Posts Tagged ‘motivation’

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How Come You Don’t Know What Your IT Dream Job Is?

Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Image Credit What Does Your IT Dream Job Look Like?

What Does Your IT Dream Job Look Like?

Stop. I know that your normal day-to-day is crazy, you are overworked, underpaid and nobody really appreciates all of the fine things that you do. I get all that. My question for you is do you have any idea why you are doing what you are doing? What are you really working towards? If you don’t know, then perhaps now is the time to find out…

What Is Your IT Dream Job?

At the start of each year we all feel sorta guilty if we don’t come up with at least a few New Year’s resolutions. Generally these are quickly forgotten and we move on with the daily grind of life. However, if that’s all there is to life, then things pretty much suck. Wouldn’t you like to be one of those people who always seems to be happy and motivated – like they are working towards something?

Outside of getting a lobotomy or starting to take some happy pills on a regular basis, how can you become one of these “motivated” people? It’s actually rather simple, you need to have a goal. I’m not talking about one of those New Year’s resolutions in which you say that you want to lose 20 pounds or you want to start being nice to everyone. Nope, I’m talking longer term here.

I’m sure that you’ve all seen coworkers who put up pretty pictures of far-away beaches and fantastic locations all around their work cubes (maybe you do the same?) so that when things get bad (everyday), they can imagine that they are somewhere else. It turns out that they are on the right track.

To give yourself something to work for, you need to have a goal that you are working towards and the writer Marvin Walberg suggests that an IT dream job is as good of a goal as any.

Defining Your IT Dream Job

If you are going to be motivated to work towards a future IT dream job, then you are going to have to be able to visualize what that job looks like. Note that is different from how you are living your life right now!

Sure you could just sit back, shut your eyes for a bit and try to picture your dream job, but generally you just end up falling asleep when you do that. How about if we set some ground rules here to help you along?

First off, lets try to make this somewhat realistic. In your dream job you won’t be sitting on a golden throne getting foot massages while lower IT staffers feed you peeled grapes. Get over it. Instead of a visit to fantasy land, let’s try to keep things grounded in reality.

First, you need to come up with a job title – what would your dream IT job be called? This title does not have to currently exist – what would you like the job to be called?

Next, write down a job description. Yes you actually have to write it down or else there is no way that you are going to remember all of it. When you are describing the job you need to add as much detail to it as possible so that you’ll be able to create a vivid mental image of what you want.

Identify who you would be working for. Go ahead and identify who they would be working for. Not all IT dream jobs have you working as the CIO, lots of times we just want to have our own area to focus on and be left alone! Identify who would let you do that.

Who would you be working with? Who would be working for you? Give this some serious thought because often the other people in your work environment determine how much you like your job. It’s your IT dream job, so you get to pick who else is there.

Finally, describe a typical day at work in your IT dream job. When do you arrive at work (do you even go into work)? What is the first thing that you do? How many meetings do you go to? How long is your day? Once again include as many details as possible in order to make it play like a movie in your head.

What All Of This Means For You

We all picked the IT field to work in for a number of reasons. One of these was that it is a dynamic field – it’s always changing. Although at times this can be very frustrating, it also means that the future is not set in stone – we can still shape it.

In order to give yourself the motivation that it takes to be able to move forward with a purpose, you need to be able to picture what you are working for – your IT dream job should be part of this. The key is to sit down and spend the time to write down the details of exactly what that IT dream job would look like.

Once you are able to visualize it in your head, you can come back to your description over and over again in order to get reenergized. It’s this kind of daily motivation that will allow you to become a true IT Leader – you know what you want and you are working towards it.

Do you think that your department’s succession plan should be public knowledge?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Isn’t it every IT Leader’s nightmare: you work long hours, pull of miraculous feats of IT project accomplishment in order to create one of the most complicated pieces of software ever, only to have all of your customers hate it?

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Posted in IT jobs | 1 Comment »

Making Changes To Your IT Department – 8 Things An IT Leader Should Know

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

IT Leaders Need To Learn How To Implement Changes In Their Teams

IT Leaders Need To Learn How To Implement Changes In Their Teams

Have you ever heard the phrase “When senior management doesn’t know what to do, they reorganize”? I’m not sure if this is always true, but it sure seems as though when times are tough reorganizations, restructuring, and even re-engineering are things that can happen to any department in IT. What’s an IT Leader to do about it?

