Posts Tagged ‘staffing solutions’

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How Should IT Leaders Use Outplacement Services?

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
Outplacement Services Can Help The Laid Off IT Leader

Outplacement Services Can Help The Laid Off IT Leader

Dang it, you’ve been let go. It really doesn’t matter the reason why – just the fact that your (former) employer decided that they could get along without your services can really sting. However, before the door swings close behind you for the last time, the ball is in still in your court and you need to know what to do with it.

As IT Leaders, we are a pretty arrogant bunch.  A recent survey by the global outsourcing firm Right Management found that seven out of 10 job seekers thought that they knew exactly what they needed to do in order to land their next job. However, once they went through the outplacement service, that number dropped down to two.

At most firms, when a layoff sweeps through and you get caught up in it, you will be offered the services of an outplacement firm. Many of us poo-poo this because for one reason or another we think that it won’t be of any help to us. That’s where you’d be wrong.

If you find yourself in this position, here’s what you need to do in order to make the most of the outplacement service that has been offered to you:

  • Don’t Drag Your Feet: You’ve been let go, get over it and don’t delay starting to use your outplacement service. The longer you wait, the more competition you will face.
  • Pick Your Consultant Carefully: You can always ask to meet with a different consultant so make sure that the one that you’ve got is the right one for you. Consider things like track record, background, experience in your industry, and of course their current workload.
  • Do Your Homework: You’ll probably be asked to complete personality tests and career assignments. Do them! This is the time for you to make sure that the next job that you get is really the right one for you.
  • Stuff Yourself: The outplacement firm probably offers many different types of classes, workshops, seminars, and networking events. This is your best chance to find out if things have changed and if your type of job is now located in different parts of other firms.
  • Don’t Work Remotely: Although in this day and age it is possible to work with your counselor online, try not to. Instead go into the office and meet with them face-to-face. This will help to build a stronger relationship with them and who knows what other professionals you’ll meet there.

Nothing can make the initial pain of being let go from your IT job hurt less. However, as with so many things in life, the pain fades over time. You need to make sure that you get moving right off the bat so that by the time your pain has faded, you are already in your next job.

Have you ever used outplacement services that were offered by your former employer? Did you have a good counselor? Did you choose to meet with them face-to-face or did you do most of it online? How did it all turn out for you? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Why Are There So Few Women In IT?

Thursday, February 12th, 2009
Why Don't More Women Enter The IT Field?

Why Don't More Women Enter The IT Field?

Oh, oh – this is the kind of blog posting that can cause all sorts of folks to get angry. Before you build up a big head of steam and get ready to fire off an angry “women are just as capable as men” letter to me, wait just a minute. The question that we’re tacking here isn’t if women are better than men at IT, but rather why are there so many more men in IT departments?

With no scientific backing what so ever, I think that a lot of us have made up our own reasons why staff meetings and all hands gatherings sure seem more like a frat party than a balanced gathering of equal numbers of both genders. Some of the made up reasons for this include guessing that women have less interest in “hard” science that makes up parts of IT, women’s educational experience makes them not want to go into IT, or that women are just not comfortable working in the male environment that is today’s IT department.

As an IT Leader who wants to manage a balanced team of both men and women (the world is, after all, made up of roughly 50 / 50 of both), understanding why you don’t have more women on your team is a critical issue that you need to resolve.

Vicki McKinney is an organizational consultant who, along with a number of academic researchers, conducted a study of 815 IT workers back in 2003. They published their results in the Communications of the ACM and what they uncovered was quite interesting.

The first set of questions that they asked tried to answer why a man or a woman would enter the IT field in the first place. It turns out that men were more likely than women to cite “love of technology / computers” as their motive. Women cited “job security”, “ease of entry”, and “flexible work hours” as their motivators for entering IT. What this means to an IT Leader is that men are more driven by factors in an IT job itself. Women are more motivated by factors around the job. This is key knowledge when you are trying to motivate a team.

Another question that was asked dealt with role models. The ability to socialize is critical to advancing one’s IT career and role models can help greatly with this. The surprising answer that came back from the survey was that both men and women had a similar level of experience with role models. What this means is that women have had no problems finding men to act as their role models in IT.

You’re going to like the next set of questions that were asked. This batch was designed to discover if there are any gender related differences in a variety of work-related experiences. What’s interesting is that the answer is YES. Specifically, women reported that their supervisors provided them with greater support in the meeting of their career goals and improving their job performance.

The final set of survey questions centered on career satisfaction. The result of asking these questions was that the researchers found no significant differences between men and women’s level of satisfaction with their IT careers.

So what’s an IT Leader to make of all of this information? Basically two things can be learned. Once in IT, women seem to be just as happy and driven as men. They may have come to IT for different reasons, but once there they share many of the same experiences. However, IT has had and continues to have what the researchers call “an input problem”: too few girls are being attracted to IT as a career path.

If IT Leaders want tomorrow’s IT department to be gender balanced, then more work needs to be done to improve young girls’ knowledge of computer careers as well as making them aware of computer related education. We all need to play a role in getting the message out…!

Do you feel that your department is gender balanced? Do you feel that women have as good of an IT career as men? Do women in your department have a better relationship with their supervisors than men do? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Your Next IT Manager Challenge: Girl Fight!

