Posts Tagged ‘creativity’

Great IT Managers Aren’t Afraid To Stumble On The Way To The Top

Thursday, November 10th, 2011
Image CreditGreat IT managers always slip up before they become great

Great IT managers always slip up before they become great

A quick question for you: are you afraid to fail? Would you be willing to take on responsibility for leading an IT team that might not be a success? I’m willing to bet that a lot of us would say “no” – our company’s IT managers who are perfect are rewarded while IT managers who fail are kicked to the curb. However, I’m going to tell you that you’re wrong – get ready to fail if you want to succeed.

How To Kill Your IT Management Career

In your job right now, what would happen to you if you failed? That end-of-year review is going to be a tough one to sit through, right? Let’s face it, failure is not something that is rewarded in our workplace and in fact it’s something that we all actively avoid if we possibly can.

However, maybe we’re just setting ourselves up for a much bigger career disaster. Can we all admit that the world as we know it is changing? Can you remember watching old-time movies where the hero would get a job at a company and then spend his or her entire career working there? We all know that those days are long gone.

Something else is changing also: our jobs. The job that you had when you started working may already be gone. The one that you’re doing right now probably won’t exist in what, 2, maybe 3 years from now. This all means that you are going to have to change and change involves risk and along with risk comes the very real possibility that you are going to fail.

How To Become A Success By Failing

Well, that failing stuff doesn’t sound like it’s going to be any fun. But wait, has anyone else ever failed? Turns out that yes, in fact most successful people who are now in leadership positions can look at their past and point to failures that helped them to get to where they are now.

The poster child for this kind of “good failure” would be Howard Schultz – the guy who founded the Starbucks chain of coffee shops. We all know and love the Starbucks store today, but when Howard first started it he really blew it. There were no chairs, he played lots of opera music, and his menu was in Italian. Clearly he realized that he had failed, quickly adjusted, and went on to become a big success.

You can do the same. You need to learn to make lots of small bets. Some of these bets will pay off, and some won’t. It’s through what you learn from the failures that you’ll be able to make tiny changes to your approach and try, try again.

If we keep doing things the same way that we’ve always been doing them, then we will eventually stagnate and then we’ll go into decline. However, if you have the courage to start to fail and to learn from those failures, then the future contains limitless possibilities for both you and your career.

What All Of This Means For You

IT managers who are afraid to fail will never become a true success. Oh sure, they may do ok for a few years, but when things get really rough, they’ll wash out.

If you are willing to adjust how you view failure, your career can take off. If you can start to look at failures as being simply being learning experiences that are not be feared, but they are to be used to become a better IT manager then you’ll be able to grow and become better at what you do.

No, you can’t be an idiot about this and do silly things that cause your IT team to fail, but if you try your hardest and your dream team still fails than you will have learned what doesn’t work. The big deal is that it takes courage for you to be able to do this.

IT managers who are a success have to had failures in their past. It’s from the forge of failure that the steel of success is formed. Learn how to make small bets so that you can learn what works and what doesn’t. Do this well and you’ll become a successful IT manager.

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

Question For You: What’s the best way to get your management to become comfortable with failures as a sign of success?

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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So there I was the other day talking with one of my IT manager customers and I was going on and on about how her team needed to start adapting their design process to include cloud computing. She knows me very well so she felt comfortable in stopping me in mid-sentence. She said “Jim, I’ve been hearing a lot about this cloud computing stuff and I sorta know what is it, but I’m not sure that I fully understand it. ” Oops, I hadn’t realized that there were still folks out there that hadn’t “drunk the cloud Kool-Aid”. Ok, so now we’re going to take care of this.

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New Thoughts About That Vision Thing

Thursday, June 23rd, 2011
Image Credit The Best Vision Is One That Everyone Can See & Support

The Best Vision Is One That Everyone Can See & Support

I’m pretty sure that your company has a vision. I’m also fairly certain that if asked, you’d be hard pressed to tell anyone just exactly what that vision is. Although we all basically understand that having a vision is good thing, the whole vision thing has been so badly handled that it’s pretty much a joke in most IT departments. However, if you really want to accomplish things, then you’re going to have to change this…

Just Exactly What Is A Vision?

