Posts Tagged ‘commitment’

IT Managers Want To Know What Makes A Good Team?

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011
Image Credit You've Got To Look Inside To See What Makes A Team Good`

You've Got To Look Inside To See What Makes A Team Good`

In order to maximize what you will be able to accomplish as an IT manager, you are going to have to be able to build effective teams. All too often when we are faced with a new challenge, we’ll simply look around for who’s available and draft them to be on the team that we’re putting together. Is it any wonder that all too often our teams never accomplish what they set out to do?

What Are The Characteristics Of A Good Team?

If we can all agree that building a great team is a critical step in solving challenging IT problems, the next question that needs to be answered is just what makes a great IT team great? Sure, we all know that having the right people with the right set of skills is part of it, but is that all that we need?

It turns out that although that’s an important part of the solution, it’s really only one part and in fact it may not even be the most important part. What makes an IT team effective is a question on which a great deal of study has been done over the last few years. The good news is that all of the studies have reached basically the same conclusion: there are 6 key characteristics of a team that will ensure that it is successful.

These 6 characteristics are as follows:

  1. Technical Skills: every member of the team needs to bring a skill or a set of skills that will be vital to solving the problem at hand. No deadwood is permitted.

  2. A Big Goal: there needs to be one overarching goal that everyone knows that they are working towards.

  3. Commitment: each member of the team needs to have fully bought into what the team is trying to accomplish.

  4. Mutual Gain: everyone on the team needs to realize that the only way that they are going to benefit from participating in the team is by contributing to accomplishing the team’s goals.

  5. Senior Support: it takes the support of the company and especially the company’s senior management in order for a team to have a hope of being successful.

  6. Coordination: the ability to align the team’s efforts with what the rest of the company is trying to accomplish is critical so that outside resources can be leveraged in order to move the team closer to completing its goal.

The Importance Of Goals

Each of these characteristics of a successful IT team is important; however, the one key to building a successful team that can not be overlooked is ensuring that there is a single goal for the team to pursue and that everyone knows what it is.

If you don’t take the time to establish a single clear goal for your team, then the various members of your team will make up their own. This is a very natural thing for IT department employees to do. The problem with this is that they will probably all make up different goals for themselves. As they work towards these goals what will happen will be that they end up working at cross-purposes and the team is unable to move forward.

Additionally, even if a single goal is created and advertised to the team, it may not be enough. Each member of the team needs to commit themselves to the goal. By doing this and by “having some skin in the game”, they will tie their reputation and their careers to the success of the team. This ensures that they will be motivated to work towards achieving the team’s single goal.

What This All Means For You

IT managers need to have a wide variety of skills in order to be successful. Not only do they need to know how to lead an IT team, but they also need to know how to build a successful team in the first place.

It turns out that this is a problem that has been studied for a number of years. There are six key characteristics that every effective IT team needs to have. Chief among these characteristics is the need for a team to have a single goal that everyone can focus on. IT managers need to ensure that each member of the team has a commitment to achieving this goal.

It is possible to build effective team. However, as an IT manager it requires you to take the time to carefully make sure that each member of the team that you select to be on the team meets the 6 criteria. If you do this, then you’ll find yourself managing nothing but successful teams…!

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

Question For You: What is the best way to determine what technical skills a given IT project is going to need?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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.

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Why Delegation Is So Hard For IT Managers To Do

Thursday, December 9th, 2010
Image Credit Delegation Is Like Running In A Relay Race – You've Got To Give It Up Sometime

Delegation Is Like Running In A Relay Race – You've Got To Give It Up Sometime

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.

But I Can Do It All Myself…

Let’s be frank here for just a moment. Yes, with a little luck you CAN do all of the work that needs to be done in your department. However, that’s not why your company picked you to become a manager. Your role as a manager is (here it comes) to manage your staff in order to accomplish far more than you could possibly hope to accomplish by yourself.

What this means is that instead of doing all of the work yourself, you are going to have to allow your staff to do the work that needs to be done. What you need to start doing is delegating work to your staff.

Delegation of work means that you are going to assign a specific task that you are responsible for to a member of your team. The person that you assign the work to needs to agree to complete it. Not only are you assigning the work, but you are also assigning the accountability for completing the assignment to that member of your team.

Here’s an important point: you can delegate accountability, but you can’t delegate responsibility. That means that although another member of your team may actually end up doing the work, at the end of the day your management will still be looking to you in order to make sure that the work gets done.

Delegating Is Good: The Benefits For You

Quick question for you: just what the heck are you supposed to be doing with your time now that you are an IT manager? It turns out that you are not really supposed to be doing IT work – that’s for your team to work on. You are supposed to be spending your time doing manager things like: planning, controlling expenses, doing business planning, getting funding and people, and dealing with staff issues.

I’m willing to bet that you currently have too much work to do. That clearly shows that you need to become a better delegator. By assigning work to your staff, you’ll take it off of your plate and reduce your overall stress level.

One of the benefits of delegating that most IT managers don’t take the time to realize is that it is exactly what your staff wants you to do. By delegating tasks to your staff, you are telling your team that you trust them to get the work done correctly and on time. This feeling of trust is a two-way street and the stronger that it is, the better your team will function.

Additionally, everyone on your team has career aspirations. In fact, someday they’d all like to have your job. Hopefully, when that day comes, you will have been promoted to a higher position (CIO?). By giving members of your team the ability to show how well they take directions and can complete work, you have a great way to evaluate them and determine who you will recommend to take over your position once you’ve moved on.

What All Of This Means For You

The good IT managers are the ones who can get the most work done. The bad ones are the ones who try to do everything themselves and end up getting nothing done. In order to be successful, you are going to have to get good at delegating the work that needs to be done to your team.

It is difficult for us IT folks to let go, but we have to. By delegating work that you could do yourself to your team, you accomplish several things at the same time. Asking members of your team to complete projects for you allows you to develop a feeling of trust between you and your team. It also gives you a way to evaluate the work performance of members of your team so that you’ll know who to recommend for promotions when the day comes.

It’s not easy to give up control over how work gets done, but it is a fundamental part of being an IT manager. The better that you get at delegating work (and making sure that it gets done correctly, on time), the more successful you will be as an IT manager.

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

Question For You: What IT manager tasks do you think should never be delegated?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

You can do it (all)! Well, not really. In fact the really good IT managers realize that they can’t do it all. However, most of us seem to forget this and find ourselves in an overload situation where we’ve got too much to do and just not enough time to do it. How can we tell when things are starting to go bad so that we can prevent it from happening – before it happens?

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Are IT Managers Afraid Of Commitment? Employees Speak Up.

Friday, February 6th, 2009
If IT Leaders Want To Retain Staff, Then They Need To Make A Commitment

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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