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Swing, Batter-Batter-Batter! June 29, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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9 comments

It’s easy to tell when a youth baseball team is struggling: they fall silent.  If the silence persists for any length of time, the coach (or a parent in the stands) will yell out, “Let’s hear a little chatter out there!”  This request hopefully refocuses the team as they start talking again.

Baseball chatter falls into two broad categories: inane repetitive noise and helpful advice between the players.  The inane noise is designed to annoy and distract the opposing team, especially the pitcher and batter as they duel at the plate.  The helpful advice is more important: players call out potential defensive plays, adjust coverage, warn about possible bunts or steals, and so forth.

The parallels for any support team, and especially IT organizations, is obvious.  A happy team is constantly communicating with themselves, in matters both large and small.  As changes occur and problems arise, they go out of their way to make sure people know what is going on.  The communication is fluid and consistent.  Ideally, most of the chatter should fall into the “helpful advice” category, although it could be fun to taunt your DBA during a big upgrade. (“Drop, table-table-table!”)

As a leader, are you listening for chatter in your team?  Are you even in a position to hear it?  Chatter is in the break room, the hallways, and the parking lot.  It’s both verbal and electronic, via Twitter, SMS, and instant messaging. Chatter isn’t in the formal memos, project charters, and design documents.  It may not even be in the general email flow.  In fact, formal communication is the enemy of chatter.

When teams get bogged down in Memos and Documents, they stop chattering.  They begin to formalize their communication, creating paper trails and looking to cover their read ends.  They think before sharing and selectively reveal information to suit their own agendas.  This kind of thinking, putting self before team, is disastrous for any group.  If it persists, the whole group will fail.

Leaders must create a culture that promotes chatter.  This includes both physical and cultural components:

  • Does the work environment provide places for people to gather and chatter?  Are teams co-located so they naturally interact?  Are there places for groups to meet informally?  Is it easy to see when people have gathered, so that others can join the conversation?
  • Are people inclined to chatter?  It’s easy for people to send email back and forth all day.  Do you encourage them to get up and actually engage in conversations?  Do you walk around and engage in conversations?  Do you provide positive feedback to groups when you see them gathering and chattering?  Do you use chatter to communicate to your direct reports?

Stuffy, staid environments inhibit chatter.  Do you work in such an environment?  Have you inadvertently created one?  Here’s an easy test: from your office, can you occasionally hear laughter?  If your people are not enjoying themselves to the point where they laugh every now and then, how can you expect them to chatter?  How often do you laugh with your team?

Our work teams are more complicated than a baseball team, but the core value of chatter is just as important.  We can’t simply call out and make them start chattering.  We have to build environments and foster cultures that make people chatter on their own.  Are your people chattering?

Whose Fault? Yours. June 19, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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10 comments

As CIOs, we lead a service organization.  Although there is much talk of late about turning IT into a profit center, the reality is that most companies rely on IT to get something else done.  Just as finance, legal, and HR provide crucial support to help a company succeed, IT provides important services that allow the other employees to accomplish their jobs and serve the external customers.

By definition, service organizations exist to serve their customers. This may seem a bit obvious, but there are many IT shops that have lost sight of this core principle.  Our job is not to find cool new tools, or nifty phones, or the sleekest laptops.  Our job is to help people get their jobs done as quickly and efficiently as possible, using technology where appropriate.

When people fail to get their jobs done as quickly and efficiently as possible, it’s our fault.  Period.  It doesn’t matter why they failed; we still own the problem.  That’s a hard concept for some people in IT to grasp and accept.

Anyone who has worked in IT for any length of time has seen this happen.  We listen to our users and determine there is a need we can fulfill. We diligently collect requirements and build a potential solution.  With the users’ approval and assistance, we develop some new tool.  We provide training and support.  After scrupulous testing, we release the tool to its intended audience.

