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Are Your Best Team Members Getting Ready To Fly The Coop?

First the bad news: it turns out that 25% of the best workers in the IT department are planning on leaving within the next 12 months. Do I have your attention now? Not to depress you even more, but it turns out that those internal job change programs that are intended to develop the next generation of IT leaders don’t work – 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: You Aren’t Engaging Your Best IT Workers

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.

Among the companies that they studied, what they found is that way too many of your IT rising stars are planning on becoming leaders at other firms! Specifically, 25% are currently planning on leaving your company within one year, 33% are not fully committed to their job (slackers), 20% have different career goals than they think the company has planned for them, and 40% have little confidence in their coworkers or the company’s senior management.

Clearly you have a problem here – your best & brightest are feeling disengaged. As an IT manager you need to find ways to get them to reengage with the company and with their careers at your company.

The researchers say that you can get them to both reengage and remain at your company. However, it’s going to take both time and effort on your part. What you are going to need to do is to provide them with the one thing that they crave above all others – public recognition for the work that they are doing. On top of this, you need to find ways to integrate their actions more closely with the company. This means that the company’s goals need to become their goals and you need to find ways to allow them to help tackle the company’s biggest challenges.

Problem: High-Pot Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Good Leader

Every IT worker wants to be classified as being a high-potential worker. What does this really mean? Researchers point out that what a company really wants from its high potential workers are leaders who will be able to grow into larger jobs and then deliver results in those jobs.

Studies have shown that more than 70% of the IT workers who are classified as being “high potential” still lack critical skills that will be needed in order be successful in future bigger jobs. What this means for you as an IT manager is that you may be wasting your precious limited talent development budget and resources on the wrong people.

The researchers say that there are three characteristics that an IT manager should be looking for when trying to determine if it would be worthwhile to make further investments in a high-potential team members: ability, engagement, and aspiration.

Your best team members need to have both the hard (technical) and soft (management) skills needed to take on bigger jobs. Additionally they are going to have be engaged with both the company and its mission – if they don’t believe, they won’t be willing to help you achieve. Finally, the IT worker’s career goals, their aspirations, also need to be in line with what the company is both willing and able to provide them with.

What All Of This Means For You

The job of an IT manager actually has very little to do with technology and everything to do with developing people. Not all team members are created the same and IT managers really want to find ways to hold on to their best workers. The problem is that they aren’t doing a very good job of this.

In order to keep your best and brightest team members engaged, you are going to have to make a special effort to recognize them and work with them to make sure that what they are working on really matters to the company. Likewise, not all high-pots are created equal. Only the ones with ability, true engagement in what the company does, and aspirations that are in line with what the company can offer will be the ones who can grow into true IT leaders.

An IT manager’s most important job is to grow and nurture the next generation of IT talent that will lead the company’s IT teams. In order to do this you are going to have to invest a great deal of your time in ensuring that your best team members don’t leave. It is possible to do this, but it needs to become one of your top tasks. If you can do this correctly, then both your career and the company will benefit from it…

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

Question For You: What percentage of an IT manager’s time should be spent on developing the company’s top IT talent?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Anyone can be placed in an IT leadership position; however, what kind of skills does it take to do a good job of being an IT leader? There are a lot of IT managers out there who would like to know the answer to that question. If you are one of them, then I’ve got good news for you – I know what you need and I’m ready to tell you…

Related posts:

1. Now What? When IT Managers Make The Wrong Job Move… Sure you did all of the research, you talked with...
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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There Are Different Ways To Keep People From Leaving Your Team…

When I talk with new IT managers, more often than not they tell me that their biggest challenge is getting good at hiring the right people for their teams. One of the reasons that this is so challenging is because it’s new to them. What they don’t know yet, is that hiring is only one side of the coin – retaining your staff is the other side and it turns that this can be an even bigger challenge.

You Are Going To Lose People

Can we talk frankly for just a minute? Do you really think that your magical IT management skills are going to keep your entire team together for as long as you work at your company? I can answer this question for you: no. You need to anticipate that you are going to be having people leave your team all the time. A good rule of thumb is to expect a turnover rate of about 15% per year. The math is pretty simple: for a team of 10 people you’ll lose 1-2 people per year, for a team of 20 people you’ll lose 3 people per year.

