Author: Jenn Steele

On Freedom

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I’ve decided to keep this blog focused on leadership (and perhaps grammar), and I’ve started a different blog on inbound marketing. Why? Because I’m finally free to post my actual thoughts.

I couldn’t always post my ongoing leadership thoughts because I had to be very careful that none of my geeks or anyone else in my firm thought that my posts were real. Somehow, if there was even the slightest hint that one of my geek constructs was based in real life, paranoia ensued. Perfectly understandable, but very limiting to my blog!

Oh, my posts still won’t be based on actual geeks I know or who have reported to me, but I expect that no one will be suspicious now. As such, I can let my thoughts on leadership and leading geeks “flow” more readily.

I’m excited to see what will come.

On Changing Careers

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Eleven years ago today, I started my first job in IT (although it was still called MIS back then). It was a career change away from the medical profession (I was a really bored medical secretary who had applied to med school), and it led me a very long way. I moved from there to my first law firm, and then became IT Director of two different Boston law firms.

By the time this post publishes today, I’ll be several hours into my first day as an Inbound Marketing Consultant at HubSpot. Eleven years after entering IT, I am making another career change.

Some of you knew this change was coming, some didn’t. I figured I’d take advantage of this “announcement” post to answer some questions that I’ve been asked recently:

Why the change?
Well, you know the saying that some folks climb all the way to the top of the ladder only to find that it’s leaning against the wrong building? Yeah, that’s me. I wasn’t happy doing what I was doing and cared more about a lot of the peripheral job functions (okay, well, leading geeks and budgeting weren’t truly peripheral…) than I cared about the plumbing aspects of the job.

But weren’t you really active in the legal IT community?
Yup. And leaving ILTA was incredibly difficult. However, in many ways, ILTA and my role as Social Networking Coordinator for the ILTA ’09 Conference precipitated this change. I realized that I adored what I was doing in marketing and social networking, and I decided to follow my heart.

What’s going to happen to this blog?
Leadership is still incredibly important to me, and I expect that I will still blog on the topic. I also expect that I will become a “geek in transition” and will blog about what I’m learning at my new job. I’m going to blog on what interests me, and we’ll all just see where it goes. I definitely appreciate those of you who have been reading since I started blogging in early ’08, but I understand that you’ll stop if I bore you. I hope to not be boring, but such is life, eh?

This should be an interesting ride.

On Boredom

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I truly hate being bored. I don’t mean “I have nothing to do” bored, I mean “I’m doing something that requires less than 1% of my thoughts but doesn’t leave me free to think/do something else” bored.

I don’t think I’m alone in this sentiment. I’ve noticed that most geeks also hate that latter form of boredom. I can’t say I’m surprised–most geeks are intelligent, creative, and like using their brains; the antithesis of boring work.

The problem with this is that with my job and with the jobs that many geeks have, we have rote, boring work that HAS to get done. This work is very easy to delay until it becomes a problem for me, for the geek, or for someone else at work. To avoid this, I employ the following strategies:

  • Identify the boring work. If I want to avoid the work badly enough, I can conveniently “forget” that it exists. I try to identify what I have to do but might prefer to ignore at least once a week.
  • Don’t delay gratification. I’m a morning person. If I try to kick off my day by getting the boring work done “first”, I may as well just go home. Instead of investing my high-energy morning creativity in interesting, creative tasks, I have just frittered it away by doing energy-sapping, boring work. By waiting to do boring work until my mid-afternoon slump, I maximize my time and energy investment. (Note: If I weren’t a morning person, I would probably reverse the process and do boring stuff first thing when I was mostly brainless.)
  • Assign a time to boring work. Approving invoices is perhaps my most tedious task. When do I do it? Friday afternoons, of course. Why? My brain has already left the premises, so I may as well spend my time wisely and do my rote tasks then. Also, by assigning a time (which is on my calendar with a reminder), I don’t allow myself to conveniently “forget” to do the work.

But enough about me. How do you handle the boring parts of your job? What works for you? I’d love to learn new strategies!

