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Feedback sessions need to be done more often with younger IT workers…

A part of an IT Manager’s job is to let those people on his or her team know how they are doing. At most companies, this is done once a year during an annual employee review. I’m not sure about you, but have you ever asked yourself if this is the best way to do this kind of thing? In the age of Facebook and Twitter, maybe it’s time to do these kind of reviews more often…

How Most Companies Do Employee Reviews

Sure employee reviews are a good thing to do, but how are they done? Well, I’m sure that you’re aware of how they are done at your company, but do you know how they are done at other companies?

Assuming that you are an IT Manager at a fairly typical company, then you probably do employee reviews once a year. Guess what – that’s how most companies do them. In a recent survey, 51% of the 500 companies surveyed said that they do these types of reviews annually. 41% of the firms said that they do them semi-annually.

How Progressive Companies Do Employee Reviews

How about all of those fancy new-fangled firms that we are always reading about in the IT trade rags – how often do they do employee reviews? At the leader of the pack (for now), Facebook, they do employee reviews twice a year.

Some progressive firms have increased the frequency to as often as every two weeks. Their thinking is that by doing this they transform what is often a big scary meeting into something that is much more common and, hopefully, useful to the both the employees and their bosses.

What’s The Right Way To Do an Employee Review?

A number of consultants have pointed out that the frequency of employee reviews doesn’t really matter if you are doing these types of reviews wrong! They point out that if you flood the employee with too much information there is a good chance that they’ll simply shut down during the meeting.

When this happens, the review won’t produce the results that you are looking for. Instead what often happens is that the employee just ends up focusing on the criticism and ignores any suggestion of constructive ways that they can become better.

No matter how often as an IT Manager you choose to do employee reviews, you need to realize that this is an important part of your job. Being in regular communication with your staff is how you find out about small issues before they have a chance to grow into big issues that can end up distracting people and wasting time for everyone.

What All Of This Means For You

I think that we can all agree that IT workers who report to an IT Manager need to get feedback on their job performance. This is a cornerstone of good management. The big question is if getting this feedback once a year is the right way to do it.

At most companies, the employee review is an annual event. However, at a number of progressive firms it has been changed. Reviews are now done more often and are done much quicker. The goal is to provide feedback to the employee so that they can start to use the information as quickly as possible.

Ultimately, no matter how often employee reviews are held, the key is to make sure that the information that the IT worker gets is useful. IT Managers need to show leadership and make sure that they don’t overwhelm their staff with too much feedback that causes them to shut down and only focus on the negative. Become an IT Manager who knows when and how to provide employee feedback to members of your dream team, and you’ll be rewarded with a great IT department working for you.

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

Question For You: Do you think that it would be possible to do employee reviews too often?

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

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The one thing that everyone in IT has learned is to stay away from projects that we just know are going to fail, right? It turns out that over in England, they seem to have forgotten this rule. They decided to do a huge IT project to modernize their health care system and guess what, it just failed. Sounds like a great learning opportunity for IT managers…

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When IT Managers fire IT workers, they need to do it the right way…

It’s time for that IT worker to go. As an IT Manager, one of the most painful decisions that you are ever going to have to make is the decision to terminate an employee. Not only is this a tough call for you to make, if you have any sensitivity then you realize that it’s going to rough on them no matter how you go about doing this. Considering how important this is to both of you, perhaps we should spend a few moments talking about the right way to go about doing this part of your job…

Lessons From Yahoo – How Not To Fire An IT Worker

Just in case you were out of town and missed it, over at Yahoo they fired their then-CEO Carol Bartz the wrong way. As an IT Manager you need to be aware of what they did and why it was wrong. First off, Carol was fired over the phone. Secondly, as reported by her, Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock who was doing the firing over the phone was also apparently reading the termination to her from a script that he had prepared. Can you say impersonal?

The lesson that you need to take away from this botched job of firing a worker is that it will come back to haunt you. Yahoo is probably going to have problems convincing people to come work for them because of this story. I mean would you want to work for a company that is that cold and impersonal when it comes to letting their workers go?

If you’ve got to fire somebody, then at least show some leadership and do it the right way. This means that if it is at all possible, you need to do it face-to-face. No, this doesn’t make it easier for you, but trust me this will make the whole experience better for both of you.