Remember that the rate that you lose people at may have nothing to do with your management abilities. The overall economy (both when it’s up and when it’s down) can have a big impact on how many people choose to leave your team each year.

During tough economic times, the number of people who leave your team will go down dramatically. However, this will all balance out because when the economy improves in the future you’ll lose more than your share of staff.

Why Bother With Retention?

So you are going to lose people – so what? You can’t prevent people from leaving, so is it really worth your time to try and keep people on board? The answer to this question turns out to be “yes, it is worth it”.

When a member of your team walks out the door, you are losing much more than just a set of hands – you are also losing a brain. In that brain is the knowledge of how your company does business. This so-called “intellectual property” (IP) is what makes your department / company different from every other IT department / company out there. An additional challenge is that if a team member leaves and goes to one of your competitors then all of sudden you may be competing with yourself.

Keeping your internal and external customers happy is what every IT manager wants to do. Since you are not the only one on your team who has contact with customers, you need to make sure that your team is happy and satisfied so that when they interact with customers they provide good customer service. Happy staff don’t leave, unhappy staff do. Keeping everyone happy and delivering great customer service is just one part of a solid retention strategy.

Finally, it’s really expensive to have staff leave your team. You might think that having someone leave will save you money, but it’s not true. Let’s look at how this is going to end up costing you money.

First, there’s going to be costs that will go along with the process of hiring someone to replace the person who has left. Next there are the indirect costs that have to do with the impact that losing a member of your team will have: more work for everyone else to do, impact on morale, and the potential that it will cause others to leave also. Finally, you need to account for the opportunity costs that having a smaller team will cause. You won’t be able to take on as much work nor will you be able to complete tasks as quickly as you might like to. This will all result in missed revenue and increased costs.

What All Of This Means For You

Forget all of the technical design and implementation tasks that you have to do as an IT manager. You need to understand that getting your team staffed and then keeping it staffed at full strength is a key part of what being an IT manager is all about.

Staff retention can seem like a burden for an overworked IT manager. However, it’s a very important part of the job. Losing a member of your team can result in three types of costs for the company: direct costs of interviewing new candidates, indirect costs of overworked remaining team members, and opportunity costs for missed deadlines and work that can’t be taken on.

There’s an old saying that goes “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. This is relevant to our discussion because if you take the time and make the effort to retain your IT team members, then you’ll be able to accomplish more and will end being a more successful IT manager.

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

Question For You: How much time each week do you think that you should spend on retention?

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. It’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Performance appraisals are just about the worst part of an IT manager’s job. You don’t like doing them, your team doesn’t like receiving them. However, as per company policy it’s a required part of the job. Considering how critical they are, you would think that you would have received a great deal of training on how best to do them. I’m going to bet that this isn’t the case…

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Post tags: direct costs, hiring, indirect costs, intellectual property, IP, opportunity cost, retention

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Putting Up Signs Won't Prevent People From Leaving

As an IT manager, your job is to lead a team and accomplish tasks. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? You can only do this if the team that you are managing stays together. If people start to leave, it’s disruptive when they leave and you are going to be distracted as you work to fill the open positions. It sure seems like you should have a good understanding of why members of your team will both stay and why they might leave…

Why Do People Stay In Their Job?

Sadly, there is no one right answer to the question of why IT workers stay in their job. Every one of us is different and we are all constantly dealing with an ever-changing set of life circumstances. These are the things that can cause enough pressure in our lives that will make leaving our current job seem like a valid choice.

As an IT manager, you need to understand why your staff will stay with the company. These are the things that you are going to want to spend your time making sure that they remain in place:

• Company Pride: it turns out that who we work for really does matter despite what we might say on a daily basis. When others ask us where we work, if the company has a good reputation and is looked up to, this will extend to your staff and they will be proud to tell others where they work. Working at an Enron or a Worldcom after they had been disgraced would have been a difficult place for IT staff to remain.
• Manager Respect: how your staff feels about you can be an incredibly powerful attraction force. If your staff feels that you support them and if they respect you, then they are going to be much more likely to stay in their current job. The good news about this is that this is the one retention force that you have the most control over – do this well and you’ll be able to keep more of your staff on board.
• Enough Compensation: your team is giving their time and talents to the company. In return for this, they want to receive something in return. They will always be comparing the two – are they getting enough for what they are giving? Although in reality, your control over how much they get paid may be limited, you can control other aspects of their compensation (work start times, flex time, etc.) that will shape how they feel that they are being rewarded for their time and talent.
• Type of work: how a worker feels about the work that they are performing can have a big influence on their desire to stay or go. If they feel that their work is meaningful, then they’ll stay. If they decide that their work doesn’t matter or isn’t having any impact on the world, then they’ll be much more likely to leave and seek out more meaningful work.

