As we enter the last quarter of 2014, I’m reminded of a story by Mike Greene that I read recently in the Business Journals (check it out here).

Paraphrasing, the story went something like this:

A man walked into an old country store late one afternoon. As he wandered around looking at the merchandise, he was occasionally interrupted by a low moan coming from behind the end of the cash register counter. He continued to peruse the shelves until his curiosity finally got the better of him. He approached the counter and asked the store owner about the sound.

The owner nodded his head toward the floor where an old dog lay sleeping. “He’s napped there every day for the past several years. So much so that he’s worn the wooden floor down and an old rusty nail pokes him in the side as he sleeps,” offered the store owner.

The man looked questioningly at the dog and then at the store owner and wondered aloud, “Why doesn’t he just get up and move to another spot?”

“Good question,” replied the owner, “as much as it hurts him, I guess it’s not enough to do anything about it.”

The end of the year is traditionally a time to reflect on the prior year and to set goals for the next 12 months. As you consider the direction you’d like to take in 2015, spend some time thinking about the things you’ve been living with and ask yourself, “Do I hurt enough to change, to actually do something about it?”

It may mean making a career move or signing up for training to expand your knowledge. Maybe it’s seeking out a mentor to help you navigate the difficulties or uncertainties in life. Or maybe it’s something else entirely.

Whatever it is, resolve that come next December, you’ll be able to look back with a sense of accomplishment and pride in what you’ve done.

photo courtesy of freeimages.com

The post Are You Hurting Enough to Really Change? appeared first on The SERO Group.

“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.”  – Dave Barry

Surveys over the past 12 years have repeatedly confirmed Dave’s sentiment. On average only two of every three hours spent at work are considered productive by IT professionals. The item most often cited reason for lost productivity is ineffective meetings. This only gets worse the higher up in the organization you climb. VPs and C-Suite people tend to spend more time in meetings than out of them.

If meetings are an abyss into which we throw our time, why do organizations hold them every day? And why do we do very little to improve them?

Fortunately, there is one simple step that you can take to vastly improve your meetings: follow an agenda.

Life Without an Agenda

When you have a meeting without an agenda, it starts a domino effect of cascading unproductive behaviors that derail the meeting. The figure below illustrates this.

Without an agenda:

• Invitees don’t know if they should attend of if they can send a delegate instead. They don’t know what will be covered.
• Invitees don’t know what they can do to prepare ahead of time and hence will be less productive during the meeting. They won’t have the figures they need; they won’t have the results of the recent analysis; they won’t have the relevant information at their fingertips.
• Since invitees don’t know how important the meeting will be, they won’t make it a priority to arrive on time. They may show up late.
• Without a critical mass of attendees present, you, as the meeting organizer, will be tempted to postpone the start of the meeting until the “important people” arrive.
• Without an agenda to keep the meeting on track, the discussion topics will tend to meander.
• People will begin to multitask, opting to be personally productive at the expense of the group’s productivity.
• Decisions will not be made and the unstated goal or reason for meeting will not be accomplished.
• As a result of all these, another meeting must be called. And the cycle begins again.

Life is Better with an Agenda

This fate is easily averted. Before sending out a meeting request, spend 5 to 10 minutes organizing an agenda for the meeting. Send the agenda with the meeting request. Your invitees will see the purpose of the meeting. They will recognize that you have prepared ahead of time and that the meeting will be worthwhile

During the meeting you can use the agenda as a yardstick by which to measure every topic that is discussed. This will keep from going down rabbit trails and keep the discussions focused on the meeting topic.

The result: people remain more engaged, productive discussions will ensue, and decisions will be made. As a bonus, your meeting will end on time.

But…

Ahhh, but you say I do not have the time to create an agenda. I understand. We are all busy.

But I submit that you do not have the time to not make an agenda. If spending 10 minutes before a meeting will make the hour-long meeting more productive, not to mention eliminating the need for subsequent meetings, I don’t believe you can afford not to make an agenda.

