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IT Leader Book Review: “Lead Well And Prosper”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How An IT Leader Does A Performance Review

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

IT Leaders Need To Find A Way To Make Performance Reviews Work

IT Leaders Need To Find A Way To Make Performance Reviews Work

I hate performance reviews. I hate getting them and I hate giving them. In my mind they are a waste of time for both the IT Leader who’s giving them and the IT staffer who is getting them. I’m not sure who dreamed these things up, but they remind me of a 19th century factory environment when the guy working on the assembly line would be called up to the big boss’ office once a year and given his pay raise. Look, it’s the 21st Century, don’t you think that we could do things better?

My main gripe with performance reviews is that I believe that the two parties that are participating in the review are not really talking about the same thing. The manager is using this mandatory meeting as a once-a-year opportunity to try to remember who this person is and what they’ve been doing over the past year. The manager will have filled in mandatory text as answers to questions like “Where is improvement needed?” The expectation  is that this will be a backward looking discussion to talk about how the employee has been performing.

On the other hand, the employee shows up for the meeting with the hope that he / she will have an opportunity to talk about getting a pay raise or even a promotion. The expectation is that this will be an opportunity to have a forward looking discussion about how to advance the employee’s career.

Sorta looks like a train wreck in the making doesn’t it?

I’m a big fan of having four separate meeting each year (at the start of each quarter). The purpose should be to talk about how things have gone, what is expected for the quarter, and a review of the employee’s career situation and goals. It should be quick and it should be positive – “here’s what you need to be doing” type of theme. Now that would be a performance review worth attending!

Do you get anything out of your annual performance review? Do you give performance reviews? Do you try to make them more meaningful? How has this worked out for you? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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How To Protect Your IT Career From Sabotage

Friday, November 21st, 2008
Your Career Is Being Threatened By Backstabbers - Do You Know What To Do?

Your Career Is Being Threatened By Backstabbers - Do You Know What To Do?

They really are out to get you, you know. All those schemers who want your job, your promotion, your bonus are even as you read this sitting at their desk scheming how best to make you look bad, take credit for your work, or even how to get you fired. In this down economy, those who have it in for you are even more likely to take action because so many firms are in the process of trimming headcount that they want to save their jobs by taking yours. What’s an IT leader to do?

Your career sabotage problems begin when you detect that someone is out to get you. Once you are aware that something is going on, it’s going to bug the heck out of you. You are now officially in a bind: if you complain, then there is a good chance that you are going to be viewed as “… not being a team player”, if you ignore it and do nothing, then you can pretty much kiss any future promotions goodbye.

So just what kind of actions do backstabbers take to bring you down? Here’s a quick list – let’s see how many of them you recognize as having been done to you either now or in the past:

  • Taking Credit For Your Work: this is a classic. The backstabber talks with you to find all about work that you have been doing and then represents that work to others as having been done by them. Sometimes they will even tell you that you’ve done a poor job and ask you to not talk about it so that you don’t look foolish – and so they can take credit for it.
  • Spreading Rumors About You: this can be a sneaky one because it can go on for a long time without you knowing about it. If you have a good network, somebody besides you will probably hear about the rumors before you do and tell you. Otherwise you’re just going to have to keep your ears open and detect what people seem to be saying about you.
  • Project Sabotage: In this case, the saboteur realizes that your career advancement depends on the project that you are in charge of being a success. Once they know this, they will be willing to work very hard to cause your project to fail. Withholding needed resources or providing needed information late are two easy ways to drill holes in your project boat.

It sure seems like it will be easy for others to sneak in to our rooms in the middle of the night and make off with our careers. Is there anything that we can do? It turns out that yes, there are things that you can do to protect yourself and your career. They aren’t easy and they don’t always work, but they sure are better than sitting around and waiting for the axe to fall on you because of the actions of others. Here are some thoughts:

  1. Keep your cool: the last thing that you want to do is to flip out. If you let your temper get the better of you, then you’ll have fewer options for solving the sabotage problem.
  2. No Direct Confrontation: Look, if they’ve been clever enough to try to get you out of their way, then they’ve probably not left any evidence lying around. Even if you could get all CSI on them, you are in a workplace and nobody really cares about that piece of hair that you found that clearly shows that your saboteur was the one that spread the rumor that you were hard to get along with.
  3. Make Sure The Rumors Are Not Correct: So this is just a bit awkward, is there a possibility that the rumors could be right? Take a moment to look in the mirror and do some hard thinking. If the stories are correct, then you’ve got other problems to solve.
  4. Love Those Timestamps: people can only take credit for your work if nobody else knows that you did the work first (first come, first served). What this means is that email can be your new best friend. When you are reporting on results or completed work, send out an email telling as many people as possible. This way the world will know that you did the work and when you did it. This can stop a saboteur in his / her tracks.
  5. Talk To Your Boss: At the end of the day, your boss is the one who really has control over your career. You need to have a talk with him/her and let them know what’s going on and ask for their help in resolving it. After all, this is just the kind of personnel thing that bosses are there to take care of.
  6. Talk To Your Boss’ Boss: Of course, if it’s your boss that is doing the backstabbing, you really need to get some outside help. Talking with his/her boss is one way to do this. Another way is to talk with someone else at that same level and ask them to intervene.

Of course, if it turns out that it’s your boss that is doing your career in, you’ve got a real problem. There is a very good chance that in the end it’s going to be either you or him/her once you start to put a stop to the sabotage. Make sure that your resume is up-to-date because there is a good chance that you just might be needing it soon…

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where someone was trying to sabotage your career? How did you find out about it? What did you do to stop the sabotage? In the end were you able to save your career? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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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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