Let’s work backwards a bit, because that’s how it happened in my book.  I’d always hated the idea of office politics, had always been an introvert, had never really liked “dealing with people.”  I joked that I got into engineering because I understood computers, but not people.

Of course, if you’ve been in this field for any more than a couple years, you probably realize where this conversation is going.  You can’t be an effective member of a team and work in isolation.  If you want to influence the direction of a product, even if your interest is solely on influencing the technical direction of its implementation, you need to develop some interpersonal skills.  More than that, you need to develop some political skills.  For example:

Bob the director of engineering decides whether to buy the software you want, but never seems to spend the dollars until Kumar gives it a green light.  Sarah and Kumar don’t get along well, but Sarah is the primary expert on the software you want Bob to buy.

Figuring out how to build enough internal support to get Bob to buy the software … that’s navigating office politics.  That’s perception, influence, interpersonal skill, negotiating, and more.  And if you think the only people who do this are managers, you are dead wrong.

As a technical contributor, I realized I was involved in these kinds of situations.  I was neck deep in what I thought I hated, already.  And to be honest, I didn’t like it.  But I was operating in a place where I couldn’t survive without it.  In other words, whether I was a manger or not, this skill was going to impact my effectiveness.  I either had to be good at it, or find trustworthy proxies who could be good at it for me.  Either way, I took it out of the equation. It had nothing to do with my decision to get into management.  I was satisfied that it was going to be a factor in my career regardless of whether I chose to advance through the technical or management tracks.

What about the other “ugly stuff”?  There’s a class of interaction I once heard described to me, rather disparagingly, as “nose-wiping.”  I was a bit scared of that.  How did I overcome my fear of nose-wiping?  That’s a story for another day, and it involves an unusual guest star (yes, I know I’ve told part of that story before, on this very blog…).

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Becoming a manager – fear of politics

Email?  Where!?
Everyone was supposed to send their updates prior to the meeting, but there’s always someone who comes unprepared and emails their information to the presenter in the middle of the meeting, forcing the presenter to open their email client in front of the entire audience to retrieve the update.  Watch your crowd when this happens … all eyes are on the screen.  People could be completely sidetracked, playing Angry Birds or whatever, and suddenly there’s dead silence and all eyes forward, just in case something they aren’t supposed to see appears when you switch to Outlook.  This isn’t malicious behavior; we all do it.  I’d love to exploit it by hiding important information I need everyone to see.  “Confidential: Tests are failing, fix your code!”

Not my email!
This causes, of course, the behavior where a presenter will do anything he or she can to avoid opening up email.  “Oh, instead of sending me that, could you put it on a share somewhere?  Like, and read me the hyperlink instead of mailing it to me?”

The grooming session
They’re about to present, so they prepare their system.  Close that Facebook tab, and replace it with one to the support forums.  Close the personal email, open one to the intranet site. Maybe make sure the desktop has an IDE open.  Open up some emails that make them look important, leave them sitting in the background.  “What, oh, yeah, didn’t mean to leave that up there. Let me close it slowly enough that you can read this….”

Just don’t care
Then again, some people just don’t care.  They are confident enough to present from within their browser and show their 15 tabs, to ESPN, Craigslist, LinkedIn, their brokerage, and more.  You gonna call them out?  When you work for them?

The paranoid
“Just share your desktop!” come the calls, as the paranoid presenter shares one window at a time, to avoid sharing any more information than necessary.  Meanwhile, dozens of people across multiple geographies have to remind the presenter every few minutes that the latest application they opened isn’t being shared and nobody can see it.

Any stories to add?

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Casual Friday: Presenting Perils

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.

Fellow EMCer Chris Ferdinandi asked within the firewall recently about fun at work (a subject he has since brought to his external blog).  The subject migrated to satisfaction at work, and what makes work satisfying.  The short answer then, to the question above, is that I entered management because I felt it could be satisfying.

All through my career, I’d been asked if I wanted to move into management.  I kept saying no — after all, I was a software developer.  I liked writing code, debugging problems, integrating components, staying on top of technology trends, and so on.  I knew I loved those things, and I knew managers didn’t do those things.

But over the years, the kind of work I did kept migrating into a specific area — developing APIs used by others.  I met people who got frustrated if they didn’t work on something which easily mapped to an end-user feature, but my own satisfaction wasn’t tied to that.  All I cared about was writing quality code, making it easy for others to debug and maintain, and making integration with my APIs as simple as possible.

It took me a few years, but I finally realized what it was about my work I found so satisfying: I was making other people’s jobs easier. My “users” weren’t paying customers, they were my fellow employees — and I was doing good by my users.

It wasn’t until years later that I had the follow-up ah-hah moment, the one where it became clear to me that individual contributors and managers are all cooperating to try and keep an organization successful.  They play different roles, but from a corporate level they are all parts of the (hopefully smooth-running) machine.  Obviously, then, it should be possible for a manager could get satisfaction out of making everyone’s jobs easier.  Heck, it might even be that a manager could play that role on a larger scale than a purely technical leader.