So, what’s stopping you? Buck the trend. Create a corporate culture within your team that will increase your and your team’s productivity.

The post One Easy Step to Improving Your Meetings appeared first on The SERO Group.

Meetings are not free, even if everyone is local and there are no travel costs to consider. The loss in productivity alone can be staggering.

Personal Productivity at the Expense of Team Productivity

I used to just “grin and bear” it as the saying goes. I used to take my laptop to those meetings under the guise of “taking notes”. But what I was really doing was being productive on my own. I was sifting through email in pursuit of InboxZero. Or I remoting into a client’s server to do some “real work” while the meeting languished.

But I’ve learned that although I was being productive as an individual, I was contributing to the ineffectiveness of the team. My mental absence was hindering the team as a whole. My personal productivity was at the expense of the productivity of the team. In essence I was part of the problem, not part of the solution.

I’ve written about some of those experiences and my short-sightedness in a prior post entitled “Closing Your Laptop in Meetings.”  If you haven’t read it, I’d encourage you to do so and then take the challenge.

Conducting Effective Meetings

Something had to give. I didn’t want to spend scores of hours each year sitting in meetings that even most of the attendees would say was worthless. So, I did a lot of research and experimenting, looking for ways to make the meetings I conduct and the meetings I attend more effective.

I finally found a few critical points that have helped me immensely in making my meetings more productive. I’ll be the first to admit that these are not rocket science; they are common sense approaches that just seem to work.

Now, your turn. What techniques have you found for making meetings more effective?

The post Conducting Effective Meetings appeared first on The SERO Group.

My laptop, my security blanket

Recently, I listened to a cast about how to make your meetings more effective by leaving your laptop at your desk. “That’s just crazy; that’s pure nonsense!” I thought as I listened. “What will they suggest next? Adding cursors to your stored procedures to improve performance?”

Like most professionals, I’ve sat through more meetings than I care to remember. Some are very productive. Others, not so much. They seem to go on and on like a bad movie. How could one make it through such meetings without a laptop with which to multi-task?

Having a laptop with you is like having a security blanket. When a meeting takes a non-productive detour, you can turn to your trusty laptop and get some things done. At least you’ll stay productive.

I’ve been to some meetings where I was able to reach inbox zero while others belabored a really inconsequential point way past reason. And I’m not alone. I remember in one all-day meeting, I received a flurry of emails from several others sitting in the same room. Many of those emails were in response to questions I’d sent to them days or weeks earlier.

If at first you don’t succeed…

But as crazy as Mark and Michael’s advice sounded to me, they have a proven track record of offering good advice. Could this really be true? It sounded so foreign to me.

So I decided to conduct an experiment. For the next couple of weeks, I’d leave my laptop closed during meetings and devote my entire attention to the meeting. No more emails. No more remoting into a client’s system to check something. Just the meeting at hand.

At first it was tough, really tough. When a meeting seemed to take a nonproductive tangent, I instinctively reached for my laptop. Argh! It was missing in action! What had I done? Stupid, stupid, stupid!

But over the next several meetings I persisted. I stubbornly stuck to my experiment as hard as it was.

The Payoff

I found that it got easier over time. Not having the laptop in which to seek refuge forced me to mentally stay in the meeting. I was more engaged. I paid attention. I contributed more.

Soon I noticed that the meetings were better as a result. I realized that I didn’t have to sit back and allow the meeting to go astray. I could do something about it. I could subtly step in and redirect the meeting back on track by suggesting we take that point off-line. I could even do this in meetings that I didn’t run. It wasn’t very difficult; most people were buried in their laptop and not paying attention.

I also realized that what Mark and Michael had said was true. While I felt that having a laptop made me more productive, the meeting is not all about me. It’s about the group and making good decisions. If I’m being more effective as an individual, it’s detracting from the meeting and thus making the meeting less productive. That wastes a lot of other people’s time and costs the company.

When I closed my laptop, I was able to influence the meeting and the outcome for the better. I wish I’d learned this lesson years ago.

