Posts Tagged ‘goals’

« Older Entries

IT Manager Leadership: Two Ways To Lead When You’re Not In Charge

Thursday, December 8th, 2011
Image Credit IT Leaders Need To Show Teams Which Way To Go

IT Leaders Need To Show Teams Which Way To Go

When I work with IT Leaders who are looking for ways to get that next promotion, I tell them that they are going to need to demonstrate leadership. This is an easy thing for me to say and a very hard thing for them to do. Complicating matters even more is the fact that IT managers are finding themselves drafted onto team that they are just members of, not leaders of. What’s an IT manager to do?

It’s Always All About Goals

When an IT manager is told to work as part of a team but not told to manage it, it can be easy to treat this as a low priority task if you aren’t appointed to run the show. I mean really, you’ve got other tasks that you are responsible for and you’re running the show there.

However, that would be a mistake on your part. It turns out that in real life senior management are often put on teams that they may not have been told to manage. If you can demonstrate the ability to work with and to even lead this type of team, you’ll be demonstrating skills that will make you a candidate for a promotion.

The first thing that you need to do when you become part of a team that you are not leading is to encourage the team to take the time to write down what they are hoping to achieve. Step up and lead the discussion as the team tries to clarify what their shared objectives are.

To Get The Right Answers, You Need To Know How To Think Correctly

Teams can be a confusing mess. There are all sorts of people and everybody thinks that they know how to solve the problem that the team has been asked to take care of. More often than not the first team meeting dissolves into a set of isolated conversations and not much gets accomplished.

You have an opportunity to show leadership in this situation. You can help the team actually accomplish something by showing them how to apply systematic thinking to the problem at hand.

Instead of just randomly breaking off pieces of the problem and then attempting to do a deep dive and come up with a solution for it, instead take a step back. Start by making sure that all of the needed data has been gathered.

Next take the time to determine how the current situation was created. Once you get group agreement on that move on and identify a set of possible solutions. It’s going to be much easier to get the team to select a workable solution from a set of possible solutions instead of trying to build solutions from the ground up with only various parts of the required data.

What Does All Of This Mean For You

IT managers will always be finding themselves in situations where they have not explicitly been put in charge providing management to a team. When this happens to you, there are two ways that you can deal with it: give up and complain about the situation or choose to demonstrate your leadership skills.

In order to show leadership and how you can manage a team, you need to start by creating a set of clear objectives that the group can work towards – goals if you like. This will provide direction for the team. Next, show the team how to think in a systematic fashion. Lay out the challenges, identify the constraints, and then start to identify solutions.

Leadership is a tricky thing. It’s not something that is handed to you, rather you have to earn it. IT managers who master the ability to create goals that a team will accept and then show the team how to think systematically will be one step closer to earning the leadership of that team.

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

Question For You: Do you think that you should create team goals by yourself or with the rest of the team?

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

When I’m working with new IT Managers I often run into the buddy / boss problem. It’s perfectly understandable that any person newly placed into an IT Manager position would like to establish a positive relationship with the people that they are managing. This is all well and good, but it’s all too easy for an IT Manager to go too far – you can be a boss, but you can’t be a buddy.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in leadership | No Comments »

4 Things An IT Leader Should Never Do During A Performance Review

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011
Image Credit 4 Things That Will Send You The Wrong Way During A Performance Review

4 Things That Will Send You The Wrong Way During A Performance Review

Most IT managers have never been trained on how to properly conduct a performance review with members of their team. What this means is that all too often they end up doing these reviews incorrectly. Not only is this bad for the team – you can’t fix what nobody knows about, but it could also have disastrous consequences for the company. Let’s talk about four of the biggest mistakes IT managers make and how you can avoid them.

Failing To Create A Plan To Close Performance Gaps

One of the most important parts of any performance review is the identification of gaps in a team member’s performance. Once you’ve identified these gaps, you need to talk with the employee about how they are going to be taken care of.

The most important part of this discussion is getting the employee to make suggestions on how the gap can be closed. This is important so that they take ownership of the solution. Your role as an IT manager is to listen to the solution that they propose and to probe it. Ask questions about any part that is unclear and make suggestions for how the solution can be changed to make it more likely that the plan will solve the problem.

In the end you and the employee will need to create a plan to deal with any performance gaps. This plan should have specific goals, a timeline for completing the work, and a clear identification of the outcomes that you expect.

Forgetting To Reexamine Performance Goals

A great deal of time may have passed since the last time you had a performance review with members of your team. It’s entirely possible that during that time, employees may have forgotten or jumbled their understanding of what goals they are supposed to be working towards.