So we’ve all spent time laughing about our company’s version of a vision; however, what is a vision really supposed to be? For that matter, what are we supposed to do with a vision if we have one?

Unlike a “mission” which is a short-term objective, a “vision” is a longer term picture of a future that could be. A vision needs to be complete: we need to understand how that future would work, what it would look like, what the result of making that future a reality would be.

In order for a vision to work, it must in some way connect with the members of your team’s deep personal needs. These needs can be based on a craving for recognition, success, knowledge, etc.

The reason that as an IT manager you want to create a vision for your team is because if you can do this correctly, then you will have found a way to tap into you team’s true commitment. With a vision that they can believe in, your team will apply all of their creativity and extra energy as they work to turn the vision into reality.

None of us like change – it always seems to require way too much of an effort on our part. If we have a vision that we believe in, then all of a sudden that change does not seem so daunting. A powerful vision is what it takes to get us to stand up and take action in order to make that vision real.

How Can IT Managers Go About Creating A Vision?

Wanting to create a compelling vision is one thing, actually knowing how to go about doing so is a completely different thing. There are a lot of ways to do a poor job of creating a vision and you’ll want to avoid them.

Instead, while creating a vision for your team you’ll want to keep in mind that for a vision to be successful it must connect with your team member’s deeply held personal beliefs. One thing that you must avoid in forming this connection is the use of “buzz words” – needless jargon will cause your vision to be rejected.

Your vision cannot be all about your team. Instead it needs to account for the larger world. Specifically, it needs to consider the needs of your department’s main stakeholders and it needs to clearly state what the benefits for them are.

Finally, the keep it simple rule applies here also. The vision that you develop for your team needs to be very easy to explain to your team. They need to be able to understand it and they need to then be able to explain it to others in a way that they’ll be able to understand.

What All Of This Means For You

Although poorly created and communicated visions have resulted in most IT staff thinking very little of visions and vision statements, it turns out that they really are important. Any IT manager who wants to motivate a team and get the most out of them, needs to create and sell a compelling vision to the team.

In order to create a vision that will stand the test of time, you need to do it correctly. This means that you need to stay away from the buzz words and make sure that the vision that you create touches team members deeply. Keeping it simple will ensure that everyone on the team is able to both remember and share the vision with others.

IT managers who take the time to work with their team and create a vision that everyone can buy into will have created a powerful motivational tool. No longer will the vision be something that gets hung on the wall and forgotten. Instead, it will become a part of everyday life and you’ll find that your team is living the vision that you’ve created for them…

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

Question For You: How long do you think that a vision should be – one sentence or can it be a full paragraph?

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

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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Is An IT Manager Really An Artist?

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
IT Leaders Are In Charge Of A Bunch Of Artists - Can We Get Them To Create Great Art?

IT Leaders Are In Charge Of A Bunch Of Artists - Can We Get Them To Create Great Art?

Here’s an interesting question that I like to whip out every so often and run through my mind: is IT a science or an art? For that matter, are we all engineers or are we really artists? If you think about it, our jobs consist of taking basic elements (colors) combining them (painting) and creating networks, servers, and applications (works of art). Is one among us the next IT Michelangelo?

Ed Catmull is one of the founders of Pixar and he is currently the president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios (they merged just awhile ago). He wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review in which he discussed how Pixar deals with the mix of art and technology that they use to create their films. His thoughts hold some interesting points for us IT Leaders.

One of the first points that Catamull makes is that Disney and Pixar are not just about great artists (Walt Disney being one of them). Rather, what makes them stand out is that they have learned to take technology and bend it in such a way as to help their artists do more. Sure seems like what an IT department is supposed to be doing!

At Pixar they have a saying “Technology inspires art, and art challenges the technology”. No matter what market your business operates in, this saying should apply to you also.

At Pixar they have developed several principles that they use to capture this saying and implement it in how they do work. Because every team in the department is not created equal, Pixar has implemented the following principles to guide their teams:

  1. Communication Is Key And Unrestricted: In order to ensure that silos of information don’t develop, they have separated the decision making hierarchy from the communications hierarchy. There needs to be no such thing as going through “proper channels” to get information. This means that Leaders have to get comfortable with the fact that they won’t know everything and others may know more than they do.
  2. New Ideas Must Be Safe: Nothing can kill innovation like an environment in which new ideas are laughed at or shot down. Everyone needs to get two-sided feedback: tell them what you liked and tell them what you didn’t like.
  3. Good Ideas Start In School: Oh the arrogance of those of us who have been out of school for many years. We forget where the next generation of workers will come from and where new ideas often spring from. We need to encourage our workers to publish their results, challenges, and solutions. Yes, you may end up giving away some competitive advantage but you’ll get so much more back in reader feedback and attracting new talent that it will all be worth it.

