multitasking (Failure) Story

I firmly fall into the “not a good multasker” camp and I should know it. However, every once in awhile I try my hand at multitasking, generally with disastrous results. Allow me to share my most recent story:

I was late for a doctor’s appointment and yet I had a conference call that I needed to participate in (not just listen to). I jumped into the car, programmed the Garmin GPS system with the doctor’s office address, stuck my Blackberry headset in my ear, and set the Garmin on “mute” so that it wouldn’t interfere with my conference call.

As I hurtled down the highway in the far left lane at about 70 mph jabbering away in an animated conversation on the conference call, I happened to look over at the Garmin and noticed that it was signaling that I needed to be taking the exit that I was just about to pass by (remember that I had been smart enough to mute it so I had no warning). Oh, oh.

A non-multitasking person would have realized that (1) I had already gone too far past the exit to make it, (2) I was in the wrong lane to try to make the exit, (3) I was going too fast to make the exit. In my multitasking state, I realized none of this and I attempted to go for it.

I didn’t make it. I was going to fast and I was too far past the exit to have ever had any chance of making it. What I ended up doing was plowing headfirst into the aluminum guardrails which were anchored to solid 4″x4″ chunks of wood. I probably hit them going a good 40 mph despite having tried to stand on the breaks once I realized what was going to happen.

Thanks to seatbelts and airbags, I walked away without a scratch. However, the car was a total loss. Oh, and I got a $100+ ticket from the police for basically being a bad driver. I say once again – I can’t multitask!

Final Thoughts

IT leaders who multitask will perform at a lower level than those who focus on one task at a time. Although this seems to fly in the face of everything that we’ve seen in our workplace (don’t multitaskers get all of the promotions?), you can’t argue with research results.

Should you try to convince your friends and peers who are multitaskers to stop doing it because it just doesn’t work? No. The core of the problem is that not only do multitaskers think they’re great at what they do; they’ve also convinced everybody else they’re good at it too.

Ultimately those of us who are not multitaskers will be able to show better results for how we’ve spent our time. If we can make sure that the rules of the game that we’re playing are all about results and not appearances, then the non-multitaskers will win every time.

If you can focus on one task at a time and do it well instead of trying to do multiple tasks at the same time poorly will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Welcome to the world of overused buzz words! The star of the show these days is “innovation” – everyone wants it, everyone is talking about it, nobody really knows how to get it. IT Leaders find themselves in a situation where if they aren’t careful, they just might make one of three different mistakes that could prevent innovation from happening within their teams…

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What’s An IT Manger To Do When You Screw-Up BIG TIME?

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009
We All Make Mistakes At Work, It's What We Do Next That Matters Most...

We All Make Mistakes At Work, It's What We Do Next That Matters Most...

So I’ll be the first one to admit it – I’ve screwed up big time at work. It was awhile back, but as I remember it I was responsible for crunching some numbers that were going into a report that was being used to plan what the company was going to be working on for the next year. Somehow I forgot to include some critical numbers. I discovered my mistake. What should I have done next?

As IT Leaders, we’d like to appear as though we never make mistakes to both our superiors as well as to our teams. However, the sad reality is that we do screw-up and sometimes in a big way. What hurts the most about doing things like this is that it flies in the face of how we view ourselves (as perfect). The fancy name for what this creates is called “cognitive dissonance“.

Phyllis Korkki has looked into this situation in a piece that she wrote for the  New York Times and to get to the heart of the matter she talked with the social psychologist Carol Travis (author of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts).
What Travis says is that internally we look at what we’ve done and we say to ourselves “There is no way that I could have screwed-up on something that I view myself as being good at.” Once we have this thought, then our mind moves on and starts to come up with various forms of self-justification for what we’ve gone and done. How do we do this? You pick: lies, blame, defensiveness, etc.

