Archive for the ‘management’ Category

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CIOs Need To Forget The Yearly Reviews – Do It Monthly!

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012
Image Credit eedback sessions need to be done more often with younger IT workers…

eedback sessions need to be done more often with younger IT workers…

A part of a CIO’s job is to let those people who report to him or her know how they are doing. At most companies, this is done once a year during an annual employee review. I’m not sure about you, but have you ever asked yourself if this is the best way to do this kind of thing? In the age of Facebook and Twitter, maybe it’s time to do these kind of reviews more often…

How Most Companies Do Employee Reviews

Sure employee reviews are a good thing to do, but how are they done? Last time I checked, this kind of soft skill wasn’t part of any definition of information technology. Well, I’m sure that you’re aware of how they are done at your IT department, but do you know how they are done at other companies?

Assuming that you are a CIO at a fairly typical company, then you probably do employee reviews once a year. Guess what – that’s how most companies do them. In a recent survey, 51% of the 500 companies surveyed said that they do these types of reviews annually. 41% of the firms said that they do them semi-annually.

How Progressive Companies Do Employee Reviews

How about all of those fancy new-fangled firms that we are always reading about in the IT trade rags – how often do they do employee reviews? At the leader of the pack (for now), Facebook, they do employee reviews twice a year.

Some progressive firms have increased the frequency to as often as every two weeks. Their thinking is that by doing this they transform what is often a big scary meeting into something that is much more common and, hopefully, useful to the both the employees and their bosses.

What’s The Right Way To Do an Employee Review?

A number of consultants have pointed out that the frequency of employee reviews doesn’t really matter if you are doing these types of reviews wrong! They point out that if you flood the employee with too much information there is a good chance that they’ll simply shut down during the meeting.

When this happens, the review won’t produce the results that you are looking for. Instead what often happens is that the employee just ends up focusing on the criticism and ignores any suggestion of constructive ways that they can become better.

No matter how often as CIO you choose to do employee reviews, you need to realize that this is an important part of your job. Being in regular communication with your staff is how you find out about small issues before they have a chance to grow into big issues that can end up distracting people and wasting time for everyone.

What All Of This Means For You

I think that we can all agree that much like the importance of information technology, employee reviews are important to the running of an IT department. IT workers who report to the CIO need to get feedback on their job performance. The big question is if getting this feedback once a year is the right way to do it.

At most companies, the employee review is an annual event. However, at a number of progressive firms in the IT sector it has been changed. Reviews are now done more often and are done much quicker. The goal is to provide feedback to the employee so that they can start to use the information as quickly as possible.

Ultimately, no matter how often employee reviews are held, the key is to make sure that the information that the IT worker gets is useful. CIOs need to make sure that they don’t overwhelm their staff with too much feedback that causes them to shut down and only focus on the negative. Become a CIO who knows when and how to provide employee feedback, and you’ll be rewarded with a great IT department working for you.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that it would be possible to do employee reviews too often?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The one thing that everyone in IT has learned is to stay away from projects that we just know are going to fail, right? It turns out that over in England, they seem to have forgotten this rule. They decided to do a huge IT project to modernize their health care system and guess what, it just failed. Sounds like a great learning opportunity for CIOs…

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The Wrong Way For A CIO To Fire A Worker

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012
Image Credit
When CIOs fire IT workers, they need to do it the right way…

When CIOs fire IT workers, they need to do it the right way…

It’s time for that IT worker to go. As CIO, one of the most painful decisions that you are ever going to have to make is the decision to terminate an employee. Not only is this a tough call for you to make, if you have any sensitivity at all then you realize that it’s going to rough on them no matter how you go about doing this. Considering how important this is the IT department and to both of you, perhaps we should spend a few moments talking about the right way to go about doing this part of your job…

Lessons From Yahoo – How Not To Fire An IT Worker

Just in case you were out of town and missed it, over at Yahoo they fired their then-CEO Carol Bartz the wrong way. As a CIO you need to be aware of what they did and why it was wrong. First off, Carol was fired over the phone. Secondly, as reported by her, Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock who was doing the firing over the phone was also apparently reading the termination to her from a script that he had prepared. Can you say impersonal?

The lesson that you need to take away from this botched job of firing a worker is that it will come back to haunt you. How to fire a worker is not a part of the definition of information technology and perhaps that’s why nobody seems to know how to do it well. Yahoo is probably going to have problems convincing people to come work for them because of this story. I mean would you want to work for a company that is that cold and impersonal when it comes to letting their workers go?

If you’ve got to fire somebody, then at least do it the right way. This means that if it is at all possible, you need to do it face-to-face. No, this doesn’t make it easier for you, but trust me this will make the whole experience better for both of you.