Excuses

I know what you must be thinking right about now. “Joe, you’ve spent too much time in the server room. Your brain has frostbite.” I know. I thought that at first, too. But give it a try. I think you’ll agree.

Mark and Michael talk about some excuses that people may have when you, as the leader of a meeting, decide to banish the portable computers from your meetings. I won’t recount those here. But I will give you some that immediately came to my mind along with my current thoughts on them.

• “I really need my laptop to take notes.” That really is an excuse. Almost everyone claims to need a laptop to take meeting notes, but very few actually do take notes with it. The temptation to do other work is too great. If you really want to take notes, and I encourage you to take notes, use pen and paper. If you must have them electronically, transcribe them later.
• “I need to be able to look up the latest figures at the meeting.” That may be, but reporting the latest figures to the group can probably easily be an action item that you take away from the meeting. Taking time during the meeting to look them up is not the best use of everyone’s time.
• “I need to have my calendar available.” Again, coordinating a future meeting can be done after this meeting ends. Spending an extra five minutes trying to schedule another meeting takes up valuable time during this meeting. Besides, if everyone was fully engaged in this meeting and decisions could be made, perhaps another meeting wouldn’t even be necessary.

For every rule there is an exception

Like the guys from Manager-Tools, I’ve found that not having my laptop open in meetings has made the meetings more productive. I think that’ll be the norm from now on. I’m even going to add this suggestion to the How to Conduct Effective Meetings Lunch and Learn that I give to companies.

There are, of course, some exceptions to this general rule. But I’m beginning to think that those are few and far between.

So what do you think? Do you take your laptop to meetings? Have you tried leaving it closed during the meetings? What has your experience been?

The post Closing Your Laptop in Meetings appeared first on The SERO Group.

Series Outline

• So I Got Promoted, Now What?
• Stop Doing Your Old Job
• Employ the Same Successful Tactics
• Get to Know Your Peers
• Get a Trusted System
• Manage Your Email
• Manage Your Calendar
• Start Having Weekly One-On-Ones
• Recognize the Tendency to Revert

How do you recognize an extroverted IT professional? Answer: He looks at your shoes when he talks to you.

That’s a harsh joke. It’s certainly not true for the people I know in the IT field, but it does illustrate a point. Those of us in the IT realm are not known for our exceptional interpersonal skills. It’s not that we don’t have interpersonal skills. It’s just that we tend to be more at ease when “interfacing” with other techies.

Being comfortable amongst similar people comes naturally. I’m reminded of the old sales axiom: People buy from people they like, and people like themselves.

Why Should I Care About My Peers?

Getting along with other IT folks may have been sufficient in your prior role, but as you get promoted up through the ranks you’ll need to extend your comfort zone to include a broader swath of the organization. Business is relational and you’ll need to be as well to succeed that landscape.

Why? There are many reasons. Here are but a few.

Learn From Your Peers

If someone has been in a position that’s similar to your new role in the organization, it stands to reason that they may have picked up some good insight during their tenure. I’m not suggesting that they’ll be perfect or that you’ll want to follow their lead. That’s probably not the case. You need to be true to your own style and make your own mark, but they may be able to help you navigate around potential land mines as you adjust to your new responsibilities in the organization.

Establish Lines Of Communication

In most organizations, a certain level of cooperation is required from multiple teams and departments. You must work with other groups to push the organization’s goals and objectives forward. It’s much easier to work with someone else when you’ve already established a professional relationship with him. People are more willing to go to bat for someone else if they know him.

Prepare For Future Conflicts

When two people interact regularly, there will eventually be conflict, even under the best of circumstances. The likelihood of conflict is escalated when put in the context of a stressful or demanding project. Some would even argue that the conflict helps to produce s better outcome. Regardless, those conflicts are less intense and are more easily resolved afterward if the two parties have already established trust and mutual respect for one another.