So this might be a bad situation to find yourself in, but what can you possibly do to make it worse? Simple – don’t tell anyone and try to cover it up. Just in case you haven’t learned your lesson from Enron, Worldcom, or most recently Satyam over in India then listen and understand. Covering up your error will lead to bigger and bigger problems that will eventually entangle you so securely that you can’t get free. Talk about stress!

So once you’ve made the mistake, what SHOULD you do? First off, realize that this mistake is not necessarily a reflection of either your intelligence or your talents. If you can realize this, then you should be able to mentally separate who you are as a person from this event.

What next? Ok – so this is the tough part. You need to point out your error sooner than later. The first step in doing this is to go to the people whom your error has affected and do that most painful of all actions, apologize.

Your next step has to be to get to work undoing the damage that you’ve done and fixing the situation that you’ve caused. This is not easy to do either, but you should realize that it’s the right thing to do. It turns out that keeping the knowledge that you’ve screwed something up inside will be a bigger burden than just getting it out into the open.

What if I get fired? Well that’s always a possibility; however, wouldn’t you rather go out because you pointed out something that you did instead of being found out by someone else? It’s all a matter of who you want to be in control of your life.

A lot rests on how your boss deals with your slip up. If he / she is going to get ticked off, then you are going to be a lot less likely to point it out. As an IT Leader you need to realize that how your team views you will also determine if they feel comfortable coming to you when they screw up (and they will).

Hopefully your boss will realize that having you point out your mistake earlier rather than later  is a good thing. Hey, if you’ve got a worker who is pointing out their mistakes to you then that’s a very good thing. If it keeps happening over and over again, then you need to move the person to a different postion.

In my case, my boss turned out to be incredibly cool. He sighed because he realized that his management was not going to be happy about the correction that was going to be required and then he went and “fell on the sword” – he accepted blame for my mistake. Talk about building loyalty! Man, I double and triple checked everything that I gave him after that and I would have gladly fallen on the sword for him…

Have you ever screwed up big time at work? Did you discover your mistake or did someone else? What did you do when you found out that you had made an error? What happened because of it? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What Can Top Athletes Teach You About Being A Better IT Leader?

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
Top Athletes Can Teach IT Leaders How To Reach The Next Level

Top Athletes Can Teach IT Leaders How To Reach The Next Level

So we all know that Tiger Woods is a fantastic golfer. However, do you think that he’d be any good at running an IT department? The answer, somewhat surprisingly, is that yes, he probably would do a good job. The reason is that there is a lot of similarity between being an excellent athlete and being a top-notch IT manager.

Graham Jones is the founder of a company called Lane4 which uses studies of professional athletes to help managers do a better job of managing. One of the interesting things that he has discovered is that in the area of sports, just like in the world of business, one of the main obstacles to achieving something that has been identified as being “impossible” just might be a self-limiting way of thinking.

One of the first things that you have to realize about being an IT leader is that great leaders are not born, but are rather made. Sure some leaders have nature gifts such as communication skills and leadership attributes; however, the most important skill that they need to have is mental toughness – this means that they get better at doing their job when things get tough.

Great IT leaders rise up not due to chance or luck, but rather because they planned to succeed. Specifically, they identified and achieved lots and lots of little goals in order to get to where they are. This requires them to sharpen their skills and to, much like Madonna, reinvent themselves many times in order to stay out in front of their peers.

So what can IT leaders learn from top athletes? Simple, how to succeed over and over again. Here are the steps that are needed to do achieve top performance over and over again:

Gotta Learn To Love That Pressure

Call it what you like, but pressure is what drives great athletes and great IT leaders to achieve their best. What this means for you is that you’ve got to find a way to learn to love pressure. Another way to say this is that you’ve got to commit yourself to using work pressure to continually improve yourself all the time.

One secret to dealing effectively with pressure is to only focus on making yourself better. Don’t let yourself get distracted by other IT leaders who mange / complete successful projects, get promoted, win awards, etc. Instead, focus on those things that you can control and don’t spend any time thinking about the rest.