A smashing success?  Not always. Users get confused.  They make mistakes.  They didn’t attend all the training, or misunderstood the documentation.  They forgot to tell us everything during the requirements meetings, or didn’t provide a complete testing regimen.

Whose fault?  Ours.   We should have asked more questions. We should have asked for more testing.  We should have rethought usage scenarios.  We should have anticipated certain mistakes and found alternatives.  No matter what goes wrong, we are at fault.  Figure out why, fix it, and file away the lessons learned for next time.

IT folks at every level fall into an easy trap when they start complaining and fussing about the end users.  It’s easy to push blame onto the unsuspecting customers when a system is used incorrectly or mistakes are made.  After all our hard work, how could they still get it wrong?

Easy: because we obviously did not work hard enough.  We build this stuff; we must ensure people can use it effectively.  If they can’t, we dropped the ball somewhere.  Railing about the users does not fix the problem.  It only annoys the users, makes us look petty, and reduces our ability to serve them.

This concept, that we are always at fault, is at the core of our ability to serve and satisfy customers.  The burden sits with us to make it right, do it better, and meet our customer’s needs.  If you are in IT, and you cannot accept this or live up to it, you have chosen the wrong career.  Get out now, before you make the rest of us look bad.

Getting Through Adversity June 17, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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2 comments

The current recession has generated countless articles and blog postings on leadership during tough times.  I’ve been hit with surveys on the topic, as well as innumerable offers for seminars and courses to help me through these times. All of these offers, articles, and surveys have the same approach: how to cut back, do more with less, and still maintain productivity in spite of limited resources.

This is not another one of those articles.

Leading in difficult times is not about making your budget work.  It’s not about figuring out who to let go, or which project to cancel, or how to adjust ROI to reflect the new austerity.  Those things are important, but they are all part of managing during difficult times.  We’re supposed to know how to do these things.  If you can’t, what are you doing in charge?  Anyone can succeed in good times; if you can’t manage in bad times, what can you manage?

Leading in tough times is about getting your people through the tough times.  The tight budget, the reduced projects, the smaller staff all result in stressed, nervous people.  They worry about their jobs and their families.  They look for any small sign that something is wrong.  Even small things get blown out of proportion, resulting in rumors and distractions.

Our job is to keep that from happening.  Leaders make sure their people are secure, informed, and as comfortable as possible.  We need to project confidence and competence.  Our people need to know that a steady hand is on the tiller and that things are being managed correctly.

If we appear nervous or unsure in difficult times, our people will reflect that back to us.  If we are calm and collected, they’ll pick up on that as well. While our situation is often not our choice, our attitude is. We need to choose wisely every day.

The best way to keep our team calm and sure is to communicate with them, all the time, in things large and small.  Don’t mislead them.  Don’t sugar-coat bad news.  Offer your honest opinions on the situation and help them understand what you are doing and how they will be affected.  This isn’t easy, but every good leader needs to learn these skills.

The current downturn may not end for a while.  Your team’s ability to succeed in spite of the situation has nothing to do with how you manage in the current climate.  It’s all about how you lead them through it.  What are you doing to lead them to the better days ahead?

The Simultac Fonton June 15, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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9 comments

Early in my career, I had the good fortune to work in a pure R&D group.  Our goal to research and develop large, scalable multiprocessors.  Some members of the group worked on more conventional shared-memory systems, and others focused on a very different kind of computer known as a dataflow machine.

One of the senior researchers had been wrestling with dataflow architecture for years.  One night, in a dream, he had a “eureka moment” in which the key to unlocking the secret of dataflow computing was revealed.  He woke up, grabbed a pad on the nightstand, and scribbled down the answer.  He then fell back asleep, presumably a very contented man.

When he arose the next morning, he reached for the pad.  On it, he had written

Simultac Fonton

and nothing else.

The frustration!  The agony!  He knew he had the answer.  He had seen it in his dream!  But what made sense in his dream made no sense the next day, and the cryptic “Simultac Fonton” was no help.

