Entries Tagged 'Management' ↓

In the past, I’ve written about how we’re all in this together.  As I read the news these days, I think it’s appropriate to revisit the topic.

Continue reading →

I don’t often post about the day-to-day details of my job.  Whether it’s just boring or actually confidential, I don’t often get into specifics.  But today I was faced with an interesting and practical question.

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.
Continue reading →

I can confidently say that managers are always calm, prepared, and ready for every task.  We’re skilled multitaskers, and never get blindsided by a problem that sucks away all our time and energy and leaves us rushing to complete something vital (like a performance appraisal).

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.
Continue reading →

Walk around the hallways of any corporation around performance review time, and the conversations you hear will all sound alike.  Everybody has a complaint.  Starting with the awkwardness of the self-appraisal, continuing through the difficulty of encapsulating a year of effort into a few paragraphs, and concluding with the often difficult conversations that can take place when a review contains surprises, everybody loves to hate the performance review.

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.
Continue reading →

I left a bit of information out of my response to Storagezilla’s question about how I ended up in a manager’s office instead of writing code.  After talking to him briefly in email I realized there was no reason not to add that information here.  It’s the story of how playing video games made me a manager.  Or something along those lines….
Continue reading →

‘Zilla recently asked me a pretty simple question with a rather complicated answer.

I’m reliably informed you were a very talented coder and then opted to go the management route, which as we all know requires the use of a different skill set usually to the detriment of techie ability.

He wants to know why I decided to go into management.

First off, thanks for “very talented!”  I won’t ask who your sources are .  The short answer is: “I was asked.”
Continue reading →

Work life and personal life aren’t always “two great tastes that taste great together.”  But in today’s workplace, it is inevitable that they will mix.  A recent post on Management Issues asked how much personal time was allowable during the workday, as many workers confessed to spending up to two hours a day on maintaining their personal lives.

The gut reaction you seem to get from that is surprise at people spending 25% of their work day on personal distractions.  But I think it’s important to challenge that reaction, for a number of reasons.

Continue reading →

A colleague of mine, Fred Stock, recently wrote about “Security Advocates” in his blog over at the RSA blogging site.  In short, he suggests supplementing your core security team with outposts of knowledge throughout your product development teams, who can evangelize security concepts, eliminate trivial demands on your core security team, and make critical decisions with product-specific knowledge.

He’s obviously writing about this from the standpoint of improving the quality of your code and your organization from a security standpoint, but I wanted to add another dimension to this: growth.
Continue reading →

Peter Quirk recently forwarded an interesting post to me.  It discussed the idea of creating a “User’s Manual” for a manager, based on the manager’s leadership style and personality traits, to help employees function under that manager.  Knowing my interest in people management and transparency, he thought I might have some ideas on it.  He was right.

Continue reading →

Our high school guidance counselor used to ask us what you’d do if you had a million dollars and you didn’t have to work. And invariably what you’d say was supposed to be your career. So, if you wanted to fix old cars then you’re supposed to be an auto mechanic.

This line from Office Space cuts to the chase.  What would you do, if you didn’t have to do anything?  I’ve asked myself that question over the years many times, and in my youth I I sounded a bit like Peter when I answered it:

I would relax… I would sit on my ass all day… I would do nothing.

It’s ironic that it’s hard to answer the question until you’ve been around the block a few times.  Here you are at 30 or 40, finally knowing what you want to be when you grow up, and you’re 10-20 years into something different.
Continue reading →