Why Do People Stay In Their Job?

As an IT manager you are always going to be dealing with the issue of having people leave the company. Although you can’t completely control this, you can at least be aware of the factors that can make it more likely that members of your team will leave.

IT managers who are aware of what makes workers leave are able to better work to make sure that they don’t:

• Changes In Company Leadership: for a whole variety of reasons there can big changes that happen at the top your company. It can be caused by the sale of the company or just an unhappy board of directors. No matter the reason, nobody likes change.

  If your staff feel that the company is now going to be heading a different direction and they don’t fully understand why, then they may decide to leave. Communication or the lack thereof can be a big part of this leaving factor.

• Conflict With Managers: one of the most powerful reasons for people to leave the firm is because they are not getting along with their manager. No matter how wonderful the rest of the company is, this every-day type of conflict can override everything else and cause people to leave.
• Friends Leave: every team is a collection of relationships. When a worker’s friends leave the company, that worker’s network of relationships is damaged and if there is not enough of a network left, then there’s a good chance that the worker may leave.
• Work-life balance issues: every team member has a life outside of work. If work starts to interfere with how a person is living their life, then there is going to be conflict that may end up in making the person have to make a choice between work and other activities. Work often loses this battle.

What All Of This Means For You

As an IT manager you need a team in order to accomplish your goals. Every member of your team will constantly be making judgements as to if they should remain in their job or move on to another job.

IT managers need to understand what will make their staff stay in their jobs. At the same time, managers need to also understand the forces that can cause team members to decide to leave the team.

We’ve identified the major forces that you are going to have to be aware of in order to keep your team together. Although you can’t control everything, staying on top of these issues allows an IT manager to keep your team together and on track.

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

Question For You: Since you don’t control how much your team gets paid, what other types of compensation can you control?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Congratulations on becoming an IT manager. If you thought that you didn’t have enough time to get all of your work done before you became a manager, it’s not going to become any easier now. If you try to do it all yourself, you are going to fail. It’s time to try a different way to get things done – delegating.

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental IT Leader, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: conflict, fair compensation, friends leave, leadership changes, meaningful work, pride, respect, work life balance

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Your Team Is Going To Be Jumping Ship If You Don’t Do Something

I don’t want to say that it’s been easy to be an IT Leader during the recent global economic crisis. However, as the world economy tanked and countless people in all industries lost their jobs, the one thing that IT Leaders really didn’t have to worry about was having members of their team jump ship to go to work for other firms – there were no other jobs to be had. Well as the economy improves, this is going to change. Got a plan for keeping your team on board?

Don’t They Love Me? Why Would They Leave?

I’ve got an ugly history lesson for you – the experts tell us that when we’ve had a recession in the past, it’s during the recovery that you’ll see a big increase in people leaving your company for other career opportunities as more and more jobs become available.

So what’s an IT Leader to do? The last thing that any one of us really wants to do is to provide our staff with the skills and training that will boost their ability (and desirability) to leave. However, that’s exactly what we should be doing.

The Big Secret

Dr. Elizabeth Craig has been looking into this issue and she has made some surprising findings. What she’s found is that the members of your team will stay longer if you actively work to provide them with the very skills that they are looking for to make themselves more valuable in the job market.

Specifically, what Dr. Craig says is that the IT Leaders who provide the members of their team with the most opportunities to increase their value in the marketplace will get the greatest benefit by doing so. This breakthrough realization is something that too few IT Leaders fully understand.