Friday, January 30th, 2009

On Top Of Everything Else, IT Managers Need To Put A Stop To Girl Fighting At Work

On Top Of Everything Else, IT Managers Need To Put A Stop To Girl Fighting At Work

By this time in the 21st Century, I’m hoping that we’ve all got the diversity message: gender, race, age, sexual orientation (you too California) don’t matter when hiring people for jobs or when managing them. However, it turns out that there’s been a pink elephant lurking in the room that many of us (males) may have not noticed: girl fights!

I’m not talking about “I’ll see you out in the parking lot after work” types of fights. Rather, it turns out that there is a sneaky thing going on in the workplace. Women are actively treating each other badly. Hmm, where did this come from?

Peggy Klaus wrote a telling article in the New York Times a while back in which she pointed out the issue that has been there all along. Peggy is a leadership coach who has truly been there, done that. This has allowed her to spill the dirt on this dirty little secret…

So what are women doing to each other at work? This can be a long list. How about: limiting access to important committees and meetings, holding back on critical information, giving assignments and promotions to others, even blocking access to people who could be mentors or senior management.

Most of these bullying actions can be placed into one of four buckets of bad behaviors: verbal abuse, job sabotage, misuse of authority, or relationship destroying. Who knew that so much bad stuff was going on at work?

The folks over at the Workplace Bullying Institute have done  a study that showed that women bullies target their abuse towards women an amazing 70% of the time. On the other hand, men who are bullies seem to split their bullying equally between the sexes. This leads to the big question: why bully in the first place?

It turns out that there are a lot of theories for why women treat women badly in the workplace (no – this is not a Jerry Springer moment):

  1. Scarcity Breeds Bullies: since promotion spots are so few these days, women at upper levels are unwilling to help women at lower levels advance for fear that promotion spots will go to those that they help.
  2. Go Bootstrap Yourself: This is a familiar one – I had to get to where I am with no help from anyone, so you should have to do the same.
  3. Avoiding Favoritism: in today’s hype-PC work environments, women don’t want to create an appearance that they are favoring females over males.
  4. Hyper-emotionality: Everyone agrees that women are generally more sensitive to emotions than men are. Some also believe that women more easily take offense and can quickly start to hold a grudge. This means that they can start to overreact when they feel slighted by someone.

So what’s an IT Leader to do with all of this girl-fight knowledge? No matter if the IT Leader is male or female, the steps that need to be taken are the same. The first step is create a true “open door” policy so that when girl fighting goes on behind your back, the victims will feel free to come to you and report what is going on.

The second is that you need to call the bully on their actions. Depending on the IT Leader’s gender (like if you are a guy), you need to be careful here. However, mistreating any employee is unacceptable and the bully needs to be told that this will not be accepted.

The nice thing about bullies is that generally when they get caught, they back down and shape up quickly. Yet one more 21st Century task for an IT Leader to master!

Have you ever witnessed any girl fighting going on in your department? Was it a senior female employee bullying a more junior employee? Did anyone tell the bully to stop? What was the final result of the bully’s actions? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What Is An IT Leader To Do When Winning Is EVERYTHING?

Monday, October 6th, 2008
Sometimes IT Staff Can Get Too Focused On Winning At All Costs

Sometimes IT Staff Can Get Too Focused On Winning At All Costs

So here’s an interesting issue that I’m sure that most CIO’s and IT managers would love to have: how best to mange over-the-top “A-Type” personalities? Hey, we all know folks like this (put that mirror down!) These are the people in our company / department / team for which winning can become more important then the big picture. We all seek to have enthusiastic people on our teams, but what can we do when enthusiasm turns into something very, very bad?

So what’s the real problem with really wanting to win a discussion, a bidding war, or a design decision? Simple – focusing too much on winning can cause smart people to make bad decision errors. When IT managers and executives become overcome by competition, they can shift their goals from maximizing value to beating their competition at any cost.

Dr. Deepak Malhotra has done a great deal of study on such folks, and he spilled his guts in an article that he wrote for the Harvard Business Review. What he found, is that there is very strong evidance that, what he likes to call “competitive arousal”, is at the root of a number of high profile business mistakes. IT is not immune to this effect.

Now this brings up a very good point: there is nothing wrong with wanting to win! We all enjoy winning, hey – it makes us feel good. In fact, we are often willing to pay a price to win. Just to make sure that we all understand it, there is often a good reason to want to win. We encounter competitive situations in which we want to win in all sorts of different forms: auctions, negotiations, legal issues, merges, acquisitions, promotions,  or even when we go recruiting new talent. In some of these cases, it may be worth it to end up paying more than the fair value for what we really, really want because it will weaken our competition, etc.

Here’s the trick: if you are going to go after some prize with that much zeal, then you had better have done an upfront analysis of the situation and determined what your limits of loss that are acceptable are. Additionally, you are going to have to balance these against the benefits to your IT organization. If you don’t do this BEFORE you get involved in the competition, and you try to do it DURING the competition then that’s when your competitive arousal will end up overriding your rational decision making process.

So what’s an IT leader to do? We are going to have to provide you with a way to identify what causes this competitive arousal to show up. Once you can spot it, you are going to need some tools that will allow you to avoid or at least reduce the possibility that it will screw-up your IT department’s strategy or destroy your department’s value. We’ll do all of this, next time…

Have you ever seen someone in your department (you?) go out of control when they got into a competitive situation? How did it start – was it them against just one rival or did they face off against a group? When did you realize that they had gone too far? How did it end up? Was there any long term impacts due to this out of control competition? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in management | 2 Comments »

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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