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The ABCs of Hiring July 1, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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9 comments

Few of us get to assemble our teams from scratch.  Most likely, we acquire a team as we move into a new position.  Much like a college football coach that inherits players recruited by his predecessor, we have to play the game with the team with have.

Over time, we get to reshape the team to our liking.  As folks move on to new opportunities, or as you “assist” folks in moving on to new opportunities, you’ll get the chance to bring new people to your team.  This is a big test for any leader.  People understand that you are not fully responsible for the team you inherit, but they won’t be as compassionate when someone you brought to the team drops the ball.

There’s a simple rule for hiring that should shape these decisions:

A people hire other A people.  B people hire C people.

When asked, every leader will insist that they hire only the best, brightest candidates.  But do they?

The best leaders surround themselves with people smarter than they are.  The best teams to lead are those where you are the dumbest person in the room.  If you are the smartest person in the room, your team has a serious problem. Find experts in the pertinent domains, create a culture that supports their efforts, and get out of the way.

Sadly, not every leader is the best leader.  Lesser leaders hire lesser people, intended to make themselves look good.  The result is a team of people that collectively rank just below the skills of the leader.  Given that any leader following this strategy is less than stellar, the entire team winds up being mediocre at best.

Few leaders will admit that they are intentionally hiring sub-standard candidates to make themselves look good.  Where, then, is this rule being applied? By everyone around you, that’s where.

People will closely scrutinize your every hiring decision.  Their assessment of each new candidate will reflect on you.  If you make good hiring decisions, people will notice.  If you make bad hiring decisions, people will notice and talk about it.  You may claim (and even believe) that you are hiring A players, but every C player you bring aboard knocks you further down the scale to becoming a B leader.

This ABC rule goes beyond technical ability.  It’s even more important when people consider the fit of your candidates into the current culture.  The ease with which your new team members integrate into the culture says a lot about how much you respect that culture.  If you diminish the importance of culture in your hiring decisions, you can lose the support of your existing team.  You may also make it much harder for your new people to succeed in their new role.

No one wants to be thought of as a B or C leader.  Seek out the A candidates while hiring, and you’ll go a long way to ensuring your own success as an A leader.

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?

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 Original Social Media Guru June 8, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Book Reviews, Networking.
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7 comments

If you spend any time doing anything on the internet, you will soon stumble across a special kind of expert who is just dying to help you improve your virtual social life.  These self-professed Social Media Gurus promise to reveal deep secrets about Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, all designed to garner you more followers, more attention, and more interest on the internet.

Let’s face it: the vast, vast majority of Social Media Gurus know just a teeny bit more than you do about all this stuff.  If you really wanted to learn their secrets, ten minutes with Google (or Bing, which is growing on me) will make you a Social Media Guru, too.  And if you really want 100,000 followers, or friends, or connections, one mortifying YouTube video should do the trick.

All these social networking tools are just communication tools: conduits for information. You can learn the mechanics of any of them in a day, and absorb most of the culture in a week.  But that doesn’t make you any more social, although you may have made a good start at a network.

What matters is what you send over those conduits.  The information you share and how you respond to others is what’s important. It’s the content that counts, not the mechanics of the tool.

Most modern Social Media Gurus want to teach you the mechanics.  This is not social networking, just like understanding the mechanics of a piano is not going to make you a piano player.  Very few Social Media Gurus can teach you what to send using these systems, once you have mastered the mechanics.

Sadly, the very best Social Media Guru died in 1955, before any of these things were invented. Fortunately for us, he wrote down all his secrets well before he passed away.  That Guru was Dale Carnegie, and his secrets are revealed in his book, How To Win Friends & Influence People.

If you have never read this book, do yourself a great favor and pick up a copy.  For Amazon’s bargain price of $8.70 ($0.96 on your Kindle) you can learn the secrets of the greatest Social Media Guru in history.  Carnegie’s book is easy to read, with each concept presented in a short chapter with supporting anecdotes.  If even that’s too much for you, he summarizes each chapter with a one-line moral at the end.  The anecdotes are delightful, recalling social situations from the 1920’s and 1930’s that are still relevant today.

If you have read this book before, read it again.  You will have the same revelations all over again, and be even more committed to changing the way you communicate with people. Carnegie was among the first, and is still the best, Social Media Guru.

I won’t even try to summarize Carnegie’s advice here.  Click the link above, buy the book, and start your summer reading with the one book that could truly improve every relationship you have.

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Comfort Zones May 22, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Networking.
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2 comments

Last summer, I had the opportunity to watch a group of Boy Scouts go through a high-ropes team building exercise.  Beyond the fun of watching boys climb 50 feet in the air with nothing more than a safety rope hooked to their waist, I learned a clever trick about comfort zones.

High-ropes courses are all about getting out of your comfort zone.  I am very comfortable on the ground, enjoying the combination of gravity and my feet firmly planted on the earth.  Climbing a 40-foot ladder comprised solely of five planks at eight-foot intervals took me way out of my zone, to the point of near-frozen, knee-shaking fear at the top.  But I did it, and I’m better for it, if only to avoid embarrassment in front of 13-year-olds who scrambled to the top like monkeys.

There was a more subtle comfort zone that was shattered five minutes into the day.  When we arrived, the instructors asked the boys to pair up.  As you would expect, they found their best friends and quickly formed twosomes.  She then asked them to each assume a character, either SpongeBob or Patrick (remember the audience here).  They did so.  She then gathered all the SpongeBobs into one group, and all the Patricks into another.  One group headed to the ropes course, and the other to another exercise.

In one deft motion she separated every boy from his best friend! For the rest of the day, the boys worked without the comfort of their buddy, opening them to social opportunities they would never have had.  They still had fun, accomplished things, and grew a bit.  But they did it with a little more risk and became more open to partnering with others throughout the day.

I was so impressed by this trick that I asked the leader about it.  She shared that they had choices for any number of groups.  Need groups of three? Team them in trios and then ask them to become one of the Three Stooges.  Foursomes? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And so forth.  They had learned that boys know how to game the “count off” trick, positioning their best friends “n” people away to make sure they stayed together.  The character game took them by surprise, before they could figure out how to thwart the leader’s intent.

As adults, we probably won’t be asked to become a cartoon character (I’d pick SpongeBob, FYI). But, boy, do we need to be broken up and moved out of our social comfort zones!  How many times do you arrive at a networking event and look for the familiar faces?  I’m guilty of this, and I really enjoy working a room and getting to meet new people.  For the less gregarious among us, breaking out to meet strangers is a difficult exercise.

How many opportunities do we miss for fear of breaking away from our comfortable friends?  There is such value in meeting new people, expanding our horizons, and finding ways to help others.  Our reluctance to engage a stranger costs us so much.  As adults, we are supposed to know better and not require outside intervention to make us do the right thing.  Yet we still revert to old behaviors, rooted deep in our psyches.

We all own this problem.  At your next event, acknowledge the familiar faces and turn away to meet the strangers.  If your friends chase you down, gently aim them at others as well.  You may have to write “SpongeBob” on your name tag to make your point, but it will be worth the effort.