Author: Jenn Steele

Customer Service = Convenience

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Editor’s note: We’ll be announcing all the nifty Leading Geeks changes soon, but Jenn got inspired before that…

I admit it, I subscribe to the Harvard Business Review. I’m a total business/leadership/management geek, and I really enjoy the articles and occasional data porn.  Heck, I’m even on the advisory board.  For a publication that’s supposed to be business-savvy, however, my recent renewal fiasco has been rather startling to me.

  • First I got a special offer to renew via email.  I’d get some articles about leadership.  Awesome!  So I click through the offer, and I can’t tell whether it’s print only or the premium subscription to print + online (what I currently have).
  • So I find them on twitter and ask about it.  (Yes, on twitter.  Deal with it.)
  • Whoops; wrong twitter account.  Apparently, they have several.  Re-tweet that to the correct account.
  • After a few back-and-forth exchanges, they ask me to follow them so they can DM me.  I do.
  • They DM me an email address that I can email for inquiry.  (Seriously?)
  • I try to DM back that email isn’t exactly convenient, but they’re not following me.
  • Meanwhile, I get some snail mail renewal offers, all with the same completely unclear offer–am I renewing print-only or premium? No way to tell.
  • 3 weeks later, I get around to sending that email (wonder why this blog is behind? Yeah; I’m hosed.)
  • They reply with (wait for it!)…AN 800-NUMBER TO CALL.
  • Seriously?
  • So I try to DM them about it.  Still not following me.  Shocking.
  • I send a public @ reply to them about it.
  • THEN I get an email back from that same person with an offer to sign me up for a premium subscription and bill me.

Now, wouldn’t it have been much easier to just give me the choice of renewing print-only or premium subscription on the initial email offer?  Yeah, I thought so, too.

Edit: I just received a customer service survey from HBR.  I’m trying to resist giggling maniacally about it…

Edit #2: Hey! All they ask is why I contacted them and whether my issue was resolved.  Seriously?  I don’t get to give feedback?  Mushrooms…

Edit #3: Oh, wait, it continues to more pages.  Usability fail.

On Illness

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I love my nieces and truly enjoy spending the holidays with them, but this year, I returned home with a very bad cold. And, as I usually do, I forced myself to go to work with it (although I did work from home for a few days, since there was no way to get that much Kleenex at work 🙂 ). This is a bad habit of mine. I have gone to work with walking pneumonia, viral meningitis, swine flu, and countless colds with less ominous names. Why? It’s what I was taught.

At my first post-college job (as a chronic migraine sufferer–thankfully I’m not any more!), my first review went something like this:

“You’re completely amazing. We would need six people to do all the work you do. However, you take all of your sick time, so we’re rating you a 4 out of 10.”

And my bad habit was born!

That said, many geeks–especially IT geeks–do the same thing. They’re aware that the company needs them to come in and fix things, so they drag themselves to work and infect everyone else. The problem is exacerbated by the rigid way that many companies count sick time; many geeks have to save their time for sick kids, etc.

Counting sick time rigidly and creating a culture of coming in despite illness backfires. Sick people infect other people, who perform poorly or take time off. This costs companies much more money than simply letting people stay home when they’re sick!

As such, I was quite impressed by HubSpot’s recent time off policy change. They stopped counting time. They said that they were fully cognizant that everyone put in more than 40 hours/week, and we were professional enough to handle balancing getting our jobs done with taking time off. What does this mean for me? I’ll probably be more likely to stay home when I’m sick. Sure, I’ll work from home (since I’m a type-a workaholic), but my coworkers have much less to fear!

On Termination

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Firing a geek should be the most difficult task for any Geek Leader. If it’s not, the leader should consider that he or she might be too angry to be rational about the situation. I would personally rather handle a broken SAN and pull 5 all-nighters in 8 days (which I have actually done) than terminate an employee. To deal with this necessary evil, I’ve adopted the following strategies:

  • Involve HR. If your company has a Human Resources department, use them! No matter how contentious your relationship may have been in the past (“What do you mean that a wooden bear that poops M&Ms might not be appropriate for the office?”), they’ll still probably be professional enough to help you through the process.
  • Speaking of process, if your company has one, you must jump through those hoops. Yes, even if they seem nonsensical.
  • Keep an open mind. If you’ve decided to warn the employee, be willing to accept that he or she might actually improve!
  • Document, document, document. If you warn the employee, write up the warning to put into his or her personnel file. Keep a log of unacceptable activities. Make sure there’s a paper trail.
  • Obey the law. If your company has very few policies around employee termination, you may want to consider doing some research and involving legal counsel. This is especially important if the employee is in a “protected class” due to age, race, etc.
  • Have a wingman. If you’ve jumped through all the hoops and still have to fire the employee, don’t do it alone. Ideally, involve HR and/or someone further up the food chain.
  • Be direct. Come up with and rehearse your opening lines that communicate that things haven’t been working out and therefore you have made the unfortunate decision to terminate the person’s employment. You’ll probably be nervous during the process, and having rehearsed lines helps.

It shouldn’t ever be easy. You’re taking away someone’s livelihood. Unfortunately, it is all too often necessary to terminate an employee for the good of the team/company. The best leaders–the most respected leaders–do not hesitate to fire a non-performer. Keep that in mind, and do what’s right. Follow the process, and get it done.