Catmull took the time to point out a few additional things that Pixar has done to keep their workers communicating with each other:

  • The Pixar building has been designed with the cafeteria, mailboxes, meeting rooms, and bathrooms are located in a common atrium. This was done to maximize chance encounters between coworkers. It goes without saying that this is how breakthroughs and solutions just “happen”.
  • When a company is successful, the ability to create a way to systematically ward off complacency while at the same time finding ways to uncover problems are probably the two most difficult issues facing a Leader.
  • Postmortems are the key to your company’s long term success. Nobody likes to do them, but everyone learns from them. Catmull suggests changing the format of the postmortem meeting so that people don’t become complacent. He also suggests that you ask each group involved in the postmortem to create a list of the 5 things that they would do again and the 5 things that they would not do again. This creates a safer environment.

I guess at the end of the day, just like the teams at Pixar, we are all artists down deep. The tools that we use and the artwork that we create may be different from what we traditionally think of artists creating, but isn’t that what art is all about?

Do you think of yourself as an artist or as an engineer? Do you think that the most creative IT folks do the best work? Is your work environment a safe place to offer new ideas? Do you do postmortems and are they valuable? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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3 IT Manager Secrets From The Folks At Pixar

Friday, January 16th, 2009

Pixar Makes Great Movies And Has A Lot To Teach IT About Manging Creativity

Pixar Makes Great Movies And Has A Lot To Teach IT About Manging Creativity

Toy Story, Cars, Finding Nemo, Wall-E – who hasn’t been amazed at the movies that Pixar has created over the past few years? I think that we can all agree that clearly Pixar has found a way to foster and grow creativity within their organization. What if IT Leaders could find out how to do the same for our departments and teams…

Ed Catmull is one of the founders of Pixar and he is currently the president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios (they merged just awhile ago). He wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review in which he discussed just what makes Pixar work so well.

Catmull make the point that he was once talking with a studio executive who lamented the fact that his biggest problem was not finding good people, but rather finding good ideas.

Catmull flat out disagrees with this thinking – he thinks that it reflects a misunderstanding of creativity. He also thinks that it places way too much importance on the initial idea in creating a new product.

Since the release of Toy Story in 1995, Pixar has released eight other films which have all been blockbusters. The real interesting point is that Pixar has never bought a script or movie idea from the outside. The ingredients that make their movies magic, the stories, the characters, and the worlds in which they live, have all been created internally by Pixar employees.

Here’s where the real learning for IT Leaders comes:

Catmull believes that Pixar’s adherence to a basic set of principles and ways of managing creative talent and risk is done responsibly. At Pixar, the job of management is NOT to prevent risk but rather to build in the capability to recover when failures occur (and, of course, they do occur).

In order for this type of environment to exist, it must be safe to tell the truth. In order for the organization to grow and improve, it must constantly challenge all of its assumptions and be searching for any flaws that could ultimately search for any flaws that could destroy the organization.

IT Leaders, just like Pixar management, need to find a way to resist our built-in tendencies to try to either avoid or at least minimize risks. I realize that this is easy to say, and very hard to do.

If an IT Leader can’t overcome his/her desire to avoid risk, then each project that they are in charge of will be an imperfect copy of a previous project that they worked on. This will result in many copies of what was never a perfect process with no hope of achieving a break through.

To have a break through in how a project is done, IT Leaders need to be able to find a way to live with uncertainty. This of course means that you also need to make sure that your department or team has the built-in ability to recover when you’ve taken a big risk and it ends up failing.

The key to being able to recover lies in the people that you have on your team, but we’ll have to talk about how you do that next time…

What’s your favorite Pixar movie? Why? Do you feel that your IT department manages creativity well? Do you have a plan for how to recover if you take a risk and it ends up failing? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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