Posts Tagged ‘motivational’

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Do You Want To Work With An IT Trophy Kid?

Thursday, March 5th, 2009
Are You Ready To Have The Millennial Generation In Your IT Department?

Are You Ready To Have The Millennial Generation In Your IT Department?

Even though the world currently looks like it is upside down, there is a much larger change going on that will have a much longer impact than this temporary financial crisis: the arrival of the millennial generation into the IT workplace. Are you ready?

Just to make sure that we’re all talking about the same thing here, the millennial generation were born between 1980 and 2001. With the baby boomer generation getting ready to walk off into the sunset, the millennials are the new kids in town and they are getting ready to shake things up.

Ron Alsop who writes for the Wall Street Journal has taken some time to study what this arrival means for all of us and he’s written a book with his answers in it called The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation is Shaking Up the Workplace. He’s discovered some eye-opening things that all IT Leaders need to be aware of.

If we had to describe the millennial generation’s view of work, the word that everyone seems to use is “entitled” – they want it all and they want it now. What are they asking for? How about: higher pay, flexible hours, promotions within a year, and more vacation/personal time. Why do they think that they’ll get it? Studies show that nearly half of the millennials have a “…moderate to high superiority beliefs about themselves.”

What’s up with these guys / gals? Where did all of this come from? Blame it on the parents (and teachers and coaches). This is the generation that was constantly told that they were the best, the ones that got trophies even when they didn’t win, and were rarly criticized in order to not damage their self-esteem. Now they are in your IT department…!

But hold on. Remember that the millennials have a solid grasp of cutting edge technology – it is a part of their life outside of work. They tend to work very well in teams and they get along well with baby boomers because they remind them so much of their own parents.

These are hard workers who will get the job done as long as an IT Leader points them in the right direction. How best to do that will be covered in another post…

Do you have millennials in your IT workplace (are you one of them)? How is is it going so far – smooth running or choppy waters? Do you feel that their (your) expectations are in line with what the company can offer? When the economy improves, do you think that they’ll stick around or will they leave? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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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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Are You A Socially Intelligent IT Leader?

Friday, December 12th, 2008
Social Intelligence Is What Makes An IT Leader Very Effective

Social Intelligence Is What Makes An IT Leader Very Effective

Them thar brain researchers are at it again. This time around they’ve been doing research in the field of social neuroscience. This is where they study what happens in your brain when you interact with other people. Oh oh! They are starting to get a handle on what it takes to make a good IT leader…

Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis have written an article in the Harvard Business Review in which they lay out these findings. Keep in mind that Goleman is the one who wrote the hugely popular book Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships.

One of the key discoveries to come out of this research is that it’s the things that IT leaders do that can affect both their own brain chemistry as well as the brain chemistry of those who work for them. These things include tuning in to other people’s moods as well as showing empathy.

What researchers are finding is that it’s not correct to say that a great IT leader’s mind is operating by itself. Rather what seems to be happening is that IT leaders’ minds’ are “fusing” with the minds of the people that they are leading. The really great IT leaders are the ones who can make the best use of this single fused mind.

What this is all leading to is that it turns out that the way to become a better IT leader is for you to find authentic work contexts in which you will be able to reinforce this type of brain fusing. To take this one step further, being a good leader is much less about being good at handling specific situations.

Instead, what is important is that you learn how to develop an interest in the people who work for you / with you and find ways to create positive feelings in these same people.

So what is this “social intelligence” thing? Goleman and Boyatzis define it as being “a set of interpersonal competencies built on specific neural circuits … that inspire others to be effective”. Oh, it’s brain stuff.

We’ve all known smart people who were really bad leaders. The two sets of skills do not always go hand-in-hand. What researchers are starting to understand is that the social skills that are needed to be a good IT leader may actually have a biological basis.

If you know and understand this linkage, then you can change your behavior and state to reinforce the neural links between you and your team. We’ll talk about how to do this next time…

Have you ever worked for someone who you really bonded with? Did you ever feel that you could read their mind and know what they wanted? Did you think that they could read your mind? Did they work well with other people also? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What Can Top Athletes Teach You About Being A Better IT Leader?

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
Top Athletes Can Teach IT Leaders How To Reach The Next Level

Top Athletes Can Teach IT Leaders How To Reach The Next Level

So we all know that Tiger Woods is a fantastic golfer. However, do you think that he’d be any good at running an IT department? The answer, somewhat surprisingly, is that yes, he probably would do a good job. The reason is that there is a lot of similarity between being an excellent athlete and being a top-notch IT manager.

Graham Jones is the founder of a company called Lane4 which uses studies of professional athletes to help managers do a better job of managing. One of the interesting things that he has discovered is that in the area of sports, just like in the world of business, one of the main obstacles to achieving something that has been identified as being “impossible” just might be a self-limiting way of thinking.

