Midwest IT Survival

Get too tactical and get set on fire

I read Neil’s “How to do Nothing” blog article on the topic of effective management back when I first discovered his blog earlier this year (2010).  I was struck by the pure simplicity of his eight attributes of effective team management at the time.  Neil was gracious enough to comment on a recent article I published on agile project management reducing application over architecture.  I went back and re-read his article and realized it is even more impactful on successful team management than I originally thought.  I thought I would take a few paragraphs to further extend the concepts Neil outlined in this article.

Anticipate rather than react

Neil suggests having your hair on proverbial fire frequently by getting hands-on in addressing issues isn’t the most affective approach.  I agree with him that in these hair-on-fire situations, it can be exhilarating to roll-up your sleeves and jump in and be the hero that saves the project or restores production service, etc.  Once a sense of calm returns after the hero has saved the day, the hero starts itching for the next crisis to be the savior and the behavior gets repeated.  The hero may get initial fame and glory, but it is short lived.  In my experience in multiple MidWestern companies, the hero ultimately gets revealed for his/her display of reactionary management.  Senior management begins to grow tired of the peaks and valleys of crisis, pending doom, disaster avoided, pause and repeat for the next crisis.  I’ve also seen the hero scratch their heads when the next re-organization comes along and the hero finds him/herself as a technical lead over a team with a new management layer above them.

Maintain relationships outside the team

I definitely agree with Neil here.  I would even add the larger the organization, the more this is essential.  As your team provides a service to a larger project or effort, the number of ways other teams can throw a wrench in the works is almost immeasurable.  In addition, the message that gets filtered to your team and then to you may be completely disconnected from the real blockage.  Being able to pick up the phone and call a peer manager, with whom you have established a rapport, and get right to the real issue is invaluable.  Once the real issue is known, you can offer guidance to your team on how to navigate to a successful path forward.  Without this knowledge gleaned from a peer manager, you can easily get caught up in the panic the blockage creates and risk being set on fire in the process.

Big visible task boards

In a word: absolutely!  By all means, assuming everyone knows what to do is a recipe for disaster.  A disaster in a sense that tasks won’t get executed according to plan and you will be dragged back into strategizing on how to go forward while accounting for the missteps of the past.  As Neil says, use a whiteboard or in my case, use some electronic task tracking system that isn’t overly cumbersome yet makes it unbelievably clear who is working on what, doing what and when.  Have you ever considered using your bug or defect tracking system as a light weight task tracking mechanism?

Team collaboration

I’ve written on this topic in the past relative to the leveraging of self-organizing, strong teams with a focus on intense collaboration.  If you make yourself a keeper of all knowledge, you will constantly be engaged to assist with tactical decision-ing and thus at risk of again, being set on fire.  If you drive team members asking you questions back to fellow team members, they will start going to fellow team members directly.  Clearly, once this occurs, you will need to be contingent of when you will need to specifically instruct your team to collaborate with you when you are engaged in some issue that you aren’t at a point of delegating just yet.

Small incremental changes

If you are considering pitching or implementing a significant change that you have dreamed up that will get everyone working better, more efficient and at the same time cure cancer, you might want to put on the brakes.  People accept change in a variety of ways.  The more aggressive the change from the current norm the more likely you will have to invest additional time in addressing how each impacted individual reacts to the change.  If you stretch your change implementation out over time so it seems like you are providing “just in time” solutions to the ultimate problem, you will most likely achieve a more successful end result all around.  Plus, with each incremental small change, you can more easily course correct or tweak your next change to be even more effective and hopefully, even less visible.

Inspect and adapt

Getting the team to contribute ideas and suggest process improvements takes the decision-ing pressure off of you and empowers the people doing the work and most impacted by the process to suggest the most effective improvements.  Plus, if the team is on board with an improvement, they are more than likely to make the implementation successful, because it is their improvement.  On the flip side, how motivated are you if you have the ultimate “my boss told me to do it, thus if it doesn’t work, not mu problem” excuse at the ready when the slightest problem is encountered?  What motivation does anyone have in that situation to try and make it work?

