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

I recently had a chat with a senior developer working on a very difficult task, trying to achieve demonstrable results in a tight time frame.  I look at his workload and know he’s walking that fine line between “challenging” and “impossible.”  How did he describe its impact on his motivation, his engagement?  As the most fun he’d had at work in over 5 years.  And what was the last one?  Another crazy struggle, when a major scalability issue appeared late in a development cycle and teams were forced to come together and refactor major components with very little time to actually design and lots of pressure to actually produce.

Are software developers inherently broken, looking for painful exercises in futility?  I don’t think so.  I think if you look the tasks that push people to these heights of motivation you’ll find a few things in common:

• Well-defined success criteria
• Insufficient time to enter analysis paralysis
• Developers empowered to pursue their own ideas
• Cooperation of close-knit and competent peers

The question I can’t answer is whether people operating on those projects produce higher quality products.  It’s clear to me that they enjoy their work more, but is that enough?  Perhaps the ruthless attention to continuous integration you see at the heart of Agile/Scrum is a safety valve for that question.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

In praise of deadlines

You shouldn’t think of that as a negative trait.  We spend 8 or more hours a day, 5 days a week, surrounded by the same people.  Changes to that environment have a much greater impact than even major changes like, say, your company being acquired.  When Data General became part of EMC a decade ago, we didn’t ask “How will they strategically make CLARiiON a part of their offering?”  We asked “Will we have to move to Hopkinton?”  (We didn’t.)

Here’s an experiment: ask your co-workers about their most memorable project.  Was it a major game-changer in the market?  Was it something that made the company above-average revenue? Probably not. It’s probably something much closer to home.  Maybe it was the project where they first learned a new technology or methodology.  Or maybe it was the time the QA department found a showstopper at the 11th hour and they stayed until 10 PM to fix it, only to find out the build machine crashed because of a power outage.  Maybe it was that executive demo when they had to pause the executable in the debugger to manually toggle a variable to get around a hardware bug.  Or maybe it was the time they worked for a year on a product only to have it canceled without explanation.

These extraordinary events can either build up or tear down a team’s energy, respect and camaraderie.  Professionalism, pride, recognition, respect for the company: these things will keep people working.  But one experience can be more powerful than the rest of those things put together, for good or ill.

As a leader, think about your team.  What experiences that they’ve shared define their time with you?  How do you create an environment where those experiences bring the team closer together in alignment with your objectives, as opposed to unifying them in apathy (or even resentment)?

Hey.  Nobody said this job was easy.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Brothers (and sisters) in arms

At EMC, most employees have goals each quarter, and must report whether or not they hit those goals at the quarter’s end.  Every 3 months, employees load up a web application and record their progress against those goals.  A goal can end up in a variety of states, but for all of them the employee has the option of entering a comment.  That comment is saved along with the status of the goals – saved to be viewed later in the year by either the employee or the manager.  There’s even an optional comment for the entire goal sheet.

I imagine many of my readers have a similar system in place. If you’re like me, you probably try and write as little in those comments spaces as possible.  “Achieved measurements as described in goal text” is a nice simple phrase, isn’t it?  Or maybe “Hit all objectives as listed.”  Perfect!

But maybe there’s a better use for this, rather than just having it be a check mark on a form somewhere?  You can probably guess where I’m going with this.  Treat your quarterly goal completion as a quarterly self-appraisal. Describe for yourself and your manager how you achieved your goals.  Be specific. Give examples.  Map it to business success.  Map it to your strengths.  Get really creative and tie it to your performance review from last year!

Why do all this extra work? After all, you don’t need to. Your manager is probably okay with a checkmark, and there’s a good chance he won’t even read your wonderful commentary.  So why bother?

Distribution of work

Writing a self-appraisal is a daunting task. You’ve just divided that work into manageable chunks.  You’re investing an hour this quarter to save an hour at the end of the year.  And you’re writing a better description of this quarter’s work than you would at the year’s end, because it’s fresher in your mind and you’re not in a rush to try and capture all the detail of the year in a single day’s writing.  Do you think you’ll spend as much time writing about Q1 at the end of Q4 as you are about to at the end of Q1?

