Each of us wants to work for, be and/or become a wise manager. One of the most important yet frequently neglected responsibilities of leadership is developing managerial capacities -- our own, those of managers who work for us and those of future managers. Vital, growing and sustainable organizations need a steady supply of managerial talent.
I recently had the privilege of giving a speech at my alma mater, Cornell University, and wandering the campus brought back memories.
Over the years, I've come to the conclusion that a critical measure of a manager isn't always found in hard metrics, productivity or profit, but in humanity. I've also learned that this humanity often shows itself best when life intrudes on the workplace.
Recently, I decided to visit the national convention of the Society of Human Resource Management. The annual SHRM conference is an astonishingly large gathering of HR professionals and hundreds of vendors of everything from health insurance to holiday hams, 360-degree review services, recruitment advertising, Web-based services and training programs.
It's definitely coming. I'm starting to hear the whispers, the talk. It reminds me of the days when we were discussing Y2k but not yet doing anything about it.
It's definitely coming. I'm starting to hear the whispers, the talk. It reminds me of the days when we were discussing Y2k but not yet doing anything about it.
Technical people have a bad reputation for being poor communicators. And unfortunately, it's not entirely undeserved. If you ask managers in the finance department about why they think that the IT people they deal with are bad communicators, they point to all the common complaints.
Recently, a couple of intended compliments threw me for a loop. Two people called me in the same week and wanted me to present keynote speeches at their conferences. Of course, that was the flattering part, but what got to me was that they both referred to me as a "motivational speaker".
I'll never forget the first time I learned that one of my subordinates was afraid of me. A talented young man, probably 26, had just left my office after explaining to me how happy he was with his current project. My assistant came in and told me that he had spent the 20 minutes prior to our appointment complaining to her about how terrible his project was and how miserable he felt.
Wouldn't it be nice if every boss came with a standard API? It would be so easy to look at the interface specifications and know exactly what he expected, in what format he expected it, when you should deliver it, what predictable events would result from your input and how you should handle error conditions. All the politics would go away. Those pesky emotions would become a nonissue. Success would become deterministic.
Information technology people tend to be answer people. When users, managers, family members or even random people from the Internet have questions, we're right there with the answers, because we're always the smart people.
Lately I've had a troubling sense that there is a cancer growing in IT departments these days. No, I'm not talking about constrained budgets, poor alignment, hiring freezes or project failures. I'm not even talking about the growth of outsourcing and offshoring. While these issues are all real, there seems to be something even more toxic eating away at our industry.
One of the great privileges and responsibilities of leadership is identifying and training the next generation of managers and leaders. Somewhere in between crisis management, contract negotiations, internal politics, status monitoring and your myriad other tasks, you should spend a few moments considering the future leadership of your organization.
It's often said that there are two types of managers: those who manage things and those who manage people. And a great divide of misunderstanding lies between them, rarely to be crossed or reconciled.
Every January, we’re treated to a plethora of surveys about IT executive priorities for the next year. From year to year, the top one or two items seem to change, but virtually everything below that level stays the same. Beyond the current hot topics, the priorities and problems of IT departments tend to be relatively stable.