Category: about

Making people successful

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Perhaps I’m a bit optimistic, but I am inherently convinced that anyone can be successful given the right attitude and circumstances.

Two small test tubes held in spring clamps
Photo credit: Wikipedia

I think I came to this conclusion in college.  During my junior and senior years, I was a lab TA for the intro biology lab at MIT (7.02). This class had four major experiments (that I’ll call units), and the TAs would rotate between groups of students for each unit.  During my junior year’s class, one group of students had a 3-person team (all others were 2) that was known as being a complete disaster.  They had no idea what they were doing, and the other TAs would be constantly frustrated by getting them to work successfully on their experiments.

I’ve always been a bit rebellious, so when I rotated to this group on the third rotation, I decided that I wasn’t going to let the other TAs’ frustrations influence me.  I spent the first day of that rotation watching and listening to them.  I discovered that they were struggling to take the protocols designed for two people and expand them to three without being confused.  I started working with them to try to more effectively divide and conquer each day’s tasks (and I had the advantage of having the best teacher for this myself – my lab partner the previous year had been SO GOOD at strategizing in the lab that I had learned some amazing ways to do it).  At the end of that unit, when it came time to grade them, I was able to grade each of them a full letter grade higher than anyone had been able to during the first two units.

My experience with the “disaster” team convinced me that setting up the right circumstances could help pretty much anyone be successful. It (along with my experiences later) taught me that, to make people successful, I needed to:

  1. Watch and learn. Had I not taken the time to watch the “disaster” team to find out what was going wrong, I never would have been able to figure out how to fix it.
  2. Identify the real problem or challenge. And I don’t mean identify the problem that I thought existed before going into the situation . With the “disaster” team, we honestly just assumed they weren’t very good at biology lab. It turned out that their real problem was struggling with logistics.
  3. Communicate. Quite frankly, the “disaster” team knew that they were pretty disastrous.  By talking to them about what I’d observed and the problems I’d identified, I got their buy-in to try to fix the problem together.
  4. Change the circumstances. Once we decided to try to fix the problem together , the “disaster” team and I talked every day about ways to solve it. As time went by, they felt more comfortable proposing their own solutions and asking me questions.

I’m not saying that my “disaster” team all pulled their grades up to As.  But they definitely improved because we were working together to create successful circumstances for them.

In the business world, I’ve learned that successful circumstances don’t always include the current role for someone. The strategies I’ve used to address that (after I’ve exhausted the above) include giving negative feedback and, eventually, terminating the person. Luckily, however, I’ve found that more often I can (with the help of the person) create an environment that helps make him or her successful.

I am a stealth geek

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Jenn Steele: Stealth GeekIt’s been a while since I posted, so I figured I’d introduce myself:

Hi. I’m Jenn, and I am a stealth geek.

I would think that, by now, I would be accustomed to the surprised looks I get when I join in a conversation about Star Trek captains (Picard was the best. Stop arguing.) or Wheel of Time characters, but I still occasionally get puzzled by the surprise.  I think it’s because I truly believe that I’m a total geek.  (Well, okay. The nerd/geek/dork test says I’m pure nerd, but I’m going to own geek culture anyhow.)

Here’s why I believe in my heart of hearts that I’m a geek:

  • I LOVE reading epic fantasy (my username at MIT was arwen. Do I really need to say more?).
  • I hate not having admin rights on a computer.
  • I have a slashdot login.
  • I lived on the “geeky” side of campus when I went to MIT.
  • Speaking of which, I did go to one of the geekiest schools in the country.
  • When I was in IT, when a new server came I would immediately want to open it up to see the components.
  • My favorite TV shows and movies usually have to do with magic, dragons, superheroes, sci fi, aliens, or whatnot.  I am a HUGE Joss Whedon fan.
  • I play video games for fun.
  • I deeply love intellectual debates.
  • I WILL correct you if you’re wrong.

Despite being a bit geeky deep down (a bit – who am I kidding?), I don’t necessarily come across as one.  I have some theories as to this as well:

  • I am an extrovert. Quite massively so.
  • I love talking to people.
  • I currently work in marketing.
  • I wear make-up.
  • I smell kinda good. (I wear perfume.  “Good” is subjective.)
  • I don’t wear glasses (during the day).
  • I dress somewhat stylishly (yay Nordstrom stylists).
  • I have a Nordstrom stylist.
  • I’m really into exercise and physical fitness.
  • I once played a ditz in drama club and high school and I have NEVER gotten rid of some of those mannerisms.  Sigh.

All that said, I could be completely wrong.  What do you guys think?  (I will return to less narcissistic posts in the future, I swear.)

My job as a manager

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Thor, the god of Norse mythology. "Thor's...
Image via Wikipedia

When you think about it, management is really a necessary evil.  Oh, sure, I happen to weirdly like it and have been accused of having a talent for it, but it’s really unfortunate that we need as much management as we do.