The Correct Way To Fire An IT Worker

So if Yahoo has shown IT Managers how NOT to fire workers, what is the correct way to perform this painful task? That’s actually a very good question that has multiple parts to its answer.

First off, we need to understand that some of the commonly held beliefs about the best way to let someone go (given to us by countless company legal departments) are wrong. Sure, these long-held myths seem to be the best way to do things, but it turns out that they actually boost the chances that the terminated worker is going to turn around and sue the company.

Let’s start with trying to understand what a worker who is being let go wants to hear from you. Even though you are firing them, studies have shown that the process can go much smoother if during the process you take the time to praise them. Clearly you need to be careful here – complement their good qualities, but make sure that it is very clear that they are still being let go.

Next, if at all possible don’t have them escorted from the building by a security guard. This takes away all of the good feelings (if there are any) that the praise that you shared with them during the firing discussion may have caused. Instead of a guard, you should be the one who walks them out of the building.

The other thing that you should not do is to have another person present in the room when you are doing the firing. Yes, I know that this is a basic recommendation from both your HR and legal departments. However, studies have shown that by having this 3rd party present is viewed by the person who is being fired as demonstrating a lack of respect for them. I for one can agree with this – it makes the person being fired feel as though the two of you are ganging up on them.

Finally, during the actual process of firing someone be sure to do it slowly. Remember, if you have been a good manager they should have been given plenty of warning and coaching before reaching this point. If you take your time and allow them to process what is happening, they will have more time to deal with this change.

One way to slow things down is to make sure that you carefully explain why they are being let go. Studies have shown that terminated employees were 10x more likely to sue their former employer if they felt that the reason for their dismissal had not been explained to them.

What All Of This Means For You

Firing workers sucks. It’s no fun for you and it’s no fun for them. However, as an IT Manager this is actually a key and important part of your management job – you need to ensure that you have the right dream team on board and you will have to make changes to that team by firing people every so often.

You need to understand how not to fire staff. Don’t do it over the phone (like they did at Yahoo) and don’t read from a script. Take the time to meet with the employee face-to-face and provide a complete explanation of why they are being let go. Try to do the actual firing with just you and the person who is being let go – ultimately this will help them deal with receiving this information.

No IT Manager gets up in the morning with the anticipation of having to fire a worker that day (at least I hope not). However, it does happen and you need to learn how to do a good job at this part of your position. Take the time to provide some humanity and understanding as a part of the termination process and you will make a difficult task that much easier for both you and the employee.

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

Question For You: Would you feel comfortable firing someone if nobody else was around while you did it?

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

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

A part of an IT Manager’s job is to let those people on his or her team know how they are doing. At most companies, this is done once a year during an annual employee review. I’m not sure about you, but have you ever asked yourself if this is the best way to do this kind of thing? In the age of Facebook and Twitter, maybe it’s time to do these kind of reviews more often…

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You can't be a buddy and be a boss

When I’m working with new IT Managers I often run into the buddy / boss problem. It’s perfectly understandable that any person newly placed into an IT Manager position would like to establish a positive relationship with the people that they are managing. This is all well and good, but it’s all too easy for an IT Manager to go too far – you can be a boss, but you can’t be a buddy.

Pick One: Buddy Or Boss

How did you ever learn to be a boss? I’m going to guess that you never took any courses on the subject. Rather, you went to work and you had bosses. You watched what they did and saw what kind of results they got. When you got promoted, you did your level best to be like the ones that were able to get things done.

This is all well and good; however, the world moves on. The new management philosophy tells us that as bosses we need to “connect” with our teams in part to keep them from leaving. Exactly what this means or how best to do it is not terribly well defined.

All too often what I see IT Managers doing is starting out small and going out to happy hours and such events with their IT team. This then leads to other activities and eventually real friendships can develop with some of your staff. This is when problems start to pop up.

As the head of an IT team, your staff works for you. What this means is that at work you have a very clearly defined relationship. When you start to develop personal friendships outside of work, these relationships can start to blur the work relationships.

What happens is that your new friends stop taking what you say at work with the proper amount of seriousness. They forget that indeed they do need to do what you tell them to do – it’s not a request from a friend that they are receiving, but rather a command from their boss. The difference may be subtle, but it’s very, very important that they understand it.

