Archive for the ‘promotion’ Category

Oh, Oh – What To Do When You Don’t Get That Promotion

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

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What Should You Do If You Fall Off The Career Ladder?

What Should You Do If You Fall Off The Career Ladder?

Things are tough all over. If you were counting on getting a promotion this year, you might want to scale your hopes back just a bit. A lot of IT Leaders are discovering that their career plans are having to be put on hold. Maybe we should spend some time talking about what you should do now…

The Root Of The Problem

Have you noticed just how far down the U.S. stock market has dropped over the last couple of years? Since most of the baby boomer generation that is currently working in IT has their retirement funds tied up in stocks, they’ve seen their dreams of a well funded retirement take a hit. What this means is that they won’t be retiring any time soon.

What this means for all other IT Leaders is that the normal process of IT staff retiring each year and opening up senior management positions that are then filled by junior IT staff won’t be happening this year. Dang!

The folks over at Watson Wyatt Worldwide Inc. have done a survey of more than 2,200 U.S. employees and they’ve found that 44% of workers who are over 50 plan on postponing their retirement. Just to make things even worse, about half of these folks are now planning on working at least three years longer than they had originally planned on.

The Promotion Problem

So let’s talk frankly here: no matter what level your IT career is currently at, you are going to be blocked. Just to make things even worse, the experts are telling us that we shouldn’t expect promotions to come back any time soon.

So what should you do? Quit? In this economy? I don’t think so. Instead we should take a look and see if we can come up with a different solution.

As always, if you are expecting a promotion and you don’t get it, you need to take a look at the underlying reasons for you not getting the promotion. If you determine that your promotion was postponed because of either the company’s economic situation is poor or because there is a human logjam before you, then you still have hope.

Now you’ve got to plot your next step.

Solutions

The easiest way to solve this problem is if you are willing to accept an alternative to a promotion – like money. This is sometimes called a “retention reward” and it’s a bonus that is paid to employees when they deserve a promotion but one is not currently possible.

Once you realize that your deserved promotion may be delayed, you need to start to take steps to boost your value to the company. What you really want to do is to make it very easy for the company to slide you into the promotion once it becomes available. This means having a talk with your boss in order to find out if there are ways to get some of the experience that goes along with the promotion position even if you can’t get the title right now.

As with all requests like this, you do need to be careful. You don’t want the company to get too comfortable with you doing the work of the higher level position while being paid at your current lower rate.

What All Of This Means For You

The world is working against you – just when you are expecting a promotion, everything gets flipped upside down and you find your way up the career ladder blocked. These things happen and you need to find ways to deal with it.

Quitting is always an option; however, unless you have another job already lined up it’s probably not the way to go right now. Instead, ask if you can get a bonus to replace the promotion that you won’t be getting right now. At the same time see if there is any way that you can gain more experience doing the type of work that you will be doing when the promotions free up once again.

Promotions will eventually return. As a top-notch IT Leader you need to use this delay to build the skills that will ensure that you will be one of the first to get promoted once things start moving again. Take these actions now and you’ll be ready for the big day whenever it finally comes…

If your next promotion gets delayed, what steps would you take?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As an IT leader you’ve got a lot to do. As though it wasn’t enough to stay on top of your staff keeping them happy, engaged, and productive, you are also constantly working to stay on top of all of that changing technology. It turns out that you have an additional task that you might not be taking the time to do: figuring out where your company is trying to get to.

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The Answer Is 9, But Do You Know What The Question Is?

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

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Your Technical Skills Aren't Going To Get You Your Next Promotion...

Your Technical Skills Aren't Going To Get You Your Next Promotion...

What is it going to take for you to get promoted? What set of skills as an IT Leader do you need to develop in order to have any chance at moving up to the next level? If you don’t know what you need to know, then how is that promotion going to happen?

It turns out that once upon a time that the oldest man in the IT department at my company sat me down and explained to me what it was going to take to move up in my IT department. Now I’ll pass that information on to you.

The Oldest Man In IT

Ah, the early days in your IT career. All you really needed to know was one programming language and maybe some database skills and you were off and running. Nowadays it seems like you’ve got to know three or four languages, at least a couple of database dialects, and one or two web-based frameworks to get your job done.

What I hadn’t realized in my youthful exuberance was that learning more languages, databases, or web skills was NOT what the company wanted me to do in order to be considered for my next management promotion. This is what Carl told me on that day that changed my career forever.

Carl was the oldest guy working in the company’s IT department. Nobody actually knew how long he had been there, but we all knew that it was longer than we had been on board. Carl’s cube had the most amazing collection of “stuff” from magnetic tapes stacked on the floor to punch cards left over from when the “big transition” had happened to online storage. Oh, and he had a lot of ashtrays from when you could still smoke at your desk – that’s how long he had been on board.