The Three Secrets To Retaining Your Team

As an IT Leader, you need to start to take action to retain your team before it’s too late. There are three specific steps that you can take:

1. Grant New Responsibilities: especially in the world of IT, your team members really do want to be challenged. In surveys, team members reported that having the ability to work on tough problems and being given more responsibility are the #1 things that determines their level of career satisfaction.
2. Boost Skills: look, you’ve got smart people working as a part of your team right now. They realize that they don’t know everything, but they have an unquenchable desire to learn more. You need to do what you can to help sate this need by providing your team with ways that they can learn more about things that are outside of their day-to-day jobs. In IT this especially includes providing the opportunity to learn more about how the company works and the basic underpinnings of business.
3. Networking: the ability to reach out and connect with others both inside and outside of the company is another critical desire on the part of your team members. Sure, their motivation may be to primarily build connections that could help them find their next job, but it will also help them gain fresh insights into how to solve the problems that they are working on right now.

What All Of This Means For You

When we were all children, one of the games that we used to play was called musical chairs. It involved constantly finding a new chair to sit in. As the global economy improves, the desire to play musical careers will start to seize your team and you could end up losing a lot of them.

It’s difficult and costly to replace critical staff. You need to start taking action right now to retain your team. This means that you’ve got to provide them with new responsibilities, opportunities to broaden their skills, and ways to connect with more people both inside and outside of the company.

This all may seem counterintuitive to you – it’s almost as though you are helping them to prepare to leave. However, this is not the case. It turns out that if you provide them with what they are truly looking for in their career, then although they could leave, they won’t.

Do you think that member of your team are going to leave once better opportunities start to show up?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

No matter how sophisticated we make security technology, it’s always going to be a hacker’s personal skills that we’ll be battling against. This leads to another interesting point: just exactly what personal skills do IT Leaders need to have in order to do their (non-hacking) jobs well?

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental IT Leader, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: broader skills, employee loss, employee turnover, job market, job opportunities, jumping ship, leaving, networking, new responsibilities, retention, skill

Google's Having A Common Staffing Problem - Will They Be Able To Fix It?

If you could go to work for any company out there right now, which one would it be? A lot of us would say Google – everything that we’ve read and heard about the company makes it seem like a great place to work. However, it turns out that even Google is not immune to IT staff problems…

Google’s Staffing Problem

Google is in the middle of what is often called a “brain drain” – some of its best and brightest workers are leaving the firm to go join other companies. In the past few weeks they’ve lost Tim Armstrong who was their advertising sales boss and they’ve lost David Rosenblatt who was in charge of their display advertising. Oh, and they are losing their top engineers to Twitter and Facebook…

What’s Google Going To Do?

Google’s plan to try to stem this exodus of talent is a typical Google solution – they’re going to try and solve it by crunching numbers. Unlike many IT firms, Google has both the data and the processing power to attempt this.

Google plans on using data that they’ve collected from surveys and peer reviews in order to discover which of its employees feel underused. This may sound a little far fetched, but Edward Lawler who works at the University of Southern California says that eventually all companies will be approaching HR issues this way.

What’s Gone Wrong At Google?

Using algorithms to find unsatisfied workers is clever and all that, but clearly there is something else going on here. Interviews with former Google employees reveal some interesting things about the day-to-day practical realities of working in this high-tech Shangri-La.

Former employees reveal that people are leaving because many employees don’t feel that their efforts will make the same amount of impact as the company matures from its startup days. Compounding the problem is the fact that Google does not appear to provide much in the way of formal career planning. Often these tasks would be addressed by a company’s Human Resources (HR) department, but it appears as though Google’s HR department is viewed by many as being quite impersonal.

So What Should Google Be Doing?

As amazing as it may seem, the answer to Google’s problems is actually very simple – hard to implement, but simple to describe. What they need to do is to put their customer first. By clearly communicating to the entire company that Google exists to serve their customers, a great deal of other staffing problems will fade away.

Final Thoughts

One of Google’s biggest problems is that they have not found a way to keep their employees engaged. This isn’t surprising because Google dominates its market and so it doesn’t have any big competitors to use as a rallying cry.

Making its customers first would allow Google to focus its staff on a single goal that would extend throughout the company All of a sudden every employee would have a way to measure the value of his/her work. Once again, this wouldn’t necessarily be easy to do, but it’s the right thing to do. If you can figure out how to do this with your team, then you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

Questions For You

Do you think that Google’s algorithm will be able to identify those employees who might leave? Do you think that it will make mistakes? Do you think that this type of algorithm would work at your company? Do you think a customer focus would solve Google’s staffing issues? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It may seem a little crazy to talk about how to handle promotions during an economic downturn, but they are still happening (hey, sometimes self-promotion yields results!) Additionally, once the world economy picks up again, there will be even more of them. What’s an IT Leader who was once “one of the guys” to do when he /she is suddenly their boss?