Vet Your Ideas Before Unveiling Them

As we come up with ideas for our department or the organization, it’s good to have a trusted colleague with whom we can share those ideas and get good and honest feedback. An idea that we conceive may have downsides that we haven’t considered. Vetting the ideas before announcing them will help you to improve the ideas and lay the groundwork for better acceptance of them when announced.

Expand Your Network

Let’s face it, business can be turbulent. Mergers and acquisitions, reorganizations and outsourcing, recessions and contracting economies all make for a very dynamic workplace. In such an environment, it’s good to have an extensive network of people who can help you if needed, or who you can help.

Ok, But Who Are My Peers?

That’s a good question. I’m reminded of the parable of the Good Samaritan where a young man asks “Who is my neighbor?” and learns that his true neighbors extend far beyond his confort zone.

Getting to know your peers means getting to know others both inside and outside of your current organization, those with whom you work regularly and those you only see occasionally, those who are in the same industry and those who work in complementary industries. In short, most anyone you come into contact with can be considered your peer for these purposes.

However, that’s a pretty ambitious target so let’s narrow it down a little for starters.

Peers At Work

The peers at work are primarily your colleagues at the same level in the organization. If you are the DBA Manager, your peers may be the Dev Team Manager, the Customer Service Team Manager, and the Quality Assurance Team Manager. Don’t limit yourself to one department or physical location; reach out to peers in other departments and locations.

You may also go up the promotional ladder a rung or two, depending on the culture of work environment.

Peers In The Same Industry

Trade shows and conferences offer great opportunities to meet other people in the same industry as yours. If you go to these types of events and only consume the information presented in the break-out sessions, you’re missing out of one of the most important aspects of the event. Networking (in the best sense of the term) is probably the most important aspect of these events. You can even participate when you’re unable to attend in person.

Peers In Complementary  Industries

During the course of your business day, you’ll likely meet people from other walks of life. Getting to know your suppliers, your customers, your service providers will help you to work more effectively with them.

How Do I Get To Know My Peers?

Getting to know your peers is not really that difficult. Little kids seem to have an innate ability to do it. If you go to a playground and watch for a few minutes, you’re bound to see a new kid arrive. At first he tentatively plays near the other kids, then before you know it he’s joined their game.

As we grow, we sometimes convince ourselves that it’s much more difficult than that. We start believing that meeting new people is hard. It’s not. If a little kid can do it, surely we can. Initially you may have a certain level apprehension or even anxiety about striking up a conversation with someone you don’t know very well. As you practice, it will become much easier.

Lots of books have been written about the subject. If you’re looking for a good starting point, try the classic How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It’s a good common sense approach for becoming a good conversationalist. In general, it’s simply finding common ground and becoming a good listener.

Some specific examples of situations where you can get to know your peers may be:

At Meetings

Meeting are pervasive in business today. Our calendars are full of them, so why not use them as an opportunity to meet someone new? Arrive early and introduce yourself to someone else who’s early. Spend a few minutes talking with her before the meeting. Afterward, send a short follow up email. Something simple like “Hey Darlene – It was good chatting with you before the meeting earlier today. Here’s a link to the resource I was telling you about. See you next week.”

Small Tokens

Don’t be afraid to reach out to your peers with little acts of kindness. For example, if you occasionally bring bagels or donuts for your team, buy some extra and give them to your peer for his team. Let him be the one to give it to his team. “Hey Marc – I was at the bakery this morning picking up some bagels for my team and thought your guys may want some too. Enjoy.”

At Lunch

Of course, lunch is one of the more common ways to get to know your peers. “Let’s do lunch.” as they say. But you’ll probably want to be more genuine than that. I find that it’s typically easier to establish a working relationship with my peers first and then invite them to lunch. For example, after I’ve met and talked with someone a few times I may ask “Hey – I was thinking of trying the new Mongolian place for lunch today. Have you heard anything about it?” And then you can invite him to join you.

Start Today

The best part about all of this is that you don’t have to wait until you’ve been promoted to begin getting to know your peers. You can start reaching out to your co-workers, customers, suppliers, and colleagues in other industries now. What’s stopping you?

