Archive for the ‘IT manager’ Category

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Why “I Don’t Care How You Feel” Is Bad IT Management

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

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Life is hard for IT Leaders and it’s not going to be getting any easier anytime soon. With everything that you need to be doing, it sure seems like having to put up with team members who have personal issues that take away from their ability to do their jobs can only hurt performance. For that matter, those “touchy-feely” workplaces that places like Google and Apple have sure seem to be missing the mark — work is for work or have these companies forgotten that?

The Good Old Days Where People Shut Up And Worked

Those of us who come from a technical background know how the world should be run. There should be a set of rules and everybody should know what the rules are and everybody should work according to the rules. If a business was run this way, an IT Leader’s job would be so much easier — you would only have to deal with the deviations from the rules.

However, we’ve tried doing this — it was called the 1950’s through the 1980’s. Remember the classic “IBM Man”? It turns out that the rigid workplace did work and you could get a great deal of productivity out of people; however, then the world changed.

What happened is that everything started moving much faster. Global competition showed up with a vengeance. Then the Internet arrived and things started moving even faster. All of those rigidly structured companies with their rigidly structured IT departments hit a brick wall. IBM felt it especially hard and there for awhile in the early 1990’s was teetering on the edge of failure.

What Works In Today’s IT Departments

If you miss the old days, you’re not going to like this part. After a lot of trial and error, we now know what it takes to make a modern company successful. The first step is to take the time to realize that the people working for the company are not “assets“, they really are people. These people have a life and potentially a family outside of work and the boundaries between the two have never been fixed.

This means that as an IT Leader you need to take the time to get to know the people who are working on your team. If you are able to really engage with them, to make a connection, then the boost to the productivity of your team can be almost magical.

The operative word here is “flexibility“. If you place people in a rigid IT environment, then they will at best do exactly what you tell them to do when you tell them to do it. If instead you are flexible and focus more on what you want them to do and no so much on how you want them to do it, then this causes your team members to become much more satisfied with their jobs and they will end up doing much more. This job satisfaction shows up as your team members treat customers and other employees better which then results in more loyal customers and more productive business interactions with other departments.

What All Of This Means For You

Creating a rigid IT team that has lots of rules to follow is a great way to keep things under control. New IT Leaders often gravitate to this type of solution because it’s familiar territory — almost like programming an IT system. However, this has been shown to be the wrong way to go about doing things.

The right way to have the most productive IT team is for you as an IT Leader to take the time to connect on a personal level with your team members. This means getting to know them and sharing your personal side with them also.

Creating an IT workplace in which the focus is on getting the work done and being flexible in just how it gets done is critical. This is the type of environment that will bring out the best in your team. The results that your team will produce from this type of situation will be the rocket fuel that powers your career to the next level.

Do you think that IT managers need to worry about getting to know all of their team members on a personal level?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

No budget, no special training, and yet you are expected to do more with less. How can you go about fixing what’s wrong with your IT team during tight economic times? It turns out that there is a simple way for you to identify where you are having issues and how you can fix them. All you need to do is to learn a about a new management tool called social-network analysis…

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Are You Cut Out To Be An IT Leader?

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

There Are 5 Skills That You Need To Be A Product Manager

There Are 5 Skills That You Need To Be An IT Leader

Jeff Vance over at Sandstorm Media talked with me to get some inputs for an article that he was writing for the Project Manager Planet site. Yeah, yeah – I know that we’re IT Leaders not Project Managers. However, Jeff did a very good job of capturing a lot of what makes our job so hard to do.

Check out his article which is called 5 Signs You’re Not Cut Out to be a Project Manager. Give it a read and every time you see “Project Manager” just mentally replace it with “IT Leader” and it’ll work out for you.

Jeff has included the classic story of Charles Pellerin, NASA’s director of Astrophysics for the Hubble space telescope program which should serve as a good reminder for all IT Leaders that you should never give up trying to make something better…

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So what do IT Leaders actually do? Generally I’d agree with you if you answered something like “create IT solutions“; however, I’ve been giving this some thought and I think that we’re missing the mark if that’s our answer…

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IT Leaders Know That It’s Not All About Them

Thursday, April 9th, 2009
IT Leaders Need To Learn To Not Be Micromangers

IT Leaders Need To Learn To Not Be Micromanagers

Please put your hand up in the air if you are a micromanager. Is your hand up – if it is then good, you have a pretty accurate picture of yourself. If it isn’t , then I bet if we talked with the people that you work with, we might get a different answer. By our very nature, IT Leaders tend to be the worst kind of micro-managers.

Where does our micromanaging come from? Of course we love to know how everything operates and so we are always seeking to gather more information. This is part of it, but it’s not the real root of the problem. That has to do with trust.

When you get right down to it, micromanagers simply don’t trust the people who work for them. It’s sorta a “give it to me, I’ll just go ahead and do it myself because it’s too much of an effort to make sure you do it right” sort of an approach.

It turns out that micromanaging any workers is a bad idea, but micromanaging IT workers is the worst. IT workers very quickly start to understand what is going on and they will quickly become complacent – doing only what you tell them to do and no more. This is a recipe for disaster.

So what should an IT Leader be doing? Simple, you need to be doing the following three things over and over again:

  • Help your staff to learn to work by themselves. You can do this by giving them meaningful responsibilities.
  • You need to facilitate the work of your staff even if you are not creating the final product.
  • Finally, you should give your employees clear goals and then step back and let them work out the details.