Too Much Information

Along the same lines, the issue of how much of your personal life you should share with your team is another difficult issue that we all need to deal with. You don’t want to be seen as being cold and aloof, but how much is too much?

One of the key realizations that I’ve seen IT Managers struggle with is the simple fact that any personal information that you share with any of your team will undoubtedly end up getting repeated. Before you share it with your IT dream team, you need to determine what the long term cost of making that information public will be.

Trivial things like the fact that you own a dog are probably ok to share with staff. The fact that you got arrested as a youth for drunken driving is probably not. The litmus test that seems to work the best in these situations is to ask yourself if you saw the front-page story in the New York Times was the information that you are about to share with a staff member, how would your mother feel? If there is any doubt on your part, then keep your mouth shut!

What All Of This Means For You

IT Managers get way too much contradictory information when it come how best to manage a team of IT professionals. Gone are the days of aloof, remote bosses. IT Managers are expected to connect with their IT department and to bond with their employees.

However, it’s all too easy for an IT Manager to take this employee bonding stuff too far. You won’t be able to effectively manage your team if you become their “buddy”. Instead you need to maintain a professional distance between yourself and everyone else. This idea means that you shouldn’t end up sharing too much of your personal information with the people who work for you.

Nobody ever said that this leadership thing was going to be easy. IT Managers need to keep in mind the role that they play in the company that they work for and what this means for the relationships that they will establish. Remember, be a boss, not a buddy!

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

Question For You: If you make a mistake and become too friendly with one of your team members, what’s the best way to correct the situation?

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

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It’s time for that IT worker to go. As an IT Manager, one of the most painful decisions that you are ever going to have to make is the decision to terminate an employee. Not only is this a tough call for you to make, if you have any sensitivity then you realize that it’s going to rough on them no matter how you go about doing this. Considering how important this is to both of you, perhaps we should spend a few moments talking about the right way to go about doing this part of your job…

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Every IT team's strategy eventually is used up

As an IT manager, one of the biggest management challenges that you’ll ever face is setting an effective strategy that your entire team can rally behind. As though this wasn’t difficult enough, there’s a little secret about IT strategies that nobody probably ever took the time to tell you about. They don’t last.

A Little Thing Called Change

So why is it that our most carefully crafted IT strategies don’t last? Well the answer to that question is actually pretty easy: change happens. That’s right, no matter how much of your world you think that you control, the reality is that you don’t control the changes that happen in it.

What this means for your team’s IT strategy is that although when you created it, it was probably a good fit for the team and what you wanted to accomplish, it soon isn’t. Because of changes in your team’s environment, even if you are managing a dream team you’re going to need a new IT strategy.

Change can sneak in using a whole bunch of different disguises. Sometimes it’s quite obvious: the CEO announces that the company is changing direction and the project that your team was working on is most defiantly part of the old way of doing business. Other times it’s a bit more subtle: a product that your team was developing IT systems to support goes out of favor with customers and so the company decides to sell it off to another company.

No matter the reasons for the change, it will happen. When it does, you need to first be aware that your current IT strategy is no longer going to do the trick and then you need to have the IT manager skills that will be required to allow you to take action.

Why Strategy Is An Ongoing Process

Effective IT managers make a fundamental realization early on in their careers. They come to understand that developing a strategy for their IT teams to follow is not a one-shot deal. Rather it is simply one part of an ongoing process.

This understanding allows them to always be taking action in support of the ongoing process that is IT strategy development. They know that they need to keep their eyes open and constantly be examining both the external customer environment and the internal work environment for changes that will tell them that it’s time to chuck their current IT strategy and start to develop the next one.

If you feel that this is a task that you simply don’t have the time to do or to do well, then you need to take action. You need to find a member of your team who does have the required time and tell them that you are entrusting them with a new assignment: detect change when it occurs and tell you about it. This will fill them with pride and will give you a chance to practice your delegating skills.

What All Of This Means For You

Setting an IT strategy for your team to execute is a demanding task. Once done, it’s very easy for an IT manager to sit back and assume that his or her primary task going forward will simply be to make sure that the team is executing the strategy.

The problem with this kind of thinking is that IT strategies don’t last. Due to a little thing called change, the conditions that the strategy was designed to deal with will go away. They will be replaced with a completely different set of conditions and this means that it will once again become your responsibility to develop a new strategy to deal with them.