Planting seeds

If your manager does happen to read this, you’re planting the seeds of your self-appraisal year-round.  You’re saying, right now, look at what I’m doing, look at how I’m doing it, look at how I’m growing, look at how I’m taking your advice.  You’re spreading that performance conversation year-round, whether your manager wants you to or not.  Remember, you can’t assume your manager is going to make time to work with you all year.  You have to take matters into your own hands.  And you are.  If you’re fortunate, you can even leverage these seeds and have a conversation with your manager now about what you just wrote.

Quarterly course correction

Let’s not forget that you also need to check on your progress year-round, and not just at review time.  By writing this you’re refreshing last year’s performance review in your head, you’re taking a step back and trying to think objectively about your performance.  You’re giving yourself a head start, and viewing your work in the context of your performance review 4 times during the year instead of just once.

Practice makes perfect

One of the common comments I hear around self-appraisals is that people aren’t comfortable writing about themselves,about their achievements, about their strengths.  So why not practice it?  Do this every 3 months instead of every year, and you’re getting 4 times the practice in writing objectively about your own performance.

Every year at appraisal time, I wish I had done this.  This year I will.  I’d love to hear in the comments below if you’ve tried something similar.  How has it worked out for you?

(Oh, managers, you can do the same thing for everyone who reports to you.  The idea is a bit intimidating, but all the same principles apply….)

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Quarterly Self-Appraisal

His particular situation could probably be best described as poor alignment of passion to position.  He worked very hard for many years in small close-knit teams, overachieving in a very physical job where results directly yielded compensation benefits. He took great pride in the quality of his work and his ability to outperform his peers in a very competitive environment. But like a good employee, he did as he was asked and moved into a supervisory role when it became necessary. Now, his compensation is fixed (at significantly less than in years past) and his drive to compete and overachieve at work has no direct outlet. Even if he somehow translates his passion for excellence into those he supervises, he would not yield any compensation benefit for doing so.  In fact, his passion works against him, as he often puts in extra hours and fills in gaps on his team with his own labor to keep from having an unsatisfactory team.

This directly led to the problem of poor transition planning for people whose careers bring them into unknown territory.  The same attributes which make someone successful at one role might hinder them in another. Rigid attention to detail and a refusal to accept excuses might work well for an individual contributor but might be seen as dictatorial in a manager.  People are being asked to wear new hats all the time, but with little to no training in new roles people are being set up to fail.

Another issue that reared its head was bad translation of company objectives to individuals.  Recently, a company made a decision to lay off 200 workers.  The decision was justified with a million dollar-plus price savings.  At the same time, the company continued to publish documents about how much they value the communities they draw their workers from, and continues to boast about its high revenues (tens of billions of dollars).  In a matter of days, they have destroyed years of credibility with their workplace: people are openly talking about how they put 200 middle-class families on unemployment in exchange for 1/20,000th of their revenue.  Now, I have no insight into the decision, but they way they’ve chosen to communicate it has cost them considerably in trust among their workforce.

There’s one final factor to mention – the constant mantra of doing more with less.  I heard a story of a company who suffered an internal scandal and terminated (for cause) over two dozen employees.  Rather than replace these employees or reorganize, the company is just making do.  People who are already stressed for a number of reasons are absorbing the extra work.  In other situations non-salaried workers’ hourly rates were cut by between 20 and 33 percent.  It’s not just that families are now forced to do more with less, it’s that they feel powerless. The want-ads for these industries are empty; they’re lucky to have a job.  And all of them are scared that things won’t improve.  Their new paychecks might be their new baselines.  Their entire financial futures are looking murky.

Nobody that I talked to has lost their job, but lots of people were feeling powerless and unmotivated.   There are lessons hiding in these stories – we may not be able to avoid layoffs, or pay cuts, but we can’t let our constant struggle to keep our heads above water turn into an excuse for treating people poorly.  Whether we’re talking about employees, customers, or partners, they may not feel like they have a lot of choice right now with the economy so uncertain … but when the tides change, how do you want to be remembered?  As the manager who made a star employee hate his job for the first time in 20 years?  Not me.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Same problems, different worlds

To my colleagues at Netapp, I congratulate you on making #1 on the Fortune Best Places to Work Survey.  I obviously would love to see EMC getting this kind of publicity for its workplace environment, but I recognize that when one of us does well, we all do well.  So great job and keep up the good work.  When the bar gets raised, we all benefit.