Hire great people

These almost goes without saying … hire great people and then just get out of their way so they can do good work.

Commit to personal development

If don’t have the flexibility to move poor performers out and attract in top performers, and let’s face it, MidWestern companies don’t always have the most flexible staffing models nor the local talent pool to quickly make team changes happen.  Bringing up the level of your current team is more than likely your best option.  Take advantage of any tuition or training bugets available to strongly encourage folks to get away from their desks and get exposed to some additional improvement perspectives.  Consider incremental “stretch” assignments to use as opportunitties to challenge those that have a weakness in a certain skill set.  Catch up with them “offline” and chat with them about what problems or challenges they are facing and offer some tips to help them get over those hurrdles.

Summary

In summary, the concept that a strong manager is precieved to be “doing nothing” is a compelling goal for any team manager to attain.  By essentially making it a top priority for you to empower your team to function as autonomously as possible, it allows you to focus on inter-company relationship building and other functions only you can do.  It also allows you to identifying process and skill set weaknesses without being tactically involved in the work to consider small, incremental improvements and then absorb the result.

Did you actually dance at your first school dance?

Jurgen Appelo recently posted his slides from the Scrum Gathering in Orlando entitled “The Dolt’s Guide To Self-Organization”.  I didn’t attend the conference, but in flipping through the slide deck, I was impressed by how much the concept of “self organizing teams” is a much better way to view the creation of a “Strong Team” as I tried to outline in a previous blog post .

I tried to capture in that previous post of mine a “hands off-ish” management style that fosters team members to step up and gravitate towards work they are interested in with the manager or team lead ensuring all the prioritized tasks needed are being handled by someone versus a more structured or top down task assignment approach.  Jurgen takes a different slant on a similar management style.  He starts with making the case that nature itself is self organizing rather than marching forward under the direction of a leader.  To further highlight this perspective, consider your first school dance or formal social gathering you attended.  Without activities directed by the school leadership, children tended to naturally separate into gender aligned groups.  Boys would be on one side of the gymnasium with girls on the other.  Then, within the gender groups, sub groups would form to further self organize along the common interests of sports, video games, comic books or other like enthusiasts.

In his presentation, Appelo suggests that “management” is not a direct natural extension of self organization, but exists none the less as a necessity.  Continuing the analogy above, the school dance needs chaperones.  How the chaperones interact or “manage” the students directly relates to how much fun the students have at the dance.  Mapping to managing an IT team or organization, how much micro versus macro management occurs relates to how much engagement and over all “value” is produced by the team or organization.  A high degree of micromanagement results in a low level of empowerment and thus a lower “value” produced by the team as a whole.  Flipping back to the School dance, if the chaperones are directing each student on what to do when on a seemingly constant basis, the kids in attendance are going to derive less fun or “value” from attending the dance.  Where as, if the chaperones are engaged in the dance event but allow the attendees the ability to interact on their own terms and only stepping in when a situation is trending negative (kids harassing or taunting others, kids on the verge of breaking out into a fight, etc.), the kids are in a better position to enjoy the dance.  The manger that is trying to constantly direct the team on a granular basis is going to reflect the over controlling chaperones at a school dance.  To sum up this notion of self-organization and how it fosters the empowerment to value equation, I discovered this quote from Majlinda Priku:

“People who actively participate in the workplace see greater skill development, and gain a greater understanding of which techniques are effective and which ones are not. They also have a greater opportunity to come up with creative solutions to problems, and novel ways to improve performance. The power to utilize their creativity and knowledge leads to expertise. People who are able to independently evaluate and implement projects have a sense of ownership that makes them committed to the project’s success.”  – Majlinda Priku, June 1, 2009,  http://www.articlesbase.com/leadership-articles/employee-empowerment-947535.html

Okay, so empowering employees through delegation to have more latitude to implement solutions to assignments sounds great, so how do you measure the level of empowerment and delegation currently in place within your team today to see where you stand?