It was the great general, General George Patton Jr, who probably said it the best: “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”
Do you think that you are a micro-manager? Have you ever worked for a micromanager? How did that make you feel? Did I leave anything off of my list of how best to manger IT staff? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Your Next IT Manager Challenge: Girl Fight!

Friday, January 30th, 2009

On Top Of Everything Else, IT Managers Need To Put A Stop To Girl Fighting At Work

On Top Of Everything Else, IT Managers Need To Put A Stop To Girl Fighting At Work

By this time in the 21st Century, I’m hoping that we’ve all got the diversity message: gender, race, age, sexual orientation (you too California) don’t matter when hiring people for jobs or when managing them. However, it turns out that there’s been a pink elephant lurking in the room that many of us (males) may have not noticed: girl fights!

I’m not talking about “I’ll see you out in the parking lot after work” types of fights. Rather, it turns out that there is a sneaky thing going on in the workplace. Women are actively treating each other badly. Hmm, where did this come from?

Peggy Klaus wrote a telling article in the New York Times a while back in which she pointed out the issue that has been there all along. Peggy is a leadership coach who has truly been there, done that. This has allowed her to spill the dirt on this dirty little secret…

So what are women doing to each other at work? This can be a long list. How about: limiting access to important committees and meetings, holding back on critical information, giving assignments and promotions to others, even blocking access to people who could be mentors or senior management.

Most of these bullying actions can be placed into one of four buckets of bad behaviors: verbal abuse, job sabotage, misuse of authority, or relationship destroying. Who knew that so much bad stuff was going on at work?

The folks over at the Workplace Bullying Institute have done  a study that showed that women bullies target their abuse towards women an amazing 70% of the time. On the other hand, men who are bullies seem to split their bullying equally between the sexes. This leads to the big question: why bully in the first place?

It turns out that there are a lot of theories for why women treat women badly in the workplace (no – this is not a Jerry Springer moment):

  1. Scarcity Breeds Bullies: since promotion spots are so few these days, women at upper levels are unwilling to help women at lower levels advance for fear that promotion spots will go to those that they help.
  2. Go Bootstrap Yourself: This is a familiar one – I had to get to where I am with no help from anyone, so you should have to do the same.
  3. Avoiding Favoritism: in today’s hype-PC work environments, women don’t want to create an appearance that they are favoring females over males.
  4. Hyper-emotionality: Everyone agrees that women are generally more sensitive to emotions than men are. Some also believe that women more easily take offense and can quickly start to hold a grudge. This means that they can start to overreact when they feel slighted by someone.

So what’s an IT Leader to do with all of this girl-fight knowledge? No matter if the IT Leader is male or female, the steps that need to be taken are the same. The first step is create a true “open door” policy so that when girl fighting goes on behind your back, the victims will feel free to come to you and report what is going on.

The second is that you need to call the bully on their actions. Depending on the IT Leader’s gender (like if you are a guy), you need to be careful here. However, mistreating any employee is unacceptable and the bully needs to be told that this will not be accepted.

The nice thing about bullies is that generally when they get caught, they back down and shape up quickly. Yet one more 21st Century task for an IT Leader to master!

Have you ever witnessed any girl fighting going on in your department? Was it a senior female employee bullying a more junior employee? Did anyone tell the bully to stop? What was the final result of the bully’s actions? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Simple Steps To Becoming A Better IT Manager

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
Becoming A Better IT Leader Requires Hard Work

Becoming A Better IT Leader Requires Hard Work

A question that I often get asked by both new and old IT leaders is “how can I become a better manger?” The question is a simple one that has complex answers. What all IT leaders want is to become one of those leaders who has the ability to get all of our employees to light up when we show up. We want to be able to get them excited about us and about their jobs. How hard could that be?

Bad news here, it’s actually fairly difficult to transform yourself into one of those very charismatic leaders if you are not already one. If you can’t cause staff to naturally respond to you, then sometimes we try to make self-conscious efforts to display leadership traits. This can backfire on you and it can come across as forced. This is not going to get you where you want to be.

Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis have written an article in the Harvard Business Review in which they report that if you really want to become a better IT leader, then you are going to have to undertake the hard work of actually changing your behavior.

What these researchers are really talking about is that to really break through what is holding you back as an IT manager, you are going to have to become socially smarter. We’re not talking about MBA book knowledge here, but rather learning to interact with people better.

As an example of this, consider the case of a manager who just didn’t know when to back off on an issue. She received feedback that this was her problem and she made several social changes. First she started anticipating how people would react to her. Next, she came up with different ways to present her opinion or information in a way that would not be so aggressive. Finally, she came up with a program that would allow her to change.

Another good way to develop the social skills that you need as an IT manger is to spend time with an IT leader who does a good job of managing. What will happen is that your brain will start to mirror what this leader is doing and this will allow you to become a better leader.

It’s important for you to realize that your brain is constantly creating new neural networks. This means that the way you are is not the way that you will be. You are not a prisoner of your genes or previous management experiences. You can change and improve if you are willing to put the time and energy in to do so.

One final note, developing the social skills that you need to be a great IT leader is especially important when a crisis situation arises. Business conditions like a take over, merger, or even layoffs can create a great deal of stress among IT workers. IT Leaders who have good social skills can keep the team together and get high performance out of them even during times like this.

Do you feel that you have the social skills needed to be a great IT leader? What skills are you still lacking? Do you have a plan for developing these needed skills? Do You have an IT leader who has the skills that you need and can you work with them to find out how they use them? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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