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental IT Leader, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Boss, career, David Rosenblatt, employee, employee motivation, Facebook, Google, information technology, it, IT manager, job, leader, management, manager, motivational, recruiting, recruitment retention, retention strategies, staffing solutions, Tim Armstrong, Twitter

If IT Leaders Want To Retain Staff, Then They Need To Make A Commitment

An IT department does not consist of just a bunch of servers and some cabling. It’s really made up of bright, talented people who know a lot about how servers, networks, and applications can be used to propel a business forward. However, not every company and not every IT manager treats their staff the same way – do you think that that matters?

The real question here is how committed to their staff are companies and IT Leaders. Are the members of your team actual people or are they just resources that can be downsized or replaced at any time. In fact, does it really matter which way you choose to look at them?

The good folks over at CIO Insite did a survey of IT Executives awhile back and they uncovered some interesting discoveries.

Quite obviously, not all IT departments are created equal. It turns out that in the foreseeable future most of the hiring is going to be done by small and midsized companies. Given the current economic climate, that’s good news. The other side of the coin is reflected by the larger IT shops which indicated that they will be reducing their IT staff (this includes IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo).

Where things get interesting is when you take a closer look at who the firms that will be hiring are looking for. They want business analysts, systems integrators, networking staff, and web designers. These appear to be the place to be in IT!

But back to our original topic – what does it take for an IT Leader to get the people that he/she hires to stick around? The CIO Insight survey revealed that just paying more is not enough. It turns out that what you have to do is to place organizational development up at the center of your IT recruiting and retention strategy.

In simple words, what this means is that in order to get your IT workers to stay, you’ve got to offer them things that they want like job security or  work/life balance. Now an important point here is that when I say “job security”, I don’t mean offering a job for life (unless you are at Toyota). Instead, what I’m talking about is having the company invest in the employee and having them develop skills that will serve them well in this job or in their next one.

In order to find out how to keep IT employees, you first have to understand why they leave. The IT Executives surveyed said that staff left for the following reasons:

• better pay / benefits
• opportunity to learn new skills
• reduced commute time
• to work at home or set own work hours

Knowing this, then what can an IT Leader do to get employees to stay? Focusing on improving every employee’s work / life balance is a good place for a company and a leader to start. Keep in mind that the benefits that do the most to boost employee retention are the ones that provide long-term financial and career security.

What have you found keeps you and your staff working at the same company? Why do people seem to leave your company? Why do new employees join your company? What changes do you think should be made to get more people to stay? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Post tags: commitment, employee, IBM, information technology, it, IT Executives, IT manager, job security, manager, Microsoft, new skills, retention, survey, work life balance, Yahoo

Quick review, here’s how the generations and their cool marketing names break down:

The Silent Generation (ages 63-81)
Baby Boomers (ages 44-62) – 80 million strong
Generation X (ages 27-43) – 59 million
Millennials/Gen Y (age 26 and under) – 80 million!

The Millennials have entered the IT workforce in large numbers and yet there has been very little written about how IT managers can deal with this completely new generation. Remember, these folks may have never seen a vinyl LP, may assume that phones have been wireless forever, and can’t understand why TVs need to have an antenna – the cable connection just goes into the back!

If you had to make some broad brush generalizations about the Millennials, they would probably look like this. Sarah Sladek who is the CEO of Limelight Generations says that the Millennials had the “…most provided for and structured childhood in history…” In a nutshell, these are the kids who got awards for just participating. Whereas the Gen-X crew is known to be self-sufficient, the Millennials are much more group activity focused. You can add to this a need for structure, feedback, encouragement, and a deep desire for instant gratification.

What’s fascinating is that although you might not expect it, Millennials actually get along in most cases very well with the Baby Boomers. One reason for this might be that many Millennials still live at home and the Baby Boomers that they interact with in the workplace remind them of their parents. However, they really, really, don’t want to be talked down to!

What’s an IT Manager To Do? Several things, including finding ways to relate, involve, engage, connect, educate, and promote job benefits to staff. A key SPOKEN realization of the Millennials is that they realize that they won’t be working for one company for 40 years. This means that more than any other generation now in the workplace, they need to know what their current job is going to provide to them right now. This means things like tangible certifications are very important to this segment of the workforce.