The post So I Got Promoted, Now What? Get To Know Your Peers appeared first on The SERO Group.

Series Outline

• So I Got Promoted, Now What?
• Stop Doing Your Old Job
• Employ the Same Successful Tactics
• Get to Know Your Peers
• Get a Trusted System
• Manage Your Email
• Manage Your Calendar
• Start Having Weekly One-On-Ones
• Recognize the Tendency to Revert

Constant Change

It seems that Moore’s Law is on its seventh double espresso. The law, which was originally described by Gordon E. Moore in 1965, primarily relates to advances in computer hardware. But given the dizzying pace of changes in all technology , I think it’s more broadly applicable to other areas today. The affects on IT Professionals is fairly obvious.

Can you name a database administrator, a solutions architect, a seasoned developer, or any other highly skilled, highly technical IT Professional that views his job as a run-of-the-mill 9 to 5 position? I can’t. Most successful people in our industry realize that in order to do their jobs, a certain amount of continuing education is required.

So over time, we’ve developed ways to keep up with the latest trends in our field. We listen to podcasts, read blogs, attend conferences, participate in user groups, and take training classes. These sources, among others, help us to do our jobs better.

There’s A Lot To Learn

It’s important to realize that once you’ve been promoted, your job has substantially changed. Many IT Professionals fail to recognize this shift and languish in their new role as Team Lead, Manager, or Director. I’ve seen it countless times at the companies where I’ve consulted.

Need proof? Think back to the first few weeks or months as a new database administrator or application developer. How much did you know, really know, about your job? At the time you may have thought you knew it all, but if you’re honest with yourself, you didn’t. Think about how much more you know now.

The same applies to your new job. You may feel like you know how to manage others and work at a higher level in the organization, but trust me when I say there’s plenty more to learn.

New Job, Same Preparation

That’s not to say that everything you learned in your last role is now obsolete. On the contrary, we can supplement that expertise with newfound and complementary knowledge and once again prepare to excel in our new role. The good news is that you already know how to do this – just take the same approach that landed you the promotion.

Dive Into Your New Role

In much the same way you seized your prior technical role and sought out every bit of information you could in your area of expertise, you can and should do the exact same thing in your new role. How?

• Seek out podcasts on how to manage a technical team. I like Manager Tools series of podcasts.
• Look for blogs that are dedicated to effective management.
• Attend a non-technical conference. Once again I hear good things about the Manager Tools conferences.
• Read books on effective communications and leadership. There are classics like anything from Peter Drucker and Dale Carnagie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People as well as more contemporary books like Good to Great.
• Join associations.

Expand Your Horizon

In your prior role, you may have found it valuable to learn some ancillary technologies to help you do your job better. The same is also true for your new role.

• Get involved with ToastMasters International.
• Read books about making presentations. Presenting to Win describes how to create an engaging presentation.
• Learn more about negotiations tactics.
• Look for opportunities to improve your budgeting and financial skills.

You Can’t Improve What You Don’t Measure

As a database or network professional, you may have found that capturing statistics and benchmarking data paid off in many ways. Metrics help determine when things are begining to depart from the norm. They can be used to help predict when upgrades will be needed. And they can be used to identify where the problem really is, and more importantly where it isn’t.

Metrics can be used in your new role, too. Capturing metrics can help you to justify new expenditures, identify gaps in your current levels and processes, and benchmark your areas of responsibility. Remember the adage: you cannot improve what you don’t measure.

Show Me The Money

Redundancy, high availability, and up-time are all good concepts and even measurements in some cases for technical people. We can see how they naturally help us to achieve our goals. However, oftentimes those concepts are a bit too abstract for other people, particularly those who may hold the pursestrings. In those cases, putting the concept or technology into financial terms often helps. For example the cost of a High Availability solution may be $200,000. That sounds expensive until you realize that the cost of being down for just one day is $500,000. In that case, $200,000 maybe well worth the investment depending on the probability of an outage.