As an IT manager, the performance review is an excellent time to revisit the goals that the entire team should be working on. As part of this discussion you need to discuss how the employee’s work will be measured against the goals.

Depending on how the employee’s performance has been during this period, they may need help in achieving the goals. This is the time to sit down and work with that employee to create a plan that will allow them to be able to achieve the goals that they are working on.

Not Getting It On Record

In this era of too many lawsuits, IT managers who don’t write down what happens during a performance review are risking a lawsuit against their company as well as their career. You should always take notes during the actual performance review and then take the time after the review to formalize those notes shortly after the performance review while you still have a clear memory of the events.

It’s what’s in those notes that will really count. You need to have all of the basics: date, key points made by you, key points made by the employee. However, there is more that you need to add. You’ll need to carefully document any disagreements that came up and what next steps were agreed on by both sides. Ultimately you are going to want to get the employee to sign your notes in order to indicate that everyone agrees on what the next steps that were agreed to were.

No Follow-Up

All too often it’s easy for an IT manager to breath a sigh of relief once the performance reviews have been completed. That’s all over with and you won’t have to worry about it again until the next performance review period. Actually this isn’t the case.

Every performance review meeting deserves a follow-up from you. The reason for this follow up is to check to see how the members of your team are doing with the new goals that you have given to them. The high performers probably won’t need any help, but the others may need additional coaching or training that you can provide them with.

What All Of This Means For You

Performance reviews are a critical part of every IT manager’s job. This is the most effective tool that you have to keep your team orientated towards achieving the company’s goals. The problem is that all too often IT managers have never been taught how to conduct performance reviews.

Just as important as knowing what to do, IT managers also have to know what not to do. Some of the things that they need to avoid doing include not creating a plan to close employee performance gaps, ignoring performance goals, forgetting to get the results of the performance review written down, and not following up after the review is over.

Now you know four performance review mistakes that others have made in the past. By avoiding these common mistakes, IT managers can transform a performance review into what it really should be — a powerful tool for change.

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

Question For You: How soon after a performance review do you think that an IT manager should conduct a follow-up?

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

IT managers understand that they are responsible for conducting performance appraisals with their team every so often. What many IT managers don’t realize is that they are also responsible for what comes next: coaching…

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in performance | No Comments »

4 Secrets IT Managers Need To Do Successful Performance Appraisals

Thursday, February 24th, 2011
Image Credit
Performance Appraisals Shouldn't Be You Versus Them

Performance Appraisals Shouldn't Be You Versus Them

On top of everything else that you have to do as an IT manager, there are those performance appraisals. You don’t want to do them, your staff doesn’t want to do them, and yet the company insists on everyone doing them. As long as you’ve got to sit down and evaluate the performance of each member of your staff, it sure seems like you may as well get the most out of it. I’m willing to bet that nobody ever told you how to do a performance appraisal the right way. Well, that’s all going to change now because I’m going to share 4 secrets to getting the most out of performance appraisals with your staff…

Prepare, Prepare, Prepare

It is my hope that everyone knows that in order to run a successful performance appraisal every IT manager needs to take the time to prepare for it. However, what a lot of us forget is that it is also important that our employees prepare themselves for an appraisal.

What this means is that they need to take the time to reflect on what they have been working on and how it has turned out. Generally these discussions are best if they center on employee goals. Key questions need to be addressed such as the status of achieving goals, which (if any) goals were exceeded, goals that the employee may be struggling with, and of course things that may be holding the employee back from completing his or her goals.

Howdy Partner!

A performance appraisal environment can be toxic if you don’t take steps to make it more positive. IT employees generally view appraisals as an opportunity for their management to either dismiss them for poor performance or to inform them that they won’t be getting much of a raise this year.

As an IT manager you need to change this situation and turn it into more of a discussion between partners who are working together to achieve great things for the company. You can make this happen by taking time at the start of the meeting to put the employee at ease: explain to them why you are having the meeting and what you want to get out of it.

In order to make the meeting a positive meeting, you are going to want to encourage your employee to do most of the talking. As they talk, you are going to want to show what a good listener you can be. Ask questions and allow them to complete their thoughts. Echo back things that they have said when you ask them follow-up questions.

Your goal here should be to provide the employee with an opportunity to “get it all out” – to lay out how they feel that they’ve done since you last talked. All of this needs to be completed before you start to talk about your appraisal of their performance.

There’s A Gap!

When you start to provide your evaluation of your employee’s job performance, you are going to have to base it on the goals that had been laid out for them to accomplish. If you haven’t asked them to do something, then you can’t very well evaluate them on how they did.

