Dr. Jim Anderson takes a look at just exactly who is better at multitasking: men or women IT managers.
Dr. Anderson explains how some long-held beliefs have been found to be flat-out wrong. He also goes on to finally reveal if any of us are really good at multitasking.
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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…
The good folks over at the consulting firm Development Dimensions International, Inc. have just completed a study of 1,100 front-line managers. The results are not what you’d hope for.
What would you hope for? Well, you’d like this collection of mangers to realized that they don’t know it all. You’d want to hear some self-doubt and you’d especially like to hear that they realize that they’ve got a ways to go in order to become truly effective managers. That’s not what DDI found.
Instead, what their survey showed was that most managers tend to over-estimate their management skills. On top of this, they seem to have very little self-doubt. Hey, I’m all for self confidence, but it sure looks like the IT manager pool is just a little bit too confidant.
Two of the questions that DDI asked in their survey really drove this too much self-confidence issue home. One question asked if during their first year the mangers ever regretted being promoted – a very natural feeling. A whopping 74% said no. The next question asked if during the first year the new manager ever questioned their ability to lead others. Once again, 72% said no. Ouch! We seem to be just a little bit too full of ourselves here.
It’s the rest of DDI’s survey that really provides the interesting information for IT managers. DDI has broken the job of being an IT manager down into 10 different skill sets. As you take a look at this list, you’ll be able to see how each one of them is a critical IT manager skill:
The survey showed that IT managers believe that they do a good job of setting work standards along with planning and organizing. Although they think that they do a good job here, it doesn’t always show. It would have been interesting if the survey had included feedback from the staff that is being managed!
Somewhat not surprising, the areas that IT managers feel that they need to work on the most include many of the soft skill areas. These include such management tasks as delegating and getting commitment from their teams. IT managers have their technical skills down, it’s the people skills that still need the most work.
What the results of this survey show us is that most of us have an over inflated view of our ability to manage an IT team. It appears as though this belief is with us when we first become an IT manager and it doesn’t seem to leave as we advance in our career.
It turns out that there are 10 different skill sets that we need to have as an IT manager if we want to do a good job of leading our department. We believe that we do the best job of setting work standards and we need the most assistance in the area of delegating.
This information is critical for us as IT managers to study and understand. None of us are perfect; however, by understanding where we are weakest we can focus our efforts to become better.
- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™
Question For You: What do you think you should do during your first year to become a better manager?
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If ever there was a trendy word in the world of IT management, it would have to be the word “team”. If you read enough books or listen to enough gurus, you’d have to be forgiven for coming away with the impression that the solution to just about every IT problem is to throw a team at it. Sure teams can be useful, but IT managers need to know when they work – and when they don’t.
They say that the world is becoming a smaller place – I think that they just might be right. IT Leaders are starting to realize that coming up with ways to staff their teams so that they are diverse is quickly moving from being a political nicety to now becoming a business necessity. Does anyone have any suggestions on how best to go about doing this?
Most IT departments are no longer single site operations. In fact, with the growth of outsourcing a single IT department may now have offices in multiple countries: China, India, Russia, etc. This type of distributed operation is a great way to ensure that more work gets done at a lower price; however, it also poses a significant staffing challenge for IT Leaders.
It’s all too easy to think that we can take a few high-performing IT Leaders from the U.S., plunk them down in one of our remote offices and have them be a an effective leader. The reality is that all too often, this doesn’t work. If you haven’t groomed someone on your team to step in and run / interface with a remote office, then they aren’t going to be able to do it.
In the U.S., IT managers are encouraged to use frank talk and direct confrontation in order to deal with team issues. However, especially when dealing with teams in Asis, this can come across as being rude and offensive.
The trick to solving IT staffing challenges for remote offices or just to deal with remote offices is to create what the experts call a “talent plan“. Doing this will allow you to provide unique levels of value to your remote IT offices.
The first part of a talent plan is to identify what positions on your team you are going to have to fill and what types of cultural skills those positions are going to require. It’s important to note that it’s not always necessary to hire a person of a given nationality in order to deal smoothly with a remote office that has other staff members of that nationality. Finding someone who is sensitive to that nationality and who has dealt with them before can fill this need.
Filling a position to manage a remote office should not be a sudden effort. IT Leaders realize that every position will eventually need to be filled because the person in that spot now will be promoted, let go, or will move on. A key part of any talent plan is to early on identify who the potential replacements are. This allows an IT Leader to take the time to make sure that the potentials get an opportunity to get trained in both the skills and the corporate values that they will need if they fill the position.
Staffing mistakes can be very expensive and picking the wrong person to lead a remote IT office or to interface with such an office can flat out be disastrous. IT Leaders realize that if they wait until the last minute when an position suddenly has to be filled, then it will be too late to do it correctly.
Instead, if they take the time to create a talent plan then their investment of upfront time and effort into grooming the right replacements will ensure that the correct staffing decisions are made. Learning to add diversity management to your IT team will mean that you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.
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Even in tough economic times, IT Leaders are still concerned about losing talent. Studies are showing that we are losing our IT Leaders at a much faster rate than new ones are being produced. On top of this, up to 30 million managers and leaders are going to become eligible to retire in the next five years. How can an IT Leader help to replace these leaders?
