Category: general leadership

On Passion

·

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 Communication and Customer Service

·

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.

On Caution

·

I’m not a particularly cautious person. I’m the person in the room who wants a quick decision and subsequent quick action. I get bored discussing alternatives after a decision is made, and a slow phasing-in of something sometimes feels like slow torture. This doesn’t mean that I don’t think through the problem in order to reach a good solution, this means that I tend to want to move into action immediately without rethinking things.

My lack of caution can be both a strength and a weakness. In crisis situations, my willingness to jump in and try possibly risky solutions has allowed me to solve the issues quickly. (Well, most of the time, anyhow.) There have been occasional times that my lack of caution costs a bit of time, but that has been the exception rather than the rule. In day-to-day life, though, I could probably benefit from having a few more second or third thoughts. I’d certainly get in less trouble with my mouth!

As a leader, it is my responsibility to balance caution and action. I’ve learned that I have to have at least one person around me who tends towards caution in order to best achieve that balance.

I first experienced this in my second IT job. I worked with a woman who I actually nicknamed “repercussions woman” for her ability to identify and voice her concerns about any project or action. At first, I found her constant raining on my parade quite frustrating. I’d already carefully considered things and formulated an action plan, so I didn’t want to hear anything that would change my implementation! As time went by, however, and she saved my bacon more than a few times, I learned to bring everything to her (often before formulating my action plan) in order to get her insight. Her talent for finding potential issues balanced my tendency to plow ahead, and our collaborative work product ended up being much stronger as a result.

I’ve led many geeks with similar talents for finding potential problems and “thinking things to death”. Their talents help me to be a better, stronger leader by bringing up consequences while my talent allows us to accomplish things quickly. The combination leads to a stronger department and better overall results.

On Crisis Fatigue

·

I’m not (usually) horrifically rude, but I happened to glance at the page of the woman next to me on the bus this morning and saw the words “crisis fatigue” at the top of one of her lists. Then I stopped reading and started typing this (honest!) because it got me thinking about the impact of crisis fatigue on geeks.

I don’t know the last time I talked to someone who wasn’t crisis fatigued to some extent. Just think about the news that we see every day:

  • The economy and its parade of tax hikes, layoffs, bankruptcies, and pyramid schemes
  • Swine flu and pandemics
  • Wars and violence–both foreign and domestic

Then add politics, traffic, weather, and the total randomness that folks call news. Now add work. It just seems like, as a society, we’re chronically over-stressed, under-staffed, over-caffeinated, under-funded and just plain tired.

Now think of geeks. Many of them live in environments of almost constant crisis. Servers and switches crash, applications are buggy, and few work environments these days have the staff or budget to fully replace the equipment or fix the problems. Add to that the sheer complexity of the products or systems supported and you can be certain that most of the user community has no idea why there are so many problems and why they’re taking so long to fix.

Are there ways to remedy the geeks’ and users’ stress? Absolutely. I’ve talked about having fun and communication as good remedies. But is it hard to remember to share a joke or communicate properly? Absolutely. There aren’t enough resources–humans, time, money, or hours in the day–to do things perfectly and remember to implement the remedies.

As a leader, it’s my job to be aware of crisis fatigue and attempt to implement remedies despite being crisis fatigued myself. Do I always succeed? Nope. I’m sick, exhausted, and stressed just like everyone else. But I do my best, and I’m glad that my moment of bus rudeness has made me more aware of the problem.

On the Meaning of Leadership

·

As some of you might know, I’m the point person on publising content for the ILTA ’09 Conference Blog. On Fridays, we publish a “Profile in Leadership” of one of the volunteer leaders of the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA). One of the primary questions we ask during the interview is, “What does leadership mean to you?” This, of course, got me thinking about how I define leadership.

To me, leadership means:

  • People want to follow you
  • You have somewhere to go
  • You can be creative and flexible in defining your goal(s) and how to get there
  • You use your followers’ diverse strengths
  • You admit that you’re wrong when you are (as I always say, “I’m perfectly happy to admit that I’m wrong–after it’s been proven to me.”)
  • You have self-confidence
  • You can be humble
  • You shine the spotlight on your followers
  • You take responsibility when things go wrong
  • You are primarily collaborative, but can be authoritative when the situation demands it
  • You evolve

There are undoubtedly many other characteristics of a leader, but these are the ones to which I aspire. These, however, are the traits that come more naturally to me or that align with my personal values. Others define leadership according to their personalities and values, and may have a vastly different idea of what leadership means.

ILTA’s “Profiles in Leadership” fascinates me, as many of the people profiled are role models to me in my legal technology career. As I read them each week, my definition of leadership might change, thus fulfilling my last trait of leadership above–I will evolve.

On Transparency, Part III

·

To continue my omphaloskepsis on transparency, I find myself asking the question, “Why bother if they don’t even look for the information?”

A comment on my last post pointed out that the meeting wasn’t the point–the availability of the information was. While I certainly agree, I should mention that nearly all the information was already available in a central repository or two, but people still kept asking me for it. Saying, “go look here” every time seems awfully rude.

Which brings me back to my initial question: why invest the time and energy making the information available if no one uses the resources?

I’ve heard answers to this question like, “You have to train them.” Or, “They might only use the information if nothing else is available, but that’s when it’s really valuable.” While both answers have merit, there’s still one elephant in the room to me: scarce resources.

In this economy, very few IT departments have adequate resources. Some of us struggle to find the bodies for day-to-day support. Others can do that, but run out of bodies if anything goes wrong. Still others can handle those, but can’t do any projects. Given that daily user service is our first priority, how exactly do we find the time to also make information available?