When discussing accomplishments, you’re going to want to talk about how their performance measured up to what the goal was. What you are looking for here are gaps between what was expected and what was delivered.

Often times IT managers run into problems when the goal is a hard-to-measure goal. Things like “boost customer satisfaction” are good goals, but are difficult to measure.

If you find a gap between a goal and your employee’s accomplishments, then this is where you should focus your discussion. It’s going to be important that you clearly show the employee why this goal was an important goal to accomplish by mapping it back to what the overall company is trying to accomplish and then showing how your employee’s efforts support the company.

You need to get the employee to concur that a gap in performance exists. Once you’ve been able to do this, the next step is to work with them to try to identify a root cause for the gap.

It’s All About The (Root) Causes

The purpose of searching for root causes is to start to identify ways that your employee can improve their performance. With a little luck, this search will allow you to avoid casting blame on the employee directly, and instead the both of you will be able to work together in order to search for the outside cause of the performance gap.

Your role here is to motivate the employee to give you useful feedback as you search for the root cause. There are several ways to do this. This is a good time to be selective – you don’t want to dredge up everything that you feel that the employee didn’t due well enough during the last review period. Be sure to mix in some praise for what they did accomplish – this will make reviewing the gaps easier for both of you to do.

Ultimately the goal is to work as a team to find ways to attack the issue that is preventing the goals from being met. If you can get the employee to work with you in order to accomplish this, then you will be a successful IT manager.

What All Of This Means For You

A well done IT worker performance appraisal is very much like a work of art. It takes planning, requires a good environment in which to create it, and it has focus: in this case on gaps in an employee’s performance.

IT managers need to take the time to make sure that a performance appraisal doesn’t turn into a waste of time. These are unique events that can better align the team and turn low performers into rising stars.

Taking the time and making the effort to get the most of your next set of performance appraisals can pay off for you. The better feedback that you can provide to your team, the better performance you’ll get out of them. Ultimately, how you conduct performance appraisals will determine how far your IT career takes you…

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

Question For You: How many performance appraisals do you think you should have with each employee each year?

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

Most IT managers have never been trained on how to properly conduct a performance review with members of their team. What this means is that all too often they end up doing these reviews incorrectly. Not only is this bad for the team – you can’t fix what nobody knows about, but it could also have disastrous consequences for the company. Let’s talk about four of the biggest mistakes IT managers make and how you can avoid them.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in performance | No Comments »

IT Managers Know That Their Goals Are The Secret To Time Management

Thursday, January 6th, 2011
Image Credit You've Got To Let Your Goals Show You The Way To Spend Your Time

You've Got To Let Your Goals Show You The Way To Spend Your Time

Doing a good job of managing your time is a challenge for every IT manager. Every day it seems like there are more and more things that you are being asked to do while the amount of time that you have to accomplish them keeps getting smaller and smaller. If only there was some way to organize what you had to work on so that you knew that you were making progress every day…

The Secret To Time Management Success: Goals

Look, the simple fact of time management is that we all start in the same place: too much to do and too little time in which to get it all done. To top things off, everything looks the same – we don’t know where to start.

This is where the power of your goals comes in. Assuming that you’ve taken the time to create good goals, ones that actually mean something to you and which are valid things for you to be striving towards, then you’ve got the guiding light that you’re going to need in order to get your limited time under control.

Your goals will help you guide your time by allowing you to identify just exactly what specific tasks you should be working on in order to achieve your goals. The side benefit of doing this is that your goals will also show you what you should NOT be working on because it’s not going to help you to achieve what’s really important – your goals.

Three Ways To Use Your Goals To Mange Your Time

In order to do a good job of using your goals to solve your time management challenges, you need to know how to get from having goals to having a time management solution. There are three basic steps that you are going to have to follow here:

  1. Break ‘Em Up: Your goals are probably high level statements like “replace such & such system” or “solve such & such problem”. These are fine for goals, but not so good as time management tools. You need to sit down and spend some time breaking up your goals into a smaller set of manageable tasks. In order to make sure that you’ve captured everything that you need to do, keep this list of tasks in sequential order.

  2. Make Time Guesses: Before you can come up with a plan for how you are going to get your work done, you first need to know how much time it’s all going to take. Take a look at each of the individual tasks that you broke each goal up into and estimate how long it’s going to take you to complete that task. In my world, after I’ve come up with my best guess I often double it in order to cover unexpected things that can delay me in getting it done. If you’ve never done something before, then ask others who have how long it took them to do it.

