You Just Have To Get Them To Listen To You

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.

How To Use The Feedback Technique

You would think that using the feedback technique would be pretty straightforward, right? I mean it’s just sitting down with your problem employee and telling them what they are doing wrong. How hard could that be to do?

If that was all that there was to using the feedback technique, this would be a very short article. It turns out that there is more. The simple fact is that in order for feedback to be successful, you as an IT manager actually need to do a lot both before you have the talk and then during the talk itself.

The first mistake that a lot of IT managers make when trying to use the feedback technique is that they assume that they already know it all. They schedule the meeting with the problem employee and then just show up and start talking.

The problem with this is that there is a good chance that you really don’t know it all. Every situation has a lot of background to it. If your problem employee is not meeting your performance expectations, you need to do some checking in order to verity that you’ve clearly laid out for them what you expected them to do. This means that you’re going to have to go back and dig through your emails and meeting notes to verify both what’s been requested and what’s been promised.

Next you’ve got to make sure that you’ve been measuring the correct things. In order to say that there’s a problem, you’ve got to be able to point to specific things that prove that there’s a real problem. To put it simply, you’re going to need to take a look at the performance objective that you’ve specified and then you’re going to have to take a look at how your are measuring your problem employee against this objective. Double check to make sure that the measurement matches the objective.

How To Handle The Feedback Meeting

When the day arrives for the big meeting, make sure that you handle it correctly. A lot of what determines the outcome of your actions has to do with how you prepare for and handle the meeting.

The first thing that you want to keep in mind is that when it comes to dealing with workplace performance issues, nobody likes a surprise. This means that you can’t spring a feedback meeting on someone. You need to tell them ahead of time that you want to have a feedback session with them, and this is the important part, make sure that you tell them what issue you want to discuss with them. This will allow them to get ready for the talk.

How you start the feedback session makes all of the difference in the world. If you start the meeting in an upbeat, positive way, then your chances of working with the problem employee and creating a solution are greatly increased. Starting in a “we’ve got a problem here” mode or one in which the employee fears for their job will only result in confrontation and denials.

Finally, instead of berating your problem employee for not performing at the level that you want them to, instead take a different approach. Take the time to explain why their behavior is having a negative impact both on you and on their fellow coworkers. By showing them how their actions are holding back the team, you have your best chance of making them want to change how they are going about doing their work.

What All Of This Means For You

As an IT Manager, one of your primary responsibilities is to make sure that your team is maximizing their contributions. If you’ve got a problem employee, then you’ve got a problem that you’ve got to solve.

The feedback technique provides a quick and simple way to go about starting this transformation process. However, it’s not something that you can do casually – you are going to have to both prepare to do it as well as treating it like a project.

The benefits of using the feedback technique to turn around a problem employee are numerous. It’s well worth the time that it takes to work with an employee that’s already on the team instead of having to fire them and then start over. Feedback is what good IT managers do well!

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

Question For You: What signs do you think that you should look for in a problem employee that would show that the feedback technique is working?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

You’d think that to be a good IT manager all that you’d have to be good at is managing people and understanding technology. Most of the time you’d be correct; however, it’s the times when this isn’t the case that far too many IT managers drop the ball.

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2. Can IT Managers Do A Good Job Of Performance Appraisals? Performance appraisals are just about the worst part of an...
3. IT Managers Need To Play The Role Of Coach If They Want To Win The Game IT managers understand that they are responsible for conducting performance...

Gamers Are Joining Your IT Department - Are You Ready For Them?

As yet another generation comes to work in the IT department, IT mangers are being confronted with another management challenge. More and more of the new wave of workers are coming from the world of multi-player online games.

These games consist of large, complex, social systems that are constantly evolving. Games like World of Warcraft and Eve Online are able to capture and hold the attention of their players because they are always new.

Hold on – before you throw you hands up in the air and give up on dealing with yet another type of new employee, you need to realize that this “gamer disposition” is exactly what you should be looking for in your department’s workforce.