In the ensuing years, he has continued his efforts to find the elusive Simultac Fonton.  Presumably it exists, or he will create it. I’ll leave it to the more curious readers to see if such a thing has ever existed.

For those of us who were present when the Simultac Fonton was “discovered,” it represents that secret element that we all seek, the magic key to our success. In that sense, we all have a Simultac Fonton, whether we know it or not.  To be successful, we must find it.

For the majority of  people, finding the Simultac Fonton is not the problem: they don’t even know what they want to accomplish!  It is difficult to find the key to your personal when you have not even clarified your metric for success.  Do you want to be a great leader?  A great father? A successful entrepreneur? A compelling public speaker? A respected teacher?  Our goals are as unique as we each are, but we must spend some serious time understanding ourselves and defining our goals.

With a goal in mind, we can then seek the corresponding Simultac Fonton. This is even harder.  For dataflow computers, the Simultac Fonton is most likely tangible, an ingenious bit of hardware or an algorithm that solves the problem. For most of our other goals, the Simultac Fonton is intangible: a personal flaw, or a blind spot, or a missing skill that we may never know we are lacking.

You may never be a great leader because you cannot convey your vision.  You may never be a great father because you cannot let go of your own needs.  You may never be a great entrepreneur because you cannot tolerate risk. For every goal, there may be a crucial element, the Simultac Fonton, that you cannot envision. If you cannot see it, you cannot seek it.

How do we see it? I think we need to turn to others and sincerely request their unvarnished feedback.  We need to develop a small circle of truly trusted advisors that will point out those flaws and describe the Simultac Fonton for us.  In return, we need to help others understand their Simultac Fontons. Only then can we each find our Fontons and achieve our goals.

Do you have a goal? Do you understand your Simultac Fonton? Are you close to finding it?  Will you succeed?

Scheduling Formal Fun June 12, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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1 comment so far

When I inherited my current team, they had gone through an exercise in self-management wherein they formed various committees to address and improve different aspects of their work life.  These teams looked into things like meeting etiquette, time management, and internal training.  Many of these teams identified a problem, solved it, and eventually disbanded.  But one team, the most important one, has lasted for years.  That team is the Fun Committee.

All of our people work hard, especially in these times of tight budgets.  Long hours, tough projects, and high expectations put our people under stress that can tear a team apart.  The best way to alleviate that stress is to blow off some steam and have some fun with your coworkers.  My group thinks that this is so important that it cannot be left to chance.  Thus the Fun Committee was born, to make sure we have fun on a regular basis.

It may seem odd to formally schedule something that should happen spontaneously.  But if you don’t plan to have fun, you rarely will.  We get so caught up in our jobs that we won’t take time to relax a bit and enjoy each other’s company.

The events planned by the Fun Committee are not elaborate.  They provide a collective birthday cake each month, which takes all of thirty minutes.  There is typically an annual Halloween costume contest in the fall, and a Strawberry Festival each spring.  There are occasional unannounced events, drawing everyone to the break room for some small treat on the spur of the moment.

Even though these events are small, they bring our whole group together for a specifically non-business event.  We socialize a bit, celebrate the moment as needed, and return to our work a bit more energized.  We’ve come to expect these events, and they are a positive component of our team culture.

Most teams enjoy getting together and having these moments, but many groups never seem to make them happen.  Without a formal approach to scheduling fun, time slips away and the events never occur.  People regret not doing more with their group, but rarely act to change things.

I didn’t create the Fun Committee, but I have certainly come to appreciate what they do and I’d hate to see the Fun Committee disband.  That’s the best part: the committee is self-sustaining.  People stay on for a period of time and then rotate off, to be replaced by others.  The committee manages this process, and I’ve never been called on to keep the team alive.  It is truly on its own, sustained by the common desire to keep that social bond strong in the group.

As leaders, team morale is as much our responsibility as anything else.  How do you build and maintain morale in your group?  Do you have a Fun Committee?  Do you need one?