This chapter discusses the phenomenon of management and emphasizes skills and ideas that are necessary for the successful manager. The first thing to do, however, is to define management:
Management (noun)
The act, manner, or practice of managing; handling, supervision, or control; management of a crisis; management of factory workers.
The person or persons who control or direct a business or other enterprise.
Skill in managing; executive ability.
What this definition lacks in creativity, it makes up for in accuracy. Quite simply, management is either the act of, the skill required, or the people who manage, direct, and supervise a process or organization. Whether you have a desire to move into management, the underlying principles should be well understood.
Good management is hard to come by and can be richly rewarded. This fact is critical and should give you pause as to why you should consider developing the organizational and leadership skills to manage both projects and people.
Bruce Tulgan, author of Winning the Talent Wars, studied the dynamic of management. He concluded that under-management was a “disease of epic proportions.”
In his research, Tulgan discovered that although organizations often create programs to engage the employee, they do little to engage the manager to engage the employee. What this means is that the idea is passed down to staff but has not been modeled and directed by management.
Good management requires a high-level combination of time and process management, leadership, and organizational insight. Typically, we are naturally proficient in one area and must work to develop the others.
I know that personally, leadership is my strong suit. The ability to motivate and drive ideas forward is a place I can hang my hat. However, I have, through notable failures, discovered that time and process management are equally important.
This chapter discusses each of these areas in relation to your IT career. The goal is for you to start developing those skills now. Whether you aspire to become a mid-level manager, a vice president, a chief information officer (CIO), or just better understand the management process, these skills can provide a huge boost to your overall value in an organization.
Leadership is most often associated with a dynamic and motivational style. However, you can achieve the same effect through a more reserved or conservative style.
Great leadership is primarily concerned with providing the resources that are necessary to enable staff members to get their job done.
If you have a desire to manage, you must be able to enable your workforce.
Enabling your workforce means giving them the resources, motivation, and direction to complete their projects and tasks.
Enabling can take many forms. It can be as simple as making sure that the physical resources for a job are in place. If you are a programmer, ensuring that you have the programming tools to get the job done is part of enabling. If you are an engineer or technician, ensuring that you have the equipment necessary to work and succeed is part of enabling.
Enabling can mean giving the appropriate amount of leeway to allow employees to accomplish their task without interruption. This might mean that a manager notifies others when an employee is unavailable for one of his projects.
Enabling also takes the form of project ownership. Turning over projects to staff members—allowing them to create and innovate—is key to effective management.
When I worked for a large law firm, I was privileged to see an excellent management style. The IT director did not assign projects to those whose title naturally fit the tasks. When a project or need arose, he would call everyone to a central location and explain the issue.
In the short conversation that followed, he identified those who had good ideas and teamed them up. These people were then assigned the project. He would request a list of resources or tools to complete the job—identifying those that were not already in our toolkits. He would then ensure that those tools were quickly located and purchased. At that point, ownership—success and failure—was the responsibility of the team.
This manager expected results and typically got them. Once, he asked if I could deliver on a given project in the time frame the attorney needed. I answered, “I think I can.”
He replied, “I didn’t ask if you thought you could do it. I’m about to stick my neck on the line and say that it will be done. Can you do it?”
I answered that I could, and he made sure that I had a laptop and the necessary software before the day had ended.
If you are to succeed as a manager, you must be comfortable with the idea of turning projects over to your staff. You must be effective at gauging your employees’ skills so that you can mitigate risk of failure, but you must also allow for some growth—forcing employees to stretch their abilities with each project. Doing so keeps them interested and makes them more valuable.
Process and time management are also critical for the manager.
Some of my peers might tell you that I cover this topic in theory only. There is truth to that. In particular, time management is my Achilles heel. For that reason, I have to spend a little more effort in this area.
If you have problems meeting deadlines or keeping track of significant project or work milestones, you might need some remedial help in this area.
This goes beyond writing things down on sticky notes or on the back of your hand. Time is our most precious commodity—and it is a commodity that we can only spend. You cannot save time or bank it. You must master its use.