Life Lessons From Carl

Carl and I got along fantastically. I don’t think that I had any special qualities, it was probably just that I was less of a young jerk than everyone else. The fact that I could admit when I was wrong and ask for help probably went a long way also.

At any rate, after I had been in the same frontline programming job for a couple of years, I happened to be having lunch with Carl one day and I blurted out that I was unhappy with my job. I told him that after two years I thought that I deserved to be promoted and I couldn’t figure out why it hadn’t happened yet.

Carl, in his slow, easy going way, asked me what I was going to do about this. I told him that I was going to show the powers that be that I deserved to be promoted: I was going to sign up for every training course and get every technical certification that I could. Carl sorta smiled at me and said “You can do all that, but it’s not going to get you promoted.”

Just How Do You Get Promoted In IT?

Carl went on to explain to me that I was looking at the problem all wrong. He said that in IT as in all parts of a business, management really just does two things. Oh yeah, sometimes you’ll see exceptions to the rule in IT where managers will still be coding, but watch them: they probably won’t go far above their current position.

What Carl told me next is what has stuck with me for all of these years. He told me that in IT, just as in the rest of the company, mangers don’t actually do anything. That is, they don’t actually create things. Instead, the work that they do can be broken down into two separate tasks: they manage people and they manage budgets. If you understand this, he told me, you’ll be on your way to being promoted.

“Great, I don’t have experience doing any of that” I can remember telling him. Carl looked at me and said “Well then, there are nine things that you are going to have to learn before you can be promoted.” You can bet that I was reaching for a napkin to write down this golden advice. Here’s the list of things that I was going to have to learn to do that Carl shared with me:

  1. Understand your workforce
  2. Active listening
  3. How to be truly appreciative
  4. How to communicate clearly
  5. Use humor wisely
  6. Inspire a team
  7. Organization
  8. Time management
  9. Budget management

I can remember looking at that list somewhat in disbelief – I had none of these skills, how the heck was I going to prepare to be promoted?

What Does All Of This Mean For You?

Knowing what it takes to get promoted into the higher levels of IT management is, of course, only one part of the battle. I would argue that knowing what you need to learn is the first and the most important part of getting your next promotion.

You are not going to find all of the information that you need in one place. Sorry, going out and getting that MBA is not the silver bullet that will get you your next promotion.

What you are going to have to do is launch a multi-pronged strategy to acquire the skills that you need. Initial knowledge can be picked up by doing some reading; however, to really learn what you need to know, you are going to have to find ways to actually do the work in the real world before you get promoted.

Everything is possible, you just need to realize that even in IT, technical skills will only take you so far. Learning the skills that you need to become an IT leader is what is going to allow you to get to the next level in your career.

What single skill do you think that is a must have in order to get promoted in IT?

innovative?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Bad things happen. Sometimes they are not all that bad – key employees leaving for example is bad, but not really all that “bad”. However, sometimes things really are bad: staff die or become seriously ill for long periods of time. What’s your plan for when this happens? What’s that, you don’t have a plan? You think that it’s the role of HR to take care of personal issues like this? Guess again…

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IT Management Challenge: Breaking In A New Boss

Friday, September 19th, 2008
IT Managers Need Tips On How To Handle A New Boss

IT Managers Need Tips On How To Handle A New Boss

A great deal has been written on how IT workers can deal with getting a new boss. For that matter, a lot has been written on what you need to do if you become the boss of a collection of IT workers. Shucks, I’ve even written a lot about how to find out what you’re CIO wants you to do. However, what’s been missing (up until now) is what an IT manager should do if he/she gets a new boss. The challenge here is that it’s not just you that will be evaluated by the new boss as they go about setting up shop, but rather it will be your team that the new boss will be evaluating. What’s an IT manager to do?

Let’s get something out of the way first. As an IT manager your new boss can broadly be placed into one of three categories: fantastic & almost god-like, average, and horriable tyrant. If your new boss falls into the fantastic / tyrant buckets, then you’ve got a whole other set of issues. However, since most bosses fall into the “average” bucket, let’s spent our time talking about what to do with just this type.

There are some interesting questions about why you have a new boss in the first place – what happened to your old boss? Oh, and by the way, why didn’t YOU get your old bosses job instead of this new person? Once again, just to keep things simple let’s push those items off to the side for now. Let’s assume that you’ve never met your new boss before – the hardest scenario.

It can appear to be a daunting task if you try to determine how to win you new boss’ favor before you meet them. In today’s era of a distributed workforce, there’s a good chance that you and your new boss may not be in the same town. This means that meeting them face-to-face should be one of your highest priorities. No matter how good you are at email or how engagaing you may be over the phone, there is no substiture for a face-to-face meeting in order to allow your new boss to size you up. Travel to meet them or have them come visit you.

