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Not All Career Ladders Go Up…

IT managers are asked to do a lot of things during the average day: recruit new workers, keep the ones that they already have, resolve disputes, etc. The one thing that they also need to be doing every day is probably the thing that gets overlooked all too often: manage their careers.

Just What Is Career Development?

When we start to talk about career development, it brings up the question of just exactly what is a “career”? Maybe more importantly, what’s the difference between a career and a “job”?

I think that we can all agree that a job is a set of tasks that you work on for a given company. A sequence of jobs is what makes up your career. When we start to talk about career development, what we are really talking about is a process that you go though in which you take a look at where you are in your work life. You need to decide if you are where you want to be, and if not then you need to decide what changes you need to make and then you need to make them.

Every job that you have makes you more valuable to both your current employer as well as the next company that you’ll work for. As time passes, your career will either drift along under its own accord or you’ll manage where it goes. Which path do you want to take?

Not All Career Ladders Go Up

All too often IT managers believe that there is only one possible path for their careers – up. In the past, this may have been true. However, this is no longer the case.

Over the past few years, companies have changed the way that they are organized. Most companies have become “flatter” – they have reduced the number of layers of management that they use to run the business. What this has meant for IT managers is that there are now fewer opportunities for promotion up the traditional career ladder.

What’s needed is a different career track. The responsibility for managing your career rests firmly on your shoulders. What you need to be doing is looking at your current job and identifying the parts that you enjoy the most.

This can come down to either the different types of work that you are doing or perhaps the it has to do with the different groups within (or outside of) the company that you are interacting with.

Once you identify what you like about your current job, you then need to find another job that contains more of what you like (and less of what you don’t like) to do. The move to this new job may be more of a parallel move instead of a traditional move up the ladder.

Managing your career and ensuring that you are doing work that you enjoy is your responsibility. Career development is just one more thing that you should be doing every day.

What All Of This Means For You

On top of all of the other responsibilities that an IT manager has, you also have to manage your career. Ultimately it’s up to you to take charge of your future and make sure that you have a career and not just a job.

All too often we IT managers believe that a career can only travel in one direction: up. In the world in which we live in, flattened organizations often make this difficult, if not impossible, to do. IT managers need to start to realize that they can move sideways in their careers as they seek new jobs that better match what their interests and passions are.

The one thing that nobody ever takes the time to teach IT managers is how best to manage their own careers. That means that we end up picking it up along the way. The most important point is that we need to always be working on it so that we’ll eventually arrive at the destination that we want to get to.

- 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: How many jobs do you think are going to make up your IT manager career?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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?

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1. IT Managers Know That Preparing For A Crisis Is The Key To Career Survival Unless you have one of those “lucky 8-balls” that we...

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You Can't Be A Complete IT Leader Without These Skills

I’m guessing that you wouldn’t go to work naked. Then why-oh-why are you thinking about going to work as an IT Leader when you don’t have all of the skills that you’ll need to do the job correctly?

I’m not sure if this is going to make you feel any better, but it turns out that most IT Leaders are showing up for work only partially dressed when you consider what skills they are missing. Maybe we’d better have a talk about this…

Can You Communicate?

All too often, IT folks assume that good communication skills mean that you have the ability to get up in front of a group of people and deliver a speech without bursting into flames. Yes, this is good skill to have, but IT Leaders need to have more.

Remember, communication is a two-way street and not only does an IT Leader need to be able to tell others what to do, but you are also going to have to be able to listen to what others are telling you.

No, we’re not talking about having the ability to sit there and listen when someone else is talking to just waiting for them to pause so that you can start talking again. Instead, an IT Leader needs to be able to listen, process what has been said, and then ask good, pointed questions that will help get to the bottom of any discussion.

Just to round things out, an IT Leader also needs to have the communication skill that will allow them to “close” a discussion. This is when you ask a final question and then have the strength to keep you mouth closed and allow the other person to provide an answer. This is how you wrap things up cleanly.

Promote, Promote, Promote!

All too often IT Leaders seem to have a “build it and they will come” sort of attitude. They believe that if their team and by extension themselves do a good job then the rest of the company will realize it and their value to the company will increase. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.

What IT Leaders need to be doing is constantly promoting both themselves and their team. Now you have to be careful here, note that I didn’t say “bragging”. The difference is subtle, but important.

One way that an IT Leader can show the value of both his position as well as his team is to become the thought leader on all things technical. By researching new technologies and then taking the time to educate the rest of the company about what they mean and how they can be used by the business in order to be more successful, both the IT leader and his team will become recognized as a valuable resource.

