Posts Tagged ‘employee motivation’

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Mirrror, Mirror On The Wall, Who’s The Best IT Manager Of All?

Friday, January 2nd, 2009
It Turns Out That An IT Leader's Emotions Are Often Reflected By Your Staff

It Turns Out That An IT Leader's Emotions Are Often Reflected By Your Staff

Those boys who get locked up and do work on behavior neuroscience continue to come up with new and interesting discoveries all the time.  This time around they’ve made a stunning discovery that will have a long lasting impact on how IT managers do their job. Do I have your interest yet?

Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis have written an article in the Harvard Business Review in which they describe what’s been going on in the world of neuroscience. Neuroscientists have discovered something called “mirror neurons” that are spread out all over our brains. Our brains have lots and lots of neurons. This newly discovered type appear to mimic (or “mirror”) what someone else is doing.

These neurons were discovered by Italian neuroscientists who were studying one particular type of cell in a monkey’s brain. This cell only fired when the monkey raised its arm. One day an assistant in the lab raised some food to his mouth and the cell in the monkey fired.

What this all means is that when we detect someone’s (consciously or unconsciously) emotions by observing their actions, these newly discovered mirror neurons reproduce the emotions that we believe that they are feeling. Taken all together, these neurons allow us to create a virtually instant sense of having a shared experience.

Why do we care about all of this brain stuff? It’s the key to being a great IT leader. It turns out that your emotions and your actions are what your department / team are going to be mirroring. If you can activate the mirror neurons in those who are following you, then you will have tapped into a very powerful force.

Additional studies that have been done on groups to measure the effects of activating these neurons has revealed even more. It turns out that when you are addressing your department / team, HOW you communicate is much more important than WHAT you communicate.

This means that if you want to get the best performance out of your team, you need to be demanding (of course) but do in in such a way that creates a happy positive mood in you team. This is all based on the simple fact that when your people feel better, then you’ll get better performance out of them.

Which now brings us to the subject of laughter. I’m not talking about having your team laugh at you (they may already be doing this). Instead, I’m talking about how often you get your team to laugh with you. Studies have shown that the best IT leaders got their employees to laugh on average three times as often as did midperforming IT leaders.

When you are in a good mood, this helps the people who work with and for you to both take in the information that you are providing as well as react quicker and with more creativity.

How often do you make your team members laugh? Have you found that your emotions cause your team to feel the same way that you do? Do you often find yourself feeling the same way that your boss is feeling? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What Should An IT Manager Look For When Hiring Employees?

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
CIOs Are Looking For Technicality Passionate Folks Who Are Enthusiastic

CIOs Are Looking For Technicality Passionate Folks Who Are Enthusiastic

Talk about confusing! IT managers are responsible for bringing the best and brightest into your organization. However, in the field of IT, just exactly what this means is difficult to pin down – we keep changing our minds! IT departments today look nothing like the IT departments of the 80′s, 90′s, and even early 2000. Once upon a time the best IT workers were those with the sharpest tech skills. Then they were told to become more like the business side of the business. Next IT certifications were all the rage (I blame Cisco for this), next they were told to get really good at one technology, oh, but don’t allow yourself to be pigeon-holed into just one technology. What’s a nerd to do?

In a recent set of interviews with CIOs that Deb Perelman over at eWeek did, she discovered that they weren’t really looking for specific skills such as SAP, Oracle Financials, or certain business skills when they did IT hiring. Rather they were looking for more of that touchy-feely stuff: enthusiasm, the ability to be flexible, and of course the ability to get things done.

What makes an IT worker different from workers in other departments at a company is that they need to be passionate about technology. Since technology is such a large part of the IT world, if an employee doesn’t love it and want to be constantly finding out more about what can be done with it, then there is a good chance that burnout will occur sooner than later. A love of technology does not mean that CIOs are looking for the classic “put ‘em in the closet” techie. The ability to relate to others and share information is now recognized as being just as important as technology skills.

If CIOs ran the world (and they don’t), then they’d be able to hire IT staffers who had lots of experience. What they are really looking for are folks who have done something over and over again so many times that it has become second nature to them. What would make such a person an even better find would be if they had good industry experience in the industries that a particular company works. A key marker of this type of IT employee is that they often move in and out of the IT department to other departments such as marketing.

We all know that IT departments at most companys have taken a number of hits over the past several years. Downsizing, offshoring, and other events have taken a toll on IT worker morale. CIOs realize this; however, they want / need their IT departments to be full of enthusiastic workers. It’s important to note here that this is not a discussion about having a more youthful department – young folks can be just as glum as older ones. Rather, CIOs want elements of flexibility and excitement to come back into their departments.