Realizing that developing an IT strategy for your team is an ongoing process is a key part of being an effective IT manager and demonstrating leadership. Understanding that it is a constant process is what it takes to be a great IT manager.

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

Question For You: How often do you think that you should re-evaluate your team’s IT strategy to see if it needs to be changed?

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

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

A quick question for you: are you afraid to fail? Would you be willing to take on responsibility for leading an IT team that might not be a success? I’m willing to bet that a lot of us would say “no” – our company’s IT managers who are perfect are rewarded while IT managers who fail are kicked to the curb. However, I’m going to tell you that you’re wrong – get ready to fail if you want to succeed.

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An effective IT strategy can result in success for your team

Hmm, isn’t strategy something that the big boys are supposed to be taking care of? Most IT managers probably don’t think that they either have the skills needed to create and implement an effective strategy or that it’s simply not part of their job. Just to be clear about this: creating and implementing an effective IT strategy for your team is most definitely a part of your job. Now let’s figure out just exactly how to go about doing it…

Step 1: SWOT

The first step in developing a workable IT strategy is to take the time to perform a SWOT analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The key here is to perform this analysis from the vantage point of your team: what do you do well, where is your team dropping the ball, what projects or opportunities do you see coming your way, what might make your team not matter anymore?

Step 2: Identify Internal Resources

Once you’ve identified the opportunities that are available to your team, you next need to determine how you can take advantage of them. In order to be assigned to work on a project or to obtain new resources, you need to be able to leverage internal resources. Use this opportunity to reach out to people and organizations within the company and forge relationships that will help your team to be able to accomplish more.

Step 3: Threats & Opportunities

Your team will always be facing both threats to its value to the company as well as opportunities for it to become more valuable. You need to look at each of these and identify what alternatives you have for dealing with them. Ensure that you both have accurate information as well as all of the information that you need. Once you’ve done this, pick one of the alternatives and make it your strategy of record for dealing with this threat / opportunity.

Step 4: Building A Good Fit

What’s going to make a strategy work with your team is to find a way to make the all of the different parts work together to make your team stronger. An example of this could be if you wanted your team to play a big roll in the company’s rollout of a new vacation management program you might have your team take a Ruby training class so that you could offer to take care of both the front-end and the back-end parts of the project.

Step 5: Alignment

Just coming up with a strategy is not enough. Once you’ve created the strategy, you need to sell it to your team. You’ll know that you’ve successfully done this once everyone knows what the strategy is and understands what their role in implementing the strategy is.

What All Of This Means For You

Creating and implementing an IT strategy for your team is a part of every IT manager’s job. The trick is knowing the 5 steps that are involved in doing this correctly.

Creating a strategy starts with performing a SWAT analysis, finding internal resources and using them to come up with a strategy to counter threats and take advantage of opportunities, combine activities in order to create a good fit among internal activities. Finally, take the time to create alignment between the various players.

Creating a strategy is the key to providing your team with a clear direction for the work that they will be doing. That’s why it is such a critical task for IT managers to do well. Follow these 5 steps and you will be seen as a strategic IT manager!

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

Question For You: How often do you think that you should revisit your IT strategy to see if it needs to be updated?

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

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So what’s it going to take to make you a successful IT manager? Is it going to be your understanding of a wide variety of emerging technologies? Is it your ability to understand where the company stands in the marketplace and where it wants to go? Or is it your business skills that allow you to seamlessly network with the rest of the company in order to lead your IT team? Turns out that these are all good to have; however, what it’s going to take to get you to the finish line is something much more valuable: personal energy.

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If your IT team is going to take the castle, then you're going to need a strategy to do it…

As an IT manager, your time is spent keeping projects and teams on track. You wouldn’t think that something like strategy would be part of your job at this stage of your career. I mean, that strategy stuff is what the big boys in IT spend their days worrying about right? Hmm, if you don’t start thinking about how to both come up with and execute a strategy now, how are you going to develop these management skills later on? Let’s see if we can show you what you need to be doing with strategy right now…

What is Strategy?

Yeah, yeah – we all think that we know what strategy is, but do we really? I mean we’ve heard the term thrown around a great deal, but would any of us really know what it means if someone asked us?

