Category: general leadership

Leading Geeks through Disasters

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Some of you have read this blog for a while might already know that I have some experience with technology disasters. Specifically, two back-to-back disasters involving many gallons of water and a server room, thereby earning me the nickname “Waterfall Girl” a few years back. (Which didn’t really stick, luckily.)

Here are some lessons I’ve learned:

  • Geeks surprise you. You never know what they’ll do in high-stress situations.
  • Communication is key. No change? Tell people that. During stressful situations, people just want INFORMATION (dammit!), and sometimes telling them that there’s been no change and you’re still working on it still actually helps them.
  • Apologies help. Folks know the disaster isn’t your fault, but apologizing anyhow somehow helps them. I’m going to guess that it’s because it addresses how they feel and demonstrates that you realize the crisis has caused them no small inconvenience.
  • You can’t please everyone. Did you make an announcement via the PA system? Well, some people would really rather have email. Did you send email? Well, prepare for responses vilifying you for not walking the floors or making an announcement Did you and your team walk the floors? Well, they’re not doing it fast enough. All you can do is your best.
  • You can’t do everything right. Maybe you didn’t communicate fast enough. Maybe you didn’t figure out the problem in time to prevent a cascade event (or maybe the cascading events were inevitable). Maybe you estimated that things would be back in two hours but it took two days. You’re not infallible, and you will probably make even more mistakes in crisis situations. Forgive yourself, pick up the pieces, apologize, and move on.
  • Acknowledge emotion. If you’ve already worked 70 hours by Thursday, you will be a bit, uh, grumpier than usual. Once when I took a post-disaster phone call, I said something to the effect of, “I realize that I haven’t slept and that you’re very stressed as well because of the disaster. My goal is to get through this conversation without either of us getting too testy or angry.” The caller laughed (as people will when you do or say something unexpected), and we got through a 12-minute conversation without excess grumpiness. Realize that your geeks will feel stress and get upset easily as well.

I’m sure there are more things to add. What have your experiences been?
Photo courtesy of Maciej Szczepaniak

Does Management REALLY Mean Death by Meeting?

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Image Courtesy of Richard Rutter

 

I’ve been trying to figure out best practices for, well, just getting stuff done with other people.  Somehow, it seems like we use email when we should use a meeting, a meeting when we should use a quick face-to-face, and a quick face-to-face when we should use email.  I’m constantly left feeling somewhat, uh, unsatisfied with the way we get things done, and I’m using this post to try to figure it out.  Any and all insight would be appreciated!

Email Errors

Last week, a coworker & I went out for lunch, grabbed a beer, and took 30 minutes to figure out a transition process.  (A transition process that we and others were actually pretty darn happy with, actually.)  Had we tried to do this via email, it would have taken eight thousand years, and I’m not sure we would ever have gotten it done. Yes, we did some prep work via email and drop-bys (and I am a Salesforce data geek, as we found out), but we got it done much more efficiently in a quick meeting than we ever could have done it via email.

I was also part of an email chain last week where we could have cut through it with a couple of cubicle drop-bys.  In fact, I got so sick of the email chain that I started walking around the office and talking to the people involved just so we could get the darn thing done.

Face-to-face Follies

That’s not to say that everything can or should be done face-to-face.  We have a bunch of consultants and salesfolk here who are almost impossible to get in front of–they’re on the phone constantly.  As such, email is absolutely vital for communication.  I’ve also been known to wander the office for many minutes looking for the person with whom I want a quick chat, only to forget about it after I got back to my desk.  Email can be vital for in-the-moment communication, so that nothing gets lost or forgotten.  Email can also include lots of parties and save people from having to wait for three weeks in order to put a meeting on everyone’s calendars.

At the very least, it’s a good idea to chat with someone face-to-face, return to your computer, and send a follow-up email to make sure everyone both remembers the conversation and is on the same page.  You can also loop in folks who weren’t part of the conversation but should be aware of its occurrence.

Meeting Madness

As you can see from above, I definitely think that quick meetings have their times and places, but should be minimized overall.  If you have one-way “vital” information, an informal “pull someone into the conference room” can often do the trick.  (As I write this, I realize that I’ve scheduled several meetings already today–all of which involved multiple people or really needed the 1:1 sit-down function of a meeting.  No, really!)  I think it’s entirely too easy to decide to schedule a meeting rather than communicate more openly and constantly.    But overall, I’m still trying to figure out the threshold for holding a meeting vs. one of the other communication efforts above.

Does anyone have any ideas?  Do you have any specific “I hold a meeting when…” criteria?  Please share!

Geeks & Gag Rules

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If you’re a geek leader, are you gagging your geeks?  (No, I don’t mean with your lack of showering.  That’s probably a different post.)

Geeks & Gag RulesWhat I’m asking is whether saying certain things is verboten in your department/team/company.  Are you so paranoid that a user or customer will hear someone venting and get offended–I used to work in law firms, so I’m quite familiar with the easily, ridiculously offended phenomenon–that your geeks can’t express themselves?

I ask because this creates a very unhealthy environment for customer-facing geeks.  Heck, it’s an unhealthy environment for customer-facing ANYBODY.  Why?

  • You’ll never know the score. You won’t ever know what’s actually happening with the users/customers because your geeks are so afraid of saying something negative that they clam up.
  • You have ticking time bombs. For folks in customer-facing positions, being able to blow off steam helps keep them sane and polite to the customers.  That horrible thing they were saying about the user they had to tell for the twelfth week in a row to press pound to save a voice mail message?  They’re saying it to you so that they won’t say that horrible thing to the user in week 13.
  • Morale? Meet toilet. When people feel frustrated & gagged in their jobs, they become unhappy.  This means that when they complain, they won’t just complain about the users–they’ll complain about you/the company and your stupid rules.

Obviously, I don’t think you should gag your geeks.  Letting them complain, laugh, and blow off steam makes for a healthier environment overall.  However, there are certainly some things to avoid:

  • A bitter culture. If ALL your geeks do is complain, you end up with a pretty miserable team of geeks.  Make sure you encourage positive, happy, and fun talk as well.  Keep in mind that a lot of culture starts at the top, and make sure you act & speak consistent with the culture you’re trying to create.
  • Putting things in writing. When I worked in a law firm & helped out with e-discovery projects, I was STUNNED to see what people sent to each other in email.  Encourage your geeks to vent verbally only.
  • Disrespect. Granted, your geeks won’t always respect every user or customer, but a basic respect for the people who help employ them is very important.  If there’s no baseline of respect, your users will know it during the phone calls even if the geek plays everything else by the book.  Again, this is something you can set from the top, by having a basic respect for them yourself.

This is a balancing act, so you HAVE to communicate well with your geeks and truly listen to what they’re saying.  But please trust me when I say that you don’t want to gag your geeks.

Photo courtesy of Bernardo Borghetti

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 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…

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…