The same tactics can be employed in your new role. Learn to associate your projects and requests with financial measures. Calculate the Return On Investment. The practice will help you to better understand the real need (or lack of real need). And it’ll help form a good basis for your request to your boss.

Carpe Diem

Although I couldn’t find a reference for it, I believe it was Tom Peters that once quipped “Nothing begets failure like success.” I believe he meant that once a company was successful at one endeavor, it was in danger of always trying to repeat that success and thus stifling true innovation.

As individuals, we are susceptible to that as well. If we, in our new job, continue doing the exact same set of tasks that made us successful in our prior role, we will doom ourselves to failure. However, we can employ the same fervor, the same passion, and the same tactics that lead to our prior success in our new roles and seize the day.

The post So I Got Promoted, Now What? Employ the Same Successful Tactics appeared first on The SERO Group.

Series Outline

• So I Got Promoted, Now What?
• Stop Doing Your Old Job
• Employ the Same Successful Tactics
• Get to Know Your Peers
• Get a Trusted System
• Manage Your Email
• Manage Your Calendar
• Start Having Weekly One-On-Ones
• Recognize the Tendency to Revert

Your Hard Work Has Paid Off

You’ve work hard over the past few years, going the extra mile to make sure that everything in your charge has gone well. You’ve managed your individual and team projects well; you’ve organized your work and developed a personal discipline so that nothing has fallen through the cracks. And now your hard work has finally paid dividends. You’ ve been recognized with a promotion. So now what do you do?

This is a question that many highly skilled, highly technical people ask themselves once the euphoria of increased pay and acknowledgement has worn off.

Unfortunately, many don’t pursue the answer long enough to find it. Instead they get mired down into the daily routine of their new role and never explore how they could better prepare to succeed. Many languish in mediocrity at best, and fail at worst.

So what’s the first thing you need to do?

Stop Doing Your Old Job

Stop doing your old job. To many, this may sound too obvious to mention. If you are promoted to a new position, why would you want to continue doing your old job as well as the new one? Isn’t one job enough?

Unfortunately, in many cases it’s just not that discrete. Often the promotion is a “working promotion.” You’ve been promoted to Senior DBA, to Development Team Lead, to Manager of the Administration Team, or to Director of Operations. The promotion comes with a new title, an increase in pay, and some new responsibilities. However, you find that in addition to your new duties, you are still accountable for many of the same tasks you had before your promotion.

To be successful in your new role, you will need to approach it with the same fervor and dedication that led to your promotion. You won’t be able to do that if effectively if you are spending a significant amount of your time doing your old job. Something has to give and it had better be the old job.

“But, It’s Not My Job”

To be clear, I’m not advocating that you tell your boss “It’s not my job anymore.” when he asks you about something that was your direct responsibility prior to the promotion. They don’t want to hear that. And besides, unless your promotion has moved you to a completely new department, that task still falls under your purview. And it’ll remain your responsibility until you’re told specifically otherwise or your replacement can be found.

So, in order to stop doing your old job, you’ll need to identify people who can successfully step into the role you once occupied, or at least take on many of the responsibilities. This can be done through a series of progressively larger and more impacting steps: assign immediate tasks, delegate small projects, and create a growth plan for your team.

Assign Immediate Tasks

Many of us have daily, weekly, or even monthly tasks that require our time and attention. There are backups to verify, meetings to attend, status reports to create, numbers to run, and logs to review, to name but a few. None of these are particularly urgent. Many are not high profile. But all need to be done.

In your prior role, you probably handled each of these at part of your job. Those responsibilities were commiserate with your level. In your new role, however, many of those activities will drain one of the most precious resources you have: your time. If you can safely offload those discrete yet repetitive tasks to one or your team members, you’ll potential free several hours per week.

Delegate Small Projects

The next step is to begin delegating some of the projects for which you are responsible. Start small and work your way up. Don’t begin with a large, complex project with multiple moving parts requiring input from numerous colleagues. Start with a small, fairly self-contained project that can be accomplished without  much outside input. Expect to work closely with the team member to whom you’ve delegated the project.