Change Sucks

One of the weirdest facts about a career in IT is that the thing that draws us to this field is that it is so dynamic. However, its been my experience that IT staff can be some of the people who are the least open to accepting changes from the way that things are currently being done.

As an IT Leader you are dealing with two issues at the same time: you need to personally come to grips with the change and you need to find a way to get your team to accept and embrace the change also. Have you ever been trained on how to do this?

8 Ways For IT Leaders To Deal With Changes

On one hand you have “the change”. On the other hand you have your team. As an IT manager you need to find a way for these two things to live together in harmony. I’ve got 8 tips on how you can make this seemly impossible task possible:

  • Don’t assume that people have a natural ability to change: all too often IT Leaders think that they can just tell their team about a change and it will automatically become part of the routine. Most people are going to need constant encouragement to make and stay with any change that disrupts their existing routine.
  • Don’t assume that people will function rationally: once again, assuming that members of your team will do what  you expect them to do once a change is announced is foolish. Instead, think for awhile about how people might react if they don’t like the change – how would you go about resiting or subverting the change if you were just being told about it? Take steps to make it easy to comply with the change.
  • Don’t assume that change is automatic: just saying that things have been changed does not mean that people will automatically change their behavior. You need to set things up so that doing things the old way is now hard, but doing them the new way is easy.
  • Don’t assume that organizations are naturally dynamic: changes that require people to stop doing jobs or start doing new jobs are the toughest to implement. You need to understand that when you make changes to a workflow it’s going to slow everything down and it will take awhile for the team to get back in the swing of things again.
  • Don’t assume that company culture is easy to change: “but that’s the way that we’ve always done it” is a powerful statement. Changes that span multiple departments take longer for everyone to accept because they are changing the company’s culture. It doesn’t matter if the company had a lousy culture, change is still not appreciated!
  • Don’t assume that every aspect of the project will work out as planned: the larger a change is, the more steps will be required to implement the change. Plans are great things, but rarely do they work out exactly the way that you wanted them to. As an IT Leader you need to be ready to step in when something goes wrong and fix it.
  • Change managers can’t be effective without explicit authority: the best way to implement a change in an IT department is to have helpers – feet on the street who will be responsible for making the actual changes that are called for. These staff members can’t hope to be successful if you don’t make it clear to the rest of the team that they have your full support and authority to make the change happen.
  • Don’t just assume that anybody can be an effective change manager: since nobody likes change, nobody likes a change manager. When you pick your lieutenants you need to make sure that they are made of the right stuff and will be able to tough it out and overcome team adversity to make sure that the changes get made.

Final Thoughts

It sure seems like the world continues to move even faster these days and changes just keep on coming. New company owners, new management, new technology, and new competition all seem to be working together to keep things quite dynamic.

IT Leaders need to develop the skills that are needed to implement changes within their teams. No, they won’t always agree with the changes that they are being asked to implement, but they are obligated to implement them anyway. If you can figure out how to do this correctly, then you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

Questions For You

Have you ever been asked to implement a change that you thought was the wrong thing to do? Were you able to convince your team to implement this change? Has there ever been a change that you were not able to implement? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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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Posted in employee motivation | No Comments »

Handling A Promotion Is Something That An IT Leader Needs To Know How To Do

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

When IT Leaders Get Promoted, That Changes EverythingIt 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?

Definitions Count

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.

Parenting Skills Help

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.”

What To Do Right After You Are Promoted

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!

Final Thoughts

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.

Questions For You

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.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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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Posted in promotions | No Comments »

Should An IT Leader Follow His/Her Dream Career?

Thursday, June 11th, 2009
IT Leaders Need To Determine If Another Career Would Make Them Happier

IT Leaders Need To Determine If Another Career Would Make Them Happier

I bumped into one of my longtime friends last week, Mark, and he told me how unhappy he was at his IT job. He was feeling a great deal of guilt over this because his firm had just had yet another round of layoffs and he had been spared. He still had his job, but he hated it. What’s an IT Leader to do in this situation?

The Grass Always Seems To Be Greener…

What caught my attention about Mark’s situation (hating your IT job is not really that novel) was that he knew exactly what he’d prefer to be doing. Mark plays jazz guitar on the side and he’s actually quite good at it. He’d love to do it full time, but he’s afraid to take the leap.