Appelo has come up with an interesting way to represent this measurement as a sliding scale on slide 58:

Manager with authority in empowerment

Tell: make decision as the manager

Sell: convince people about decision

Consult: get input from team before decision

Join: make decision together with team

Advise: influence decision made by the team

Confirm: ask feedback after decision by team

Delegate: no influence, let team work it out

Employees with authority in empowerment

With “Tell” being the manager having the authority with little employee empowerment and “Delegate” being the employees having more authority and considerable empowerment.

I find this scalar approach to be extremely helpful as a way to reflect on recent decisions to measure the level of empowerment in place.  As an example, when I reflect on a high level of selling involved in getting a decision implemented, I wonder how I could have provided more information or context to the situation in order to move up the scale towards more employee “no brainer” decision acceptance.  I also find myself throughout the day moving up and down the scale for each unique situation that occurs.  By setting the goal of trying to be more closely aligned with the employees with authority in empowerment side of the scale in most situations, one can begin to determine where, on average, your team’s level of empowerment and delegation is at.  If you find yourself frequently telling or selling decisions, take a step back and try to determine what are the barriers to moving up the scale and take steps to change your approach to see if you can indeed move up the scale.  Take note of the techniques you employ that move towards employee empowerment.  You may find a pattern that the trend is positive for your team or a particular individual that you can continue to leverage going forward.

In summary, I find Appelo’s self organizing teams to indeed be a more natural way to capture how IT professionals work.  Keeping with that model, employee empowerment and delegation are a great way to look at how to build a strong team.  The authority in empowerment scale is a good tool to help measure the level of effective employee delegation that is taking place within your team.  By using the scale, one can identify where one finds oneself telling or selling.  This further enables one to try different approaches in future similar situations to see if one can move from telling and selling to advising, confirming and true delegation.

How do you build a strong team?

Some find having to go to work every day … day in and day out … to be a drag, but if you have ever worked on a strong team, you know that that drag isn’t so bad because you have peers around you with a sense of team work that has everyone pitching in to do quality work with a strong sense of pride.  In the previous article I elaborated on elements of a strong team.  This article picks up where that article left off … how does one go about creating a strong team?

How do you know if you are on a strong team?

Simple, you can cite current and frequent examples from your day to day work that align with the elements shared in the previous article.

How does one go about creating a strong team?

A bit harder … up front, a strong team culture, as so often quoted, starts at the top.  The team manager must take steps to foster such a culture.  Micromanaging the team is a sure way to block any sprouting of a sense of strong team.  The manager needs to set the tone that cooperation and teamwork is favored and rewarded with shameless self promotion frowned upon.  Empowerment or more simply, allowing people to do their jobs with low supervision and coaching rather than pointing out failures or frequent “is it done yet?” status queries goes a long way to encourage teamwork.

A team lead or manager also needs to show an outward passion towards the work the team is doing; including taking an interest in what each team member is doing such as listening to what they are getting excited about.  Is it that new development component that enables all kinds of rich UI features?  Is it that next platform upgrade that includes an ability to take a virtual snapshot of a box nightly to aide in troubleshooting those “happens once in awhile, but when it does …” problems?  Is it that emerging architectural standard that will make a great cup of coffee while curing cancer at the same time?  Technical people get excited about aspects of technology that align with their interests.  In leading a team, being aware of professional interests and looking for opportunities to steer those interests toward current and future service demands will help to create a sense of a strong team.  Team members seeing their interests align with work requests will instill a true sense of importance with each individual.  This creates a real notion of “my ideas are being heard and acted upon” and further supports the concept of a strong team described in these articles.