Make A Friend (or Two)

Within the world of IT, there is often a “loner” attitude that many of us hold: I can do it all by myself. As an IT Leader, you need to stop thinking this way and start making as many contacts as you can.

Your career will only be as strong as your network and that means taking the time to develop real relationships with as many people as possible. Not all IT Leaders have this skill.

What All Of This Means For You

If you really want to be a successful IT Leader, you’ve got some work to do. There are a set of skills that you’ll need to develop in order to be successful over the long run.

To be an IT Leader who has the ability to get things done, you’re going to have to have the ability to be a good two-way communicator. You’ll have to learn to spend your time tirelessly promoting both the your team and your value to the company. Finally, you are going to have to get good at that critical skill: networking.

None of these three skills are impossible to do. However, the key to being a successful IT Leader is to get good at doing all three at the same time…!

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

Question For You: Which of these three skills do you think is the most important for an IT Leader to have?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It turns out that an IT Leader really doesn’t do all that much. I mean, they probably don’t do any coding, they don’t debug network problems, and they don’t design next-generation storage solutions. Sorta makes you wonder just exactly they do do? It turns out that most of an IT Leader’s time is spent doing scary stuff, like managing people…

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Post tags: closing skills, communication skills, good listening, influence skills, marketing themselves, sales skills

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If You Really Want An MBA But Don’t Have The Time, Maybe There’s Another Way…

As IT Leaders who live in troubling times we are always trying to do two things: hold on to our jobs and be more successful. One of the best ways to do both of these, or so we have been told, is to go out and get an MBA. Well that’s all great and fine if you’ve got four or five years to burn, don’t need to do anything else at night, oh and have a big chunk of cash sitting around that you had no other plans for. Maybe it’s time to look for a better way to accomplish what we’re trying to do…

Say Hello To The Alternative To The MBA

Before you decide to either quit your IT job and go back to school in order to get an MBA (really, really expensive) or start going to night school to get an MBA (just really expensive), maybe you should take a moment and consider all of your options. Maybe what you really want is a specialized Master’s degree.

Yeah, yeah – I know what you are thinking. >We’ve all been drinking the “get an MBA” Kool-Aid for so long that it’s hard to imagine doing anything else. However, depending on what you want to do with your life, this might actually be a better solution for you.

If having spent time being on the IT side of the company has gotten you interested in what goes on over on the business side, then getting an advanced business degree of some sort is probably a good idea. However, one of the things that keeps us from doing this is often the time involved to get the degree.

The Appeal Of Specializing

Business schools are starting to get the message. They are beginning to offer more and more specialized business programs that are only 12 months long. In the 2008-2009 school year there were 645 programs offered. This is up from the 614 programs that had been offered just two years earlier.

What these types of degrees offer are parts of the typical MBA curriculum, but they are often more technical in nature and generally spend less time on general management skills.

Here in lies the rub: these types of specialty business degrees are not designed to get you promoted to eventually become the CEO. Rather what they are designed to do is to sharpen your business skills in a narrow area and make you more valuable to the company in your current job. Since we’re interested in becoming the CIO, not the CEO, this might be just what we’re looking for.

This type of continuing education especially appeals to nre IT professionals: those who don’t have the five years of work experience that most MBA programs require for entrance. No matter if this is your case, or if you’ve just found some part of the company’s business side that you are really drawn to, a narrowly focused master’s degree might be just the ticket for you.

What To Do With Your New Degree

Ok, so let’s say that you bite the bullet and run off and skip the MBA and instead get a very focused master’s degree in marketing, finance, or some other business discipline. What then?

It turns out that taking this path, might feel like the right thing for you to do, but as they like to say on TV, your results may vary. Since specialty master’s degrees are not as well known as MBA’s you’re going to have to deal with some lack of recognition issues.

Although it may change in the future, right now MBA students still seem to get the best deal when it comes to getting the economic benefits from going through the effort of getting an advanced degree. The people who design the GMAT test that everyone takes to get admitted to graduate programs are reporting that MBA students are saying that they get a 73% increase in salary after graduating while students with specialty master’s degrees are only reporting a 26% increase.

What All Of This Means For You

In the end the decision rests with you. We all know that continuing our education is an important thing for every up-and-IT leader to do. Going back to school almost seems like a no-brainer until you realize that you need to spend some time thinking about just what you want to get out of doing so.

A specialty master’s degree offers IT professionals who have been working for less than five years or who found one particular part of the job most interesting with a new option. By investing 12 months of study, they can walk away with both another degree as well as a deep understanding of one area of business.

The value of taking this educational route will really depend on the career that you want for yourself. If you are comfortable working inside of the business instead of running it, then a specialty master’s degree might be the right way to go for you!