Also, Netapp, sorry to see that the layoffs didn’t miss you guys entirely.  Lots of good folks looking for work right now, from my own co-workers from EMC to our fellows from Netapp, IBM, Microsoft, Seagate, Dell, and so many more.

While most companies are turning to layoffs, some are looking at other alternatives.  The move by HP to cut salaries by 5% across the board has sparked a lot of conversations in hallways all over the industry.   I’m sure it’s sparked a lot of conversations at HP, too.  At the same time, moves by Wells Fargo to try and keep some employee recognition events running even while accepting government bailouts was received, well, poorly. Overall, corporations are scaling back long-term incentives.  The compensation picture is much different now than it has been in years.

If where you happen to work today things aren’t this bad, this is not the time to gloat. It’s time to step back and realize that we’re all doing the same jobs for the same pool of money and we’re all trying to make our work lives as pleasant as possible with the constraints we’re facing.  It’s time to get creative and get cooperative. We’re all part of a community even if our paychecks happen to be drawn from different corporations.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been involved in some interesting conversations with a variety of people, all talking about what is great and not-so-great about our working lives.  It’s really helped me focus on what I’m passionate about as a manager. It’s a given that I want to manage a team that produces quality software that is loved by its users.  But more importantly, I want to do what I can to make sure my team’s working lives are as painless and productive as possible.  This realization has led me to some interesting new people to follow on twitter, new blogs to read, new people to connect to in new ways.  Hopefully some of that will find its way into posts here in the future.

What are you doing differently as a manager, or as an employee, to make things better at your workplace?

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Sticking together, revisited

My manager forwarded me some excerpts from Customer Satisfaction Surveys done during December of 2008. These were from ControlCenter customers who had service requests completed during the month and were asked some questions and given the chance to comment. Obviously these were customers who were already unhappy, having been forced to file service requests in the first place.  There were a number of comments which weren’t very flattering — both about issues in the product, and about our field response to those issues.

I was torn on whether to send along the excerpts to my team.  As software developers working on the guts of the product, they certainly must be on board if we’re going to improve some of the quality issues where the users had complaints.  On the other hand, there is nothing my team can do to improve field response times, the performance of PowerLink, and so forth.  If I share with them unedited comments about the entirety of the users’ pain, am I motivating them to do what they can or just demotivating because there are other problems they can’t fix?

In the end, I sent an edited version of the email on to my team.  And here’s why – I have to trust my team to do the right thing, no matter what else is going on.  I look at the list of values we’re supposed to operate under and I see things like Empowered Decision Making, Leadership, Teamwork, and Accountability.  You don’t say you value those things and then hide behind “well it’s not [entirely] our fault.”  There’s a phrase we invoke quite often here at EMC called Total Customer Experience (TCE).  TCE doesn’t end when you hand off your software to the quality assurance team.  If we’re going to embrace the challenges ahead of us and actually bring this product ahead in quality and usability we need to see the whole picture, start to end … even if that picture isn’t always pretty.

The decision wasn’t a simple one though, and other managers have told me they wouldn’t have done the same.  So I ask you all: what would you do?

(To be fair, I did edit out some comments which I felt would only serve to distract from the message.  Maybe I chickened out … but I like to think I took a practical approach to a tricky question.)

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Oversharing with your team?

Yeah, right.

This post explains some simple crutches for harried managers working on reviews.  These tips are not a substitute for a year-long investment in the performance of your team, and they aren’t even necessarily best practices, but maybe they’ll help make life a little easier this month.

(These assume your reviews contain two main sections: a list of accomplishments, and a list of competencies the employees use as strengths or need to better utilize going forward.)

Get some reference materials

Any reference material can be used as a crutch.  The goal here is to refresh your memory in some kind of standardized way. My two crutches this year were unofficial spreadsheets.  One is a chart with one axis having all the competencies (communication skills, technical expertise, command of the business, etc.), and the other with the job levels (associate vs. senior engineer, etc.)  The items on the chart are descriptions of how someone at that level would use that competency.  An Associate Engineer and a Principal Engineer both use their communication skills, but their scope is so different that it can be hard to see how they relate.  Having some objective descriptors of expected behavior can help.

