Category: leading geeks

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.

On Caution

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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

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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

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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.