One of the first things that you have to realize about being an IT leader is that great leaders are not born, but are rather made. Sure some leaders have nature gifts such as communication skills and leadership attributes; however, the most important skill that they need to have is mental toughness – this means that they get better at doing their job when things get tough.

Great IT leaders rise up not due to chance or luck, but rather because they planned to succeed. Specifically, they identified and achieved lots and lots of little goals in order to get to where they are. This requires them to sharpen their skills and to, much like Madonna, reinvent themselves many times in order to stay out in front of their peers.

So what can IT leaders learn from top athletes? Simple, how to succeed over and over again. Here are the steps that are needed to do achieve top performance over and over again:

Gotta Learn To Love That Pressure

Call it what you like, but pressure is what drives great athletes and great IT leaders to achieve their best. What this means for you is that you’ve got to find a way to learn to love pressure. Another way to say this is that you’ve got to commit yourself to using work pressure to continually improve yourself all the time.

One secret to dealing effectively with pressure is to only focus on making yourself better. Don’t let yourself get distracted by other IT leaders who mange / complete successful projects, get promoted, win awards, etc. Instead, focus on those things that you can control and don’t spend any time thinking about the rest.

You need to be able to step away from the workplace pressure. This means that you actually do need to have another life – family / hobbies / sports, whatever. Top athletes have the ability to flip the pressure switch on when they are “on the job” and then flip it off when they are involved in their other life.

It’s All About The Long Term

By the way, you will occasionally fail. This means that you need to have a way to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get back to work. A good way to be able to do this is to have long term goals that you focus on.

What star athletes do is to create very detailed plans that are made up of a series of short term goals. The plan is laid out so that the athlete can do his / her best at the right time – not peaking too early or too late. IT leaders need to do the same. You want to make sure that when you have a big success, it is the right time for it to get maximum exposure within the company.

Push Baby, Push!

We all push ourselves based on the people who we work directly with. If we are working with a bunch of slackers, then there won’t be much self-pushing going on. Instead, we should be searching for opportunities to work with the best-of-the-best. This is very similar to when top athletes train with their fiercest competitors in order to push themselves to be their very best.

Invent And Then Reinvent Yourself

Always be sure to get feedback from trusted sources. This will allow you to understand what you are doing well and where you need to make changes. These changes will allow you to reinvent yourself so that you can become the best IT leader that you can be.

Party Like A Rock Star

Something that IT leaders all to often pass over is to take a break after a major achievement and celebrate. Spending as much effort celebrating a success as you did achieving the success is a way to reward yourself. This is the time to blow off some steam, pause and catch your breath before you push on to the next higher level.

Do you feel like you are performing at your peak management level? Do you have a plan with goals for how you are going to reach the next level in your career? Are you “training” with the best of the best in your office? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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IT Leaders’ Secret Techniques For Motivating Staff

Friday, September 26th, 2008
Secrets IT Leaders Can Use To Motivate Their Staff

Secrets IT Leaders Can Use To Motivate Their Staff

Now that we’ve discovered that all humans, including those in in your IT department / on your IT team, respond to four basic drives, we are now faced with the really big question: how does an IT leader use this knowledge to motivate his/her staff? It turns out that there are actually a number of possible levers that you can pull…

The Drive To Acquire Is Handled By How You Handle Rewards: This is, of course, a classic staff driving lever. How well your IT department sorts out the good performers from the poor ones, how it matches the rewards that it hands out to performance delivered, and how easily it permits talented staff to advance in the organization determines how well you are meeting your employee’s drive to acquire.

The Drive To Bond Is Handled By Your Department’s Culture: Put simply, this comes down to how much camaraderie exists within the department. Does your staff work well together? Is there openness, teamwork, and genuine friendship amont the people who work for you?

The Drive To Comprehend Is Handled By How You Design Jobs: Are the IT jobs in your department both meaningful, interesting, while at the the same time challanging? These are all critical to meeting the needs of this drive.

The Drive To Defend Is Handled By Your Performance Review Process: If the annual performance review process is seen as being fair and trustworthy by all, and if resources are allocated in a transparent way then this will meet your staff’s drive to defend.

The key take-away for you regarding all of this drive stuff, is that in survey after survey, IT employees reported that when there was even a small enhancement to their ability to fulfill any one of these four drives, then their overall motivation shot up. However, (this is also a key point) all four drives have to be met – missing even one can significantly dampen an employee’s motivation.

Finally, employees have said that the statements and actions that their immediate IT managers make are just as important to their overall productivity as all of the company’s policies and rules. Now that’s food for IT leaders to spend some time thinking about…!

How many of these four drives do you try to satisfy in your employees? Do you feel that you are currently being successful? Why/why not? What is blocking you from doing a better job of meeting these basic drivers of your employees? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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