The Correct Way To Fire An IT Worker

So if Yahoo has shown CIOs how NOT to fire workers, what is the correct way to perform this painful task? That’s actually a very good question that has multiple parts to its answer.

First off, we need to understand that some of the commonly held beliefs about the best way to let someone go (given to us by countless company legal departments) are wrong. Sure, these long-held myths seem to be the best way to do things, but it turns out that they actually boost the chances that the terminated worker is going to turn around and sue the company.

Let’s start with trying to understand what a worker who is being let go wants to hear from you. Even though you are firing them, studies have shown that the process can go much smoother if during the process you take the time to praise them. Clearly you need to be careful here – complement their good qualities, but make sure that it is very clear that they are still being let go.

Next, if at all possible don’t have them escorted from the building by a security guard. This takes away all of the good feelings (if there are any) that the praise that you shared with them during the firing discussion may have caused. Instead of a guard, you should be the one who walks them out of the building.

The other thing that you should not do is to have another person present in the room when you are doing the firing. Yes, I know that this is a basic recommendation from both your HR and legal departments. However, studies have shown that by having this 3rd party present is viewed by the person who is being fired as demonstrating a lack of respect for them. I for one can agree with this – it makes the person being fired feel as though the two of you are ganging up on them.

Finally, during the actual process of firing someone be sure to do it slowly. Remember, if you have been a good manager they should have been given plenty of warning and coaching before reaching this point. If you take your time and allow them to process what is happening, they will have more time to deal with this change.

One way to slow things down is to make sure that you carefully explain why they are being let go. Studies have shown that terminated employees were 10x more likely to sue their former employer if they felt that the reason for their dismissal had not been explained to them.

What All Of This Means For You

Firing workers sucks. It’s no fun for you and it’s no fun for them. However, as CIO this is actually a key and important part of your job – you need to ensure that you have the right team on board and you will have to make changes to that team by firing people every so often. The importance of information technology to your firm means that you need to be able to do this part of your job well.

You need to understand how not to fire staff. Don’t do it over the phone (like they did at Yahoo) and don’t read from a script. Do this badly once and overnight it will be the talk of the IT sector. Take the time to meet with the employee face-to-face and provide a complete explanation of why they are being let go. Try to do the actual firing with just you and the person who is being let go – ultimately this will help them deal with receiving this information.

No CIO gets up in the morning with the anticipation of having to fire a worker that day (at least I hope not). However, it does happen and you need to learn how to do a good job at this part of your position. Take the time to provide some humanity and understanding as a part of the termination process and you will make a difficult task that much easier for both you and the employee.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: Would you feel comfortable firing someone if nobody else was around while you did it?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

A part of a CIO’s job is to let those people who report to him or her know how they are doing. At most companies, this is done once a year during an annual employee review. I’m not sure about you, but have you ever asked yourself if this is the best way to do this kind of thing? In the age of Facebook and Twitter, maybe it’s time to do these kind of reviews more often…

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2 Rules For Being A Better CIO Boss

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012
Image Credit You can't be a buddy and be a boss

You can't be a buddy and be a boss

When I’m working with new CIOs I often run into the buddy / boss problem. It’s perfectly understandable that any person newly placed into a CIO position would like to establish a positive relationship with the people in the IT department that they are managing. This is all well and good, but it’s all too easy for a CIO to go too far – you can be a boss, but you can’t be a buddy.

Pick One: Buddy Or Boss

How did you ever learn to be a boss? There is no real definition of information technology management that you can look up in order to get management tips. I’m going to go so far as to guess that you never took any courses on the subject. Rather, you went to work and you had bosses. You watched what they did and saw what kind of results they got. When you got promoted, you did your level best to be like the bosses that you had that got things done.

This is all well and good; however, the world moves on. The new management philosophy tells us that as bosses we need to “connect” with our staff in part to keep them from leaving. Exactly what this means or how best to do it is not terribly well defined.

All too often what I see new CIOs doing is starting out small and going out to happy hours and such events with their IT team. This then leads to other activities and eventually real friendships can develop with some of your staff. This is when problems start to pop up.

As the head of the IT department, your staff works for you. What this means is that at work you have a very clearly defined relationship. When you start to develop personal friendships outside of work, these relationships can start to blur the work relationships.

What happens is that your new friends stop taking what you say at work with the proper amount of seriousness. They forget that indeed they do need to do what you tell them to do – it’s not a request from a friend that they are receiving, but rather a command from their boss. The difference may be subtle, but it’s very, very important that they understand it.

Too Much Information

Along the same lines, the issue of how much of your personal life you should share with your staff is another difficult issue that we all need to deal with. You don’t want to be seen as being cold and aloof, but how much is too much?

One of the key realizations that I’ve seen CIOs struggle with is the simple fact that any personal information that you share with any of your staff will undoubtedly end up getting repeated. Before you share it, you need to determine what the long term cost of making that information public will be.

