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Problem Employees Are An IT Manager’s Problem

Thursday, March 17th, 2011
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IT Managers Need To Clean Up The Employees Problems That They Own…

IT Managers Need To Clean Up The Employees Problems That They Own…

Not all IT employees are created equal. As an IT manager you are going to have some great employees on your team – and then you are going to have the others. Every bunch of apples has at least one bad one in it, and every IT manager finds that he or she has a problem employee somewhere in their midst.

What should you do when you discover that you have a problem IT employee on your team? They seem to take up all of your time and they are the ones who require all of your attention. Clearly this can’t be allowed to go on for long. What’s an IT manager to do?

Why Are Some IT Team Members Problem Employees?

Before you can solve the issue of your problem employees, you first need to understand why this issue exists in the first place. Ultimately it all comes down to employee motivation.

As an IT manager, you want your employees to work hard. However, your problem employees simply aren’t doing that and it shows in how little they are able to accomplish and potentially in the low quality of the results that they are producing.

In the past, it was thought that the best way to motivate all employees, including the problem ones, was through what researchers called “extrinsic” incentives. These are things like more pay, larger offices, more impressive job titles, etc. Sadly, the research showed that these types of things normally don’t cause IT workers to work harder for very long after they are given and they don’t solve the issue of your problem employees who simply aren’t working hard enough.

The good news is that the same researchers did more studies and what they found is that there is an additional set of rewards called “intrinsic” rewards that do motivate most employees over the long haul. These types of rewards have to do with the type of work that employees are doing: doing more interesting work, facing more challenges, and gaining more job related responsibility.

How To Solve The Problem Employee Problem

Not all problem employees can be transformed into hard working employees that you’ll want to have on your team. Instead, your job as an IT manager is to work with your problem employees in order to determine if there is any way to change the way that they perform their work.

You are not going to be able to talk them into doing better work. No amount of threats, praise, or even motivational pep-talks is going to get you the results that you are looking for. Instead, you’re going to have to find a way to tap into what motivates them from the inside.

There are a number of ways to tap into your problem employee’s intrinsic rewards system. Here are three that you can try:

  1. Remove Job Controls: some problem employees are not performing at their peak level because they are struggling with being managed too closely. They find too much (or too close) management to be restrictive and therefore they perform at a lower level. As an IT manager, you can remove some of these controls while still making sure that the problem employees are aware that they are still fully accountable for completing high quality work on time according to spec.

  2. Total Ownership: IT employees can often become frustrated and disengaged if they can’t see how the work that they are doing fits into the larger picture. With your problem employees one thing that you can do is to make them responsible for a larger section of work that will allow them to better see how their contribution fits into the whole.

  3. Provide More Information: they don’t call IT workers “knowledge workers” for nothing. Keeping your problem workers aware of how the project that they are working on is going and what it’s status is can help them to feel more included and boost their sense of worth along with the quality of the results that they are producing.

In the end, your job as an IT manager is to work with your problem employees in order to see if they can be turned around. These job transformation suggestions will help in some cases; however, if you can’t transform a problem worker into a productive worker, then it may be time for you to go looking for a replacement.

What All Of This Means For You

IT managers all too often find that at least one member of their team is a problem employee. These employees are for some reason not motivated to perform their jobs at a level that you need them to.

In order to attempt to address this issue, IT managers need to work with the problem employees to make one more attempt to turn them into productive employees. This involves establishing intrinsic rewards that will help to make their jobs more interesting.

Not all problem employees can be transformed into productive team members. However, IT managers have the responsibility to work with problem employees in order to see if there is any way to help them boost their performance.

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

Question For You: How long do you think that an IT manager should work with a problem employee before throwing in the towel?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

IT Managers who discover that they have a problem employee on their hands need to move quickly to solve their problem. The trick is determining just exactly what you need to do. Sure you could fire them, but then you’d have to go through all of the effort of going out and finding their replacement. It sure seems like coming up with a way to transform a problem employee into a good employee is what you should be looking for.

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Google’s Lessons For Managing Tech-Savvy Teams

Thursday, January 14th, 2010
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How Does Google Solve Common IT Manager Issues?

How Does Google Solve Common IT Manager Issues?