Just think about it.  When your team or company is small enough, you don’t really need managers.  Each person in the room knows that they need to simply get “stuff” done in order to make the team or company work.  If they’re good enough at that, your company grows, and that’s when you need managers.

Why do you need managers? Coordination and resources.  My job as a manager isn’t to be the almighty powerful lord of my domain (even though sometimes it’s just fun to act like that to see how quickly my team calls me on it.  The best teams take less than 10 seconds.).  My job as a manager is to be a resource and the coordinator  for my team so that they can get the real “stuff” done.  In other words, the power is actually theirs, not mine.

What does this look like (you KNOW I’m going to do a bulleted list, don’t you?)?  So glad you asked! 🙂

  • Understand what they do. It’s pretty darn tough to act as a coordinator and resource when you haven’t the foggiest notion what they do all day.  I’m not saying you need to be a pain and look over their shoulders constantly, but you need to have a grasp of what their day-to-day jobs look like and what short-term (and long-term) goals they’re working towards.
  • Get out of the way. In trying to get things coordinated and achieve your mandates, it’s very easy to get in your own way (and in the way of your team).  When push comes to shove, you have to chat with them and then, well, trust them to do their jobs. Yes, your butt is on the line for their work, but that’s why you get paid the big bucks, right?  If you put yourself in the way by demanding constant meetings, updates, etc. (basically, being a micromanage-y PITA), “stuff” just won’t get done.
  • Give them what they need. One of your most important jobs as a manager is to give your team the resources that they need.  Basically, your job is to smooth the path in order to make their jobs as easy as possible.  Sometimes that takes the form of covering for one of them during a family emergency, or dealing with political BS, or bringing in caffeine or a V8 after a late night. Basically, you’re never, ever “too good” to do something that helps one of them get their job done.
    • “But Jenn,” you whine, “I’m not a secretary.”  No, you’re not.  And if you’re blessed enough to have the god or goddess that an admin is, maybe your job will look less “menial” because you don’t have to do as much detailed coordination. But if you don’t have one, suck it up and do the work.
  • Show appreciation publicly.  If you want to make sure your team is demoralized, go ahead and do a private, “Good girl, now get back in your box,” when one of them truly goes above and beyond.  Send an email to your VP, or announce it on the wiki, or use a formal feedback channel to let your company know just how amazing she was.  She might act embarrassed (and there are those employees who don’t want public kudos, so get to know her or check with her first before your stand on the rooftops and shout, but note that “Oh no, you don’t have to do that,” isn’t a refusal), but there is a very wide chasm between public appreciation and private, and employees are aware of that.
  • Show appreciation and disappointment privately. Standing on the rooftops isn’t appropriate for every employee action, so giving a constant stream of feedback is incredibly important.  Don’t ever wait for review time to tell him that he has done well or poorly.  Each day is an opportunity to say, “Nice one with the foo case,” or “In the future, can you make sure that you say goodbye before you hang up the phone?”

I’m sure I’ve missed what a lot of you do, but this is how I see my job?  What have I missed?  What can you add that will make me (and others) a better manager?

Moving to Seattle!

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Downtown Seattle, Washington and the Bainbridg...
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What?  You’re moving to Seattle?  When?  What happened?

Yes; my husband and I are moving to Seattle.  We’re flying out late on the 26th of July.  Amazon made him an offer we couldn’t refuse.

What’s happening to you?  Your job?

I’ll be looking for a job in Seattle.  And friends.

Where will you be living?

We’ll be in corporate housing near downtown for a few months while we attempt to sell our house & look for another apartment.

Why didn’t you tell me before now?

I’m telling you now, aren’t I?  🙂  I wanted to wait for the big announcement at my department’s meeting at work.

Can I see you before you leave?

Probably, but get in touch with me soon!

I live in Seattle!  When can we get together?

I’d love to see you!  (Assuming you aren’t an ax murderer.)  Drop me an email at jennsteele (at) gmail (dot) com, and we’ll get together sometime after August 1st (since I’ll be a crazy person before then).

My completely nitpicky pet peeves (humor)

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Quotes. Made in notepad
Image via Wikipedia

Dear fellow geeks, geek leaders, and other random people who read this blog:

This is not a useful post.  This post, in fact, will show you how the inside of my brain works.  It can be a scary, scary place sometimes.  Also?  This isn’t a rant.  This is just nitpicky.  Also probably brought on by lack of sleep.  And it’s supposed to be funny, not cranky.  So if you read it as cranky, oops.