You probably won’t sleep well the night before. Frankly, I’d be worried if you did.

On Interviewing

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I have to admit that I find the process of interviewing prospective candidates for a job to be an odd mix of exciting and nerve-wracking. While I absolutely love getting to know people and thinking of the possibilities for them within my organization, I find I often worry about making candidates comfortable and not breaking any of the intricate set of HR laws surrounding interviews. Overall, though, I really enjoy it.

Interviewing geeks has its own challenges, as many of them come in to the interview extremely nervous and shy. Since I can hold a meaningful conversation with a coffee table, I usually talked to them until they would eventually stutter out a few replies from which I could get a decent read. If you’re not as ridiculously extroverted as I am, however, you may find interviewing geeks challenging.

If you’re interviewing geeks, you have to first define your goals. They should be in these general buckets:

  • Technical ability. Can they execute the geeky part of the job?
  • Personality requirements. Can they execute the non-geeky part of the job?
  • Team fit. Will they have credibility on both geeky and non-geeky levels with their fellow geeks and the company as a whole?

Once you’ve defined what belongs in those buckets, figure out how to get to them.

  • Technical ability: What kinds of situational or technical questions do you need to ask? Should you give a written or computerized test? Make sure that the questions are appropriate to the level of the position for which the candidate is interviewing.
  • Personality requirements: I love behavioral interviewing for this. Propose a situation to them and ask how they’ve handled similar situations in the past or would handle this situation in the future. Ask them to tell a story about the last time they got angry or made a mistake.
  • Team fit: You may be able to determine team fit from their answers to the above, but sometimes geeks don’t give much away in their personality even while telling behavioral stories. In that case, it’s time to schmooze. Ask how their weekend went or what they do for fun, and volunteer your own weekend stories and your hobbies. This piece has the most two-way conversation of the entire interview, and those of us who tend towards the quantitative often forget the value of this “useless” chatter.

I haven’t always been perfect in my interviewing (note to self: write blog post on terminations), but as I started defining my goals (“buckets”) and figured out how to get to them, I was able to much better identify good geeks.

On Skepticism

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At the ILTA ’09 conference in August, I attended a couple of sessions by Jason Dorsey, the Gen Y guy. At the second of his sessions, he mentioned a service online that helped people find couches to crash on. Then he said, “You Gen Xers in the room are looking this up right now to see if I’m telling the truth.” I quickly dropped my Blackberry and pretended that I hadn’t been doing exactly that, much to the amusement of the Boomer sitting next to me.

Gen X leaders aren’t as common as we should be. At the point in our careers when the previous generation should start retiring to let us take over, they’re not. Their 401Ks have been decimated, and they just don’t feel old yet (hi, dad!). I was very fortunate to be able to move into leadership early in my career.

As a Gen X leader, I found that leading and managing other Gen Xers was incredibly easy. Here are my tips for managing Gen Xers:

  • Maintain honesty and credibility
  • Address their skepticism
  • Be yourself

Luckily, this leadership style works well for geeks, too, since their intelligence and natural skepticism means that many of them have Gen X attitudes even if they’re older or younger than that generation.

I have to wonder whether anyone has studied Gen X attitudes (skepticism) and juxtaposed that with geek attitudes (also skepticism). I also have to wonder if that means that Gen X geeks are incredibly difficult for non-Gen X non-geeks to manage…

Vendor Story: Message from beyond the grave

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I meant to post this Friday, since it would have been more appropriate for Halloween, but I’m a bit late with it.

I had been IT Director of a Boston law firm for about 4 years, which was plenty long enough to have learned to stop answering my phone. For those of you who might not know, anyone with any sort of decision-making responsibilities in IT could easily spend 10 hours/day just fielding cold calls. As such, if we don’t recognize the number (or if we don’t have an assistant to field the calls), we don’t pick up.

While I didn’t answer my phone, that didn’t mean I didn’t get my voice mail. One day, I got this message:

Hi, Jenn! This is (vendor) from (company). I was just talking to (partner), and he told me that you should definitely get back to me, since your firm is very interested in (service we needed like holes in our heads).

Not such an unusual message, right?

Here’s the problem: that partner he had “just been talking to” had passed away nine months before. To add insult to injury, said partner had been out for nine months before that battling cancer.

I didn’t call the vendor back, but I was sorely tempted to ask him how that partner was doing and what medium he used to talk to him. I mean, wouldn’t that partner’s widow want to know…?

On Disaster

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In my 11 years in IT, I had the dubious honor of going through a few systems disasters. (One actually earned me the nickname, “Waterfall Girl,” when I presented on it at a conference.). Here are the lessons I’ve learned:

  1. People want someone to blame. “Whose fault is this?” Was an oft-repeated refrain during the disasters. Unfortunately, in IT, “No one’s,” is usually the answer.
  2. “I told you so” is incredibly dissatisfying to say after numerous all-nighters.
  3. There’s a big difference between disaster recovery and business continuity. The first is relatively easy; the second will bite you if it’s not properly scaled.
  4. Geeks surprise you. They will do anything and everything to get things back up and running. If you see your geeks in a disaster, prepare to have your preconceptions challenged.

In a true disaster, my first go-to person would be my brother-in-law, the firefighter. However, in any systems disaster–involving waterfalls or not–my first choice would be to find a good geek!