Sigh, if only we all could work for Google, right? If there is one company out there that seems to “get” IT, it would have to be Google. The stories that float around about how nice the Google campus is and all the free food and other perks sure make it seem like a Shangri-La. Hmm, but wait a minute, no matter how nice it seems, they’ve got to be dealing with the same IT Leader issues that we all are. Maybe it’s time to have a talk with their (former) CIO…

It’s All About Choice

One of the big issues that IT Leaders have to deal with on an almost constant basis is the issue of keeping our teams up and running. This comes down to making sure that they have the right laptops, the right operating systems, etc. If you are not careful, this can eat up a lot of your available time.

Over at Google, Douglas Merrill who was their CIO up until April of 2008 said that the model that they used for solving the individual system issue was freedom of choice: employees got to choose both their machine and their operating system. I’ll bet that pretty much eliminates any complaining!

You would think that this would make support from an IT perspective a lot more complicated / expensive. You’d be right, but Merrill said that it didn’t boost costs all that much in part because of Google’s extensive use of self-service. They maintain internal web sites where users can go to download and install any software that they need. They do this by themselves and it places no additional burden on the IT department.

What About Security?

I can almost hear what you are saying / thinking right now: man, that must cause all sorts of security nightmares. Any IT Leader that you talk with these days probably has one or more horror stories about a team member downloading (or clicking on) something that they shouldn’t have and causing a mess that took forever to clean up.

Merrill says that they look at things a bit differently at Google. Most companies try to secure their networks by locking down the endpoints: our laptops and our smart phones. He feels that this really doesn’t work very well — thus all of the problems that we still have. At Google they put the security into the infrastructure.

What this means is that, yes, they still have antivirus and antispyware applications running on everyone’s laptops, but they also have a lot of software running on their corporate mail servers and infrastructure. When taken together, they feel that they have solved the problem of just how you can secure your corporate network.

Just in case you need more convincing that they really take their security seriously, Merrill states that Google has over 150 engineers who work on nothing but security. They’ve worked very hard to make sure that security is not something that is handled by “some group” and instead is worked into everything that they do. One of the ways that they make this happen is to use automated tools to check each developer’s code before it gets put into production.

What All Of This Means For You

No, most of us are not going to end up working for Google (unless they take over the world, at which this turns into a different discussion). However, how they run their IT shop does hold some clues for the rest of us.

When it comes to resolving issues regarding the technical environment in which their team members work, they’ve turned over the decision making to each employee. We can’t necessarily set up the same system, but it does provide some clues. Where possible if we allow the team to decide things like what code editor to use or what template to use then all of a sudden it’s not “my” decision, but rather “our” decision which is always a lot easier for everyone to live with.

Security is another issue that just doesn’t seem to want to go away. Google’s approach is to do the baseline needed at the edge of the network and then focus on securing the core. This just seems like an overall good idea. Additionally, setting up ways to carefully check your team’s products to ensure that they are secure is always a good idea for any IT Leader.

It looks like Google is running a pretty tight ship in their IT department. Even if we can’t all work there, we can still learn from their example…

Do you think that working at Google is all that it’s cracked up to be, or is it just like working in any other IT department?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As the world economy tanked and countless people in all industries lost their jobs, the one thing that IT Leaders really didn’t have to worry about was having members of their team jump ship to go to work for other firms – there were no other jobs to be had. Well as the economy improves, this is going to change. Got a plan for keeping your team on board?

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Making Changes To Your IT Department – 8 Things An IT Leader Should Know

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

IT Leaders Need To Learn How To Implement Changes In Their Teams

IT Leaders Need To Learn How To Implement Changes In Their Teams

Have you ever heard the phrase “When senior management doesn’t know what to do, they reorganize”? I’m not sure if this is always true, but it sure seems as though when times are tough reorganizations, restructuring, and even re-engineering are things that can happen to any department in IT. What’s an IT Leader to do about it?

Change Sucks

One of the weirdest facts about a career in IT is that the thing that draws us to this field is that it is so dynamic. However, its been my experience that IT staff can be some of the people who are the least open to accepting changes from the way that things are currently being done.

