Archive for the ‘management’ Category

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Why A Quiet IT Team Should Make An IT Leader Nervous

Thursday, August 26th, 2010
Image Credit Just Because You Can't Hear It, Doesn't Mean That They Aren't Talking

Just Because You Can't Hear It, Doesn't Mean That They Aren't Talking

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…

Why Silence Is NOT Golden

So here’s an interesting thought: if one of your primary jobs is to manage your IT team, then how are you going to be able to tell if you are doing a good job? One way that might come to mind right off the bat is if you don’t hear any complaints than certainly you must be doing a good job, right?

It turns out that Dr. James Detert, a researcher at Cornell, and a team have been looking into what workers do and don’t tell their bosses. The results (and the reasons for them) just might surprise you. Here are four common myths that every IT Leader should know are not true.

Myth: Women Are Less Likely To Speak Up

Most managers believe that women and non-professional IT workers are more likely to NOT speak up simply because they think that it will either harm their career or just isn’t worth the effort. I must confess that I believed this myth.

It turns out that this just isn’t so. Based on studies that were done by Dr. Detert and his team, it turns out that women and non-professional IT workers are just as likely as professional men to speak up in the workplace. In fact, the researchers have shown that your gender, level of education, and your level of income have no bearing on the probability that you’ll express your opinions at work.

Myth: Talkers Tell All

IT Leaders who are getting a lot of feedback from their IT team may start to feel confidant that they are in touch with everything that is going on. I mean come on, if your team is talking to you then they’ve got to be telling you everything, right?

Sorry, once again it turns out that this is not the case. In studies that were done by the researchers it turned out that almost half of the workers polled said that they hold back. The reasons varied, but the most common causes of IT employees holding their tongues were when they thought it wouldn’t do any good or when they thought it might harm their career.

Myth: Safety First

IT Leaders who have a problem with their team not talking to them may wonder why. A natural first assumption is that their IT team for some reason doesn’t feel safe doing so. For some reason, the thinking goes, they believe that speaking up about an issue will come back to haunt them.

Well guess what, the reasons that your team might not be talking to you is actually much more boring than that. The number one reason that someone on a team won’t tell their boss what’s really going on is, drum roll please, simply because they are too busy – they don’t want to waste their time. Ouch, that hurts!

Myth: Only The Big Issues Are Scary

Finally, you would assume that it would be the big issues that would cause IT workers to hold back. You know, things that involve actual crimes or unethical things. Oops, once again you’d be wrong.

The researchers found that IT workers will not speak up on even the smallest issues. Unfortunately these are the very issues that an IT leader needs to hear about if he / she wants to improve how IT can help the company operate.

What All Of This Means For You

The technology part of being a IT Leader is probably easier than the people part. However, you are going to have to be good at both if you want to be a successful manager.

One of the most important things that you’ll need to realize is that your best way of identifying issues is to get your team to tell you about them. Not hearing about issues doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. We’ve pointed out four myths that can lead an IT Leader to make the wrong conclusions.

Now that you know that silence doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t have any problems, you are ready to take the next step. This means that you’ve got to go out and form real relationships with your team so that you’ll be able to tell when they are holding back – and then you’ll know that it’s time to dig deeper!

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

Question For You: Do you think that having an “open door policy” really means anything for today’s IT Leaders?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

What is it going to take to make your IT Leader career a success? Sure, you can deliver IT value and get your projects done on time, but will that be enough? The answer is no. For you to be seen as a successful IT Leader you are going to have to be seen as a “high potential” IT Leader – one who is going to go places beyond your current assignment. Clearly you need to know what it’s going to take to get others to consider you to be high potential…

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IT Leader Start-Up Issues: What Have You Gotten Yourself Into?

Thursday, March 11th, 2010
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IT Leaders In New Positions Need To Take The Time To Do An Assessment

IT Leaders In New Positions Need To Take The Time To Do An Assessment

Every IT Shop Is Different

In the life of an IT Leader, there will come the day that you find yourself in a new position. You might be working for the same company and just be in a different role or you might be starting a new job – no matter, the challenge is the same. Where do you start? It turns out that doing nothing right off the bat might be the right idea…

Doing An Assessment Of Your Team

When you find yourself in a new IT Leader position, you might be tempted to do what many of us have done in the past – make some noise. We’ve all see others do this before: almost immediately upon assuming a new position, they do a reorganization or some such action just to show that they are going to “shake things up”. That’s all fine and good, but it really doesn’t accomplish anything.

Instead, your time would be better spent doing an assessment of the IT team that you’ve just inherited. To use the popular terminology of the day, this needs to be a 360-degree assessment of both those people who will be on your team as well as the people that you will now be working for.

What you’re going to be looking for is to develop a good understanding of how things are right now. You might be overflowing with things that you want to accomplish (or you might have been told what you will have to accomplish), but now is not the time to be making changes before you know what is going on.