Following are some ideas that I have found critical regarding time management:
Keep a single journal or book for your tasks and appointments.
Although you don’t necessarily need to go out and purchase an expensive time management binder, you should try to keep information about tasks, appointments, and projects in a single location.
I have worked with many professionals who have multiple notepads with notes and contact numbers in each. Later, finding key pieces of information is difficult.
Take a few moments at a designated time to plan your day’s critical tasks.
This can occur at the end of the day or early in the morning. Use whatever time is effective for you. Sit down and make a list of critical tasks for the day, and then prioritize those tasks.
Of critical importance here is to look over your schedule and see whether you have overbooked your tasks and appointments. Although it is great to be ambitious, your day might be encumbered by many unplanned distractions. If you schedule and plan for tasks without room for delays, you’ll find that you’re constantly failing to finish your list.
Make sure that your list is ambitious but achievable.
A key to making the move to management is the adoption of skills before you have a formal title or responsibility. Fortunately, if you have read this book sequentially, you likely have started to identify and work on some of the skills.
The sections that follow cover several key skills in relation to their role in a management career.
The ability to hold an audience and accurately convey your message is critical. This is true whether it is a large corporate gathering or a small departmental meeting. Project ideas are typically presented by management. The ability to be concise and engaging during a presentation is a must, as is the ability to be persuasive.
You don’t have to be Tony Robbins or Zig Ziglar. However, you must understand how to best structure a presentation for your audience. You need to understand those things that are important to them. You also need to be able to clearly explain how your team can successfully address your audience’s concerns.
If you can add a little flair or humor, that’s even better.
When you’re creating presentations to management, remember the following:
Management has little time—. Get to your point quickly, and let managers know what you want from them. I have taken part in many presentations in which managers have been convinced of the importance of a project, only to have the presenter fail to explain his desire to undertake it.
Keep the culture and personalities in mind—. I have a tendency to be theatrical at times. I have a lot of fun giving presentations. However, I am also aware of the particular personalities of my primary audience.
If I am meeting with a new executive, I often ask his coworkers and peers about his style. If the executive is stoic and conservative, I rein myself in a bit. If he is demonstrative and dynamic, I up the energy and edginess.
Maintain a strict agenda—. Meetings often flounder because of lack of direction. The meeting facilitator (most often a manager) lets tangential issues take over the agenda.
Once, while working with a client whose meetings often went longer than planned and seldom stayed on the agenda topics, I helped draft a meeting primer. It helped reduce the time of meeting and helped keep the client on agenda.
Here are some of the key ideas my meeting template included:
— Most meetings should be less than an hour.
— Place high-priority items at the beginning of the meeting.
— Place as few items on the agenda as possible. You have to recognize what type of items require a face-to-face meeting and what requires only some e-mail communications. Don’t place the latter into a meeting agenda.
If, during the course of the meeting, you come across an item that cannot be answered quickly, don’t spend too much time on it. Assign it to one or two attendees with the charge of getting the necessary information and briefing those in attendance via memo. If another meeting is needed, you can schedule it then.
If the two attendees are able to make a decision based on the knowledge they discover, give them that authority during the meeting. This reduces unnecessary communication down the road.
— Based on meeting information, assign roles of projects to appropriate individuals.
— When your meeting ends, summarize the findings, the tasks that need to be completed (action items in management-speak), and the feedback you expect. When people leave, they should feel that items were either removed from the agenda or have become a task for someone to complete.
The ability to coalesce a team of individuals into a common purpose can be one of the greatest skills a manager can possess. Doing so requires an ability to see and diffuse potential personality conflicts and the ability to create and communicate a vision that multiple people share.
This is no small task. Office politics are often petty and yet stubborn and pronounced. Individuals who otherwise share skills and interests might, for any number of reasons, have a problem with one another.
In addition, people are selfish by nature. Although working with a team is ultimately a superior career strategy, you will find some who work against the team concept in hopes of bolstering their own career.
You must learn how to recognize and deal with all these situations while remaining distant enough not to get caught up in them.
In both analyzing management styles and anecdotally looking at areas where I’ve done well and areas where I’ve struggled, I’ve created a short list of simple methods or techniques to foster team building, as discussed in the sections that follow.