On Wars and Battles

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself using the phrase, “Right war, wrong battle.” As a principled leader, I’ve fought wrong battles many times without realizing that fighting those battles may have cost me the wars I was trying to win. As a geek, I’ve found myself doing the same thing. I’ve been so concerned with doing things right that I miss out on my chance to do what might be far more effective in achieving the right result.

Think of it this way: if you use all of your ammunition in winning a single battle, you won’t be able to fight in subsequent battles, which will cost you the war. Whether your ammunition is political capital, human resources, trust, or budget, this analogy holds.

I’m resolving to ask myself the following questions:

  • What war am I trying to fight?
  • Is this situation simply a skirmish?
  • Will winning this battle cost me the war?
  • Is there a better battle for me to fight?
  • What is my ammunition? What resources am I burning to fight this battle?

Surrendering a battle isn’t my nature. I am passionate about achieving effective, efficient results for my company, and my default behavior is to fight for that in every situation. I’m hoping, however, that by prioritizing the war over each battle, I will become a more effective leader.

On Burnout

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This isn’t actually a blog post. This is just letting everyone know that between my grandfather’s passing 2 weeks ago and the (totally awesome) ILTA Conference, I’ve been a little out of action.

Wait, maybe it’s a blog post after all. Turns out that I just can’t keep my mouth shut when I have a thought.

Except that this thought is, “I’m burned out”. Not such a surprise, after presenting some obscene number of times last week (6 if you count the regional meeting and the vendor presentation. More if you count two quick ILTA TV spots (that I’ll link to when the links become available)). Here are my observations on being burned out:

  • I repeat my thoughts to myself more than usual.
  • I repeat my thoughts to others more than usual.
  • It is much harder to put together a complete sentence.
  • I have to write more things down.
  • Unfortunately, I find it difficult to read my handwriting.
  • People keep telling me I look tired.
  • Rote tasks are actually easier.
  • I keep habitually working long hours, but don’t get as much done.
  • I feel stupid.

When I’m less burned out, I should be able to apply the above to leading my geeks. Right now, though, I’m just glad that we have a long weekend coming…

On Triage

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Those of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook might have noticed that I had a bout with food poisoning on Thursday night that landed me in the Emergency Room. I’m feeling much better now, but had an unfortunate experience with triage in the ER.

We had elected not to call an ambulance; my husband drove me to the hospital (with me in the fetal position in the front seat). I walked myself into the ER and told them I was in excruciating stomach pain. They handed me a pager and told me to sit down. By the time my husband parked and walked in, I was back in that fetal position and sobbing from pain. (I don’t cry much; this really freaked him out.)

Somehow, my sobbing from the pain (where everyone else in the waiting room looked much, much healthier) didn’t change my order in the triage queue. The patients were all staring at me and wondering what was going on, but this didn’t seem to phase the nurses.

What happened? Well, I got pushed to a “normal” place in the queue, I believe, for the following reasons:

  • I didn’t arrive in an ambulance.
  • I walked in on my own two feet.
  • I was able to articulate what was wrong with me.
  • I occasionally made jokes, despite the pain (this is how I deal with pain. Weird, yes. I think it’s to make everyone around me feel better).

The Help Desk is one of my departments at work, and I realized that they have to triage as well. It’s very easy for them to mentally dismiss anything stated to them calmly, even though the situation might be much more severe than it looks at first glance. Had I needed my stomach pumped emergently or it was something other than food poisoning, the way I was triaged would have ended with serious health consequences for me. In customer support, you always have to treat the problem as it deserves, rather than according to the way you perceive the person to act. That’s the only way to properly triage anything.

On Passion

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I keep contemplating the recent statistics that indicate some huge percentage of workers will be fleeing their jobs once the economy bounces back. I find I’m more interested in the other side; the people who want to stay in their jobs. What makes them want to stay? Aren’t they under the same pressures as the others? Aren’t they just as overworked? Don’t they have the same bosses/teammates/working environments?