John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas have done research in this area and they have discovered that that this type of experienced game player can bring 5 types of character traits to your workplace. These traits will help them to not only thrive but to also succeed in today’s modern workplace:

1. Focus On The Bottom Line: In the games that these online players are playing, each player is constantly being measured and assesed. Each player is ranked and compared to other players using systems of rankings, points, and titles.
2. Diversity Is Good: Gamers realize that they can’t do it all themselves. In order to be successful in a game, players need to build a strong team. The teams that are the most successful are the ones that consist of a strong mix of both abilities and talents.
3. Change Is Good: Gamers thrive on change. The worlds in which they play are constantly changing – nothing is constant. Their actions transform the world in which they are playing. Gamers have come to expect this type of massive change.
4. Learning Is Seen As Fun: The games that players are participating in consist of complex challenges that have to be overcome. These challenges make the game fun. Discovering the tools that are needed and creating the knowledge that is need to overcome challenges is what turns problem solving into a fun activity.
5. Innovation Is A Lifestyle: Gamers are willing to explore new ideas and ways of solving problems. Even when the solution to a problem is known, gamers are willing to search for new solutions that will solve the problem quicker or by using fewer resources.

If you can learn to be supportive of the gamers who come to work as members of your team, then you’ll have a workforce that is both flexible and willing to overcome stale ways of doing things.

Do you have any gamers on you staff now? Have you noticed that they seem to solve problems in different ways from other workers? Do they seem to respond to they way that they are being manged? Do their accomplishments need to be evaluated in a different way then other workers are? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Post tags: employee motivation, employees, Eve Online, gamers, information technology, it, IT Management, IT managers, manager, motivation, World of Warcraft

It Turns Out That An IT Leader's Emotions Are Often Reflected By Your Staff

Those boys who get locked up and do work on behavior neuroscience continue to come up with new and interesting discoveries all the time.  This time around they’ve made a stunning discovery that will have a long lasting impact on how IT managers do their job. Do I have your interest yet?

Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis have written an article in the Harvard Business Review in which they describe what’s been going on in the world of neuroscience. Neuroscientists have discovered something called “mirror neurons” that are spread out all over our brains. Our brains have lots and lots of neurons. This newly discovered type appear to mimic (or “mirror”) what someone else is doing.

These neurons were discovered by Italian neuroscientists who were studying one particular type of cell in a monkey’s brain. This cell only fired when the monkey raised its arm. One day an assistant in the lab raised some food to his mouth and the cell in the monkey fired.

What this all means is that when we detect someone’s (consciously or unconsciously) emotions by observing their actions, these newly discovered mirror neurons reproduce the emotions that we believe that they are feeling. Taken all together, these neurons allow us to create a virtually instant sense of having a shared experience.

Why do we care about all of this brain stuff? It’s the key to being a great IT leader. It turns out that your emotions and your actions are what your department / team are going to be mirroring. If you can activate the mirror neurons in those who are following you, then you will have tapped into a very powerful force.

Additional studies that have been done on groups to measure the effects of activating these neurons has revealed even more. It turns out that when you are addressing your department / team, HOW you communicate is much more important than WHAT you communicate.

This means that if you want to get the best performance out of your team, you need to be demanding (of course) but do in in such a way that creates a happy positive mood in you team. This is all based on the simple fact that when your people feel better, then you’ll get better performance out of them.

Which now brings us to the subject of laughter. I’m not talking about having your team laugh at you (they may already be doing this). Instead, I’m talking about how often you get your team to laugh with you. Studies have shown that the best IT leaders got their employees to laugh on average three times as often as did midperforming IT leaders.

When you are in a good mood, this helps the people who work with and for you to both take in the information that you are providing as well as react quicker and with more creativity.

How often do you make your team members laugh? Have you found that your emotions cause your team to feel the same way that you do? Do you often find yourself feeling the same way that your boss is feeling? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Post tags: employee, employee motivation, information technology, it, IT Management, manager, motivational, personnel, promotion, recruiting, retention, team building, team dynamics, teamwork

Quick review, here’s how the generations and their cool marketing names break down:

The Silent Generation (ages 63-81)
Baby Boomers (ages 44-62) – 80 million strong
Generation X (ages 27-43) – 59 million
Millennials/Gen Y (age 26 and under) – 80 million!

