Entries Tagged 'Corporate' ↓

It’s that time of year again when people begin complaining about how difficult it is for them to write self-appraisals.  I wrote some about this subject last year around this time, and it’s since been consistently the most-visited page on my blog.  Obviously people feel ill-prepared to write appraisals of their own performance.  What I keep hearing from people is that they are uncomfortable making note of their strengths.

The first question I ask is the most obvious.  Do you know what your strengths are?  If not, you have a bigger problem than your self-appraisal to deal with.

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As we enter the week of Thanksgiving, and head into the core US holiday season, we’re supposed to be thinking about giving thanks and being generous.  Of course, we’re also entering the final stretch of the quarter and the year, so we’re over-committed at work and trying to balance our obligations at home as well.  It’s a tricky time to be an effective employee.

It’s worth noting, however, that managers are also soon going to be working on annual performance reviews.  And while we all know reviews should cover the entire year’s work, often times a high-impact event at the close of the year gets some extra mental attention during this busy time.  So what can you do at work to bring a little bit of what the holidays are supposed to be about into your routine?

Be thankful

A simple “thank you” goes a long way.  A more complex “thank you” goes a little further.  “Thanks, Bill, I wouldn’t have thought of looking there, you made my day a lot easier.”  It takes 15 seconds to type that, and whoever you are thanking probably saved you more than 15 seconds.  So send the email.  Better yet, drop by their cubicle, or say something when you spot them in the hallway.

Be generous

Sitting in your inbox is that simple request.  It’ll take you a couple minutes to process it, and you have so much else going on, but it’ll really make a difference in that person’s day.  So ttop putting it off.  Set aside 5 minutes this morning to be helpful, and then go on to your “real” work.

You can also be generous with your praise.  Saying “thank you” is great, but copying the boss is generous as well.  It wins on so many levels it’s hard to even list them.  I’m not suggesting every single “thanks” needs a cc: line, but once in a while it’s a powerful tool.

It doesn’t need to be a “thanks” either.  Sometimes you can just directly tell someone about great performance by a team member.  I recently sent an email to a senior director letting him know about a great moment with someone in his organization.  His response was that he rarely receives that kind of direct feedback.  Flood your management with emails and you’ll get ignored.  Target a couple moments of high performance, though, and you’re playing with powerful tools.

Balance your life

It’s crucial now to remember your work-life balance, and that of your teammates.  Tensions may be high, and small things leap into significance. Don’t forget that for some people, the holidays are a time of joy and pleasure … while others are on an emotional rollercoaster.

As for yourself, be present at your family dinner; put down the Blackberry and enjoy the blackberry pie instead.  That email will still be there after the kids are in bed.

The great thing about gestures like this is that they multiply. You are essentially increasing the positive climate, and as a colleague of mine recently put it, when the tide rises all ships rise with it.

If you’re in the corporate workforce, you’re familiar with Powerpoint, and probably familiar with various controversies around it.  People spend a lot of time debating how much or how little to put on slides, they design cool systems for maximizing impact, and they worry endlessly about how to word something on a slide in case it somehow bites them later.

There’s a radical solution here which I like to apply once in a while.  Don’t show any slides.  Just call your meeting and meet.

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I’ve been thinking a bit more about the topic of my previous post (deadlines forcing decisions and focus), and comparing it to some other moments of high-energy, high-engagement, high-satisfaction productivity over the years.  I realized there was a factor I hadn’t really considered before, and that was the capacity of the task to force all participants to remain in the moment.

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Watson Wyatt surprised nobody this week when they released results of a new study that showed massive drops in employee engagement and morale of late.  Well, that’s not entirely true … some of what they said surprised me.  Here’s a quote:

Employee engagement levels for all workers at the companies surveyed have dropped 9 percent since last year, and close to 25 percent for top performers.

If one assumes that in general top performers are more engaged than their peers, this stat suggests maybe the engagement levels, well, leveled. There’s one more ugly stat in there:

Forty-one percent of employees indicate that changes have had an adverse impact on quality and customer service, while only 17 percent of employers believe this is the case.

So let’s get this straight.  We’ve got massive disconnect between corporate perception and employee perception, and our most critical people are disengaged and uninspired.

What’s a manager to do?

Well, you could do worse than to model your response after what successful companies do during times like these: invest in the things that matter most, take market share, and be ready to emerge from the rough times stronger than your competitors.

Now more than ever it’s important to get the little things right.  You may have zero budget, zero time, and nothing but grim news.  But you’ve got to find ways to invest in your relationships with your co-workers.

(Those of you old enough to remember Cheers, I’m not talking about that Norm.)

I was paging through my reader this evening and came across an article by the always-wise Jeremiah Owyang about handling your boss’s connecting with you on Facebook.  You probably know where I stand on this already, especially if you’ve read my post “Five reasons to ‘friend’ your co-workers (or boss!)“.  Basically, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage if you have the opportunity to do this, and don’t.