Seems like this is the kind of thing that we should go to an expert for. One of the most successful consulting companies out there is the Boston Consulting Group. Their founder, Bruce Henderson defines strategy in the following way:

Strategy is the deliberate search for a plan of action that will develop a business’s competitive advantage and compound it.

You might be thinking “big deal, I’m just an IT manager”. However, strategy is part of your current manager job and it will become even more important later on in your career. That means that you’ve to be working to develop your strategy skills now so that they will be there later on when you really need them.

How Can An IT Manager Develop & Use A Strategy?

As a leader of an IT team, you’ve got a number of different ways that you can go about developing a strategy for your team to use. The godfather of strategy, Michael Porter, said that the purpose of creating a strategy was to allow you to find a way to position your team. This is where you’re going to have to make some decisions.

Specialize: Your strategy could be to have your IT team specialize in one specific area. You are ultimately competing with other IT teams within your company. This means that your strategy needs to lay out a plan for how your team is going to deliver projects faster, better, or at a lower cost than other IT teams will be able to.

Subset: This type of strategy has you saying that your IT team is going to work towards meeting the IT needs of a specific group of users within your company. This can be a department (finance), application users (email), or even a specific team (process improvement).

Location: This is one of the more powerful strategies. When you adopt this type of strategy, you determine that your team is going to focus on meeting the needs of a group of customers that you have access to – ones who are located in a specific geographical area. Generally this is easiest to do if the team that you are targeting is located in the same place that (the majority of) your IT team is.

The goal of whatever strategy you choose needs to be to deliver value to both the customers that you are serving as well as the company as a whole. By doing this, you’ll have a chance to not only develop your strategy skills, but you’ll also be able to execute on that strategy.

What Does All Of This Mean For You?

Developing and executing a strategy is something that IT managers need to be doing right now. This isn’t a skill that you can put off developing until later on in your career. This skill will take time to develop and so you need to start right now.

Once you understand that strategy is really a plan of action to achieve a business goal, you need to create a strategy for your team. You need to decide if your team’s strategy is going to be based on being good a specific set of IT skills, it they are going to focus on serving one functional part of the company, or if they are going to address the needs of a geographically based group.

By creating a strategy and then working with your team to execute it, you’ll start to discover just how hard this can be to do well. Every setback and change in strategy direction that you encounter will help you develop your IT strategy skills. When the time comes for you to create strategies that will guide the IT department, you’ll be ready!

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

Question For You: Once created, do you think that you should share your strategy with the rest of your team?

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

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Hmm, isn’t strategy something that the big boys are supposed to be taking care of? Most IT managers probably don’t think that they either have the skills needed to create and implement an effective strategy or that it’s simply not part of their job. Just to be clear about this: creating and implementing an effective IT strategy for your team is most definitely a part of your job. Now let’s figure out just exactly how to go about doing it…

Related posts:

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2. How Are IT Managers Supposed To Keep Their Best Employees? When I talk with new IT managers, more often than...

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True IT Management Talent Is Forged In The Fires Of Challenge

I’ve got some bad news for all of you IT managers out there: it turns out that 25% of the best workers in the IT department are planning on leaving within the next 12 months. Not to depress you even more, but it turns out that those internal job change programs that you have perhaps created that are intended to develop the next generation of IT leaders don’t seem to be working – 40% of the internal rotations that are made by IT “high-pots” (high potential) employees end up in failure. Let’s take a look at what problems you need to solve …

Problem: The Wrong People Are Managing Your Top Talent

Jean Martin and Conrad Schmidt are researchers who have been looking into what makes leadership transitions successful. What they have discovered is basically bad news for IT managers.

In order for an IT manager to grow their star talent, IT managers need to be able to first identify who this talent is and then they need to find ways to put them in positions of increasing responsibility in order to get them ready to lead the company. All too often this isn’t happening.

The people in the IT department who are best able to initially identify high potential candidates are the coworkers who are working with the majority of the IT workers. If developing the best and the brightest talent is left to these members of the IT department, it’s just not going to happen.

Instead, what needs to happen is that you as IT manager need to actively participate in the process. This means that you need to work with frontline staff so that when potential star talent is identified, they can be slotted into development programs. Make sure that you reward coworkers for finding high-quality talent so that they’ll be motivated to share their best with you and won’t be tempted to hoard those workers that they believe can make their lives easier.