The Millennials have entered the IT workforce in large numbers and yet there has been very little written about how IT managers can deal with this completely new generation. Remember, these folks may have never seen a vinyl LP, may assume that phones have been wireless forever, and can’t understand why TVs need to have an antenna – the cable connection just goes into the back!

If you had to make some broad brush generalizations about the Millennials, they would probably look like this. Sarah Sladek who is the CEO of Limelight Generations says that the Millennials had the “…most provided for and structured childhood in history…” In a nutshell, these are the kids who got awards for just participating. Whereas the Gen-X crew is known to be self-sufficient, the Millennials are much more group activity focused. You can add to this a need for structure, feedback, encouragement, and a deep desire for instant gratification.

What’s fascinating is that although you might not expect it, Millennials actually get along in most cases very well with the Baby Boomers. One reason for this might be that many Millennials still live at home and the Baby Boomers that they interact with in the workplace remind them of their parents. However, they really, really, don’t want to be talked down to!

What’s an IT Manager To Do? Several things, including finding ways to relate, involve, engage, connect, educate, and promote job benefits to staff. A key SPOKEN realization of the Millennials is that they realize that they won’t be working for one company for 40 years. This means that more than any other generation now in the workplace, they need to know what their current job is going to provide to them right now. This means things like tangible certifications are very important to this segment of the workforce.

It’s All About Connections: This group of workers is interested in being mentored. They really want to learn new things and they realize that people who have done the job for awhile have much to teach them. That being said, interacting with their own peers is just as important . This means that a good IT manager will provide both types of opportunities: mentoring and peer networking.

Use The Internet: This generation grew up online. That means that they are very comfortable socializing and exchanging information online. In order to minimize the potential security issues that the use of external social networking sites can cause, IT managers need to establish internal social networks that everyone can participate in.

The Millennials represent the future of every IT department. It is our responsibility to adapt to their ways of learning and show them what it will take to succeed in the IT industry.

Do you work with Millennials now? How’s it going – does everyone get along or are there conflicts and misunderstandings? Have any special programs or changes in policy been put in place to adapt the workplace for this new generation of workers? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Tags: Millennials, Baby Boomers, it, employee, information technology, retention

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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.

Tags: layoff, firing, termination, employee motivation, it, employee

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The great thing about talent portability in today’s IT market is that whenever you have a need to fill a position that requires a specialized set of skills or experiences, you can generally go shopping and find exactly what you need. The downside to this is the simple fact that your competition can do the same thing and they might be selecting from your employees!

Gone are the days in which firms developed their talent from within. Carefully nurturing those-who-would-be managers, giving them the training that they needed and rotating them among job assignments so that they would be ready when the trumpet sounded for them to take center stage in the Colosseum of business. Perhaps somewhat sadly, that model no longer exists.

Instead, today’s IT professionals are free to move on whenever a better opportunity presents itself. Applicant-tracking company Taleo has done a survey in which it was revealed that 80% of firms that participated in the survey have moved away from this “we know whats best for you” model to now starting to use internal job boards that are designed to make it easy for employees to apply for open positions and move around within the firm instead of leaving it. The poster child for this approach is Dow Chemical who was able to cut its turnover rate in half when it moved to using the internal job board approach to fill positions.

A small note of experience is probably due at this point. I’ve worked at a number of large firms in which it was mandatory that all openings were posted on the job board. However, the position was often already effectively filled by the posting manager long before the posting. Once the rest of the firm starts to understand that the job board is basically just window dressing, its value and its ability to retain staff goes down significantly.

What’s interesting about the shift to using a job board approach is that it moves the burden of managing an employee’s career from the company over to the employee. This has, of course, caused a great deal of chaos. The disconnect comes when an IT team member wants to move on to another job opportunity and his/her manager doesn’t want to let them go. Now we’ve got conflict! Welcome to the world of negotiations – somebody needs to be able to step in and find a way to preserve the investment that the company has made in this employee.

Different firms are finding different ways to deal with this issue. McKinsey tries to resolve this type of issue by (of course, it’s McKinsey after all) using rankings: how did the employee rank the job posing opportunity and how has the employee’s team ranked them on the current project that they are working on? If all of this analytical work does not resolve the issue, then the Senior Partner gets brought in to play the role of King Solomon. Before they imploded, Bears Sterns had created an office of mediation which took on the job of working out such differences between employees and their managers when an employee wanted to move on to another internal job.