So that left the rest of the equation — discussing with my manager what my skills were, learning what of those might map well into the management role, for example.  And then there are the other issues — office politics, lack of control over my own success, and so on.

But the first step, the critical step, was admitting to myself what gave me satisfaction at work.  Everything else followed (and will follow, in future posts).

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Why did you become a manager?

When I was looking for my first industry job, putting your email address on your resume meant something about how tech-savvy you were (I get it — I’m old).  Now, I attach that same significance to a social media link.  Not many of my entry-level applicants have those.  A few have LinkedIn profiles, but none of them have personal blog URLs, Twitter IDs, or other social networking information.  This doesn’t surprise me much … social media is a bit of a polarizing issue.  I can certainly imagine some hiring managers seeing a twitter ID and assuming certain unpleasant things about the applicant. I wonder what guidance new graduates are getting these days on the issue beyond the obvious?

I have been surprised to see more resumes having intern or co-op experience, which was rare when I was graduating.  I’m pretty sure my first resume had my Kelly Services data entry job on it, so yes, I’m impressed by your stint at the big company down the road … no matter how banal the tasks may have been, I’m sure you learned some lessons that you won’t have to repeat wherever you land your first full-time position.

I still see applicants who list every type of technology under expertise, and then have no way of explaining it in the rest of the resume.  I appreciate you listing every microchip whose machine code you’re proficient in, but since none of your listed academic or professional projects have used that, I’m going to assume it’s either a hobby or a class you took and have since forgotten.  Other folks seem to just empty the buzzword bingo slide onto their resume — after the first couple programming languages and database vendors you list, they all start to blend together.  I assume you can handle an IDE; I don’t need to see a list of seven of them.

I’m sure it’s challenging to write a resume as a new graudate.  You have very little with which to differentiate yourself from your peers.  I’m always excited to see a good description of a large academic project, especially one where peers cooperated and achieved something beyond any individual’s reach.  But if your resume is 5 pages long and you’ve only been out of school a year, we may have different expectations about what this document is supposed to do.

Speaking of which, I am surprised at the number of people who haven’t taken the step of getting some assistance with proof-reading their resumes.  I recognize that people have varying degrees of comfort with the written word, and a resume is so unlike “real” writing that it’s hard to infer much from one, but blatant errors still surprise me.  I want to remember your resume for the right reasons, not because you’re the only one who didn’t run a spell check.

Overall, I am excited to be seeing so much interest in the position, and looking forward to bringing a new person into the team.  Hopefully soon I’ll be writing about how great it is to interview so many bright and passionate applicants who so clearly have the potential to be excellent engineers….

(on a side note, it was difficult to choose how to spell resume.  In the end, I went with simplicity.  Feel free to review the usage notes on the wiktionary page and then come scold me.)

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Reviewing resumes

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.

Your successes generally come from doing one of two things: finding circumstances that match your strengths, or adapting  yourself to match your circumstances.  But without knowing your strengths and weaknesses, you are relying on blind luck to achieve either.

(You may want to read up more on this subject: if so, I recommend understanding the concept of the Johari Window and perhaps looking at some of Marcus Buckingham‘s writing)

Most people realize, then, that self-knowledge is important.  But sharing that is more challenging.

Some people are simply unused to making rational assessments of personality traits and talents.  They become emotionally invested in those traits and have trouble disconnecting. I have little advice here except that practice makes perfect. If you are uncomfortable describing yourself in this way, try starting with others.  Write up a “self-appraisal” of your manager, of a peer, or of someone whose work ethic you admire.  For added challenge, write one for someone whose work ethic you find fault with — look for overlooked strengths.  Just the act of disconnecting emotionally from these personality traits will make writing your own appraisal easier.

More common, I think, is a sense of humility, a desire not to self-promote.  Many of us grew up being told it was unseemly to broadcast your own accomplishments.  If you take just one thing from this post, take this: you are not bragging when you describe your strengths.  You are not saying “I am an excellent coder because I am awesome and I worked so hard and I deserve lots of money.”  You are saying “I am an excellent coder.”  Your manager may not know you are an excellent coder until you tell him or her.  You are not taking credit for your strengths.  Maybe you just won the genetic lottery and happened to have a great mentor.  Your manager doesn’t care why you possess certain strengths.  But it’s crucial that your manager know that you do.

You want to be humble?  Recognize that your unique strengths are probably not so outstanding that everyone’s already aware of them.  In other words, it’s presumptuous to assume everyone knows what you’re good at.

Not only that, but true humility comes with making the rational assessment of your traits and then being able to discuss it with someone else.  You want a lesson in humility?  Sit down with your manager and discuss why he or she thinks you aren’t that good of a coder, even though you think you are.

For some people, then, maybe it’s fear, not humility, keeping them from having that conversation.