Another opportunity to build a strong sense of team is to try and emphasize a narrow focus for the team’s services.  “We do this, and we do this … of, and we also do this other thing once in awhile” will tend to water down the team’s focus.  In watering down, the team members will see very little overlap in what they are working on with other team members.  With little overlap comes little drive to cross communicate, share items, help solve each others problems, etc.  Sure, a team most likely provides multiple services, but by bringing those disparate services into a more singular and common theme, team members will begin to see how their work overlaps other team member’s work.  With more overlap, team members will be more inclined to share ideas and communicate.  Individuals with technical problems will feel more apt to share since others may have worked on similar issues rather than assume they are a one person silo and will continue to plod along trying to solve the issue on their own.  Also, to reinforce this sharing, as a team manager or lead, try to mix up who is working on what group of tasks.  If Bob is the printer expert, try to avoid routing all printing problems to just Bob.  Not only will Bob grow tired of being the printer guy, he will have no one else to chat with and generate new ideas and approaches to printer problem solving.  Plus, as an added bonus, mixing up the task handling will increase your team’s ability to handing spikes in requests, increasing work throughput, and reducing single points of service failure.

What other external factors develop a strong team?

As a leader, one can try all of the above techniques and achieve some degree of a strong team, but external forces help to bump up the sense of team even further if handled positively.  One external factor that a team led or manager has no real control over but he or she can leverage to their advantage in creating a strong team is having a small team being charged with providing services within a larger organization.  The theme of being the under dog that is struggling to succeed against some difficult odds helps to galvanize a team together with a sense of survival that ultimately builds team work.  This is also colloquially referred to as going up against the 800 pound gorilla.  It is the tried and true notion that working together against the larger “foe” will result in more success than going it alone.  One point of caution, carrying this “us against them” theme too far into a negative tone will work to undermine morale by making people uncomfortable to be pushed to be combative.  Thus, make sure to have a sense of competitive pressure in working within the larger organization but be careful not to proceed into negative territory:

Not OK: “We hate that other team!  They are terrible.  They make our lives miserable.  They can’t plan worth beans and thus everything is a last minute crisis.  They don’t know what they are doing.  We could do their jobs twice as good in half the time …”

Better: “Man that other team is demanding.  They are our most challenging customer.  Since it doesn’t look like they are going to change, what can we do to reduce the last minute crisis requests on our side?”

Another external factor that strengthens a team is going through a demanding work activity involving everyone pulling together to get the job done successfully.  The immediate example that comes to mind is having everyone pitch in together to complete a bunch of tasks for a project that has an aggressive deadline.  By pitching in and completing the work together, everyone shares in completion glory.  Under the tight time pressure, applying the approaches listed prior and acting as a coach or mentor rather than a task or slave driver can give everyone that sense of working together equaled the final success.

Anyone have any other examples of techniques one can use to strengthen a team that one has control over?  How about example of other external situations that, if handled a certain way, can strengthen a team?

Ever work on a strong team?

Do you or have you ever had the opportunity to work on a strong team at any point in your professional career?  A team where everyone has a collective sense of being part of something bigger than themselves?  Everyone had a role on the team that wasn’t defined by a Human Resources job description, but rather, a combination of skill set strengths and work task preferences aligned ultimately with what needed to get accomplished?  A team where, as work came in, everyone volunteered to own tasks and everyone else lined up to provide support and assistance?  A team where everyone knew the strengths and weaknesses of each team member plus everyone could count on each other to get the job done?  If you have, your mind is probably getting flooded with random memories of events and situations of that team environment.  Do affirmative answers to these questions actually define what a strong team means to you?

Strong Team = A team where everyone has a collective sense of being part of something bigger than themselves?

