Month: August 2008

Jenn Speaking at ILTA ’08

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For any of you who might be attending, I’ll be speaking at the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) 2008 Conference in Grapevine, Texas next week.

On Monday, August 25th at 10:30 AM, I’ll be a panelist in the “Best Practices in Professional Development in Law Firms” panel. Ruth Halpern, of Halpern & Associates, put together this panel; she’ll be providing the “meat” of the content, while Kathryn McCarthy and I will be telling all sorts of stories.

On Monday, August 25th at 4:00 PM, I’ll be a panelist in the “Business Continuity Technologies that Work for Law Firms of All Sizes and Shapes” panel. This panel should be fun–there are a lot of characters with a wide range of disaster experience. My role is pretty much the poster child for “what not to do.”

If you happen to be a New England ILTAn, I sincerely hope to see you at the Regional Meeting at 5:15 in Austin 1, 2, 3. After all, percentage attendance is one of the events for the Regional Competition!!

On Communication

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Let’s face it: geeks can sometimes be poor communicators.

(It’s tempting to end the post there to prove my point…)

I’ve seen geeks forget to inform colleagues and bosses that they’ll be on vacation, geeks neglect to inform companies about scheduled downtime, geeks fail to ask essential questions, and everything in between. So how does one, as a leader of geeks, deal with this?

  1. Know yourself. Many geek leaders were once geeks themselves. Have you inadvertently created a culture of non-communication? Do you tell your geeks if you’re leaving the office to play golf or have lunch? Do you let them know about potential changes and plans?
  2. Know your geeks. Wander into offices and cubes and ask what’s going on. Ask “why?”. And actually listen.
  3. Communicate about communication. Let your geeks know what is and isn’t acceptable to keep quiet about. For example, I make it clear that my geeks can tell me as much or as little as they want about their lives outside of work, but if I ask what they’re working on for their jobs, I require answers.
  4. Leave your door open. Allow your geeks to come by when they feel like doing so. Won’t happen much, but some geeks are more comfortable chatting than emailing. No, really, I’ve seen it. Honest.
  5. Revisit things. Introverted geeks won’t ask all their questions and voice their concerns in an initial face-to-face meeting; they’ll need to mull it over. If you don’t give them space to bring up these thoughts, you may never hear them. And they’re probably good thoughts to hear.
  6. Consider written communication. Email can be useful for this, but I’m planning to set up a wiki for my department to track projects.
  7. Don’t play the blame game. There are definitely unacceptable levels of communication (see examples above), but before ranting and raving at your geek about how he or she was REQUIRED to tell you about the system change, go into inquiry mode. Find out why the geek forgot to do it. Make it clear that it can never happen again, and then, if necessary, examine ways to prevent it. You may need to make a template email that the geek can send out to the company for downtime, or you may simply need to accept an apology.

If you try, you can probably create an environment where your geeks will communicate more. They’ll never become The Great Communicator (thank goodness), but you should definitely see some improvement.

On Inquiry

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Good geeks ask “why?”.

If you give them a number to hit, they’ll ask “why?”. If you tell them your sales goals, they might ask “why?”. If you ask them to do something, they’ll ask “why?”.

If your geek fails to ask “why?”, you probably don’t have a great geek on your hands. Or she is shy, and you should make her comfortable enough to ask “why?”.

Why?

Well, I’m glad you asked…

Asking “why?” shows curiosity, which is a close cousin of creativity. I find that geeks can get to the fundamental issues of a matter and develop a solution that is often better than the original task proposed (the one that they questioned). If they don’t ask “why?”, your geeks risk getting stuck in the box of your way of doing it.

Yes, it’s possible for them to go overboard, and sometimes you won’t have a good answer to their question, but don’t be worried when geeks ask “why?”, be worried when they don’t.