Posts Tagged ‘team dynamics’

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

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

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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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Group Decisions Can Be The Wrong Decision For IT Leaders

Thursday, May 28th, 2009
IT leaders Need To Know How Groups Make Decisions

IT leaders Need To Know How Groups Make Decisions

Decisions, decisions, decisions – how is an IT Leader supposed to make good ones? In our eternal quest to find a way to make good IT decisions on technologies, staff, and projects, is there a silver bullet that we can find that will show us the way?

One approach that is used by (too) many IT Leaders is to follow the crowd. I can see you shaking your head, but  come on, admit it, we all like to go where everyone else is going. If you don’t believe me than look around you – what development techniques are you using (agile?), what data center changes are going on (virtualization?), what initiatives are you working on (social networking?). Maybe Jason Zweig over at the Wall Street Journal can provide some insight on group decision making.

How Do Groups Make Decisions?

Group decision making is how a lot of IT decision making gets done. Robert Sutton, an organizational psychologist,  over at Stanford University has spent time studying how groups make decisions. I like what he has to say – “The best groups will be better than their best individual members and the worst groups will be worse than the worst individual.”

Sutton says that the reason that groups to behave this way is because of two things. The first is that they may have a tenancy to follow a given leader in sort of a rush to conform. The other possibility is that the group will split into warring factions and won’t be able to reach any decisions.

How Can Groups Make GOOD Decisions?

Richard Larrick over at Duke University believes that in order for any IT group to be able to make good decisions, the IT Leader needs to have built the group correctly. Groups need to be built using people who have different perspectives, experiences, and who are not shy about speaking up. Of course group members also need to have those IT skills that we all value so highly: the ability to take in lots of information, filter out the important parts, and learn from any mistakes that they make.

Tips For Making Better Group Decisions

So how can an IT Leader help a group to make a good decision instead of getting tied up in knots? There’s no magic cure, but here are some suggestions on what can be done to improve your odds of getting good decisions out of your groups:

  • Measure Success: Use the collective knowledge of the group to clearly define how a decision’s success should be measured. Starting at the end helps to make better decisions.
  • Use Numbers Carefully: Groups like to use facts and statistics when making decisions. However, you need to use this kind of data to rank your options. Then the group needs to do additional research and find out what’s really going on. Then create another list of ranked solutions. Average them out and you’ll have a balanced decision.
  • Reframing: When a group is charged with trying to answer a big question (“should we close our data centers”), use the power of multiple people to take both sides of the argument (“close” vs. “don’t close”) and have them build cases for their position. This will provid you with your best chance of seeing all sides of the question.

Final Thoughts On Group Decisions

Most IT Leaders would like to be thought of as bold decision makers who are never wrong. The reality is that sometimes a group really is needed in order to fully understand difficult questions. Building the group correctly and making sure that they know how to reach good decisions is part of what it takes to be a good IT Leader.

Questions For You

Have you ever had to build a group to study a problem? Did you do a good job of selecting the right people? Have you ever been on a group that was trying to solve a problem? Did you look at all sides of the problem or did you rush to make a decision? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

What We’ll Talk About Next Time

Did you even know that something called an “Non-compete Clause” existed? It turns out that you may have signed one when you started your current job (it differs from company to company). This piece of paper basically spells out the legal agreement between you and the company – they want you to stay and they want to scare you into not leaving…

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IT Leaders Know That It’s Not All About Them

Thursday, April 9th, 2009
IT Leaders Need To Learn To Not Be Micromangers

IT Leaders Need To Learn To Not Be Micromanagers

Please put your hand up in the air if you are a micromanager. Is your hand up – if it is then good, you have a pretty accurate picture of yourself. If it isn’t , then I bet if we talked with the people that you work with, we might get a different answer. By our very nature, IT Leaders tend to be the worst kind of micro-managers.

Where does our micromanaging come from? Of course we love to know how everything operates and so we are always seeking to gather more information. This is part of it, but it’s not the real root of the problem. That has to do with trust.

When you get right down to it, micromanagers simply don’t trust the people who work for them. It’s sorta a “give it to me, I’ll just go ahead and do it myself because it’s too much of an effort to make sure you do it right” sort of an approach.

It turns out that micromanaging any workers is a bad idea, but micromanaging IT workers is the worst. IT workers very quickly start to understand what is going on and they will quickly become complacent – doing only what you tell them to do and no more. This is a recipe for disaster.

So what should an IT Leader be doing? Simple, you need to be doing the following three things over and over again:

  • Help your staff to learn to work by themselves. You can do this by giving them meaningful responsibilities.
  • You need to facilitate the work of your staff even if you are not creating the final product.
  • Finally, you should give your employees clear goals and then step back and let them work out the details.

It was the great general, General George Patton Jr, who probably said it the best: “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”
Do you think that you are a micro-manager? Have you ever worked for a micromanager? How did that make you feel? Did I leave anything off of my list of how best to manger IT staff? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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The IT Manager’s Dilemma: Smart People Or Good Ideas?

