Thriving in the 21st century workplace

While waiting for a meeting to start yesterday, a colleague and I swapped stories of the perils of presenting.  Whether it’s a livemeeting or a projector hooked to your desktop, there’s some loss of privacy that can come with using your PC to host a meeting.  For example ….

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I hear it all the time, from technical contributors: “I’d never want to be a manager.“  The reasons are usually straightforward.  Some fear losing their technical acumen, others dislike office politics, and many just enjoy feeling in control of their own contribution and don’t want to worry about other people.

Sometimes I’m asked why I made the decision to enter management.  I realized today that even though I started this blog to talk about that question, I haven’t spent much time really digging into it.

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I’m in the interesting and enviable position of having an open (entry-ish level) position on my team, here at EMC.  Over the years I’ve brought a few people into the company, either directly or indirectly.  But it’s been a while, and it’s interesting to see the state of the hiring process … and the people trying to get hired.

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If, like me, you skirt around the edges of the fitness blogging scene, you’re probably familiar with the person who starts a fitness blog, writes about their incredible gains (in fitness) and losses (in weight) and then suddenly the blog dries up for six months or a year.  You know what happened — the person hit a rough patch with their fitness and didn’t want to write about it.

So when someone who writes about today’s workplace, about corporate culture, about working at EMC, slowly dries up in terms of post count, it might be a good default assumption that they’ve hit a rough patch at work and don’t want to write about it.

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I sat today in a team meeting, where we talked about our long-term goal of delighting our customers.  It’s an easy thing to talk about, but it’s very hard to achieve.  There’s a reason people always come up with the same holy grails of customer delight (say, the iPad) … there aren’t that many of them!

I ended up speaking some with our senior director about a recent set of experiences I had with Charter Communications.  I recently upgraded my services with them, and have had several small nagging issues that I never thought to call them about.  Just little things that kept me from being delighted.

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If you’re at all active online, you’ve probably seen the recent hubbub about Facebook and privacy.  Every time Facebook changes its privacy settings, the articles start floating around, but this time it’s more serious.  The NY Times has dedicated space to the story, and Facebook itself has called a meeting of all its employees to discuss the issue.  At least one colleague of mine is deactivating his account, and I’ve decided to take an audit on my use of the service and rethink my assumptions around it.

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The buzz at the office is reaching a high as last-second preparations for EMC World compete with people’s “real work” every hour of every day.  I am sad to report I won’t be attending EMC World this year; I was really looking forward to the coffee at the Bloggers’ Lounge but I’m needed here in Hopkinton (the same reason my blog posts seem to be drying up of late …).  But there are some exciting things happening within my organization that you might want to know about.

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If you know me, you aren’t surprised by my Survivor addiction.  From its very first episode I’ve been on board, and every new season I dive in and watch as teams of strangers play in this odd mix of competition and cooperation, as social structures evolve and intermingle and new strategies emerge to conflict with the old.

Recently this season (an “all-star” season with returning contestants), I watched as two competitors vying for control of a team gave us an interesting leadership lesson.

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… get an important answer.

Two colleagues of mine demonstrated to me today a habit which, on its surface, can be difficult to understand.  They really enjoy asking the stupid questions.  We’ll be in a design review, looking at a fairly straightforward diagram showing a few components interacting, and they’ll ask what customer use case this represents and what those components are.

We all know the answer.  It’s fairly obvious. But the person writing the design didn’t label the components and left it open to interpretation.

My first instinct was to jump in, say it wasn’t important, that we needed to get to the guts of the design to review it.  I was wrong.

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A while back I made kind of a big deal about getting back into the technical arena and putting away my manager hat.

Fortunately, I didn’t toss it too far aside.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in almost 15 years at EMC it’s that change isn’t disruptive to the status quo, it is the status quo.

Everything I said I was doing before, I’m still doing.  I’m wearing a lot of hats right now.  My small development team has grown as it takes on more responsibility, and I find myself playing the roles of Scrum Master, Technical Lead, and Development Manager.  Somewhere in all that I’m trying to individually contribute technically as well, but that is at the bottom of the list.

The other thing that keeps falling off the list is contributing to “the conversation” (both internally at EMC and externally on twitter and in people’s blogs).  I’m afraid that is going to be an uncomfortable reality while I try to wrap my arms around all these roles and make sure my own commitments aren’t being missed. Try not to do too much without me .

It’s a great place to be, in the thick of the action, surrounded by good people.  I’m never bored, I’ll say that much!