Here goes.  I hate it when you…

  • Change the subject line of the email.  I have multiple reasons for this:
    1. I don’t read subject lines.  I also don’t read chapter titles, article titles, etc.  I don’t know why.  It’s weird.  My husband makes fun of me for it.  So I’m not actually going to SEE what you put in there for my cute little eyes to see.
    2. It breaks my email threading.  I have a strange obsessive behavior that makes me adore my threaded email conversations.  I cuddle up with them at night (no, not really.  If you’re like me and don’t read titles, please go back and note the “humor” thing up top.).
  • Make plurals with apostrophes.  Just please don’t do it.  Unless you like watching me twitch.  In which case you should go ahead and do it, but don’t expect me to buy you a beer.  Ever.
  • Misspell Latin phrases.  If you can’t spell it, don’t use it.  You don’t sound erudite, you just make me twitch.  See previous bullet point about twitching.
  • Hug me.  There are a few non-family members who I don’t mind hugs from (Whose first names pretty much always start with “J”.  No, I don’t know why.), but otherwise, there will be twitching.  But this one doesn’t get you exempted from the beer buying, so this one is a lesser evil in the Jenn hierarchy.
  • Correct my order of punctuation and quotation marks.  Yes, I know I do it “wrong” for American English.  No, I don’t care.  Pthththt.
So, gentle readers, what are your completely ridiculous pet peeves?  (Other than being called “gentle readers”, that is.  I think that one’s weird, but I’m still leaving it in there.)

Customer Service vs. Accuracy

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Customer service vs. accuracyI recently had two customer service experiences with a company that sent me a defective DVD and then sent me the wrong disk as replacement.  The discussions were nearly identical (both took place via online chat), but they left me feeling very different.  During the first discussion, I was confident that I had done everything I needed to do.  During the second one, I was unsure.

That uncertainty led me to examine the conversations in order to see the differences.  Interestingly, there was no real difference in what the service rep said would happen next.  Instead, what I found was that the first rep put it this way:

We will absolutely take care of that for you.  I’ll escalate it now, and you’ll get the replacement DVD.

But the second rep put it this way:

I don’t have the authority to replace DVDs.  I’ll escalate this to support and they will be in touch with you.

Which one was more accurate?  Probably the second.  Which one made me feel better?  The first.

I personally have the tendency to be overly accurate and not reassuring enough–something that I’ll now be working on.  And as I think about it, the geeks I’ve worked with who excel at customer service tend to leave some of the exact details out (like the first rep above did) in the interest of making the user/customer/client feel like they have been both heard and taken care of.

So what do you think?  Which do you value more–customer service or accuracy?

Photo courtesy of Roman Pinzon-Soto.

Post-Traumatic IT Stress Disorder

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Post-traumatic IT stressMy last job was a circus of IT disasters.  I arrived at the company just in time to have system after system crash and various others need to be replaced (having the windows open RIGHT BEHIND the blade servers was just FUN during blizzards, I tell you…).  It seemed that nothing had been configured according to best practices, and sleep was a very scarce resource–I once pulled 5 all-nighters in 8 days, and my staff was doing the same.  Every time my phone would ring, I would flinch, my heart would start pounding, and my hands and feet would get numb.

So I changed careers.

Flash forward a while until Saturday.  My husband’s company was having some trouble with their servers.  He mentioned that things might hit the fan as a result.  Next thing I knew, I flinched, my heart started pounding, and my hands and feet got numb.  In other word, I had the same stress reaction that I used to have to IT disasters when I worked in IT.

I have to assume I’m not the only geek who has experienced this.  So I started thinking about how you might notice this in your geeks.  I came up with the following:

  • Your geeks look like they’re overreacting.  Maybe it’s a simple system hiccup, but they’re running around with their hair on fire.  That’s your first clue that the hiccup probably isn’t the first they’ve survived, and they’re afraid of worsening hiccups to come.
  • Your geeks look like they’re underreacting. My first clue that my previous company’s systems were sub-optimal should have been that the staff would brush off any minor system problems.  I call this the “hard candy shell” syndrome, where they’ve been through so many disasters that they’ve had to build an emotional wall of uncaring in order to protect their sanity.
  • Your geeks are jumpy. I personally tend to jump & shriek at loud noises, but that’s not really normal behavior.  If your geeks wince or jump at every email or phone call, you might have geeks suffering from PTITSD (post-traumatic IT stress disorder).

There are probably other signs of PTITSD.  What are some you’ve seen?

Photo courtesy of r000pert.

The Learning Curve

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How do geeks learnAs a geek I’m often asked, “How do you know this stuff?”

Well, there’s no magic bullet, we (geeks) do not have inherent knowledge of technology. We didn’t simply wake up one morning and build a network, or repair a server. A good system engineer will need to be an excellent troubleshooter, this skill, like art, can be cultivated and groomed, but is very difficult (if not impossible) to learn. Like art, you’ve either got it, or you don’t.