You’re not going to find what you need written down anywhere, instead you’ve got a lot of talking to do. Your situational assessment needs to cover a lot of ground. Specifically you’re going to want to know about the following four areas:

  1. The IT ecosystem (hardware, network, communications, endpoints, etc.)
  2. Applications (business and support)
  3. Corporate organization and hierarchy
  4. Processes and procedures for common IT tasks

Results Of An IT Team Assessment

As you can probably guess by now, an IT assessment is not something that you can do overnight. It’s going to take some focused effort to uncover the information that you’re going to need.

What you should be looking to assemble out of all of this data collection are a set of key indicators that will tell you where you need to be spending your time. Each one of the areas that you’ve collected information on can probably by now be broken down into an additional level of detail: specific hardware systems (e.g. storage), specific applications, etc. Each of these IT components will have their own status.

This status in its simplest form can be thought of as being a traffic light: red, yellow, or green. The green status areas can safely be ignored for now – they are under control. Things get more interesting when you start to take a look at the yellow and red areas.

Clearly the red areas need immediate attention. However, it’s the yellow areas that will provide you with the greatest value for having done the whole assessment task. These are the areas that while they may be under control for now, have the potential to “go red” and quickly turn into a problem that could consume your hours, days, or even weeks.

What All Of This Means For You

When an IT leader is placed into a new position, his or her first actions can often set the stage for their long term success. Starting things off by taking actions just to look like you are doing something won’t help – it may do more harm than good.

Instead what you need to do is to take the time to do an assessment of your new IT environment. This will require you to look both up and down the company hierarchy. You’ll be trying to understand how all of the components of the IT department fit together (or don’t!)

A well done IT assessment will provide you with a clear roadmap on where you need to be spending your time. The areas that are either not doing well or just getting by are where you’ll need to be spending your time. Focus your time and talents here and you’ll be able to shine in your position.

Question For You: What do you think the most important thing that you can do is when you are just starting a new IT position?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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?

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What Do IT Managers Really Do?

Thursday, September 24th, 2009
IT Leaders Are A Lot Like Music Conductors, But ...

IT Leaders Are A Lot Like Music Conductors, But ...

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.

If you think about it, what we really spend our time doing is managing people and hoping that they will help us to make our IT projects successful. That being said, did you ever get any training on how to mange people?

IT Leaders Don’t Make Beautiful Music

One of the more popular ways to think about the how IT Leaders do their job is to picture them as being orchestra conductors. You can almost imagine yourself standing in front of your team, tapping your conductor’s wand on the sheet music stand in front of you, and then with a flourish you begin.

First up is the requirements team, before they are done the system architects  step in followed by database developers and user interface developers softly at first and then louder as time moves on. Nice mental picture, eh?

Too bad life doesn’t really work out this way. Dr. Henry Mintzberg at McGill University says that in reality what you’d be hearing is what a pre-concert warm-up sounds like – everyone out of tune and playing over the top of each other. Now that’s what I am familiar with!

Dr. Mintzberg points out that each and every one of us is flawed - there is no such thing as a perfect IT Leader. However, the really good IT Leaders are less screwed-up and that is something that we can shoot for.

It’s All About The Interruptions

Think about how your yesterday went. Did you start the day with a plan and then were you able to accomplish that plan? I’m willing to bet that the answer is probably not. It’s a fact of life for the modern IT Leaders that every day is basically a stream of interruptions – one after another.

Don’t even get me started on what Blackberrys and email have done to compound the interruption problem. One top of this madness we need to find a way to mange the people that we work with – and it sure looks like we’re doing it the wrong way.

The Three Planes Of IT Leader Management

IT Leaders are never taught how to manage people to get results. This means that too many of us end up hiding behind emails and sticky notes when we are trying to get our virtual teams to accomplish tasks.

Dr. Mintzberg has identified three different “planes” of how we can mange people. We need to use all three, but we are currently not balancing how we use them.

  • The Direct Plane – this is where IT Leaders “get their hands dirty” and jump right in and manage actions directly. You know what this looks like – we mange projects, we write code. In all honesty this is the easiest way to do things because we don’t have to go through the effort of getting others to do work for us.
  • The Manage People Plane – this is the tricky one. If IT Leaders can find the time, then they can work with the people that they need to take action in order to make their IT project a success and motivate them, train them, build teams, etc. In other words, make it so that they can take action and be more effective. Easy to say, hard to do.
  • The Manage Information Plane – all too often this is where IT Leaders choose to hide out. Here we can mange information in order to drive people. We use budgets, objectives, we delegate tasks, set organizational structures, etc. All very powerful stuff, but note that we don’t necessarily have to deal with real people and all of the messy issues that that might entail.

Final Thoughts

Nobody ever taught you how to manage the people that you need to convince to do what you need them to do in order to make your IT project a success. You’ve probably discovered by now that you’ve got a lot of different ways to make things happen.