Initially, delegating will not free up your time. On the contrary, it will likely consume more of your time in the short-term than if you just did it yourself. But the payoff is just around the corner, just a few months down the road. As you get better at delegating and your team learns how to run with the delegated projects, you’ll be able to do more and more. Delegation is a force multiplier once you pay the initial start up costs in time.

Create a Growth Plan for Your Team

The best people have a knack for bringing out the best in other people. They somehow get others to perform and exceed even their own expectations. You want those kind of people on your team. And if you want them on your team, you can bet that your boss wants them on his team, too.

One way to bring out the best in other people is to consciously and intentionally create a growth plan for each of them. Talk with them. Learn their aspirations. Discover their likes and dislikes. Create a plan to help  them grow professionally, technically, and interpersonally. In short, you’d eventually like for them to easily step into your shoes once you get promoted again.

Ifs, Ands, and Buts

But isn’t all this risky? Won’t one of your team members take your job? Or won’t they get promoted out from under you?

Fostering an environment where you can be more effective while growing your people is not “risky.” In fact, a good argument can be made for just the opposite. Not growing your team is risky. Creating an environment where personal growth is not evident, where the same old routine is done day in and day out, is far riskier to you than growing your team. The best people won’t want to stay in that environment. You’ll be left with the mediocre.

One of the best compliments you can be paid as a manager is to have one of your team members promoted to a new position. It’s speaks well of the environment you’ve created. And when that happens again and again, senior management will recognize your role in producing highly effective people.

And when you get promoted, you’re next transition will be easier because you’ll have already cultivated your replacement.

The post So I Got Promoted, Now What? Stop Doing Your Old Job appeared first on The SERO Group.

“In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” That’s the premise of Dr. Laurence Peter in his 1969 book, The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong My first thought when I read a statement like that is: I wonder if Dr. Peter worked in a hierarchy and if so would his premise still apply?

Nevertheless. I think we’ve all seen instances where someone who is very good with technology is promoted and flounders. Horribly. And the worse they do, the more stress they feel. And they flounder even more. So what happens? The don’t make changes in their daily work required by the new position.

This is the first in an nine-part series on how to do your job better once you’ve been promoted. Hopefully the next eight posts in the series will help you to be aware of the new dynamics required by your new role so you adjust and excel.

Stop Doing Your Old Job

At first blush, this may sound too obvious to be worth mentioning. But there’s a reason it’s first on the list. This is far more prevalent than you may think.  If you don’t address this shortly after your promotion, it can set you up for failure down the road. [more…]

Employ the Same Successful Tactics

In your prior role, you approached your job, your responsibilities, and your preparation in a certain way, one that eventually led to your promotion. And while you don’t want to simply repeat the “what” you were doing before, you can most definitely leverage the “how” that got you the promotion. [more…]

Get to Know Your Peers

Far too often, IT professionals believe, mistakenly in my opinion, that they are paid to be good with technology. To be sure, that’s a part of it. In some jobs it may even be the majority of it. However, none us work in a vacuum and it’s important to know your colleagues before you need them. [more…]

Get a Trusted System

In your prior role, your may have had little difficulty managing your  workload and tasks. But now things are more complex. You are responsible for for work that you assign or delegate to others. You had better find a good system for managing that work.

Manage Your Email

Email is a great way to communicate, however when you receive scores or even hundreds of emails every day, it can quickly become unwieldy and detrimental to your productivity. A considerable portion of your day, or even night, can be consumed by email. You’ve got to find a good technique for managing your email inbox.

Manage Your Calendar

This could just as easily be called “Protect Your Time”. The collaborative world of shared calendars can be great for people who’s job it is to coordinate and plan meetings. However, for those of us who must attend meetings as well as doing work, shared calendars can be quite a disruption our days. You must take steps to ensure you have time to work.

Start Having Weekly One-on-Ones

As a new supervisor, team lead, manager, director, or even executive team member, it’s critical to build a trust with your team that can weather the storms that are sure to come. A great way to do this is to conduct a weekly, one-half hour, one-on-one meeting with each of member.