While some of them might not have the same boss/pressure/working environment ugliness that the “departers” do, I think most of the “stayers” are probably in the same situations as their cohorts. I think the biggest difference is that the stayers love something about what they do.

They might not like certain aspects (boss/pressure/etc.), but there is something about the stayers’ current jobs that ignites their passion. Maybe they love the work. Maybe they love the industry. Maybe they love the team or the flex hours or the proximity to their kids’ schools. Whatever it is that they love, it’s both a personal priority and a passion.

If you’re one of the departers, you probably want to consider your priorities and passions for your next job. If you haven’t identified what’s important to you, you probably won’t find it. If you don’t find it, you’ll be yet another departer. Personally, I’d much rather be a stayer. How about you?

On Credibility

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This morning, I decided to try out a new smoothie place. I walked a block out of my way, only to discover a “sorry, we’re closed” sign. On that sign were the company’s hours, stating that they should have opened an hour earlier. Disappointed and somewhat annoyed, I walked back to my bus stop. That store had lost both credibility and my business.

This got me thinking about geeks and credibility. There are two kinds of credibility we need to have: personal and technical.

Personal credibility is the easier of the two. Do what you say you’ll do. Communicate if you can’t for some reason. Admit when you’re wrong. It takes some work to squash your ego and do some of this, but it’s completely do-able.

Technical credibility is far more difficult. Especially if you’re working with systems and software that you did not build and that are not documented. Land mines could abound, and you’ll probably step on a few. Unfortunately for geeks, non-geeks usually interpret lack of technical credibility as lack of personal credibility, and schisms build.

As a geek leader, I’d like to say that there’s an easy solution to the schism problem, but there’s not. Especially if you’re a new geek in the company, people won’t trust you (since personal credibility must be built). Step on a few land mines (or have a few old pieces of equipment fail), and you have to start from zero again and again. The only way to build credibility is to maintain personal consistency and do your very best to fix the systems or software to eventually be able to maintain technical credibility. It’s frustrating, but necessary.

On Communication and Customer Service

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Recently, I had some trouble with my gym. It was time to re-up my personal training package, and the gym had changed owners since the last time. My trainer tried to facilitate matters, but no one from management got back to me for over a week. Even though they had been told (3 times!) by my trainer that I wanted to take care of it before I left for vacation, I finally received the package information after I had already left.

The price had gone up significantly, even with a discount. So I emailed back after my vacation saying the following:

Wow; that’s a 14% price increase over last time, even with the 10% price break! That’s awfully steep, given that the gym’s physical quality hasn’t improved at all (in fact, there are fewer weights to train with in the lower poundages, decreasing the quality of my experience when my trainer has to substitute).

What’s going on with this??? The locker room is filthy, too.

Management’s response? Silence.

I talked to my trainer about the utter lack of response, and she tried again to facilitate conversation. When she got back to me, she said that management wasn’t planning to reply and that I “just needed to tell [her] what I wanted.” To me, this was completely unacceptable, and I flew into a raging fit. I emailed my management contact and cc’d her boss, demanding lower prices, more weights, and a clean locker room. I quoted their mission statement and press releases to them, saying that I hoped they could learn to live up to their claims.

A few hours later, I received an obsequious apology, letting me know that they were increasing their cleaning and were so sorry for my experience, etc. I relented and re-upped my package. End of story.

Of course, the story could have ended much sooner, and it could have ended without an enraged customer and many difficult conversations between management and my trainer. How?

My management contact could have simply replied to my initial questioning email, saying something like, “I’m sorry you’re not happy with conditions, but we’re still working to improve your location. The 10% discount brings the 30-session package down to previous levels, and we no longer offer the 40-session package that you had.” My response to that would have been vastly different. Even though I didn’t like the answer I got, I would have sucked it up and renewed my package at the quoted price.

So much of customer service is about communication. Even if the answer isn’t what the customer wants, it will still make him happier than an utter lack of response. Had my gym’s management contact realized that, it would have saved us both hours of frustration.