  3. Create Priorities: All goals are not created equally. Some are more important than others. In order to make sure that you spend your valuable time working on the right things, you’re going to need to prioritize your tasks. Some tasks may have to be started earlier than others because they will take longer to accomplish or because they require resources that are not currently available. It’s generally best if you group your tasks into one of three priorities: high, medium, low or whatever. This will show you what you should be working on now and what comes next.

What All Of This Means For You

As our lives as IT managers keep getting busier and busier, trying to do a good job of effectively managing our time can easily become a real challenge. It turns out that by using our goals as a way to get our bearings, IT managers can quickly establish a good time management system.

Just knowing what your goals are is not enough. You need to use three simple rules in order to use your goals to manage your time: break them down into smaller tasks, estimate the time each will require, and prioritize.

Although this may seem like a simple solution to a complex problem, you’ll be amazed at how quickly it works. In no time you’ll be on top of what you have to do and you’ll be getting the right things done. Perhaps you should start planning on what you’ll do with your free time…

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

Question For You: How many goals do you think an IT manager should have?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

With a little luck, every IT manager realizes that they are only as good as the people that they have working for them. What this means is that they need to be a good boss if they want to be successful. This leads to a critical question: how good of a boss are you? It turns out that most of us seem to think that we’re a better boss than we probably really are…

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in time management | 1 Comment »

Top-Down Or Bottom-Up: What’s The Best Way To Set Goals?

Thursday, October 21st, 2010
Image CreditGoals Are Important – Which Way You Set Them Is Important Also

Goals Are Important – Which Way You Set Them Is Important Also

Everyone needs goals. As an IT Leader, it’s going to be your responsibility to help your team set both team and individual goals. Although at first this sounds pretty straightforward, in practice it often turns out to be a bit tricky. The most important question that you’re going to have to answer is which way do you want to go about setting goals: top-down or bottom-up?

The Top-Down Approach

Say hello to “Big Brother” – he’s going to be setting the goals for you and your team. The top-down approach to goal setting is where your company’s senior management identifies the goals that they want you and your team to be working towards. They then have you assign these goals to the members of your team.

When goals are set this way, the company generally has identified a broad set of goals that it would like to accomplish in the near future. Your assignment is to then take these broad goals and create objectives for your team members that are aligned with what the company is trying to accomplish.

Although it may seem a bit authoritative at first glance, this approach is actually well-suited to certain situations. Specifically there are three types of IT workers who need to have top-down goals assigned to them: those who need close supervision in order to do their job, new team members, and any team members who don’t know or understand what the company’s goals are.

The Bottom-Up Approach

As a manager, you’d think that the bottom-up approach for creating team member goals would be easier than the top-down approach, but it turns out that it isn’t. In the bottom-up approach, the members of your team create their own goals.

Once this is done, it then becomes your responsibility to combine these various goals into a unified set of goals for the team. As you can well imagine, this can be quite a challenge for any manager.

There are certain types of team members for whom the bottom-up method of goal creation is well suited. Specifically, those team members who determine their own work, who understand the company’s goals and strategy for achieving those goals, and who understand the role that they play in the company.

It’s All About Buy-In

No matter which of these two methods is used to set the goals for your team, it’s going to be important that everyone on the team buy-in to both their personal and the team’s goals. As an IT Leader, it’s your job to make sure that this happens.

The best way to get buy-in from your team no matter which way you choose to go about setting goals is to get everyone involved in their goals. Involvement creates a sense of ownership and as an IT Leader, that’s what you want out of your team.

If you’ve used the top-down method to assign goals to team members, it can be a bit challenging to get buy-in. However, taking the time to talk with team members about their goals, why they are important, and how they relate to the company’s success can foster a sense of ownership.

What All Of This Means For You

Goals are a critical tool that IT Leader need in order to point the way for their teams. How best to create those goals has been an ongoing discussion since time began.

The two most common methods used today are top-down and bottom-up. In the top-down method IT Leaders assign goals related to the company’s objectives to team members. In the top-up approach, team members create their own goals and the IT Leader uses these to create a set of team goals.

In the real world, often a combination of top-down and bottom-up methods are used to create goals for IT teams. As an IT Leader, it’s your job to make sure that not only do the goals get created, but that each goal also has an owner who will be responsible for ensuring that it gets accomplished. Good luck!

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

Question For You: Which way of setting goals do you prefer: top-down or bottom-up?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Ok, enough of this cloud stuff already! The field of IT is just like every other field out there and we have our own share of trendy topics – cloud computing sure seems to the one that we’re dealing with right now. With all of the magazine articles on clouds and conferences going on, you’d think that every IT Leader and CEO has a good understanding of just exactly what a cloud is. Well, you’d be wrong…

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in goals | 8 Comments »

« Older Entries