Problem: Playing Over-Protective Parent To Your Up-And-Coming Future IT Leaders

Once you’ve identified your star IT talent and you’ve got them enrolled in your talent development program, you really don’t want them to fail. Or do you?

All too often what IT managers do is to hand pick the assignments that are given to up-and-coming stars. The goal is to find positions where they will be challenged, but not too much. Since you’ve already invested time and energy in getting them this far (and since there are a limited number of stars), you really don’t want them to fall flat on their face. This means that you don’t want to place them in a position where they might fail.

This is the wrong thinking. Although yes, you really don’t want to put anyone in a situation where they can’t win, at the same time you do want to put your best performers in difficult situations so that they can have a chance to become “battle hardened”. The military does this all the time – you have to have seen actual combat if you want to eventually become a General someday.

Only by coming face-to-face with a truly difficult IT / business situation will your talent be able to prove their mettle. Yes, some will fold under the pressure, but you’d rather find it out now than later on when you’ve invested even more in them. Place your best talent in situations where they can prove that they really are the best that the IT department has to offer.

What All Of This Means For You

Nobody ever said that growing the next round of IT leaders was going to be easy, but who knew that it was going to be this tough? Ensuring that the firm has a deep bench of future talent is one of an IT manager’s key jobs.

Mistakes that an IT manager needs to avoid when developing talent include allowing top talent to be discovered and managed by IT team members. These individuals are too important to be left to chance within the small world of a given department. The other mistake is for IT managers to work too hard to shield their star talent from failures. Talent needs to be exposed to challenging circumstances in order to be given the ability to fully develop.

IT managers need to understand that they can’t put their best and brightest staff in a closet with the hopes that they can bring them out when the need arises. Instead, they need to spend time every day working to ensure that the talent is growing and getting ready for the positions that they’ll eventually fill.

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

Question For You: What do you think that an IT manager should do if a star talent is put into a position in which they fail?

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

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When I work with IT Leaders who are looking for ways to get that next promotion, I tell them that they are going to need to demonstrate leadership. This is an easy thing for me to say and a very hard thing for them to do. Complicating matters even more is the fact that IT managers are finding themselves drafted onto team that they are just members of, not leaders of. What’s an IT manager to do?

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Google Has Been Searching For What Makes A Good Manager

One of the biggest challenges that modern IT leaders face is how to do a good job of managing their IT team. The burden of making the right technology decisions, managing budgets, and meeting the needs of the rest of the company is challenging enough, but what can make or break a manager is how good of a job you do nurturing and growing your staff. The folks at Google have the same issues and they’ve harnessed their immense computing power to come up with a solution…

How Google Solved The Riddle Of IT Management

I’m not sure if you’ve been reading the news lately, but Google’s been having a problem: they are starting to lose their IT employees. Once upon a time Google was the coolest place on the planet to work, but things have changed.

With the arrival of cooler places to work (i.e. Facebook), folks have been defecting from Google in droves. Adam Bryant reports that this may be one of the reasons that some of the Google number crunchers were tasked to work on a new project in early 2009: Project Oxygen.

This team was charged with crunching all of the data that Google had gathered in order to determine what characteristics of bosses the Google employees were looking for. Basically Google wanted to know what makes someone a good boss.

To determine this, the team wrote code to process all of the performance reviews, results from employee feedback surveys, and nomination forms for top managers. What they were looking for were words and phrases that dealt with either praise or complaints.

What Google Found Out

At Google, technical expertise has always been what they’ve valued in their employees the most. Managers there were encouraged to be hands-off types of managers – don’t hold your people back. The thinking was that if workers got stuck, they could then reach out to their bosses for help because it was assumed that their bosses had deeper technical skills.

Well guess what, they got it wrong! It turns out that what IT workers were really looking for is what we’ve always been told that a manager should be: involved.

Here are the top 5 most important characteristics of an effective IT leader as uncovered by Google’s data mining efforts:

1. Be a good coach

2. Empower your teams and don’t micromanage

3. Express interest in team member’s success and personal well-being

4. Don’t be a sissy: be productive and results orientated.

5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team.

What All Of This Means For You

I guess what Google found out shouldn’t really come to any of us as that much of a surprise. I think that we always knew that the secret to successfully managing an IT department had to be the same secret that every other department in the company was trying to uncover.