The worst kind of IT Leader manages only by using information. Sure this is a comfortable way of doing things and seems to be the simplest way to get things accomplished. However, it’s always better to spend the time working with the people that you need on your side. In the end you’ll be glad that you did and you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I’ve got a quick question for you: what is the next step in your career? What do you want to get promoted to? In fact, as long as we are talking about that, what comes after THAT promotion? If you want to become a real IT Leader, then the career ladder generally goes: IT worker, manager, director, executive director, CIO. Got a plan on how you are going to get to that next step?

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6 Management Suggestions To Help IT Leaders In Tough Times

Thursday, May 21st, 2009
Tough Times Call For Solid IT Leadership Skills

Tough Times Call For Solid IT Leadership Skills

Can it get any worse than it already is? Does anyone see a light at the end of the tunnel yet? Times are tough all over, and being an IT Leader right now is just about the toughest job out there. It would be all too easy to tuck your head down, turn off the lights, and not talk to anyone until this is all over. However, you are an IT Leader and you can’t do that.

In these tough times you need to overcome your base instincts and do what good managers should do – lead. As a reminder of just what that really means in these tough times, here are six things that you should be doing right now:

  1. Treat your employees as responsible adults. Yes, sometimes in these dark days they don’t seem to act that way, but they are. This means that you can’t boss them around or soothe their fears with made up half truths.
  2. Reach out. This means that tough times call for you to reach out beyond your normal contact groups and have more fingers that go deeper into the company. This is the only way that you are going to be able to discover what is REALLY going on. This is the information that you’re going to need to be able to communicate to your team.
  3. Practice emotional intelligence. It’s true that your team will perform better even under all of this fear and doubt if they believe that you really do understand and respect them. This means providing opportunities for everyone’s opinions to be heard.
  4. Be Fair: Tough times won’t last  forever and you’re going to need your team to stick around when they no longer have to. This means that when you have to do distasteful tasks like layoffs, you need to be open and honest about why certain decisions were made. Everyone may not agree with you, but at least they’ll understand why you did what you did.
  5. Open The Door Wider. Allow your employees to being more of themselves to work. Time are tough and you are going to be asking more from your remaining staff, you need to make it easier for them to balance all parts of their life.
  6. Enjoy Your Job: It is critical that you find some part of your job that brings you joy and happiness. Even in these tough times, you need to let others know that this one thing makes you very happy. Your enthusiasm will be noticed and it’s catching – you’ll bring everyone’s mood up.

How many of these six management actions are you currently doing? Are they being successful? Do you disagree with anything that’s on my list? Did I leave anything off? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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IT Leader Book Review: “Lead Well And Prosper”

Thursday, April 16th, 2009
Nick McCormick Wrote The Management Book "Lead Well And Prosper"

Nick McCormick Wrote The Management Book "Lead Well And Prosper"

So how is an IT Leader supposed to keep on top of his / her game? There were very few college courses that we had to take during our undergraduate years that dealt with management (or even better, leadership). Even if you’ve gone on and gotten an MBA, precious little time is devoted to the day-to-day skills that one needs to be a good leader.

That’s where books like Nick McCormick‘s Lead Well And Prosper come in to play. Nick reached out to me awhile ago and asked me to take a look at a copy of his book in order to get a bit of publicity for it. I agreed.

I’ve read a lot of management books in my time and I generally come away from them with mixed feelings. Books like Jack Welch’s “Jack: Straight from the Gut” always strike me as a good read, but don’t really provide me with any tools that I can use – Jack got lucky and did a good job.

There are a lot of other management books out there that read like a textbook because, in fact, they are. These always seem to be just a bit too removed from my reality to do much good.

Nick’s book, “Lead Well and Prosper”, attempts to strike a middle ground between these two extremes. By in large, he does a pretty good job. The one thing that struck me when I was reading this book was that Nick’s style of writing is very conversational. This means it feels like you are having a talk with the author when you read the book. This will work for some and won’t work for others who looking for books to be having a one-way dialog with them.

In the 15 chapters that make up the book, Nick starts each chapter off by presenting a fictitious scenario between two workers: Joe Kerr the manager (“Joker” – get it?), and Wanda B. Goode. After this scenario is presented in which Joe almost always makes a management mistake, Nick spends the rest of the chapter dissecting the situation and explaining what SHOULD have been done.

The scenarios are a little contrived, the analysis is a bit on the basic side, but I have to give to Nick – he hits most of bases in regards to what it takes to be a good manager.

So who should read this book? It’s a quick read at 75 pages and so it won’t take anyone too long to get through it. As I was reading it, I tried to think about who I would give it to. I came away with the impression that it would make an excellent gift for anyone who has been newly promoted. Yes, they probably already know many of the things that the book covers. However, when you are going into a new job is just the time to be reminded about what it takes to be a true leader.

Go out and pick up a copy of Nick McCormick’s book Lead Well and Prosper and when you are done reading it, pass it on to your next friend who finds themselves in a new position where they need to be reminded of what a leader really is.

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