I often hear people complain about their manager taking credit for their work. Although I have rarely seen this in practice, I know it exists. A good manager gives more credit to his staff than he takes himself. He understands that his ability to create high producers is what he is held accountable for.
Career development necessarily includes some self-promotion. In a management role, however, promoting your team is of far greater value. Doing so accomplishes several objectives:
Your team is held in higher esteem—. As a manager, your success is largely gauged on your group as a whole. If you promote your team—their strengths and their accomplishments—your team will be viewed as stronger. A stronger team is looked to for better projects. This can end up being self-perpetuating. As you solve more problems, you get the better problems to solve.
Your team members develop loyalty—. My son had a teacher who was emotional and, at times, bitter. Eventually we moved him to the only other available teacher. The teacher we moved him to was known as the strictest teacher in the school. Later, knowing how strict she was, I asked my son if he was happier in his class.
“Yes,” he replied.
“But isn’t she strict?”
“Dad,” he replied, “she’s strict, but she’s fair.”
A hard/demanding boss, one who pushes his staff but is fair and promotes his team’s successes, is typically okay to work for. You know that you are required to work and to achieve, but you also know that your manager will go to the mat for you and recognize your contribution. This creates loyalty.
To create the type of environment in which innovation and creativity flourish and where people take initiative, you must allow for and even celebrate failure. The fear of failure is the single greatest hindrance to initiative and innovation.
When staff members are afraid to take calculated risk because of fear of repercussions, they are unlikely to push for new and innovative solutions. Creating innovation is necessarily risky. If you are to have a department and team that are viewed as innovative, you and your staff must be able to fail with some degree of safety.
Of course, this does not mean or require you to allow for foolish and blatantly risky projects. Putting a company’s data or operations at risk is irresponsible.
In creating a culture that allows for failure, you must emphasize the need for logical controls and strong backup and recovery options. In addition, creating segregated lab environments is a wise course of action.
Although you are ultimately responsible for the actions and success of the team, your employees must have the authority, tools, and responsibility to correct their own mistakes. The idea is to give them the ownership of the full project—they own the success, and they own the failure. If a project or task goes awry, your staff must have the mentality that immediately creates a corrective action plan and puts it into place.
I’ve mentioned Bruce Tulgan’s book titled Winning the Talent Wars. In it, Tulgan creates the case that corporate America is no longer interested in hiring employees. Instead, companies want to bring on talent when needed. They are interested in project skills for project success.
To have a team that is successful and that is viewed as a valuable addition to the corporate team, you must foster a project-based mindset.
You must be able to assign the projects to your staff—along with the responsibility of that project’s success. When doing so, the staff member becomes the de-facto project manager, and every other member of the team becomes a resource for his use. It is then the staff member’s responsibility to manage the scheduling of those other resources.
Of course, with newer employees and those who struggle with this type of project ownership, your allocation of responsibility should be according to their ability.
It is a recipe for failure to assign too much project ownership to someone whose abilities do not match the responsibility. Your success as a manager rest with your ability to assess, develop, and manage that ability in your staff.
Although the list of skills to move to management is not long or complicated, the acquisition of those skills is a lifetime of work. It is no mistake that good managers are well compensated and highly valuable.
To make the move to management, you need to make a commitment to yourself. You need to commit to personal growth, largely remove yourself from emotional office politics, and create a plan in which you develop the key management skills discussed in this chapter.
And you need to start managing and leading now! Good managers appear because their actions make them natural choices for the position. If your plan is to take a management role only when the pay and position are presented, you might never get your opportunity.
Do you have aspirations for management? If so, what can you do now to adopt a management approach to projects and your career? Record your thoughts in the space provided.
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Identify a project that has no clear manager—even a small one. Offer to take ownership of that project. It’s not important whether you’re called a project manager—just that you own the success and resources needed for the project.
Do you think in terms of projects or of daily tasks? Work to create a holistic project mindset.
Consider purchasing project management software, such as Microsoft Project. Tutorials are available online to help you master its use.