In the current hard economic times, many IT professionals are having the whole “afraid to leap” thing solved for them by getting laid off. If you happen to lose your job, it may cause a deep seated burst of career change desire to well up in you.

Been There, Done That, Now What?

If you find yourself in a situation where you start to long to take up that “other” career that you have always longed to pursue, there is some hard thinking that you are going to have to do. We’ve all heard stories of IT professionals who have walked away from it all to setup restaurants, bakeries, dry cleaning stores, etc. only to seem them fail in a spectacular fashion.

The big question is what separates the crazy second career ideas that we all have from the ones that just might work? Business coach Pamela Slim believes that it’s not the idea, not the career that you are interested in, or even the market that you want to enter. Rather she believes that your success or failure in a second career really depends on you.

Second Career Success Secrets

Slim believes that you can separate your deeply held career urges from those that you pick up from watching an episode of “Dirty Jobs” one night by one simple fact: real second career desires don’t go away over time, they just get stronger. In fact, we can’t ignore them – they are always there.

Hey IT leader should you make the jump? Here’s the question that you have to ask yourself: no matter what job you have, your future will be filled with uncertainty, doubts, and you are  going to find yourself working very hard to keep your head above water. When you reach the end of the race, how much is it going to matter to you if you gave the second career a go or if you let it just remain a passing thought? Answer this question and you’ll know what your next steps need to be as you work to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

Oh, by the way, my friend Mark is still slaving away at his IT job. He continues to dream about a music career, but he loves his regular paycheck more.

Questions For You

If money wasn’t an issue, what job would you be doing today? What makes that job more attractive to you than your current job? Have you ever taken steps to experience what it would be like to work at that other job full-time? What would it take financially for you to switch over to that job? 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.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Would you be showing up in shorts and flip-flops? How about jeans and a T-shirt? Well why don’t you? The answer to this question is something that we normally don’t spend a lot of time thinking about, but because it can have a big impact on our careers, perhaps we should…

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Posted in career | 2 Comments »

How IT Leaders Can Grow Good Ideas

Thursday, April 30th, 2009
IT Leaders Need Practical Ways To Grow Innovative Ideas Within Their Departments

IT Leaders Need Practical Ways To Grow Innovative Ideas Within Their Departments

Innovation, innovation, innovation. Everyone seems to be talking about it, but nobody seems to have any clear guidance for IT Leaders when it comes to telling them HOW to grow good ideas within their IT departments. Well we’re going to change that starting right now.

Dr. Jan van den-Ende and Bob Kijuit have spent some time thinking about this problem and they’ve got some suggestions for us. The problem that they’ve been doing research on is just how to come up with systems that will allow IT departments to nurture GOOD ideas while at the same time getting rid of BAD ideas.

In a nutshell, what they have found is that if you can come up with a way to tap into the input of many people early on in the idea process, then you can make sure that the good ideas make it all the way to the top.

In most companies, new ideas are often collected via some form of  the old fashion “suggestion box”. Using this method, literally thousands of ideas can be submitted in a company of medium size if you have an enthusiastic work force. The problem that this causes is that then someone has to review all of those suggestions and identify the worthy ones. Good luck with that!

What the research has found is that if people take the time to discuss their ideas with colleagues then this helps out a lot. These discussions can help further refine the idea in terms of technical issues or market feasibility. If the idea is really a stinker, then it will cause it to be quickly discarded.

The researchers have also discovered two additional things:

  • if ideas are discussed with colleagues who work outside of the submitter’s department instead of colleagues inside his department, then there was a better chance of the idea eventually being accepted.
  • if ideas were discussed with friends and trusted colleagues then once again the idea had a better chance of eventually being accepted.

The reason for these higher acceptance rates is probably because both close friends and outsiders can give the most frank feedback.

IT Leaders can help their departments to generate innovative ideas. They just need to introduce this additional review and discussion step into the process in order to improve the quality of the ideas being submitted.

Does your IT department have a program to collect ideas from department members? Does anyone currently review and take action on these ideas? Do you get too many or too few ideas submitted? Do you think that adding a peer discussion step in the process would help in your department? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in innovation | 2 Comments »

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