It’s All About Connections: This group of workers is interested in being mentored. They really want to learn new things and they realize that people who have done the job for awhile have much to teach them. That being said, interacting with their own peers is just as important . This means that a good IT manager will provide both types of opportunities: mentoring and peer networking.

Use The Internet: This generation grew up online. That means that they are very comfortable socializing and exchanging information online. In order to minimize the potential security issues that the use of external social networking sites can cause, IT managers need to establish internal social networks that everyone can participate in.

The Millennials represent the future of every IT department. It is our responsibility to adapt to their ways of learning and show them what it will take to succeed in the IT industry.

Do you work with Millennials now? How’s it going – does everyone get along or are there conflicts and misunderstandings? Have any special programs or changes in policy been put in place to adapt the workplace for this new generation of workers? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Tags: Millennials, Baby Boomers, it, employee, information technology, retention

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The great thing about talent portability in today’s IT market is that whenever you have a need to fill a position that requires a specialized set of skills or experiences, you can generally go shopping and find exactly what you need. The downside to this is the simple fact that your competition can do the same thing and they might be selecting from your employees!

Gone are the days in which firms developed their talent from within. Carefully nurturing those-who-would-be managers, giving them the training that they needed and rotating them among job assignments so that they would be ready when the trumpet sounded for them to take center stage in the Colosseum of business. Perhaps somewhat sadly, that model no longer exists.

Instead, today’s IT professionals are free to move on whenever a better opportunity presents itself. Applicant-tracking company Taleo has done a survey in which it was revealed that 80% of firms that participated in the survey have moved away from this “we know whats best for you” model to now starting to use internal job boards that are designed to make it easy for employees to apply for open positions and move around within the firm instead of leaving it. The poster child for this approach is Dow Chemical who was able to cut its turnover rate in half when it moved to using the internal job board approach to fill positions.

A small note of experience is probably due at this point. I’ve worked at a number of large firms in which it was mandatory that all openings were posted on the job board. However, the position was often already effectively filled by the posting manager long before the posting. Once the rest of the firm starts to understand that the job board is basically just window dressing, its value and its ability to retain staff goes down significantly.

What’s interesting about the shift to using a job board approach is that it moves the burden of managing an employee’s career from the company over to the employee. This has, of course, caused a great deal of chaos. The disconnect comes when an IT team member wants to move on to another job opportunity and his/her manager doesn’t want to let them go. Now we’ve got conflict! Welcome to the world of negotiations – somebody needs to be able to step in and find a way to preserve the investment that the company has made in this employee.

Different firms are finding different ways to deal with this issue. McKinsey tries to resolve this type of issue by (of course, it’s McKinsey after all) using rankings: how did the employee rank the job posing opportunity and how has the employee’s team ranked them on the current project that they are working on? If all of this analytical work does not resolve the issue, then the Senior Partner gets brought in to play the role of King Solomon. Before they imploded, Bears Sterns had created an office of mediation which took on the job of working out such differences between employees and their managers when an employee wanted to move on to another internal job.

In the end, the world of employee training and retention has been turned upside down. Where once firms were responsible for training and managing the careers of their employees, now that is no longer the case. Instead, the responsibility for managing one’s career is now the responsibility of each employee and training, which used to be a given, is now viewed in terms of its short term payback to the company. The old system of talent management had been set up along the lines of an engineering system: given a set of inputs, a predictable set of outputs would be produced. Today’s talent management is much more fluid. It is driven more by external market conditions and viewed through operations tools that are better able to adapt to increasing levels of uncertainty. It is possible to manage your pool of talent, you just need to update the tools that you are using to do it with.

Tags: employee, recruiting, retention, IT jobs, IT manager

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Everyone who has lead a team, managed a department, or run a company knows that in addition to all of the other “keeping the doors open” jobs that they have, the task that can sneak up on them at any time is staffing. This coin has two sides: you don’t want to have too many warm bodies on your team if you don’t have the paying work to support them. At the same time, you don’t want to have to few or you’ll not be able to secure new work and that will eventually lead to your firm’s demise.