The journey to becoming a good system administrator / engineer (i.e. geek) will require all forms of learning. Traditional methods include; reading, classroom instruction, seminars, and most important hands-on experience. Non traditional methods are (CIO’s, Directors, and the like cover your ears) system failures, crisis and emergency repairs.

Let’s start with the easy stuff, traditional learning. Reading is essential to learning technology. Yes, it’s arduous, and the three inch thick IT books (replaced by gigantic PDF’s) are about as exciting to read, as your mortgage papers, and usually written as well. Fear not, it’s rare that it will be necessary to read one of these monsters from cover to cover. Read the first chapter or two, skim through the rest and add it to your library to use as a reference as needed (and you will need it). The point here is that unless you’re a true genius, you can’t retain all of that information anyhow, understand the concepts, and refer to it as needed for the detailed information and procedures. Classroom instruction will have higher learning retention than reading (at least it does for me). The reason for the higher retention is the hands on experience most classrooms provide. The triple play of lecture, reading and doing, drives the lesson home. Seminars are good resources to discover what’s available, and to keep up with the new technologies, products and trends. The seminar will rarely teach you how to use or implement the new technology, but only serve as an introduction.

There are two ways to retain 100% of your knowledge: repetition and crisis. I certainly don’t recommend causing a crisis as a learning tool, but if you’re in IT long enough, crisis will find you, and you will never forget the solution. A crisis forces you out of your comfort zone, requires you to dig deep, and implement a solution in minutes or hours, not weeks and months. This rapid problem solving and the associated stress will set the knowledge firmly into your grey matter.

Did you know that Microsoft clusters rely on the disk signature in the MBR (master boot record) to mount the drives? I do. How did I learn this, well it wasn’t in any book I read, or covered in during my clustering class, I learned this one the hard way.  After an otherwise successful SAN migration none of the clustered servers would come online. The event log said that the disk could not be found, but the disks were mounted and accessible to the nodes, this didn’t make sense. An hour or so of combing the internet reveiled the solution. Using DISKPART it’s possible to edit the disk signature. Fortunately the signatures it was looking for were listed in the error messages, and after all of the signatures were updated; the clusters came online to the great relief of my boss and myself. I will forever remember the relationship of disk signatures and cluster volumes, I’m now what some would call, an expert.

These catastrophic events can also make or break a career in IT, did you attack the problem head on, and deliver a solution, or did you pee your pants.  The best IT professionals, have done their homework, learned their lessons, and most importantly (but hopefully not often) can work under the enormous stress of a crisis and apply their knowledge.

That’s how I know this stuff.

Photo courtesy of Seth Sawyers.

On Self-Assessment & Celebration

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On Self-Assessment & CelebrationRecently, I had to complete a self-assessment.  I hate self-assessments.  I always discover that I have this weird brain dichotomy, where I somehow think that I’m pretty awesome and yet completely suck at the same time.  So I have to wonder if my self-assessment reads as somewhat schizophrenic to the folks that read it. In any case, filling it out completely depressed me, because all I really remember about the comments I made is how many areas I need to improve.  Bleh.

I have to wonder if I’m not alone, and if this might especially apply to geeks.  I’ve noticed that most geeks have a knack for focusing on the negative.  It’s like they take anything positive as a given, and only focus on the negative aspects of the situation.  (Gee,  no wonder IT & Engineering Departments can be just full of sunshine and light, eh?)

Most of my geeks (when I led geeks) tended to focus on what they did wrong rather than what they did right.  (I have to wonder if our parents’ tendencies to focus on bringing up the B in handwriting rather than celebrating our As in everything else contributed to this.)  Despite these somewhat dour tendencies, as a leader I usually tried to mention and occasionally celebrate the things that went right (if only to preserve departmental sanity sometimes.  Well, my sanity sometimes.  Oh, never mind.).

It strikes me that I would have had a happier weekend if I had treated my self-assessment as an opportunity to celebrate my strengths rather than mourn my weaknesses.  Oh, sure, I undoubtedly have some GIANT blind spots for some of my weaknesses.  But those are probably balanced with some giant blind spots for some of my strengths.  Perhaps I’ll try that next time I have to do a self-assessment and party instead of pout.

Photo courtesy of boxercab.

Introduction: John Guidroz

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John Guidroz's old macJohn Guidroz is a naturally born salesman that has used the application of IT to support a very successful career in both the Telecom and Healthcare Industries. When he was a kid his dad got a Apple computer in 1986, the Apple IIGS, and he was hooked. Over the next 20 years, he had a fascination with technology and how it can make our personal and business life more efficient. In sales he used the help of his IT staff and internet knowledge to help lower prospecting time while increasing sales. Every salespersons dream

Having a good partnership with your IT staff and knowing the proper way to lead them can help many companies with a heavy IT interaction improve their sales process. Of this he is sure.

Image courtesy of blakespot.