But one thing Owyang talks about that I failed to, is how to handle being the boss and entering this situation.  As a manager I’ve been in this situation a couple times, and chatted about it with co-workers over lunch.  The key to avoiding difficulty is knowing (and communicating) your social media norms.  For reference, here are mine, as relate to mixing work and online networking:

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The following is inspired by a number of true stories, though it is fiction:

Susan, manager of a development team, receives an email (sent to several dozen people) that the sanity test cycle is being held up because of a problem … a problem she thought had been fixed.  She sends a hurried “reply to all” saying as such, asking whether the fix ever made it in.  Igor knows his teammate Rosalina was ironing out some last-minute issues with the fix late last night, but doesn’t know what happened.  Igor sends a reply-to-all saying “Rosalina was supposed to check in that fix,” prompting Susan to ask, in front of the same 50 people, whether the fix ever made it in, in some rather unhappy language.  Rosalina replies a few moments later that the fix was held up, but that a manual workaround has been applied and testing can continue.

On the surface this looks mundane, but if you look a bit deeper it exposes some behaviors which can have a lasting negative effect on the team.  It’s bad enough when your teammate throws you under a bus to get ahead … but Igor has thrown Rosalina under a bus and gained nothing out of it.  This is a blame-avoidance culture gone too far.  Igor is so scared of getting in trouble that his first reaction isn’t to fix the problem, it’s to dodge the incoming blame missiles.

I can’t blame Igor for what he’s done.  He’s been trained, either by Susan or by other managers, to do this.  But imagine everything else about the story is the same, except Igor takes the time to walk over to Rosalina’s desk, they converse for a moment, and then Rosalina responds to the email, “I was working with Igor on that problem late last night.  I applied a workaround while we work out some last-minute details.”

The situation is no different, and nobody is being deceived or misled or any problems buried.  It’s just a matter of changing how things get communicated.

Here’s another example.

Roger, Director of Software Engineering, sends an email to his entire management staff asking whether a certain scenario was considered when the product requirements were estimated.  Bill, a Senior Manager, replies-to-all, “Li, on my staff ,was supposed to consider that.  Did you, Li?”

Ouch!  There’s another bus-throwing incident, this time Bill tossing Li under one for no reason.  In fact, Bill made himself look worse, like someone who can’t trust his own staff.  Imagine Bill instead privately contacted Li and asked about the situation, and then summarized the answer.  Here are two possibilities:

“Li, on my staff, started to look at that but got pulled aside for some higher priority work.  I can share the details with you if you want, Roger.  If we need to go back and invest more into this, let me know and I’ll work with my team on it.”

“Li, on my staff, took a look at this and we’re all set.  Feel free to swing by and we can discuss the details.”

Frankly, the reply-to-all blame dodge and/or bus-toss is one of the most distasteful behaviors I encounter from otherwise civilized professionals.  We need to drill it into people’s heads that it’s a lose-lose proposal.

A few years back, I was trying to improve my poker game (as a real geek if I start doing something I have to research it; I can’t just experience it).  I read a few books and one of the pieces of advice I received (probably from author Larry Phillips in his book of Zen advice for poker) has stuck with me well into other areas of my life.

Simply put, it’s this: don’t make yourself into a character in a story.

In the game of poker, this basically means that you shouldn’t let yourself see patterns in the randomness of the game which influence you.  After something improbable happens a few times, you might begin thinking “That always happens to me,” and next time there’s a chance of that happening, you back off, frightened.  Your ace-high flush bested by a full house twice in one night becomes “I never win with flushes,” and next time you get a flush, you fold the winning hand.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look for situations where you misread the game — perhaps you are “always” losing with the second-best hand because you aren’t evaluating the probability of the winning hand being present accurately.  But that’s not what Phillips is talking about.

This advice carries over into the professional world as well.  How many times have you encountered people who claim “I just don’t get that kind of stuff,” when faced with a new problem?  “Oh, I’m no good at writing,” or “I don’t get all this social media stuff,” or even “I’d never make a good manager.” These individuals have written themselves into a story; instead of seeing all their options, they are living life like a character in a book, their reactions predetermined by the plot they’ve built in their head.

Not only are these people missing out on their own potential, they are advertising their closed-mindedness to their colleagues, customers, and managers.

I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t be self-aware.  Knowing your strengths and weaknesses, knowing where to invest your energy and where to cut your losses: these are vital skills to acquire.  But do it knowingly, by choice, and carefully.  Don’t project the “oh well it’s not meant to be” attitude of the two-dimensional character in a pulp novel.

photo credit: dcJohn
Every once in a while, life gets busy and I completely neglect any attempt at professional education. The past few months have been like that for me, but I recently had a strong recommendation to attend a specific class here at EMC and did. In the process, I remembered why I enjoy them so much.

The trick is that it has nothing to do with the class. The material in the class is important in its own way, but there’s no shortage of information available to anyone who is looking for it. But these other benefits are much harder to come by: Continue reading →

Have you read my disclaimer?  Over on the side of my page?  These are not my employer’s opinions, I don’t speak for EMC, EMC doesn’t speak for me, and so on?

That might protect EMC if I were to go off the deep end legally.  They might be able to fire me, disavow all knowledge of my actions, and prevent themselves from getting in too much trouble themselves.  But if I were to do something legal but just plain stupid, do you think that disclaimer would prevent the EMC brand from being damaged in your eyes?  Of course not.

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