Two weeks ago I found myself in the wrong position on this issue. The project that a team that I was responsible for had run into some delays. This meant that the schedule had been stretched out and yet the funding for the staffing had not been changed. What this meant is that I had to start to shed project members. This ended up requiring me to to make several trips down to the cafeteria with team members to let then know that their time on the project was up. Needless to say this was not fun for me and it was clearly not fun for them. As I did this, I was wondering what’s a manager to do to avoid this type of poor talent management?

After the bloodletting was done, I started to do some research in order to find a better way to manage talent. A smart guy by the name of Peter Cappelli over at the University of Penn’s Wharton School has spent some time looking at this situation and he reports that things are pretty grim.

What is talent management? In a nutshell, it’s an attempt to anticipate the level of need for staff and then creating a plan for how you are going to achieve it. Dr. Cappelli says that he’s found that most firms fall into one of two groups for managing their talent: either they do nothing and run around when they have to fill a position or they have a staffing forecasting system that’s left over from the 1950′s which is now inaccurate because the world is moving so much faster.

Anybody remember internal development programs? When I worked at Boeing certain workers were identified as “Hi-Pots” (High Potentials) and they were placed on a career path that rotated them through multiple departments. This approach has pretty much gone the way of the Dodo. The few shining exceptions are at GE and PepsiCo that have their famous management academies that mangers attend as part of their job. While these are great programs, who cares since only a few managers in the world have access to them.

In the 1990′s hiring folks from outside became all the rage. It was possible because there were so many people who had been shed from other companies that the pool of available talent was quite large. Bad news – that pool’s all but dried up now. Additionally, as the pool got smaller, firms who had spent money training their employees started to see them leave and go to work for their competitors. This, of course, made them even less interested in investing in training their staff.

Ok, so where do we stand right now? Most companies / departments / managers don’t have any sort of talent management plan in place right now. However, the upper management is starting to realize that this is one of their key challenges. The ultimate question is how can your firm’s talent be managed in such a way that it will allow the firm to ultimately make more money (and spend less)?

I’ve got some thoughts on things that you can do, but first do you agree that things are as dire as I’ve laid them out to be? Does your firm have a talent management program? Are YOU being managed as part of a talent management program? Post a comment & let me know.

Tags: employee, recruiting, IT staff retention, retention, it+careers

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental IT Leader, 2008. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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Sorry in advance for going off on a bit of a rant here, but I’ve become fed up with both IT workers and managers who continue to completely miss the boat when it comes to creating, working, and managing exciting and fulfilling IT jobs.

This time my trigger was going out to lunch with a group of my friends who have gotten themselves roped into running one of those internal “High Achiever” IT management programs. You know the type: your boss identifies you as having management potential and so you get picked to attend a weekly/monthly class where they teach you about teamwork and, perhaps, introduce you to other parts of the company. This particular program selects the team to run next year’s program from the students who are participating in this year’s program. My friends had participated in last year’s program and were now complaining about how much of their time running this year’s program was taking up and that they didn’t feel that they were getting anything out of it.

I didn’t actually reach across the lunch table and grab them by their shirt collars; however, I was sorely tempted to do so. My frustration with them came from the simple fact that they were not taking the time to notice that they had been given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I asked them how many management training courses their company had sent them to. The answer was, of course, none. I then proceeded to point out to them that what they were doing as a part of running this training course was basically real-world practice for becoming IT directors, executive directors, VPs, etc. The challenge was that none of the students in the class worked for them. This meant that they couldn’t get things done by telling people what to do (managing), instead they were going to have to convince folks to do what they wanted them to do (leadership). This was where the real learning for them was going to take place!

At the end of our lunch, my friends were reinvigorated and pumped up about what they now had to accomplish. Their job had not changed one bit, but the way that they looked at their job had undergone a complete transformation. At the end of the day this is the key to making any IT job a success: you have to clearly identify the challenges that it will be required to solve and the acknowledgments that will be given for solving those challenges. This is exactly what IT staffers are looking for in a job and they will stay if they find it and move on if they don’t.

What really got my goat was trying to understand where were my friends’ managers in all of this? Instead of having to go out to lunch with me to get re-focused and re-energized, their managers should have been doing this on an almost daily basis. Once again it appears as though IT managers have allowed themselves to get too focused on project schedules, code delivery, and server configurations and have missed the key role of IT management: creating challenges and providing acknowledgments. How good of a job are you doing at this?

Tags: IT jobs, employee motivation, IT staff, retention, self motivation

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