What about all those certifications that were supposed to be our ticket to lifetime employment? It turns out that CIOs don’t think that much of them these days. Instead, what they are looking for is experience and a history of executing projects successfully. These days it’s really all about your ability to get the job done.

CIOs realize that the job market for IT professionals will keep growing through 2016. Things are going to get tricky because the Baby Boomers are getting ready to leave the market and the Gen X/Y folks don’t have the numbers needed to make up for the exodus. What this means for CIOs is that they are going to have to start growing their own talent internally. All of a sudden that enthusiasm stuff starts to become a lot more important.

Do you feel that your department is filled with enthusiastic people? Do the people in your department have good IT instincts? Are you still thinking about getting more certifications? If so, what one? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in career, it, Uncategorized | No Comments »

An IT Leader’s Guide To Managing “A-Type” Personalities

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
Some Rivalry Is A Good Thing, Too Much Can Be Trouble...

Some Rivalry Is A Good Thing, Too Much Can Be Trouble...

So we’ve talked just a bit about the dangers of having players in your department / on your team who get so caught up in something that winning becomes everything to them. It’s almost as though you were attending an auction and it got down to the last two bidders on something and they both just went completely bonkers and started to try to out-bid each other – no longer caring what the real value of the thing that they were bidding on was. This can happen in IT and IT leaders need to spot the warning signs so that they know when to take action.

Rivalry: I’m pretty sure that we are all quite familiar with this driver of competitive arousal! What’s interesting is that it turns out that competitive arousal is quite common (oh, and dangerous) when the level of rivalry is intense. What this leads to quite naturally is the conclusion that head-to-head rivalry is the type of behavior that most interferes with rational decision making. In studies of auctions, researchers found that people would blow right by their preset limits when they were bidding against just a few bidders. The smaller the number of bidders, the greater the rivalry. In IT this drive can show it’s ugly head when we are in negotiations with vendors or with potential employee candidates.

Time Pressure: It’s almost like those scenes that you see in a movie: the sound of a ticking clock or the image of a digital timer counting down seems to cause people to become overwhelmed and can cause their desire to win to basically go crazy. This one is pretty easy for IT leaders to figure out. Time pressure impares decision making by increasing the IT employee’s psychological arousal. This then decreases their ability to find and apply any more relevant information that could help them solve the issue. The IT employee will then revert to their simple decision making processes and stick with it no matter if it is correct for the situation. We’ve all been in time crunches, it’s just that some of us let it impact our decision making ability more than others.

Spotlight: Everything changes when we think that all eyes are upon us. Once again research has shown that when there is an audience for what is going on, especially if the audience is fully engaged in the events, then this will increase the psychological arousal in an IT employee and thereby reduce their problem solving and creativity. In IT we can see this time after time when we work our way through negotiations, bidding wars, inter-departmental disputes, etc. If the issue is being worked quietly, then perhaps everyone will remain rational. However, once that big bright spotlight of publicity gets shone on the proceedings, then everything can change.

With all this being said, you might be getting the impression that competitive arousal is a bad thing. No so. However, too much of it can lead to bad decision making. Next time we’ll talk about how IT leaders can manage competitive arousal within their organization.

Have you ever witnessed a rivalry that got out of hand? What made you realize that you were no longer dealing with rational people? Was the rivalry ever resolved? How do you work under time pressures? Do you feel that the less time you have, the less creative you are? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What Is An IT Leader To Do When Winning Is EVERYTHING?

Monday, October 6th, 2008
Sometimes IT Staff Can Get Too Focused On Winning At All Costs

Sometimes IT Staff Can Get Too Focused On Winning At All Costs

So here’s an interesting issue that I’m sure that most CIO’s and IT managers would love to have: how best to mange over-the-top “A-Type” personalities? Hey, we all know folks like this (put that mirror down!) These are the people in our company / department / team for which winning can become more important then the big picture. We all seek to have enthusiastic people on our teams, but what can we do when enthusiasm turns into something very, very bad?

So what’s the real problem with really wanting to win a discussion, a bidding war, or a design decision? Simple – focusing too much on winning can cause smart people to make bad decision errors. When IT managers and executives become overcome by competition, they can shift their goals from maximizing value to beating their competition at any cost.

Dr. Deepak Malhotra has done a great deal of study on such folks, and he spilled his guts in an article that he wrote for the Harvard Business Review. What he found, is that there is very strong evidance that, what he likes to call “competitive arousal”, is at the root of a number of high profile business mistakes. IT is not immune to this effect.

