Posts Tagged ‘trust’

Whatever Happened To IT Worker Loyalty?

Thursday, July 28th, 2011
Image Credit IT Workers Are No Longer A Company's Best Friend

IT Workers Are No Longer A Company's Best Friend

Hey IT manager, just how loyal to your company are you? How loyal do you think that your team members are? I’m betting that the answer to both of these questions is “not very”. Given that that is the current situation that we find ourselves in, how did we get here and what is an IT manager to do about it?

What Happened To IT Worker Loyalty?

Once upon a time, as all good fairy tales start, IT workers did feel loyal to the company that employed them. The baby boomers who are running IT departments these days grew up in an era where loyalty to the firm was rewarded.

The thought was that if an employee was willing to stick with a company through thick and thin, then the company would reward the employee with long-term employment, career advancement, and both a pension and health care benefits long after they had retired. Those days are now officially gone.

What has replaced IT worker company loyalty is more of a temporary agreement. It goes something like this: workers say “if I use my skills and talents to complete work for you, then you’ll pay me but our relationship is not a long-term relationship.”

What Do IT Workers Want These Days?

Given that this is the new reality of the IT workplace, what does this mean for IT managers? One of the most important changes is that younger IT workers now expect that they will end up having many more jobs than the boomers ever did.

IT managers need to be aware that as the younger generation comes into the workplace, the lack of loyalty will mean that managers’ jobs will need to change. A key change is that the younger IT workers won’t stay in a job where they don’t feel that they are being challenged. If they feel this way for too long, then these IT workers can be expected to leave the firm for better opportunities.

The new job for IT managers is to make sure that they take the time to retain their workers – company loyalty is no longer going to be doing the job. Instead, IT managers are going to have to take the time to make IT jobs more challenging for members of their teams. On top of this, in order to retain IT workers managers need to find ways to allow IT workers to express their creativity. Clearly keeping members of their team from jumping ship needs to become an important part of every IT manager’s day.

What All Of This Means For You

IT managers need to face a new reality: the days when IT workers had a great deal of loyalty towards the company that they were working for are long gone. Boomer IT managers especially have to come to grips with this new reality.

What has replaced worker loyalty is a form of a short term promise: I’ll work hard for you while I’m here as long as you agree to pay me well and we’ll both agree that this relationship won’t last forever. This is the employment situation that IT managers need to deal with.

IT managers can still accomplish great things even given the lack of employee loyalty. In order to retain their workers, IT managers need to take the time to ensure that their staff’s jobs are both challenging while allowing them to express their creativity. IT managers who learn how to do all of these things at the same time will find that their teams stick around longer than everyone else’s.

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

Question For You: If there is no loyalty, then what is the best way for an IT manager to get their workers to stay with the company?

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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 your IT team 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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Why Delegation Is So Hard For IT Managers To Do

Thursday, December 9th, 2010
Image Credit Delegation Is Like Running In A Relay Race – You've Got To Give It Up Sometime

Delegation Is Like Running In A Relay Race – You've Got To Give It Up Sometime

Congratulations on becoming an IT manager. If you thought that you didn’t have enough time to get all of your work done before you became a manager, it’s not going to become any easier now. If you try to do it all yourself, you are going to fail. It’s time to try a different way to get things done – delegating.

But I Can Do It All Myself…

Let’s be frank here for just a moment. Yes, with a little luck you CAN do all of the work that needs to be done in your department. However, that’s not why your company picked you to become a manager. Your role as a manager is (here it comes) to manage your staff in order to accomplish far more than you could possibly hope to accomplish by yourself.

What this means is that instead of doing all of the work yourself, you are going to have to allow your staff to do the work that needs to be done. What you need to start doing is delegating work to your staff.

Delegation of work means that you are going to assign a specific task that you are responsible for to a member of your team. The person that you assign the work to needs to agree to complete it. Not only are you assigning the work, but you are also assigning the accountability for completing the assignment to that member of your team.

Here’s an important point: you can delegate accountability, but you can’t delegate responsibility. That means that although another member of your team may actually end up doing the work, at the end of the day your management will still be looking to you in order to make sure that the work gets done.

Delegating Is Good: The Benefits For You

Quick question for you: just what the heck are you supposed to be doing with your time now that you are an IT manager? It turns out that you are not really supposed to be doing IT work – that’s for your team to work on. You are supposed to be spending your time doing manager things like: planning, controlling expenses, doing business planning, getting funding and people, and dealing with staff issues.

I’m willing to bet that you currently have too much work to do. That clearly shows that you need to become a better delegator. By assigning work to your staff, you’ll take it off of your plate and reduce your overall stress level.

One of the benefits of delegating that most IT managers don’t take the time to realize is that it is exactly what your staff wants you to do. By delegating tasks to your staff, you are telling your team that you trust them to get the work done correctly and on time. This feeling of trust is a two-way street and the stronger that it is, the better your team will function.

Additionally, everyone on your team has career aspirations. In fact, someday they’d all like to have your job. Hopefully, when that day comes, you will have been promoted to a higher position (CIO?). By giving members of your team the ability to show how well they take directions and can complete work, you have a great way to evaluate them and determine who you will recommend to take over your position once you’ve moved on.

What All Of This Means For You

The good IT managers are the ones who can get the most work done. The bad ones are the ones who try to do everything themselves and end up getting nothing done. In order to be successful, you are going to have to get good at delegating the work that needs to be done to your team.

It is difficult for us IT folks to let go, but we have to. By delegating work that you could do yourself to your team, you accomplish several things at the same time. Asking members of your team to complete projects for you allows you to develop a feeling of trust between you and your team. It also gives you a way to evaluate the work performance of members of your team so that you’ll know who to recommend for promotions when the day comes.

It’s not easy to give up control over how work gets done, but it is a fundamental part of being an IT manager. The better that you get at delegating work (and making sure that it gets done correctly, on time), the more successful you will be as an IT manager.

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

Question For You: What IT manager tasks do you think should never be delegated?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

You can do it (all)! Well, not really. In fact the really good IT managers realize that they can’t do it all. However, most of us seem to forget this and find ourselves in an overload situation where we’ve got too much to do and just not enough time to do it. How can we tell when things are starting to go bad so that we can prevent it from happening – before it happens?

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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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