IT Leaders Need To Think Differently About How They Will Do Recruiting In The Future
It’s starting to look like the economic winter just might be getting ready to thaw. Once this happens, IT Leaders realize that they’re going to have a massive task added to their already overloaded plate – recruitment.
During the economic downturn IT workers were staying put because they didn’t know what was going to happen next. Additionally, firms stopped hiring except for the most critical functions. When things start to pick up again, this will all change. Are you going to be ready IT Leader?
We all need to remember that recruitment is really a game that we are playing with our competition – we want to get all of the good talent in order to boost our firm and our competition wants to do the same. On top of all of this, who among us has ever been trained on how to properly do recruitment?
The good folks over at Forrester Research realize that we need some help and so they’ve done some research for us. Their conclusions just might surprise you a bit. They believe that there is something that we need to start doing if we want to be successful in attracting the right kind of talent: we need to diversify our talent pool.
Right now all of us pretty much do the same thing when we want to fill a position in our IT department: we start looking at other firms who do what we do in hopes of finding an IT professional who is willing to leave and come work for us. This has worked for a long time because there have been so many people working in IT. However, with outsourcing and the Baby Boomers starting to retire, this isn’t going to keep working much longer.
Instead, Forrester tells us that what we need to do is to expand the pool of talent that we recruit from when we go looking to fill a position. This means that we need to start looking at college students and non-IT business professionals as potential sources of new recruits.
College students have always been an underused resource. The reasons are many, but more often than not it boils down to the simple fact that it takes time to guide them when you give them a task – you can’t just “fire and forget”. Sometimes poor management of college students results in poor performance and this can leave a lingering sense of frustration that causes IT Leaders to shy away from working with college students.
Non-IT business professionals, sometimes called “super users“, are a fantastic under-tapped resource. This resource has both the technical and business knowledge that can prove invaluable to any IT department. Providing existing employees with an opportunity to rotate into the IT department can be a win-win situation: you get the talent that you need and the employee gets a brand new career track.
What are we really looking for when we go to fill an IT position? We’d really like to find candidates that have three things: technical skills, business knowledge, and interpersonal skills. The ponds that we’ve been fishing from for these types of workers has just about dried up. In order to meet the staffing challenges of the future, we’re going to have to start fishing in other ponds.
Rethinking about how we attract, develop, and then retain college recruits can pay huge dividends. Who wouldn’t want to hire someone that they already knew and who they had groomed for a specific role in the organization? Likewise inviting non-IT business professionals to join the IT department solves staffing problems and breaks down internal walls.
Learning to do a better job of fishing for new talent will mean that you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.
Where do your new hires come from – other IT companies? Have you used college students before? How did that work out? Could you list 5 “super users” who work in your company right now? How many of those would be interested in working in IT? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.
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They say that the world is becoming a smaller place – I think that they just might be right. IT Leaders are starting to realize that coming up with ways to staff their teams so that they are diverse is quickly moving from being a political nicety to now becoming a business necessity. Does anyone have any suggestions on how best to go about doing this?
It may seem a little crazy to talk about how to handle promotions during an economic downturn, but they are still happening (hey, sometimes self-promotion yields results!) Additionally, once the world economy picks up again, there will be even more of them. What’s an IT Leader who was once “one of the guys” to do when he /she is suddenly their boss?
Nell Minow is the co-founder of The Corporate Library and she’s gone through this very experience. One of the lessons that she’s learned is that how you go about defining things really counts. One of the biggest changes that Minow had to go through was how she defined “we” and “they” (we ALL use these terms everyday). What she discovered was that the wider she made her definition of “we”, the better off everyone was.
When all of a sudden you find yourself in charge of a group of IT professionals, you may discover just like Minow did that your built-in parenting skills are going to be called on. Your interaction with your team is going to be broken into two types of activities. They will come to you and say “Look at what I did!“, and you’ll have to say “Good job – do more!” Likewise, sometimes they will come to you and say “He took my stuff!” (budget, staff, office) and you’ll have to say “Give it back.”
Immediately after you are promoted, you need to have a talk with your former colleagues. Minow points out that your relationship with them has been changed and this needs to be addressed. She used this as an opportunity to say “If you have a problem, then I have a problem.” However, at the same time she told them “I refuse to be responsible for a problem that is not brought to my attention.” Minow also insists that anytime someone brings her a problem, they also have to propose a solution to it. Not just any solution, she insists that the solution must cost less than the problem!
We all love to be promoted. It’s an acknowledgement of what we’ve been able to accomplish at our job. However, every IT Leader knows that promotions change the relationships that we’ve developed with our colleagues. These changes need to be dealt with in the open in order to allow our teams to move forward. If you can do this successfully, then you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.
Have you ever been promoted to be in charge of people that you used to work with? How did that affect the relationships that you had with those people? Have you ever worked for one of your colleagues who got promoted? Did they take the time to redefine your relationship? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking. Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.
It’s starting to look like the economic winter just might be getting ready to thaw. Once this happens, IT Leaders realize that they’re going to have a massive task added to their already overloaded plate – recruitment.
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