Recognize the Tendency to Revert

When push comes to shove and the pressure really begins to mount, many new managers tend revert back to their comfort zone, to their strengths, to what made them successful in their prior role. But that only makes matters worse. Being aware of this can help you to avoid it.

Questions:

• What were some of the unforeseen challenges that you faced after your last promotion?
• How did you cope with the new challenges?

The post “So I Got Promoted, Now What?” appeared first on The SERO Group.

As technical professionals, we have a myriad of responsibilities This is especially true in today’s economy when so many of us are being asked to do more with less. It’s easy to get caught up in our daily tasks and projects. We must improve the response time of a report and gently slap the hand of the guy who designed it so inefficiently. We must crank out more code to meet an arbitrary deadline promised by a salesman.

It’s easy to lose heart and to think of ourselves as just another cog in the underbelly of a faceless, heartless organization.

At least one-third of each business day is spent at work. For some if us, it’s much more than that. When we are discontented with our jobs, it affects the other areas of our lives. That’s why it’s important to keep a healthy perspective on life.

The Power of Perspective

I’m reminded of the story a man who was waking down the street in old England many years ago when he happened upon a construction site. As he approached, he saw a laborer. The man stopped and asked the laborer what he was doing. The laborer gave a sneering look and replied “I’m laying bricks. What does it look like I’m doing?” and continued about the business of laying bricks.

A few minutes later, the man came to another laborer who was wielding a trowel and slathering mortar onto a granite block. The man asked the second laborer what he was doing. “I’m raising this wall.” replied the laborer as he continued working.

Another few minutes passed and the man came to a third laborer with trowel in hand. The man asked the laborer the same question posed to the first two laborers “What are you doing?” The laborer looked at the man and replied “I’m building a magnificent and grand Cathedral where generations of believers will be able to come to worship God Almighty.”

That’s the difference perspective can make. All three laborers were doing the same thing from an outsiders vantage point, yet each viewed their activities differently.

What Are You Doing?

So, let me ask you: what are you are doing? Are you creating maintenance plans? Or are you ensuring the medical staff have the information they need to help treat patients effectively? Are you going through your daily check list on the servers? Or are you working on something much more important, much bigger than yourself?

How is your perspective?

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Don’t misunderstand; I like soda. But when I’m expecting sweet tea, the normally pleasant taste of the carbonated beverage is face-wrenchingly awful.

Thus, the importance of expectations.

What To Expect?

When working with your clients, your boss, your spouse, your kids, and everyone else for that matter, it’s critically important to set expectations. Let them know what to expect. Let them know when to expect it. Let them know any caveats that may exist. It gives them a sense of comfort.

As with the beverage example, expectations are important; the same result can be interpreted as good or bad depending on expectations.

If you promise a client that you’ll provide a deliverable in ten business days and you deliver it in seven, they’re very happy. Conversely, if you promise to deliver in five and you don’t have it ready until the seventh day, they’re disappointed. In both cases they receive the deliverable in seven days, yet in one case you’re a hero and in the other case you’ve failed.

How Can You Manage Expectations?

Managing expectations is not difficult. In fact, it’s straightforward.

• Under Promise. Don’t over commit yourself. Examine your workload, your capabilities, your own expectations, and then build in some margin.
• Over Deliver. This go right along with Under Promise. Going the extra mile and exceeding expectations is a nice way to give them a sense of “wow”.
• Communicate Clearly. It’s been said that there are four components to communication: the sender, the message, the medium, and the recipient. A breakdown and any of those can lead to a misunderstanding. Make sure that the message that you intend to deliver is the one that is received.
• Communicate Frequently. Providing timely updates about the progress along the way is just as important as setting the initial expectations. Any delays, any changes to the initial expectations should be communicated early in the process.
• Be Honest. As the old saying goes, honesty is the best policy. Best honest with others. If you are unsure of the outcome, tell them. It’s better that they know this up front.

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