You need to be able to step away from the workplace pressure. This means that you actually do need to have another life – family / hobbies / sports, whatever. Top athletes have the ability to flip the pressure switch on when they are “on the job” and then flip it off when they are involved in their other life.

It’s All About The Long Term

By the way, you will occasionally fail. This means that you need to have a way to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get back to work. A good way to be able to do this is to have long term goals that you focus on.

What star athletes do is to create very detailed plans that are made up of a series of short term goals. The plan is laid out so that the athlete can do his / her best at the right time – not peaking too early or too late. IT leaders need to do the same. You want to make sure that when you have a big success, it is the right time for it to get maximum exposure within the company.

Push Baby, Push!

We all push ourselves based on the people who we work directly with. If we are working with a bunch of slackers, then there won’t be much self-pushing going on. Instead, we should be searching for opportunities to work with the best-of-the-best. This is very similar to when top athletes train with their fiercest competitors in order to push themselves to be their very best.

Invent And Then Reinvent Yourself

Always be sure to get feedback from trusted sources. This will allow you to understand what you are doing well and where you need to make changes. These changes will allow you to reinvent yourself so that you can become the best IT leader that you can be.

Party Like A Rock Star

Something that IT leaders all to often pass over is to take a break after a major achievement and celebrate. Spending as much effort celebrating a success as you did achieving the success is a way to reward yourself. This is the time to blow off some steam, pause and catch your breath before you push on to the next higher level.

Do you feel like you are performing at your peak management level? Do you have a plan with goals for how you are going to reach the next level in your career? Are you “training” with the best of the best in your office? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Pimp My IT Job!

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

How To Improve My IT Job
What to do when you are stuck working on a program/project that is not the executives’ current favorite? Do you feel as though you are stuck in your company’s technical back waters and that your skills are growing older, staler, and more out-of-date each and every work day? Do you look enviously at your coworkers who are working on more glamorous projects and using cool new tools like Ruby or various Web 2.0 toolkits to create shiny new beasts?

Well fear not, amazingly enough you are not alone. Most of the IT community is in your shoes — we work to keep the critical systems up and running and try to make them just a bit better each and every release. “Project Envy” is a fact of life that we all live with. What to do about it?

There is no single magic cure for this affliction; however, here are three ways that I have dealt with this in both my own career and in trying to keep folks on my team motivated:

  1. I.N.T.L.S: “It’s Not The Language, Stupid” Lots of times our jealousy of other workers and projects stems from the fact that they get to use a neat new toy that we don’t get to use. Get over it — good design is good design, no matter what language or tool you have to work with. Back in the day, folks were able to get Fortran to do some pretty amazing things that it had never been originally designed to do. Think about it this way: how boring must it be if the language / tool that you are using to solve a design problem does too much of the work for you. Instead, focus on creating the tightest, clearest code that is humanly possible. We all like a challenge and this will help you to overcome language envy.
  2. Can Anyone Say “Soft Skills?”: If you find yourself trapped on a back waters project, instead of spending your days surfing dice.com, how about if you spend some time working on those skills that you are going to need in order to make it through your entire 45 year career? Skills like communication, delegation, negotiation, etc. If your career eventually takes off, you will desperately need these skills so use this “pitstop project” as an opportunity to bone up on what you’ll need.
  3. Play the Metrics Game: Most IT departments have fallen in love with metrics and this offers you a great way to get some department wide recognition no matter what project you find yourself stuck on. Back water projects are generally in charge of older, stable applications or systems. You can use this to your advantage. Study what metrics your department is tracking and determine which of them are most important to upper level management. Then take a look at your project and ask yourself how you can make this project #1 in terms of department metrics. By doing so you’ll rise to the top and will get noticed. This just might be enough to get you moved to another more popular project.

There are many more things that you can do should you find yourself stuck on a project that turns out to not be the flavor-of-the-week. Complaining, sulking, and surfing for a new job are always options, but there are much better ways to spend your time!

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