In the end, the world of employee training and retention has been turned upside down. Where once firms were responsible for training and managing the careers of their employees, now that is no longer the case. Instead, the responsibility for managing one’s career is now the responsibility of each employee and training, which used to be a given, is now viewed in terms of its short term payback to the company. The old system of talent management had been set up along the lines of an engineering system: given a set of inputs, a predictable set of outputs would be produced. Today’s talent management is much more fluid. It is driven more by external market conditions and viewed through operations tools that are better able to adapt to increasing levels of uncertainty. It is possible to manage your pool of talent, you just need to update the tools that you are using to do it with.

Tags: employee, recruiting, retention, IT jobs, IT manager

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If you thought that just barely getting by using skills to manage your IT staffing needs using both home grown talent as well as warm bodies that you purchased off the street was tough, just imagine how challenging it is when you try to move things up one level and adapt your IT organization to the uncertainty in demand for IT talent. Just think about that for a moment: how would your life be different if instead of running around trying to fill holes in your organization as they occur, you could actually be ahead of the 8-ball and be ready for changes as they came?

Here’s a fundamental thought that will help you to solve this staffing problem once and for all. It’s based on lessons that our supply chain friends learned the hard way a long time ago. Instead of trying to stock your IT department with every body that you think that you might need both today and for the next x number of years, instead do what the supply chain guys do. Bring in small batches of what you need more often. This will allow you to not have to attempt to predict your staffing needs so very far out.

For a good example of how the current IT hiring/staffing process is broken, take a look at how recent college graduates are brought into the organization. Most firms do almost all of their new graduate hiring right after the students get out of college. This means there is a wave of new recruits that enter the firm in June. Even if you allow for some new-hire orientation and perhaps some training, the firm still has a need to carve out a substantial number of new-hire spots all at once. If the company is struggling in the current quarter, then this can be especially difficult.

A different way to handle this issue would be to take this single large problem and divide it into two smaller parts. Not all college graduates really want to go to work immediately after finishing 4, 5, or 6 years of intense schooling. Some would more than willing to delay their start date by 3-6 months. If this was done, then the firm would only have to process half as many new recruits at a time. More personal attention could be paid to each incoming employee and better fits for talents and interests could be made. Having fewer number of new hires to place but having them more often makes the staffing challenge much easier – you never have too many or too few. Retaining non-working students for 3-6 months can be as simple as agreeing to pay them 1/2 salary until they start working full time.

Long and expensive training programs present the same challenge. A two year management training program could be broken up into four 6 month programs. Each smaller program could have its own goals and forecasts. The benefit of doing training this way is that should an employee in training decide to leave the firm, then the entire training program expense may not have been spent on them.

Finally, within IT organizations different programs are often allowed to maintain and run their own talent management programs. The end result of this is that all too often, one program will have too many potential managers and another will have too few. Since there is no centralized way to communicate these supply issues, the firm generally just deals badly with the imbalance. If talent management within the IT department was centralized, then this issue would not occur.

So now we have an understanding of where to find IT talent and we now know how to deal with fluctuation in the need for IT talent, I guess the next thing that we should talk about would be how to improve the Return on Investment spent on developing employees…

How does IT staffing work at your firm? Do you seem to have waves of new employees sweep in every so often? Is your department set up to handle this flood of talent? Have you ever tried to manage the process by adding fewer new employees more often? What was the result? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Tags: it, employee, personnel, employee motivation, training, staffing

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So hopefully we can agree that most firm’s approach to talent management is at best broken, and often missing-in-action. What’s an IT manager to do? Well, let’s first look for a process that actually works in the modern corporation and then let’s see what we can do to model it for talent management. That can’t be that hard to do can it?

If you very coldly view staff as “products” for just one fleeting moment, then you might be able to agree with me that one might be able to view talent management as some sort of soylent green supply chain problem. There has been a lot of work done on how to improve and optimize supply chains over the last 60 or so years and we can use this work to improve how we manage talent today. If you’ll allow me to extend the product analogy just a little bit further, then you’ll find that the nirvana of talent management would be if we could create a “just-in-time” delivery system that would provide the right employee at the right time to get the job done correctly.