As an IT Leader you are dealing with two issues at the same time: you need to personally come to grips with the change and you need to find a way to get your team to accept and embrace the change also. Have you ever been trained on how to do this?

8 Ways For IT Leaders To Deal With Changes

On one hand you have “the change”. On the other hand you have your team. As an IT manager you need to find a way for these two things to live together in harmony. I’ve got 8 tips on how you can make this seemly impossible task possible:

  • Don’t assume that people have a natural ability to change: all too often IT Leaders think that they can just tell their team about a change and it will automatically become part of the routine. Most people are going to need constant encouragement to make and stay with any change that disrupts their existing routine.
  • Don’t assume that people will function rationally: once again, assuming that members of your team will do what  you expect them to do once a change is announced is foolish. Instead, think for awhile about how people might react if they don’t like the change – how would you go about resiting or subverting the change if you were just being told about it? Take steps to make it easy to comply with the change.
  • Don’t assume that change is automatic: just saying that things have been changed does not mean that people will automatically change their behavior. You need to set things up so that doing things the old way is now hard, but doing them the new way is easy.
  • Don’t assume that organizations are naturally dynamic: changes that require people to stop doing jobs or start doing new jobs are the toughest to implement. You need to understand that when you make changes to a workflow it’s going to slow everything down and it will take awhile for the team to get back in the swing of things again.
  • Don’t assume that company culture is easy to change: “but that’s the way that we’ve always done it” is a powerful statement. Changes that span multiple departments take longer for everyone to accept because they are changing the company’s culture. It doesn’t matter if the company had a lousy culture, change is still not appreciated!
  • Don’t assume that every aspect of the project will work out as planned: the larger a change is, the more steps will be required to implement the change. Plans are great things, but rarely do they work out exactly the way that you wanted them to. As an IT Leader you need to be ready to step in when something goes wrong and fix it.
  • Change managers can’t be effective without explicit authority: the best way to implement a change in an IT department is to have helpers – feet on the street who will be responsible for making the actual changes that are called for. These staff members can’t hope to be successful if you don’t make it clear to the rest of the team that they have your full support and authority to make the change happen.
  • Don’t just assume that anybody can be an effective change manager: since nobody likes change, nobody likes a change manager. When you pick your lieutenants you need to make sure that they are made of the right stuff and will be able to tough it out and overcome team adversity to make sure that the changes get made.

Final Thoughts

It sure seems like the world continues to move even faster these days and changes just keep on coming. New company owners, new management, new technology, and new competition all seem to be working together to keep things quite dynamic.

IT Leaders need to develop the skills that are needed to implement changes within their teams. No, they won’t always agree with the changes that they are being asked to implement, but they are obligated to implement them anyway. If you can figure out how to do this correctly, then you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

Questions For You

Have you ever been asked to implement a change that you thought was the wrong thing to do? Were you able to convince your team to implement this change? Has there ever been a change that you were not able to implement? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It’s starting to look like the economic winter just might be getting ready to thaw. Once this happens, IT Leaders realize that they’re going to have a massive task added to their already overloaded plate – recruitment…

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Neuroscience Can Make You A Better IT Leader

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
A Good IT Leader Needs A Healthy Brain

A Good IT Leader Needs A Healthy Brain

Dr. John Median is a developmental molecular biologist who recently sat down with the Harvard Business Review and had a talk about what we’ve recently found out about how the brain works and what this can tell us about being better IT leaders.

The key question that IT leaders want to get an answer to is to find how how relevant neuroscience discoveries are to the day-to-day job of management. Dr. Median says that he thinks that one of the reasons that we are all so fascinated by brain research these days is because it truly is the most interesting and complicated processing tool that we have ever seen. How’s this for a fascinating fact: there are as many neurons in your brain as there are stars in a typical galaxy. Despite having this level of knowledge about the brain, we still know very little that can be related to the real world.

One thing that science has learned is that stress is very, very bad for our brains. Since it hurts our brains, it also decreases our productivity. The reasoning behind this is pretty simple. Evolution has wired our brains to help us to survive. What this means in practical terms is that our brains were originally set up to deal with stress for short periods of time: 30-60 seconds. Remember “fight or flight?” However, in today’s modern IT workplace everyone is under stress almost all the time. Our brains were never set up to deal with stress all the time. This can lead to other problems with things like a lack of motivation, poor sleep and immune system issues.

