Posts Tagged ‘information technology jobs’

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Should An IT Manger Be A “Secret Shopper” When Looking For A New Job?

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
IT Leaders Need To Check Out Both Their Next Job And The Company That's Offering It

IT Leaders Need To Check Out Both Their Next Job And The Company That's Offering It

So let’s pretend for a moment that you are NOT fabulously satisfied with your current job as an IT Leader. You’ve decided that global recession or not, you really, really need to find yourself a new IT job. How do you plan on going about doing this? There is nothing new that I can tell you about Monster.com or Dice.com, writing the perfect resume, or even how to leverage social networks like LinkedIn in order to get an offer. Instead, let’s talk about what you need to do AFTER you get the offer.

When you were just out of school, or when a job that you had suddenly went away, you probably went searching for the first job that would start providing you with a paycheck. However, times have changed. You now actually have a bit of a career going and, assuming that you currently have a job, you’d prefer to not muck it up.

What this means is that your search for you next IT Leader job needs to include a few additional steps that just might strike you as strange – but could very well save your career. Interested? Let’s see what you need to do next.

Once you have an offer from a company, STOP! Don’t accept it right off the bat. Tell the company that you need some time to consider their offer. Two days would be perfect, but you can even accomplish what you need to get done in a single day if you move quickly.

We all know that job descriptions are generally junk – originally created too long ago by someone who thought that they knew what they needed and then transformed into junk by caring members of the HR and legal teams so that nobody would be offended or even know what the job was about. This means that you need to make sure that you can get along with your potential new boss (hopefully you have already talked with him/her). Now you’ve got to find out if this COMPANY is the right company for you.

In a nutshell, if the company makes a lousy product / service and all of their customers are ticked off at them, then this is probably not the best place for you to take your career to. This is the new angle that you need to add to your job search: not just checking out the new job, but also checking out the company that you are considering joining.

How do you do this for an IT job? If the company that you are thinking about joining has retail stores or distributors that carry their products, then this part is easy – it’s time to go shopping. If you were considering joining Bose’s IT department, then you’d want to visit your local Best Buy and check out their home theater section.

Even more important than confirming that Bose products are still available (proof that they aren’t going out of business), would be what you learned by talking to the sales associates. What do they think about Bose products? Do people return them? Are they selling well? Although these are not IT questions, they are critical to making sure that you are joining a growing thriving company instead of a stalling, shrinking one.

If the company that you are thinking about joining does not have their products in retail stores, then you’re going to have to be a bit more creative. Almost all firms have some sort of help / support line. Play the role of a customer and give it a call – how do they treat you? Do some on-line searching for reviews of the company and their products. Look for legal actions against the company – discrimination lawsuits are never a good thing.

At this stage in your IT career, you need to adopt a bigger view of the world when you go looking for your next job. It’s no longer just about the job, but now it’s also about the company that you might be working for…

Did you take the time to check out the company that you are currently working for? How did you go about checking them out? Was the information that you found accurate? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in jobs in information technology | 1 Comment »

How An IT Leader Can Manage Competitive Arousal In Their Team

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
Competition Can Change IT Workers Into Bad Decision Makers

Competition Can Change IT Workers Into Bad Decision Makers

It’s great to have an IT team that is full of go-getters. However, as with everything in life, sometimes teammates can be too competitive. When we let the heat of battle overcome our better judgement, then we’ve got a real problem. When this happens, we stand a very good chance of starting to make very bad decisions. Long after the competition has been resolved, we’ll still be living with the effects of those decisions and that can come back to haunt us over and over again.

Last time we discussed that rivalry, time pressure, and a bright spotlight of public attention can all contribute to making us become competitively arroused. This is how we start to make bad decisons. Given all of this, now lets spend some time talking about what can be done by IT leaders to manage competative arousal within their teams.

An IT leader can work to prevent problems by minimizing the potential for competitive arousal to occur in the first place by doing two things: avoiding the certain types of interaction that can lead to competition among teammates, and working to defuse the common risk factors that can lead to excessively competitive behavior.

In the first case, an IT leader needs to have the ability to think like a chess master and look into the future. He/she is looking to identify those interpersonal dynamic conditions that could lead to competitive arousal within their team. Once an IT leader has spotted these potentially volatile conditions, then they can step in and can work to restructure the deal making process into one that they believe will still lead to a successful outcome while not leading to a overly competitive situation.