Since inventing a brand new way to do talent management would be too risky, let’s take a closer look at what supply chain processes can do for us here:

• The bane of talent management is forecasting how many people will be needed over time. Supply chain processes have exactly the same challenge; however, they’ve come up with a way to do it.

• Reducing the costs of manufacturing a product is very similar to a company’s efforts to minimize the amount that they spend to develop talent.
• The common practice of outsourcing parts of a manufacturing process is equivalant to hiring outsiders to do jobs.
• The challenge of making sure that products get delivered on time can be thought of as being similar to planning for company events where succession is necessary.
• Finally, supply chain management deals with how products move through a supply chain and eliminating bottlenecks that occur in that chain. Managing a pipeline of internal talent is very similar as you attempt to have employees advance through development jobs with different responsibilities.

In the end, there are four principles that can be drawn from supply chain management and applied to talent management. What’s interesting is that two of them deal with uncertainty that appears on the demand side (make vs. buy and forecasting) while the other two deal with uncertainty on the supply side (improve development ROI and how to protect that investment). We’ll discuss these four principles in detail next time.

What do you think? Is it too chillingly cold to try to apply supply chain principles to HR tasks? Should we not try to fix something that you don’t think is broken? Do you have another example of an existing process that would be a better model to use? Leave a comment and let me know.

Tags: employee, it careers, retention strategies, supply chain

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Everyone who has lead a team, managed a department, or run a company knows that in addition to all of the other “keeping the doors open” jobs that they have, the task that can sneak up on them at any time is staffing. This coin has two sides: you don’t want to have too many warm bodies on your team if you don’t have the paying work to support them. At the same time, you don’t want to have to few or you’ll not be able to secure new work and that will eventually lead to your firm’s demise.

Two weeks ago I found myself in the wrong position on this issue. The project that a team that I was responsible for had run into some delays. This meant that the schedule had been stretched out and yet the funding for the staffing had not been changed. What this meant is that I had to start to shed project members. This ended up requiring me to to make several trips down to the cafeteria with team members to let then know that their time on the project was up. Needless to say this was not fun for me and it was clearly not fun for them. As I did this, I was wondering what’s a manager to do to avoid this type of poor talent management?

After the bloodletting was done, I started to do some research in order to find a better way to manage talent. A smart guy by the name of Peter Cappelli over at the University of Penn’s Wharton School has spent some time looking at this situation and he reports that things are pretty grim.

What is talent management? In a nutshell, it’s an attempt to anticipate the level of need for staff and then creating a plan for how you are going to achieve it. Dr. Cappelli says that he’s found that most firms fall into one of two groups for managing their talent: either they do nothing and run around when they have to fill a position or they have a staffing forecasting system that’s left over from the 1950′s which is now inaccurate because the world is moving so much faster.

Anybody remember internal development programs? When I worked at Boeing certain workers were identified as “Hi-Pots” (High Potentials) and they were placed on a career path that rotated them through multiple departments. This approach has pretty much gone the way of the Dodo. The few shining exceptions are at GE and PepsiCo that have their famous management academies that mangers attend as part of their job. While these are great programs, who cares since only a few managers in the world have access to them.

In the 1990′s hiring folks from outside became all the rage. It was possible because there were so many people who had been shed from other companies that the pool of available talent was quite large. Bad news – that pool’s all but dried up now. Additionally, as the pool got smaller, firms who had spent money training their employees started to see them leave and go to work for their competitors. This, of course, made them even less interested in investing in training their staff.

Ok, so where do we stand right now? Most companies / departments / managers don’t have any sort of talent management plan in place right now. However, the upper management is starting to realize that this is one of their key challenges. The ultimate question is how can your firm’s talent be managed in such a way that it will allow the firm to ultimately make more money (and spend less)?

I’ve got some thoughts on things that you can do, but first do you agree that things are as dire as I’ve laid them out to be? Does your firm have a talent management program? Are YOU being managed as part of a talent management program? Post a comment & let me know.

Tags: employee, recruiting, IT staff retention, retention, it+careers

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