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
Pixar Can Teach IT Leaders A Lot About Selecting Staff For Teams

Pixar Can Teach IT Leaders A Lot About Selecting Staff For Teams

When an IT manager is given an assignment to complete a project, who should he/she want to have on their team? Within the world of IT, there are many different types of people that you can choose from, but all too often it comes down choosing people who are as smart as (or less) that you or choosing people who are smarter than you are. What should an IT manager do?

Ed Catmull is one of the founders of Pixar and he is currently the president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios (they merged just awhile ago). He wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review in which he discussed how managers at Pixar deal with this problem.

Catmull is a firm believer that you really need to have the smartest people possible on your team – even if they are smarter than you are. In fact, Catmull is a firm believer that smart people are even more important than good ideas.

All of Pixar’s films have been big commercial successes. However, there have been projects that have almost caused the company to fail. It’s from these stories that Catmull has become convinced that having smart people on your team is a necessity.

Pixar’s first big successful film was called Toy Story. After this hit, the creative team that made it got busy on Pixar’s next film that was to be called A Bug’s Life. Pixar also wanted to make a follow-up film to Toy Story which would be called Toy Story 2. Because the original creative team was busy, a second creative team was assembled to mange this project.

Originally Disney who was distributing Pixar’s films at the time wanted Toy Story 2 to be a direct-to-video release which meant that both the cost and the quality could be lower. However, Pixar decided that having two different standards for quality would be bad for the studio’s morale and so Disney was convinced to make it a full theatrical release.

The way that you make an animated movie is to create storyboards which are crude pencil sketches of the movie’s action and mate them with dialogue and temporary music. The result of this is called a story reel. As the team worked on Toy Story 2, these story reels were not improving like they should have been.

The reasons for this were many. The Directors and the Producers were not able to work together in order to meet the challenges that they were facing. One key point to realize is that there was nothing wrong with the story – everyone was very happy with the initial story. It’s just that the team was having problems turning it into a compelling movie.

In the end, Toy Story 2 was saved and went on to be a big commercial success for Pixar. How was this done? The original creative team was able to wrap up their work on A Bug’s Life and they swooped in to save the day. The specific things that they did changed it from a ho-hum movie to an interesting one.

All Disney released movies have a happy ending; so this was never in doubt in the work that the original creative team had put together. The new creative team took this, tore it apart, and inserted several points in which a happy outcome was by no means guaranteed. This made the movie much more interesting.

Pixar’s lessons from this project should resonate with IT leaders everywhere. Catmull says that the most important of these lessons “…is that if you give a good idea to a mediocre team, then they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.”

The other lesson that IT Leaders need to learn from Pixar is that every IT department needs to have only one quality bar by which to measure each project. You need to be able to communicate to the entire department that it is unacceptable to have some ok projects as well as great projects. This is how you move beyond lip service for quality…

When you are pulling together a team for a project, are you willing to choose the best people for the project? How do you feel about having people who are smarter than you on a project? Does this cause friction? Does your IT department grade every project when it’s done? Are all projects of the same quality? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Are You A “Tuned In” IT Manager?

Friday, January 9th, 2009
Great IT Leaders Know How To Resonate With Their Staff And Make Gut Decisions

Great IT Leaders Know How To Resonate With Their Staff And Make Gut Decisions

Just how do great IT managers go about making decisions? We all have different ways of doing this, but many of us talk about making “gut decisions”. What this is really a way of saying is that an IT leader who has good business instincts is a great value to the company that they work for.

Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis have written an article in the Harvard Business Review in which they call this type of leadership as being the ability to recognize patterns. We’d all like to have more of this kind of accurate decision making ability – so where does it come from? Bad news here – it comes from extensive experience.

If you want to become known as someone who can make good, quick decisions, then start trusting your gut; however, also make sure that you get as many inputs from others as possible. The time that it requires to get inputs from others can often take too long to collect. What’s an IT leader to do?

It turns out that you can probably trust your gut. This is because in your brain you have a class of neuron cells that are called “spindle cells”. This type of neurons both attaches to other cells easier and transmits information to them quicker.

The ability to quickly connect and transmit judgments, beliefs, and emotions creates what scientists like to call our “social guidance system”. This system gets used whenever we have to make a choice among several different alternatives.

This system also helps us to make up our minds as to if someone that we meet is trustworthy. It turns out that within 1/20th of a second these spindle cells will fire and we’ll decide how we feel about someone. Studies have shown that these quick decisions actually turn out to be quite accurate.

What all this means is that as long as you can “tune in” to your staff’s moods, you should feel comfortable trusting your gut instincts. There is a physical side to all of this that can impact your staff.

It’s called “resonance”. Researcher Annie McKee says that this is similar to what you see when you see people dancing together, getting ready to kiss, or when they are playing musical instruments together. Teams that are being lead by a skilled IT leader are often physically coordinated in how and when their bodies move together during meetings.

Give this some thought and start trusting your gut more. It appears as though your first thought is more often then not the right decision!

Do you trust your first impressions? Do you ever seek inputs from others in order to confirm what your initial impression was? Do your first impressions turn out more often than not to be right or wrong? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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