Posts Tagged ‘one on one meetings’

Free Answers From Google On How To Be A Better Manager

Thursday, August 25th, 2011
Image Credit
Google Has Been Searching For What Makes A Good Manager

Google Has Been Searching For What Makes A Good Manager

One of the biggest challenges that modern IT leaders face is how to do a good job of managing their IT team. The burden of making the right technology decisions, managing budgets, and meeting the needs of the rest of the company is challenging enough, but what can make or break a manager is how good of a job you do nurturing and growing your staff. The folks at Google have the same issues and they’ve harnessed their immense computing power to come up with a solution…

How Google Solved The Riddle Of IT Management

I’m not sure if you’ve been reading the news lately, but Google’s been having a problem: they are starting to lose their IT employees. Once upon a time Google was the coolest place on the planet to work, but things have changed.

With the arrival of cooler places to work (i.e. Facebook), folks have been defecting from Google in droves. Adam Bryant reports that this may be one of the reasons that some of the Google number crunchers were tasked to work on a new project in early 2009: Project Oxygen.

This team was charged with crunching all of the data that Google had gathered in order to determine what characteristics of bosses the Google employees were looking for. Basically Google wanted to know what makes someone a good boss.

To determine this, the team wrote code to process all of the performance reviews, results from employee feedback surveys, and nomination forms for top managers. What they were looking for were words and phrases that dealt with either praise or complaints.

What Google Found Out

At Google, technical expertise has always been what they’ve valued in their employees the most. Managers there were encouraged to be hands-off types of managers – don’t hold your people back. The thinking was that if workers got stuck, they could then reach out to their bosses for help because it was assumed that their bosses had deeper technical skills.

Well guess what, they got it wrong! It turns out that what IT workers were really looking for is what we’ve always been told that a manager should be: involved.

Here are the top 5 most important characteristics of an effective IT leader as uncovered by Google’s data mining efforts:

  1. Be a good coach

  2. Empower your teams and don’t micromanage

  3. Express interest in team member’s success and personal well-being

  4. Don’t be a sissy: be productive and results orientated.

  5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team.

What All Of This Means For You

I guess what Google found out shouldn’t really come to any of us as that much of a surprise. I think that we always knew that the secret to successfully managing an IT department had to be the same secret that every other department in the company was trying to uncover.

Google started out thinking that the ability to master technology was the answer and ended up with a completely different answer – it’s the human touch in the end that is the most important. I believe that this lends a lot of creditability to their findings.

IT Managers need to step back for a minute and think about what this means: we’ve got to start to take the time to truly connect with our team if we want them to experience true job satisfaction. I believe that we can all do this, it’s just that we all need to take the time to do it right!

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

Question For You: Do you agree that an IT leader’s technical skills are less important than their “soft” people skills?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I’ve got some bad news for all of you IT managers out there: it turns out that 25% of the best workers in the IT department are planning on leaving within the next 12 months. Not to depress you even more, but it turns out that those internal job change programs that you have perhaps created that are intended to develop the next generation of IT leaders don’t seem to be working – 40% of the internal rotations that are made by IT “high-pots” (high potential) employees end up in failure. Let’s take a look at what problems you need to solve …

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Posted in management | 6 Comments »

How Do You Prevent A Staffing Disaster Before It Happens?

Thursday, March 4th, 2010
Image Credit If You Are Prepared, Then You’ll Be Able To Prevent An Accident

If You Are Prepared, Then You’ll Be Able To Prevent An Accident

The Coming Disaster In Your IT Department

What do you think the mood of your IT team is right now? Poor? Downright bad? If your workplace is like most businesses out there right now, your team is still reeling from all of the layoffs, hiring freezes, pay cuts, etc. If nothing else, there has been a lingering sense of dread that has been in the air for the better part of two years. What do you need to be doing?

The Scope Of The Problem

There’s nothing physically wrong with your team, they are just really, really stressed out. What this means is that their creativity and productivity are probably at all time lows. You’re going to need to step in and do something about this situation.

I can almost hear you now: “I just don’t have time to do this right now.” Well guess what, you had better start to find the time. Otherwise you are going to find yourself buried in a wave of interviews as you try to fill all of the open positions in your department when everyone leaves.

The Conference Board has done a survey of 5,000 U.S. households (your team may not have been part of the survey, but the results probably still apply) and the results showed that only 45% were currently happy with their jobs. You’ve got a problem on you hands.

Steps You Can Take Now To Avoid Problems Later

You’ve got no budget, you’ve got no open req’s, what’s an IT manager to do when you need to cheer up your team? The good news is that there are a lot of low-cost, no-cost things that you can do that will save you much grief later on:

  • Job Titles: What are the titles of your staff? They are probably pretty boring. One thing that you can do that costs no money is to look into upgrading their titles – titles only, no promotions. Yes, you’d have to work with HR to do this, but the joy of going from “Systems Engineer IV” to “Senior Systems Engineer” can be absolutely amazing.
  • Work Time Options: Is your current team working a forced 9-5 work day? Loosing up on this can be a great no-cost way to pump some life back into the department. Yes, the work still needs to be done and yes, the company still needs to get value for the paycheck that it’s handing out; however, allowing your staff to determine when they work (including both nights and weekends) can go a long way to boosting morale and productivity. A nice side benefit of doing this is that it creates an almost entrepreneurial feeling and all of a sudden everyone becomes more willing to help each other out.
  • Bonuses: Remember when people used to get raises that were more than the cost of living? Well even though those days seem to long gone, one thing that you can do is to talk with HR and get your hands on some bonus money. Once you’ve got it, set up a bonus incentive program and just watch how everyone suddenly becomes motivated.
  • 1-on-1 Meetings: This may be the simplest of all the things that you could do – start taking the time to listen. Set up a time once a week where you’ll turn off the phone and the Instant Messaging and just talk with each staff member individually. This is a great chance for them to blow off steam, share their great new idea, or just have a chat with you. It doesn’t have to be too long – 15 minutes will do just fine.

What All Of This Means For You

As the global economy starts to improve, you as an IT Leader are going to have to start taking steps to make your beaten down staff feel special once again. If you don’t do this, then when the job market picks up, they are going to leave you.

Many of the most effective things that you can do involve low-cost or no-cost actions. Things like changing job titles, becoming more flexible with work times, or even just taking the time to listen better would all have positive results.

No matter what you decide to do, make sure that you do something. There is nothing more important for you to be spending your time on than making sure that your talented and experienced staff stay on board with you.

Question For You: In your company, what would the easiest thing be for you to do in order to boost your team’s morale?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

In the life of an IT Leader, there will come the day that you find yourself in a new position. You might be working for the same company and just be in a different role or you might be starting a new job – no matter, the challenge is the same. Where do you start? It turns out that doing nothing right off the bat might be the right idea…

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Posted in staffing | 4 Comments »