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

Question For You: Do you think that specialty master’s degree will become more or less valuable in the future?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Is it possible that the challenge of managing a team of IT professionals could have anything in common with the challenge of curing global illnesses? Good management is something that we can always learn from and healthcare has a lot of similarities with IT: it uses highly trained workers, it’s always experiencing lots of changes, and technology plays a key role in every part of how it’s done. Tachi Yamada is not only a doctor, but he is also the president of the The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program. He’s got some great insights that can help us do a better job of managing IT teams.

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Post tags: 2 year degree, business school, career advancement, career counselor, economic benefits, general management skills, increase in salary, master’s degree, MBA, more focused, specialized business degrees, two year degree

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It’s Always Best To Work From The Top Down

Why Bother Listening To Senior Management

In order to be successful as an IT Leader (no matter where you are at in the company’s management hierarchy), you’re going to have to do what you are told. Well, wait a minute, maybe I should phrase that differently. How about something like this: you are going to have to find out what they want you to do and then you are going to have to do it?

If we were all working on an assembly line, life would be simpler. We’d have a clearly defined job to do and we’d be supplied with the parts and tools with which to do it. Well, with a little luck you get paid more than an assembly line worker and the reason is that being an IT Leader is a lot tougher – your job is ill-defined and keeps changing. Finding out what you are supposed to be doing is half the battle.

You’re Going To Need A Questionnaire

There are probably no shortage of people who are telling you what to do. However, the big question is: are they the right people who should be telling you what to do? At the end of the day, the only people who really count are the ones who are running the company. What do they want you to be doing?

Yes, the information that the upper levels keep sending you in emails, podcasts, and other such communication channels are a good high-level indicator of what direction they are trying to take the company. However, these forms of communication are probably too generic. You are still facing a number of different things that you could be directing your team to spend their time on and it’s not clear which way you should go. Time for some interviews.

Senior management can be busy, but they also realize that it’s really part of their job to provide direction and it that’s what you go looking for, they’ll find the time to talk with you. Keep in mind that you don’t want to be just talking with IT’s senior management, you want to talk to the management of the rest of the company – really IT’s customers.

You’ll have the same set of questions that you’ll want to be asking over and over again so it’s probably a good idea to create a questionnaire to help you do this. I’m not suggesting that when you start your discussions that you whip out a long form and start reading from it, but rather that you collect your thoughts before any discussion so that you don’t forget to cover any topics.

You should be asking questions that cover a lot of ground – make the most of your time with this member of the management team. Ask questions like what they are hoping to accomplish this year, what is preventing them from being as successful as they would like to be, and most importantly what is their view of the IT department – good, bad, or ugly.

It’s All About The Customer

The ultimate goal of finding out what is being expected of you as an IT Leader is to balance what people want you to do with all of the things that you know need to be done. Yes, we live in the real world and there’s a good chance that these two lists may not match up!

In the end, your customer (maybe internal departments) are always right. Note that I didn’t say “rational”, just right. Your senior management may not be able to express their goals in terms that directly relate to the role of IT within a company (“boost profits”), but you’ll need to be looking for ways that your team can help the IT department help others.

What All Of This Means For You

Nobody ever said that being an IT Leader was going to be an easy thing. One thing that you need to make sure that you have a good understanding of is to know just exactly what your senior management wants you and your team to be doing.

This is going to require you to develop some interviewing skills. You’re going to have to go up the mountain and ask your firm’s senior management what they are trying to accomplish and how it’s going.

Ultimately it comes down to how you and your team are going to serve your customer. If you can figure this out, then congratulations – you are going to be successful.

Question For You: Do you think that your senior IT management is going to approve of you talking with other departments?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you’ve been reading the papers or watching the news on TV, you’ve probably started to see stories that are daring to hint at a global recovery. Now that’s all fine and good and I’ll believe it when it shows up. However, smart IT Leaders know that now is the time to act. Are you getting your team ready for the madness that will hit your firm when things really start moving once again?

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental IT Leader, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: boost profits, conflicting goals, goal, interview, questionnaire, senior management, succeed

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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Post tags: it career, it careers, IT professional, IT projects, IT Staffing, it strategy, multitask, multitasker, multitasking, professional staffing, Ruth Pennenaker, self motivation

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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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental IT Leader, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: apologize, career, cognitive dissonance, employee, IT Management, IT Manger, leader, manager, mistake, personnel

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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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental IT Leader, 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: competition, information technology, it, leader, manager, motivation, motivational, performance, self motivation

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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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental IT Leader, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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