Now this brings up a very good point: there is nothing wrong with wanting to win! We all enjoy winning, hey – it makes us feel good. In fact, we are often willing to pay a price to win. Just to make sure that we all understand it, there is often a good reason to want to win. We encounter competitive situations in which we want to win in all sorts of different forms: auctions, negotiations, legal issues, merges, acquisitions, promotions,  or even when we go recruiting new talent. In some of these cases, it may be worth it to end up paying more than the fair value for what we really, really want because it will weaken our competition, etc.

Here’s the trick: if you are going to go after some prize with that much zeal, then you had better have done an upfront analysis of the situation and determined what your limits of loss that are acceptable are. Additionally, you are going to have to balance these against the benefits to your IT organization. If you don’t do this BEFORE you get involved in the competition, and you try to do it DURING the competition then that’s when your competitive arousal will end up overriding your rational decision making process.

So what’s an IT leader to do? We are going to have to provide you with a way to identify what causes this competitive arousal to show up. Once you can spot it, you are going to need some tools that will allow you to avoid or at least reduce the possibility that it will screw-up your IT department’s strategy or destroy your department’s value. We’ll do all of this, next time…

Have you ever seen someone in your department (you?) go out of control when they got into a competitive situation? How did it start – was it them against just one rival or did they face off against a group? When did you realize that they had gone too far? How did it end up? Was there any long term impacts due to this out of control competition? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in management | 2 Comments »

IT Leaders Have Two Of These But Do They Use Them?

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
You Should Be Listening Twice As Much As You Talk!

You Should Be Listening Twice As Much As You Talk!

About a year ago I had a chance to sit down with a member of an IT team that was working for me in order to have a heart-to-heart with him. We’ll call him Tim. Tim was a project manager on one of my teams and so far he had been a steady performer. I’d say that he was strong on the analytical side and soft on the interpersonal side; however, he was doing a good job and I had really had no complaints on his performance. Recently, things had changed with Tim. His whole demeanor had been transformed as a deep depression seemed to both surround him and flow off of him and onto anyone that he interacted with. It had gotten so bad that nobody really wanted to have anything to do with him. Clearly this was having an impact on his ability to do his job. It was time for me to step in and see what I could do.

I took Tim with me down to the cafeteria in order to get him into a neutral location. I started my conversation with him by explaining that I had been pleased with his work up until recently. I told him that it sure seemed like something had changed and I needed to find out what it was because things couldn’t continue like they were. Tim initially said exactly what you’d expect a guy to say: “Nothing’s wrong.” I thought about opening up on him with both barrels – look, he was doing a lousy job and he was going to be out the door if he didn’t shape up. However, I knew better and so I kept gently probing. Finally, Tim got around to saying “I hate my Director.” Once again, my gut reaction was to tell him “Too bad, he’s not leaving so you had better make some changes.” However, somehow I was able to hold my tongue and instead said the three most important words that an IT Leader can say “Tell Me More…”

Tim started telling me the standard things that everyone says about their boss behind their backs “He doesn’t give clear instructions, he changes his mind too often, he’s never around when I need to talk to him, etc.” This is regular stuff – not enough to cause such a change in personality. So I went on and said “What else has happened lately?” This finally got Tim to confess everything. In a staff meeting, his boss had found some errors in some slides that Tim had prepared showing the status of the project and had called him out on it in front of the rest of the department. Given Tim’s personality, this was just about the worst thing that anyone could do to him. He was wounded and still sulking several weeks after the event. Bingo! We had our smoking gun.

This was a problem that I could (and did) fix rather easily. That’s not the point of this posting. Rather, my first reactions as Tim’s story unfolded would have been the wrong ones to act on and if I had, then I would have ended up doing a great deal of damage and not fixing the problem. I guess that’s why we all have two ears and just one mouth.

David Benzel is an author and a speaker and he points out that as IT Leaders we all have four main responsibilities when it comes to communicating with our IT teams:

  1. To listen
  2. To get the facts
  3. To determine the problem
  4. To help resolve the situation

As hard as it is to do, listening is both an art and a science that all of us IT Leaders need to get better at doing. Listening is hard to do because it requires you to focus your attention and use your full brain to process what is being said – no multi-tasking allowed! By keeping your mouth shut and your ears open, you allow your staff to do the talking and when they do that, you will learn amazing things.

Have you ever been in a situation in which you spoke too soon without doing enough listening? What happened when you did this? Have you ever seen someone who was a good listener at work? How did people respond to them? Were they more or less effective at their jobs than their peers? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in IT manager, soft skills | 3 Comments »

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