Trivial things like the fact that you own a dog are probably ok to share with staff. The fact that you got arrested as a youth for drunken driving is probably not. The litmus test that seems to work the best in these situations is to ask yourself if you saw that the front-page story in the New York Times was the information that you are about to share with a staff member, how would your mother feel? If there is any doubt on your part, then keep your mouth shut!

What All Of This Means For You

CIOs get way too much contradictory information when it come how best to manage a team of IT professionals. Gone are the days of aloof, remote bosses. CIOs are expected to connect with their IT department and to bond with their employees. The importance of information technology is such that CIOs do need to find ways to connect with their staff.

However, it’s all too easy for a CIO to take this employee bonding stuff too far. You won’t be able to effectively manage your staff if you become their “buddy”. Instead you need to maintain a professional distance between yourself and everyone else. This idea means that you shouldn’t end up sharing too much of your personal information with the people who work for you.

Nobody ever said that in the IT sector that this leadership thing was going to be easy. CIOs need to keep in mind the role that they play in the company that they work for and what this means for the relationships that they will establish. Remember, be a boss, not a buddy!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: If you make a mistake and become too friendly with one of your employees, what’s the best way to correct the situation?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It’s time for that IT worker to go. As CIO, one of the most painful decisions that you are ever going to have to make is the decision to terminate an employee. Not only is this a tough call for you to make, if you have any sensitivity at all then you realize that it’s going to rough on them no matter how you go about doing this. Considering how important this is the IT department and to both of you, perhaps we should spend a few moments talking about the right way to go about doing this part of your job…

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Posted in management | No Comments »

Free Answers From Google On How CIOs Can Be Better Managers

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011
Image Credit
Google Has Been Searching For What Makes A Good Manager

Google Has Been Searching For What Makes A Good Manager

One of the biggest challenges that modern CIOs face is how to do a good job of managing their IT department. The burden of making the right technology decisions, managing budgets, and meeting the needs of the rest of the company is challenging enough, but what can make or break a CIO is how good of a job you do nurturing and growing your staff. The folks at Google have the same issues and they’ve harnessed their immense computing power to come up with a solution…

How Google Solved The Riddle Of IT Management

I’m not sure if you’ve been reading the news lately, but Google’s been having a problem: they are starting to lose their IT employees. Once upon a time Google was the coolest place on the planet to work, but things have changed.

With the arrival of cooler places to work (i.e. Facebook), folks have been defecting from Google in droves. Adam Bryant reports that this may be one of the reasons that some of the Google number crunchers were tasked to work on a new project in early 2009: Project Oxygen.

This team was charged with crunching all of the data that Google had gathered in order to determine what characteristics of bosses the Google employees were looking for. Basically Google wanted to know what makes someone a good boss.

To determine this, the team wrote code to process all of the performance reviews, results from employee feedback surveys, and nomination forms for top managers. What they were looking for were words and phrases that dealt with either praise or complaints.

What Google Found Out

At Google, technical expertise has always been what they’ve valued in their employees the most. Managers there were encouraged to be hands-off types of managers – don’t hold your people back. The thinking was that if workers got stuck, they could then reach out to their bosses for help because it was assumed that their bosses had deeper technical skills.

Well guess what, they got it wrong! It turns out that what IT workers were really looking for is what we’ve always been told that a manager should be: involved.

Here are the top 5 most important characteristics of an effective IT leader as uncovered by Google’s data mining efforts:

  1. Be a good coach

  2. Empower your teams and don’t micromanage

  3. Express interest in team member’s success and personal well-being

  4. Don’t be a sissy: be productive and results orientated.

  5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team.

What All Of This Means For You

I guess what Google found out shouldn’t really come to any of us as that much of a surprise. I think that we always knew that the secret to successfully managing an IT department had to be the same secret that every other department in the company was trying to uncover.

Google started out thinking that the ability to master technology was the answer and ended up with a completely different answer – it’s the human touch in the end that is the most important. I believe that this lends a lot of creditability to their findings.

CIOs need to step back for a minute and think about what this means: we’ve got to start to take the time to truly connect with our staff if we want them to experience true job satisfaction. I believe that we can all do this, it’s just that we all need to take the time to do it right!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: Do you agree that a CIO’s technical skills are less important than their “soft” people skills?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

To read the IT trade journals or speak with CIOs you’d think that we’ve all found the magic silver bullet that IT’s been looking for during the past few years: server virtualization. The ability to mash together a bunch of different expensive individual servers and shrink the company’s IT footprint down by a factor of 5x while reducing power and cooling costs at the same time sure seems to be a miracle cure for IT budget problems. Guess what: this isn’t Hogwarts and you’re not Harry Potter. Virtualization has its own set of problems and we need to have a talk…

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