When you meet them, what will you talk about? The key here is to let them do most of the talking. Your value to your new boss rests on the type and quantity of problems that you can make go away. It really is that simple. The worst situation that you can find yourself in is if your team is in charge of solving problems that your new boss doesn’t really view as being problems! This is why it’s critital for you to let your new boss tell you what he/she thinks their most critical problems are.

Remember the first day of school back in elementary school? Everyone in class was trying to show off for the teacher so that they would gain her affection from the get-go. Things are very similar when you get a new boss, everyone will be trying to get on his/her good side starting on day one. You can improve your odds of doing this if you take a moment and think like a chess master. Your new boss is dealing with exactly the same issues that you are – he/she despertatly wants to “look good” for their boss who put them in this new positon. Your long-term value will be in what you and your team can do to make your new boss look good to his/her boss.

So what DON’T you want to do when you have a new boss? Probably the worst thing in the world you can do is to overwhelm them. Email is easy to send and all too often IT managers start to CC their new boss on every email to show the boss how important the IT manager is. A much better approach is to show your value by creating a condensed summary of what your team is currently working on. Even here there are some dangers: us IT managers like to list each and every little accomplishment so much so that our summary often turns out to be equavalant to  “War & Peace” in length. Keep it short – one computer screen of information should do the trick. Write it in such a way that your new boss now has useful informtation that they could pass on to their boss.

The rough rule-of-thumb is that a new manager has about 90 days to show his/her stuff. You need to be tracking these first 90 days and doing everything that you and your team can to make your new boss shine in that time. Investing in your new boss now will result in a rich payout later on…

How did things go last time you got a new boss? Were you able to clearly communicate the value of both you and your team? Were there any misunderstandings? Did other IT managers steal your spotlight? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Do You Suffer From "Munchausen At Work" Syndrome?

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

People who set fires in the workplace just to be heroes when they put them out suffer from munchausen at work syndrome

We all deal with problems that flare up at work, but some people do a better job than others. In fact, some people deal with workplace problems so often and do such a good job of dealing with them that they get awards, bonuses, and eventually promoted. Phred Dvorak over at the Wall Street Journal took a look at this situation and discovered something that most of us have suspected for a long time: some people are creating workplace problems and then jumping in to solve them. What’s up with this?

A business professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Nathan Bennett, has come up with the phrase “munchausen at work” to describe the phenomenon in which workers actually go about causing problems so that they can come back later on and take credit for fixing them. In the medical profession, there is an equivalent syndrome called “muncheausen” which is a mental illness in which someone makes someone else sick so that they can be a caregiver to them.

This workplace equivalent of arson is very hard to detect. The folks who set the fires are often the ones who show up when the problem is burning out of control and through their Herculean efforts are able to get the problem back under control. One reason that this behavior is hard to discourage is because companies often reward it with either recognition or promotions. Hey – it worked to get me promoted last time, why wouldn’t I use it again to get my next promotion?

In my career I’ve seen a lot of this. The challenge to the fire starters seems to be in determining just how big of a problem to cause. If it’s too small, they won’t get any recognition, if it’s too big they won’t be able to fix it or someone else will be brought in to solve the problem.

One interesting observation is that the munchausen at work syndrome is often seen among workers who have moved on to other jobs. They set fires so that they can swoop back in and solve them thus showing that they are still be best person for that job in the company.

You may be able to spot muncheausen at work staffers as they go about setting their fires. Common sparks that they set to dry timber include layoff rumors (so they can save your jobs), relationship problems (so they can “patch things up” between teammates), and reports of angry customers (so they can smooth things over with them and keep them as a customer).

Although the current downturn of the economy that we are experiencing may serve to reduce the number of fires set by munchausen at work suffers, spotting the deception is a good first step in stopping the behavior. Additional steps that you can take to put an end to this special form of workplace violence are:

  • Be sure to always stress teamwork over individual problem solving achievements.
  • Stay away from creating “office heroes” because it encourages munchausen syndrome.
  • Keep an eye peeled for information hoarders – they may be trying to start a fire.
  • Make sure that managers are always working to find out what employee needs are.

In this age of looser gun control laws, you might think that you’d be able to see any workplace problems walking down the hall towards you. However, munchausen at work may be a problem that you already have and yet didn’t realize it!

Have you ever worked for someone who suffered from munchausen at work? What kind of fires did they start and how did they put them out? Have you ever caused a problem at work with the hope of being asked to solve it? How did this work out for you? Leave a comment and let me know.

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