While I don’t have a good answer for the “how” question, I’ve realized that making resources available both internally and externally is worth the time. Why? It all comes back to user service:

  • Users feel better served if geeks can answer their questions more readily.
  • Geeks feel more empowered if they know they have (or can find) information.
  • Users feel less helpless in a crisis if they can find an update faster (or know where to look).

I’m still trying to figure out how to train everyone to look in the developed resource repositories (namely the intranet for the users and the knowledgebase for the geeks), but I’m a little more satisfied that putting the information out there is worth it.

On Transparency, Part II

·

My apologies for the 2-week gap; I’ve been developing content for a blog that will launch mid-May.

But on to the subject: transparency. Again. In Part I, I discussed opening up my master project list to my peers and the anxiety that provoked. Now I’ll be talking about transparency inside my own department.

As the head of a (geek) department, I find it sometimes difficult to determine how much information to disseminate to my geeks. Unlike giving information to my peers, this uncertainty is not motivated by my fears. The primary reason I find it tough to figure out how much info to share within IT is that I read too much.

I’ve read articles on transparency and agreed with them. I’ve read articles on information overload and agreed with them. I’ve seen staff who drop out of meetings because they “just don’t need to know” and the information would confuse them or increase their stress levels. I’ve seen other staff completely frustrated by lack of information about what’s going on in other parts of the department. What’s a geek leader to do?

I don’t think there is an easy answer to that one. In my last department, we were small and seated all in the same area. At least once each day, we’d end up congregating at the Lit Support Specialist’s cube right outside my office. We would chat about anything and everything, ranging from childhood memories to weekend plans to current and upcoming projects. This worked well for us.

My current department, however, is twice as big and very spread out. We often congregate in the Help Desk area, but usually not the entire team together. I eventually realized (thanks to some rather gigantic “hints”) that the casual method of information sharing that worked at my last firm wasn’t going to fly at my current one.

So I started having weekly 30-minute meetings. I moved these meetings from the training room to the Help Desk area, since the Help Desk folks were having trouble making it on time and staying. After trying a few different times, we settled on a time when most of the firm was at lunch so the phones weren’t quite as continuous.

At some of these meetings, I do most of the talking. For example, when I started a new change management procedure, we spent most of the time talking about that. At other meetings, we go around the room and each person talks about his or her current projects or issues. Each geek shares as much as he pleases or tunes out if he doesn’t want to know. They have access to my master project list (the live document) and can question anything they please. (Somehow, this doesn’t cause me any fear. This is probably a good thing.)

We’re still trying to get to the appropriate level of granularity, since not all my staff talks to each other often enough to disseminate solutions to specific problems. I have to admit that I find that frustrating, since a 30-minute meeting is only long enough for brief discussions. But we’re getting better.

I have to wonder, though, if there’s ever a “perfect” level of internal transparency. If so, anyone know what it is?

On Transparency, Part I

·

Finally! Here it is folks, Part I of some of my thoughts on transparency.

I really thought I was into this Enterprise 2.0 collaboration/transparency/etc. thing. I thought I was all enlightened and loved to communicate. Then I decided to do something completely unexpected and shared a link to my master project list (all 14 pages of it) with my peer directors at my firm so that they would know about upcoming IT changes. You know what I found out?

Transparency is SCARY! Why?

  • If people know what you’re doing all the time, they’ll know when you’re doing something wrong.
  • Opening the kimono (so to speak) invites people to comment on what’s going on. Even if you don’t want them to!
  • If you’re the first person in your company to open the blinds, people will know much more about your work/department than you’ll know about theirs.
  • Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, the more people know, the more gossip (both positive and negative) will happen about your doings.

So I sent the email (while experiencing all of the above fears) and held my breath. “What if they think I’m nuts? What if I’m doing something wrong? Do I want them to be able to tell me what I’m doing wrong when I don’t know what they’re doing to attack back?” These thoughts were surprising to me. I always claim that I could LIVE on camera given the chance. But no, I was paranoid about sharing a document that included information that I would have been happy to tell each of them in-person instead.

Results? Well, no one has said anything. One person has looked at it. I’m honestly glad I did it, if only to experience some of the feelings that people have that make them hesitant about opening things up.

On Letting Go

·

I’m not very good at letting things go. I have learned to forgive easily (I’m pretty much incapable of bearing a grudge), but if I know that someone is carrying around a misconception, it will literally keep me up at night. I want people to know and understand the RIGHT answers to their questions. I want people to thoroughly understand ALL my reasons for doing something (at least from a high level). I want my husband to know EVERYTHING he’s doing wrong.

Okay, I’ve grown out of that last one (mostly), but I still have trouble letting things go.

For example, some of the commenters on my post, “Why IT Goes Nuts Sometimes,” have the impression that I’m nuts because I have to deal with stuff coming to my predecessor instead of to me. (That doesn’t bug me at all; the non-support by the guy who emailed me was what drove me nuts.) Knowing that these commenters had the wrong impression has seriously bugged me until this moment, when I could correct it in this post.

Why do I need to let go of my lack of letting things go?

  • Most people’s brains, attention spans, and patience cannot take a rapid-fire list of everything.
  • Contrary to what I usually like to think, I am not always right.
  • I don’t ever want to know every little detail of something. (And it actually drives me nuts when geeks do a deep-dive into the how-to or how something works in a 30-minute meeting.)
  • Most people don’t really care about having the wrong impression of something trivial.

In my experience, many geeks have this same tendency (Edit: You know, like this comic.). This is why management gets bored with technical details or users get frustrated at lengthy explanations. Does my boss care about every high-level reason behind my strategy? Nope; just the most important business-related ones.

Just as I get frustrated with getting bogged down in details, others get frustrated by long lists of abstract reasons. Or worse, lists of their faults or mistakes as I see them. Now that I’m more cognizant of this, perhaps I can let it go.