Additionally, an IT leader needs to be constantly working to defuse the risk factors that may lead their teammates to enter into competitive arousal. There are three ways that this can be done:

  • Reduce Potential Rivalry: Luke Skywalker was motivated to overthrow the Empire at all costs because he saw it as being “evil”. When IT workers start to view rivals as being “bad”, or “evil” they can start to view winning as being required no matter what the cost. When this happens, the IT leader needs to identify who is feeling the greatest amount of rivalry and then limit their role. Another helpful approach is to do your homework before the competition begins. Clearly lay out how much you are willing to “lose” in order to “win”. Doing this before competitive arousal kicks in ensures a more rational decision will be reached.
  • Slow Down The Clock: In order to reduce the pressure that a ticking clock brings to the table, an IT leader needs to search for ways to stop the clock or at least to extend its window of time. Deadlines are almost always too short in which to complete the work. Extending or eliminating them is a key IT leader job.
  • Dimming The Public Spotlight: A great way to take the burden of meeting public expectations off the shoulder of individual IT staffers is to spread the decision making responsibility across multiple members. This isn’t a perfect solution, but it go a long way towards reducing the stress felt by individual team members.

Although it’s not often that the IT leader is the one who is getting caught up in a competitive situation, he/she does play a key role. The ability to anticipate that a member of the department is going to enter into a rivalry situation, come under time pressure, or get caught in a spotlight is part of an IT leader’s job. In the end, we all overestimate just how rational, careful, and even logical that we are in high pressure situation. It’s the role of an IT leader to save us from making bad decisions when we find ourselves there.

Have you ever had to diffuse a rivalry situation within your department? Did you see it before it became a problem or did you have to react after things started to get bad? Have you ever been able to remove a deadline that was causing your team to start to make bad decisions? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in IT manager | 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 »

Neuroscience Can Make You A Better IT Leader

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
A Good IT Leader Needs A Healthy Brain

A Good IT Leader Needs A Healthy Brain

Dr. John Median is a developmental molecular biologist who recently sat down with the Harvard Business Review and had a talk about what we’ve recently found out about how the brain works and what this can tell us about being better IT leaders.

The key question that IT leaders want to get an answer to is to find how how relevant neuroscience discoveries are to the day-to-day job of management. Dr. Median says that he thinks that one of the reasons that we are all so fascinated by brain research these days is because it truly is the most interesting and complicated processing tool that we have ever seen. How’s this for a fascinating fact: there are as many neurons in your brain as there are stars in a typical galaxy. Despite having this level of knowledge about the brain, we still know very little that can be related to the real world.

One thing that science has learned is that stress is very, very bad for our brains. Since it hurts our brains, it also decreases our productivity. The reasoning behind this is pretty simple. Evolution has wired our brains to help us to survive. What this means in practical terms is that our brains were originally set up to deal with stress for short periods of time: 30-60 seconds. Remember “fight or flight?” However, in today’s modern IT workplace everyone is under stress almost all the time. Our brains were never set up to deal with stress all the time. This can lead to other problems with things like a lack of motivation, poor sleep and immune system issues.

So what happens when we have too much stress in our lives? Dr. Median says that stress can mess with our hormones. When this happens, the connections between brain cells that help us remember things can start to fray and weaken. Unfortuantly, the hormones associated with stress seem to like to prey on the part of the brain that is called the hippocampus - where our memories are kept. Some studies have guessed that the total cost of lost productivity due to stress is somewhere around $200 billion/year. What does this mean for IT managers? Simply put, anything that you can do to lower the stress level that is being experienced by your team will pay back rich dividends.

One very interesting point that Dr.Median makes is that our memory is NOT like a Xerox machine. Our brains and our memory were always designed to help with one thing only: our survival. We really have no idea HOW we remember things, but what we do know is that it seems to take a long time for memories to become permanent. The best way to remember something is to constantly re-expose yourself to it. Once again. for IT managers this means that if you want your team to remember the company’s mission statement, then you’re going to have to start every meeting off by reading it to the team.

The good news out of all of this is that our brains will continue to grow and change throughout our entire lives. If you want to have a better shot at having a healthy, growing brain for your entire career, then the #1 thing that you’ve got to do is to exercise. Exercise in any form and aerobic exercise in particular helps your brain. Dr. Median points out that people who exercise are 50% less likely to get Alzheimer’s disease. From an IT leader point-of-view, this goes along nicely with the idea that a healthy team is a more productive team. Anything that you can do to make it easier for your team to stay in top shape will once again help your team to perform that much better.

What are you doing today to lower the stress level of your team? What is the primary cause of their stress? Is your team able to stay healthy or are they “under the weather” all the time? Do you think stress plays a role in your team’s physical health? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Posted in employee motivation | No Comments »

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