The second was a worksheet with a tab for each team member, and competencies listed for each. Within each competency are 5 descriptive lines taken from the official descriptions. I used this worksheet to start my brainstorming on which competencies define which individuals — after reviewing the first chart, I used this one to assign a strength rating to each descriptive line, for each team member.  In the end I could see what my gut reaction was to each person on the team.  What strengths defined them, what areas weren’t they as strong in?

However you do it, there’s value in having definitions to force you to think objectively.  Now, I like to write down my initial gut feelings for each team member in terms of strengths and development opportunities, along with just a sentence or two explaining why.  Nothing set in stone yet, no connections to previous years or hard data, but I’ve made some progress on everybody’s review.

Consulting the “what”

Now it’s time to revisit what your team did, not just how they did it.  If you have a year-long crutch for this (like a status spreadsheet, an email folder, etc.), great, but some of us aren’t so disciplined.  Other ways to get the “what” ball rolling?  I consult quarterly goals, saved meeting minutes, meeting invites, and old emails.  There’s time involved in all those steps, and you should decide which ones fit your work style best.

Finally, it’s time for the next big crutch: self-appraisals.  Read only their accomplishments and not their competencies (advanced self-appraisal tip: if you know your manager does this, try and make sure you talk a little about your strengths in your accomplishment section!).  This suggestion is somewhat controversial — lots of people will suggest leaving the SA until your PA is completely written, but we’re talking about crutches here, not the ideal process.

You should be able to pull enough together from these crutches to break down each team member’s contributions now. Be consistent across the team, in terms of categorization and detail.  Do not copy and paste! It’s important that this section reflects your knowledge of each team member’s contribution and reflects some unique perspective.

Yes, this is real work.  It takes time. I promised crutches, not shortcuts.

Once you’re done here, it’s a good idea to go back and polish your rough competency thoughts.  Add some detail, clean up inconsistencies, and so on.  If you followed that work flow, you’ve got a rough draft of the review based on objective data and your recollections.

Check your work

We’re back to the crutches.  One employee at a time, open up the previous year’s review and the self-appraisal.  Read over the competency sections in detail.  Look out for glaring issues in your reviews. Did you miss a strength someone called out? Maybe you need to revisit. Be consistent year over year; find ways to talk about the things you said last year, and talk about how people improved (or didn’t!).

While you’re doing this, look for major gaps between self-appraisals and your reviews. What are people’s blind spots with regards to their performance? Add some language to clarify these areas, to help prepare for the actual sit-down review meeting.

Reread each review in turn, correct any typographical errors or sloppy grammar, and you’re off to the races.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of performance reviews. There’s lots to talk about in terms of remaining objective, dealing with matrix management situations, why sometimes a good review is a harder review to write than a bad one, and more.  But I wanted to get some concrete tips out there, little crutches to help people who might be feeling a bit overwhelmed.

Last but not least, I’d like to suggest one thing.  If you make it out of the review process alive, try to note one thing which you’ll improve on next year.  After all, we all get reviewed too, and it would be nice to be able to show how we learned something .

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Last-minute Performance Review crutches

There’s all kinds of advice and tips which can make the review process less painful; the problem is that most of them (rightfully) require year-round investment. What if you want some last-minute tips?  You’re in luck, that’s what I’ve got.  Today, I’ll focus on the self-appraisal.  Followup posts will talk about other aspects of the review.

First off, let’s be clear.  You really should do your self-appraisal.

Within my organization, the self-appraisal is optional but encouraged.  I strongly advocate writing a self-appraisal, and even if the deadline has passed for an official one I still recommend writing an unofficial one and sending it via email.  Nobody has as much vested in your review as you do. If you can’t find the time to do the self-appraisal, what makes you think your manager will find the time to do a thorough job on the final review?

A few simple tips around the SA:

• Use bullet lists for describing the year’s accomplishments.  Be thorough but brief. Don’t overwhelm with detail or highlight trivial tasks to make your list look longer.
• One place to add more detail is in tasks which your manager wasn’t directly involved in.  “Interfaced with reporting team” isn’t as good as “Spent a week with reporting team helping integrate with version 3.1 of database views.”
• Use names for cross-functional contributions so your manager can follow up if he or she wants … unless you don’t want your manager following up!
• When describing your strengths, consult last year’s review to refresh your memory of what your manager thinks you bring to the table.
• Try to pick out a strength that he or she didn’t focus on last year, and mention it.
• Talk about how your strengths helped your team and other teams.  When it comes down to it, your manager doesn’t care that you’re a good communicator — but he or she does care that your communication skills helped with collaborative troubleshooting of a customer problem across two geographical sites.