That is much harder to break through, unfortunately.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Know thyself. Then what?

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.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

It’s that time of year

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.

You should see people squirm when there’s nothing being projected.  You’ve forced them out of their comfort zone, and set the stage for things to get exciting.

Your projector, your screen, your slides … these are crutches.  Many times they are doing more harm than good.  Why?

Many times, if you’re leading a meeting, you’ll spend all your looking at your slides and not your colleagues.  You will miss countless nonverbal cues, but it’s worse than that.  You are attaching yourself to your slides, to their wording.  You are unable to truly converse, you are instead presenting.  You will get uncomfortable as the conversation goes in a way you didn’t predict, and exert subtle (or not-so-subtle!) pressure to drag things back to your nicely prepared bullet points.

And you aren’t the only one staring up at that screen, are you?  Your audience is looking at your slides instead of at you.  They are reading ahead, and mentally checking out once they’ve read all the bullet points.  “Nothing important here, let me go back to my blackberry.”

It gets even better.  The projected slides give your audience permission to check out of the conversation.  Tell me you haven’t seen this before: ten people in a room, eight of them barely involved, two doing most of the talking.  A third person’s name is mentioned, and he or she snaps to attention, not at the people talking but at the projected slide.  They’re doing two things here.  They are setting their context, “Wait, what are they talking about?” but they are also buying time.  “Nobody will ask me a direct question while I’m so obviously involved in reading the slides….”

Clearly this doesn’t apply 100% of the time.  Presenting is a valuable mechanism for lots of interactions.  But we’ve somehow become so enamored with our hammer that we forget not everything out there is a nail.  The true meeting is becoming a lost art form.

Try it sometime.  Take the power back — resist the urge to power up that projector.  See if you don’t come out feeling more engaged with your co-workers … and with decisions reached in less time!

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Discard your crutches and run!

For example, contrast these two anecdotes:

Ben knows his daughter is home sick from school today, and he’s worried about her.  He keeps getting a weird exception coming from apache and he can’t figure out why.  He’s got half the team in his cube, and as soon as they’re done he knows he can go home and check on his daughter.  But no matter what, nothing works.  It takes him until 9 PM, and it ends up being something really stupid and obvious.  He’s mad at himself for missing it, and mad at the team for not finding it.  He leaves frustrated and angry.

Jill has no plans tonight, which is good because she keeps running into problems with the local maven repository.  She’s got half the team in her office trying to figure out why.  5 PM comes and goes, and the team stays on the task.  While they’re swapping stories over cold pizza at 9 PM someone spots a stupid configuration problem.  They all laugh about it, promise not to tell anyone how simple it was to solve, and go their separate ways.

Two years from now, both these developers will remember those nights.  While the end result was exactly the same in both situations, one team will bond closer through the hardship while the other will not.  One developer will think of it somewhat fondly, the other as a time when his work kept him from being where he needed to be.

Jill had the freedom to be in the moment, while Ben’s attention was elsewhere.  This isn’t Ben’s fault, or a credit to Jill.  It’s just unhappy circumstance.  How many of us have been in situations like both those?  I remember staying late into the evening trying to fix a configuration problem for a ControlCenter demo at EMC World — it was annoying and frustrating but in total the team that stayed to fix it grew closer and remembers it with a chuckle.  Why?  We were miles from home, had nowhere else to be, and had the freedom to attack the problem fully in the moment.

I’m not suggesting you hire only mid-20s kids with no families who will lose themselves in their work.  But it’s important to recognize the reasons why the same circumstances can either build a team up or tear it down.  I’m also not suggesting (by far!) that managers manufacture artificial barriers for teams to overcome together.  Software development is full of enough pitfalls that the team will stumble into these situations without your help!

So the question becomes: what can a manager, a technical leader, or a team member do to help the team operate in the moment?  How can we capitalize on those moments when they arrive?  How much does the attitude of the leaders present (and remember: we expect leadership at all levels here … directors and interns share this responsibility!) shape the way the team perceives a difficult moment?

More than I think people realize.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Working in the moment

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.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

From the “no kidding” department

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:

• I will never send a Facebook invite to an employee I currently manage.  It’s not fair to ask them to make that decision.
• I will send Facebook invites to other co-workers (including managers), and always include a disclaimer about how I don’t mind being rejected because not everyone uses these sites the same way.
• I accept any Facebook invite from anyone in my professional network, and count on using the filtering mechanisms if I need to.
• I will send LinkedIn invites to anyone in my professional network, and accept all of them as well.
• I will not write a LinkedIn recommendation for anyone I currently manage, nor for people in my immediate “family” at work.
• If you mention your employment at EMC, I will follow you on twitter, unless your update stream is embarrassingly bad and you clearly aren’t expecting anyone from EMC to have noticed your passing mention of your job.

I’m sure I have more, but these are the ones I rely on day-in and day-out.  What are yours?  If you don’t know, maybe it’s time you figured them out.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Know your (social media) norms