Archive for the ‘management’ Category

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Look’s Like It’s Strategy Time For IT Managers

Thursday, October 13th, 2011
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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…

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…

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IT Managers Know That Trial By Fire Is The Best Way To Pick New IT Leaders

Thursday, September 1st, 2011
Image Credit True IT Management Talent Is Forged In The Fires Of Challenge

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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Free Answers From Google On How To Be A Better Manager

Thursday, August 25th, 2011
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Google Has Been Searching For What Makes A Good Manager

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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Posted in management | 6 Comments »

IT Managers Overestimate How Good Of A Manager They Are

Thursday, January 13th, 2011
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How Do You Think That You Measure Up As A Boss…?

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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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?

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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Posted in management | 9 Comments »

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