Google started out thinking that the ability to master technology was the answer and ended up with a completely different answer – it’s the human touch in the end that is the most important. I believe that this lends a lot of creditability to their findings.

IT Managers need to step back for a minute and think about what this means: we’ve got to start to take the time to truly connect with our team if we want them to experience true job satisfaction. I believe that we can all do this, it’s just that we all need to take the time to do it right!

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

Question For You: Do you agree that an IT leader’s technical skills are less important than their “soft” people skills?

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

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I’ve got some bad news for all of you IT managers out there: it turns out that 25% of the best workers in the IT department are planning on leaving within the next 12 months. Not to depress you even more, but it turns out that those internal job change programs that you have perhaps created that are intended to develop the next generation of IT leaders don’t seem to be working – 40% of the internal rotations that are made by IT “high-pots” (high potential) employees end up in failure. Let’s take a look at what problems you need to solve …

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How Do You Think That You Measure Up As A Boss…?

With a little luck, every IT manager realizes that they are only as good as the people that they have working for them. What this means is that they need to be a good boss if they want to be successful. This leads to a critical question: how good of a boss are you? It turns out that most of us seem to think that we’re a better boss than we probably really are…

The Survey

The good folks over at the consulting firm Development Dimensions International, Inc. have just completed a study of 1,100 front-line managers. The results are not what you’d hope for.

What would you hope for? Well, you’d like this collection of mangers to realized that they don’t know it all. You’d want to hear some self-doubt and you’d especially like to hear that they realize that they’ve got a ways to go in order to become truly effective managers. That’s not what DDI found.

Instead, what their survey showed was that most managers tend to over-estimate their management skills. On top of this, they seem to have very little self-doubt. Hey, I’m all for self confidence, but it sure looks like the IT manager pool is just a little bit too confidant.

Two of the questions that DDI asked in their survey really drove this too much self-confidence issue home. One question asked if during their first year the mangers ever regretted being promoted – a very natural feeling. A whopping 74% said no. The next question asked if during the first year the new manager ever questioned their ability to lead others. Once again, 72% said no. Ouch! We seem to be just a little bit too full of ourselves here.

What Makes Someone A Good IT Manager?

It’s the rest of DDI’s survey that really provides the interesting information for IT managers. DDI has broken the job of being an IT manager down into 10 different skill sets. As you take a look at this list, you’ll be able to see how each one of them is a critical IT manager skill:

• Setting work standards
• Planning and organizing
• Decision making
• Communicaiton
• Technical and professional skills
• Initiating action
• Adaptability
• Coaching
• Gaining commitment
• Delegating

The survey showed that IT managers believe that they do a good job of setting work standards along with planning and organizing. Although they think that they do a good job here, it doesn’t always show. It would have been interesting if the survey had included feedback from the staff that is being managed!

Somewhat not surprising, the areas that IT managers feel that they need to work on the most include many of the soft skill areas. These include such management tasks as delegating and getting commitment from their teams. IT managers have their technical skills down, it’s the people skills that still need the most work.

What All Of This Means For You

What the results of this survey show us is that most of us have an over inflated view of our ability to manage an IT team. It appears as though this belief is with us when we first become an IT manager and it doesn’t seem to leave as we advance in our career.

It turns out that there are 10 different skill sets that we need to have as an IT manager if we want to do a good job of leading our department. We believe that we do the best job of setting work standards and we need the most assistance in the area of delegating.

This information is critical for us as IT managers to study and understand. None of us are perfect; however, by understanding where we are weakest we can focus our efforts to become better.

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

Question For You: What do you think you should do during your first year to become a better manager?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If ever there was a trendy word in the world of IT management, it would have to be the word “team”. If you read enough books or listen to enough gurus, you’d have to be forgiven for coming away with the impression that the solution to just about every IT problem is to throw a team at it. Sure teams can be useful, but IT managers need to know when they work – and when they don’t.

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental IT Leader, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: adaptability, blind spots, bosses, coaching, communications, delegating, gaining commitment, IT Management, leadership attributes, little self-doubt, organizing, over-estimating, planning, question your ability, setting work standards

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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?

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

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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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental IT Leader, 2010. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: consequences, Cornell, don't feel safe, employee silence, illegal or unethical activities, myths, non-professional employees, not holding back, see speaking up as futile, serious allegations, withhold information, women