According to research by Amy Wrzesniewski, as reported in 12: The Elements of Great Managing (Wagner and Harter, Gallup Press, 2006), people want to work for an organization with a higher purpose or a mission that means something to them.  I believe the same holds true for a team within an organization.  If a team has each team member working on separate tasks that don’t come back to a common thematic service offering, it is difficult for each team member to get a sense they work for a team with a higher purpose.  Without an opportunity to share related successes and failures and generally kvetch or vent about stressful situations that each team member can identify with, the people on the team won’t have a strong sense of team.  If common exchanges like below aren’t occurring, there doesn’t exist that sense everyone is working for a higher purpose:

Bob: “Hey, working with Larry in Accounting is really a challenge.”

Sally: “Yah, I know.  I dread getting requests from him.”

Bob: “What is his deal anyway?”

Sue: “You guys talking about Larry in Account?”

Bob and Sally: “Yes”

Sue: “Oh, he is easy to work with.”

Bob: “How so?”

Sue: “He just gets very nervous when his PC doesn’t work exactly the same each time.  If you move his icons around or patches or updates cause his PC to work just slightly differently, look out, he is going to freak.  Just let him know nothing is going to change and fix whatever he needs and you will be fine.”

Bob: “Great, I’ll give that a try!”

Strong Team = Everyone had a role on the team that wasn’t defined by a Human Resources job description, but rather, a combination of skill set strengths, work task preferences aligned ultimately with what needs to get accomplished?

Bob might be interested in how the system works together as a whole, and thus engages on tasks that are architecture in nature or involve major system upgrades.  Sally might be a bit intimidated or uncomfortable interacting directly with people outside the team but favors highly detailed technical tasks and thus gravitates towards tasks that fit this description.  Joe might be losing his zeal for highly technical tasks and would rather interact with people to establish the more detailed requirements on what needs to be accomplished and thus provide specifications to Sally.  Sue might be a bit junior and thus gravitates towards the more mundane, repetitive tasks that increases her confidence in her abilities but everyone else see as low challenge work.  Yet, on the HR side, everyone is either a “Systems Engineer I” or “Systems Engineer II”.

Strong Team = A team where, as work came in, everyone volunteered to own tasks and everyone else lined up to provide support and assistance?

Building on that sense of everyone working for something bigger than themselves comes the way incoming work is divvied up amongst the team members.  A sure sign of a weak team is when the team lead or manager has to monitor all in coming work requests, specifically assign out tasks with exhaustive granular detail and follow-up with status meetings and the always dreaded status reports.  At the opposite end of the spectrum is the strong team were as work comes in, everyone assimilates the work without having to wait for their assignments.  Instead of the manager or team leader acting as a task master, instead, they provide guidance as to how to handle competing priorities as well as context behind requests.  This team dynamic involves each team member being aware of their implicit role within the team as well as the strengths, weaknesses and interests of all other team members rather than:

Systems Engineer II: “This work should be assigned to a ‘Systems Engineer I’ and I’ll go back to my desk and surf the web till something fitting my job description comes in.”

Junior resources know the typical IT technical hierarchy where “senior” resources became senior resources by having tenure defined by having rolled up sleeves and made things work to the state the system or service is in at present.  Junior resources know they have to respect this effort and accept more junior tasks until one can grow into a senior resource.  Senior resources know they were once junior at some point and thus are open to assisting fellow teammates.  Junior resources know they need senior resource to help them get their work done; yet, they respect senior resources time and workload and thus only engage after trying all avenues on their own first.  All these combine into a natural divvying up of in coming work requests favoring each person’s unique skill set and interest yet with everyone mindful all the work has to get done on schedule.

How do you know if you are on a strong team?

Simple … you can cite current and frequent examples from your day to day work that align with the elements above.

How does one go about creating a strong team?

Look for part 2 to share some thoughts on how to go about creating a strong team.

Some find having to go to work every day … day in and day out … to be a drag, but if you have ever worked on a strong team, you know that that drag isn’t so bad because you have peers around you with a sense of team work that has everyone pitching in to do quality work with a strong sense of pride.

Anyone have any other examples they can share that captures the elements of working on a strong team?