My last few tips for the SA are important enough to separate out of the list above.

First, if you choose to fill in anything in the “development opportunities” (or “things I could do better”) section, pick a trait you and your manager have already discussed and one you feel you can see a clear path on.  Whatever you do, do not mention something your manager isn’t already aware of.  For example, if you have a fear of confrontation and you think it’s slowing down your ability to function in collaborative design meetings, but nobody else seems to have picked up on it, go ahead and keep working on that issue on your own.  You’re obviously compensating for it enough and any improvements you make will be seen as growth and not as fixing a problem.  On the other hand, if you’ve already discussed ways in which you could be contributing more at those meetings with your manager, call back to that conversation and use it to fill in this section.

Second, realize that by writing the self-appraisal you are setting the tone for the conversation.  Don’t waste that opportunity!  If you expect some disagreement over the scope of your influence, for example, make sure you have some examples of how you’ve been influential in ways your manager might not know.  If you feel you’ve made progress in an area that was discussed as a growth opportunity in a previous review, call it out.

Every manager uses the SA differently.  At a minimum, the SA gives your manager a list of accomplishments.  At the next level it helps set the tone of the conversation around strengths you want to highlight, and weaknesses you want to focus on.  But at its most useful, the SA can be much more powerful.  If you come into the performance review with a comprehensive and realistic outlook of your strengths and their impacts, as well as a focus point for future development and concrete ideas on how to go forward, your review might just be painless. At the very least you’ve shown that your career is important to you, and that you have ideas about where you’re going in it.  Your manager will have no choice but to respect that and to respond to it.

(Finally, even though it violates the idea behind this post, writing your SA should give you some idea of what you could do differently this year to make writing next year’s easier.  Try to take something away from the process and feed it into this year’s workflow, so next year you aren’t stressing for last-minute tips!)

Other people have of course written on this subject.  I found a great writeup from a director at Microsoft that you might enjoy as well.  Any tips you want to add?  Leave them in comments or drop me a line on twitter….

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Last-minute Self-Appraisal Tips

You might wonder why that is?  The following list outlines just a few of the “management” challenges faced in keeping this game community afloat.  How many do you think map directly into the corporate world?

• Derive, clarify, publish, and maintain a list of organizational values
• Develop and manage over time criteria and processes around community membership and behavioral standards
• Execute against those processes and enforce those criteria
• Deal with turnover from the community
• Deal with turnover from management team, including recruiting and training replacements
• Gather and take into account member feedback
• Handle interpersonal conflicts between members whose values don’t align
• Handle conflict of vision between leaders of the organization, making sure the community doesn’t splinter in the process
• Decide when to eliminate support for a game due to lack of sustainable player base
• Decide what new games have enough player base to warrant forming a new leadership team around
• Form teams to solve in-game and out-of-game problems, and deal with their results

It goes on and on.  It should be no surprise that among those who consistently are involved in leading the community we’ve found many “real” leaders, including military officers, corporate managerial types, community leaders, and entrepreneurs. The leaders are fairly evenly matched across gender, but most are over 30.

Of course, these skills aren’t new.  Twenty years ago, people were developing these skills in volunteer organizations, places of worship, schools, and sports teams.  The ‘net has opened it up to a much wider audience, and drastically reduced the barrier to entry.  Sound familiar?

So when I was asked to change my title from “engineer” to “manager,” I realized that my work would change, but it wasn’t heading off into some totally alien space.  I was already volunteering my time to do a lot of those things … now I’d be getting paid to do them.

An unfortunate side effect, and well-worth noting, is that once I dealt with these things all day, day after day, my appetite for dealing with them as a volunteer was drastically reduced.  I stepped down as a community manager for the gaming community, and had to turn a blind eye to many of the problems the organization faced.  I couldn’t expend the emotional energy on both fronts.  There are those who do it, but I’m not one of them.  I think it would be interesting to talk to someone who is, and see what their secret is…..

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Video gaming and the office