So what happens when we have too much stress in our lives? Dr. Median says that stress can mess with our hormones. When this happens, the connections between brain cells that help us remember things can start to fray and weaken. Unfortuantly, the hormones associated with stress seem to like to prey on the part of the brain that is called the hippocampus - where our memories are kept. Some studies have guessed that the total cost of lost productivity due to stress is somewhere around $200 billion/year. What does this mean for IT managers? Simply put, anything that you can do to lower the stress level that is being experienced by your team will pay back rich dividends.

One very interesting point that Dr.Median makes is that our memory is NOT like a Xerox machine. Our brains and our memory were always designed to help with one thing only: our survival. We really have no idea HOW we remember things, but what we do know is that it seems to take a long time for memories to become permanent. The best way to remember something is to constantly re-expose yourself to it. Once again. for IT managers this means that if you want your team to remember the company’s mission statement, then you’re going to have to start every meeting off by reading it to the team.

The good news out of all of this is that our brains will continue to grow and change throughout our entire lives. If you want to have a better shot at having a healthy, growing brain for your entire career, then the #1 thing that you’ve got to do is to exercise. Exercise in any form and aerobic exercise in particular helps your brain. Dr. Median points out that people who exercise are 50% less likely to get Alzheimer’s disease. From an IT leader point-of-view, this goes along nicely with the idea that a healthy team is a more productive team. Anything that you can do to make it easier for your team to stay in top shape will once again help your team to perform that much better.

What are you doing today to lower the stress level of your team? What is the primary cause of their stress? Is your team able to stay healthy or are they “under the weather” all the time? Do you think stress plays a role in your team’s physical health? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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After The Firings, What’s A Manger To Do?

Sunday, August 31st, 2008

How can a manager motivate a team after a round of layoffs?

Thanks to a sluggish economy, we’ve been reading about more and more layoffs, firings, staff reductions, rightsizing, etc. Your firm may have done one of these, be doing one, or just have started to think about doing one. No matter – letting staff go is can be one of the hardest parts about being a leader. There is a lot of information out there about how to let people go with dignity; however, there isn’t a lot of guidance on how to pick up the pieces after a big layoff. What’s a manager to do with those who escaped the executioner’s axe?

Since firing coworkers takes so much of a manager’s emotional energy, we can be excused for not remembering to take the time to adequately reassure those who are left onboard. Motivation is hard enough to do in the good times, re-motivation after a layoff is nigh impossible. As much of a challenge as this additional task is, it’s critical because studies have shown that the workers who remain quickly become unproductive and are unwilling to take on any risk now that they’ve seen what can happen to other workers. To top this off, all too often these disheartened workers end up leaving the company. Great – now you’ve gone from having to do layoffs to having to do interviews.

What’s A Manager To Do? A good place to start is to once again realize that every employee is an individual. This means that everyone will process the layoffs in their own personal way. A manager needs to let this happen. Dr. Warren Bennis is a professor of management out at the University of Southern California and he says that “Respect is the key word…” Layoffs often seems so cold and impersonal. It’s the job of a manger to work with the employees who remain and help them to understand why the layoffs are happening, acknowledge the pain that it is causing, and to let the employees know when the bloodletting will end. Having done all of this, then managers have to be able to sit back and listen. Allow the employees to react to the layoffs and realize that there are no right or wrong reactions.

What About Morale? Clearly one of the first victims of any layoff will be the morale of those employees who remain behind. One way that a manager can start to rekindle the light of motivation is to spend time with the remaining workers reviewing and discussing the organization’s goals. There are fewer people now and the key question will be how to achieve the goals with a smaller team. This is an important way to ensure that employees realize that they have a future with the company and they really will be better off once they are farther down the road.

Any Way To Future Proof An Organization? The ultimate question for any manager is if there is a way to prepare an organization for layoffs before they occur. The short answer is no. However, if a manager is able to keep the employees involved in discussions about how the business is doing, then there should never be any surprises if another round of layoffs occurs.

Have you been able to get a team of survivors motivated again after a layoff? How did you do it? What was your biggest challenge – team members or messages that the company was sending out? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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