It’s all about the people

September 3, 2011

Writing code is great. You can sit for hours at an end with a sore neck, coffee, an ashtray full of dogends (for smokers) and depending on the amount and quality of progress a feeling of despair or exhilaration.

Against the collective desire of the development community, I still, every now and then, do a bit of coding. It doesn’t happen all that frequently, but when it does… I enjoy it very much. I enjoy the thrill of the chase. The relentless pursuit of the binary state of done.

However, since I wrote my first line of code my career had a bit of everything and eventually landed in management. And that was it for me. Although I’m not particularly fond of all management work, I thoroughly enjoy dealing with people.

Smart, silly, hateful, passionate, lazy, dumb, lovable people.

When dealing with people you seldom have a state of done or even know what the state of done is. You can never consider all variables because variables become infinite. The human being is not only unpredictable per se but is also affected by a millon contributing environmental factors ranging from weather to a sports result. Nothing prepares you 100% for the task of managing people.

I find that fascinating.

That is what I love the most about my trade and generally about anything in the world. For the most part, I love people. I ocassionaly hate them. But I always love working with them.

It’s unpredictable, brillant, capricious, endearing people that makes it all worth while.

Shuje

PS: On my next post I will show you how to make a sound in a frequency that only dogs and Lady Gaga can hear.

1 Comment | Management, Office Life | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by shuje

Talking is not the goal of a meeting

January 4, 2010

If there was a tool that could monetize the time wasted on useless meetings I assure you CEOs everywhere would go berserk and start punching people. The fact is the higher up the chain of command your resources are the more likely they will spend a lot of time in meetings, and the more their wasted hours will cost you.

The title for this post is worth emphasizing: Talking is not the goal of a meeting.

Meetings have specific goals. These are not always tangible or even measurable but very real nonetheless. Although there are several types of meetings with several purposes, they all usually fall under one or more of the following:

  1. Informative meetings: The goal is to communicate something. Examples of these are one-on-ones for communicating a promotion, status update meetings with clients, corporate gatherings to communicate news, sales pitches, etc.
  2. Decision making meetings: These are held to discuss certain topics and make decisions for later action. Examples of these are board meetings, management meetings, etc.
  3. Social meetings: After office parties, office-hour lunches, birthday celebrations, etc. Although one would be tempted to say that these meetings are just for talking, the goal is to build team spirit.
  4. Work meetings: Working together is better than pulling the cart alone. Working in the same room or getting together to tackle something with a team, could prove very useful.

You will probably find more categories or a different way or categorizing them. That’s fine; I wasn’t trying to set a standard.

As an example the goal for a sales pitch is to ultimately sell your product or service. The goal can be easily ascertained: At some point in time it’s either you’ve made the sale or not.

A meeting for team building has no measurable goal. Hopefully once it’s over you will notice some improvements, but it is never as tangible as the previous example.

The following is a brief list of common setbacks I’ve come across when participating in meetings:

Lack of proper facilities: You would not believe how many times I had to improvise because the meeting organizer forgot to book a conference room or a phone bridge. Also projectors, white boards, presentations, everything required to carry out the meeting should be prepared with anticipation.

Misunderstanding the goal of the meeting: If the purpose of the meeting is deciding budget cuts for next quarter and someone brings a beer keg and party hats things are bound to go to the crapper. At the very least, the meeting organizer should understand what the meeting is for and try to set a proper tone.

Lack of an agenda: Let’s leave social gatherings out of this one. For the rest of the meeting types a meeting roadmap, usually represented in the form of an agenda is a great aid. Even for one on ones, having some predefined structure can help direct the meeting. Agendas should not be improvised as a last minute thing. They should be prepared with anticipation.

Absence of a moderator: In every meeting someone has to moderate. Usually someone handles the timing, the agenda, the action item list, etc. The moderator could be appointed formally or tacitly. Often times when no moderator is appointed someone takes it upon himself to naturally lead the proceedings.

Compulsive talkers: I knew a manager that was so enamored of his voice that meeting durations invariably multiplied tenfold and nothing useful came out of them. He would go on and on for hours not even scratching the surface of the predefined topics. Everyone would leave the room a bit older and a lot dumber, wondering how he / she could make up for the lost time and what on earth was that all about.

Meeting output: Some meetings have a byproduct called the action item list. This is a set of tasks with a deadline and the person accountable for executing it. If decisions are made but there is no proper action item list as the output of the meeting, and moreover, this action item list is not periodically revised, then the meeting might as well not have existed in the first place.

Distracted participants: This one I never figured out how to solve, mainly because I’m part of the problem here. People will read e-mails, answer cell phone calls, chat, etc. Smart-phones and laptops are so common in everyday corporate life that having everyone focused on the meeting is almost impossible.

My favorite meetings are those in which everything is prepared with a reasonable degree of anticipation. They have an agenda, all the facilities necessary to carry it out, a moderator, an action item list as output and a minute of the meeting to set everything in stone. These meetings leave everyone with a sense of accomplishment. Sadly, most meetings I’ve been a part of, are nothing like that.

CEOs everywhere: Start punching and always remember what Dwight from The Office said: “The eyes are the groin of the head”

Shuje

On my next post I will show you very graphic evidence as to why banana hammocks should be banned. Until then please comment below or send me details of your bad meeting experiences to shuje@holoom.com

6 Comments | Office Life | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by shuje

Antibodies for your job

December 21, 2009

A good friend of mine in the project management business once told me that each time you get a promotion (i.e. new responsibilities) you might suffer the adaptation until your body builds the appropriate defenses to deal with the pressure. She called those defenses “Job Antibodies” which was rather amusing but very true.

I experienced this when I was appointed manager for the first time. I certainly didn’t feel like a manager – I had yet to build the confidence – and although I had had the de facto manager status before, the actual title conferred a very palpable accountability. Since the manager inside of me was still crouching, naturally everything about anything regarding the job made me nervous: team meetings, one-on-one conversations, reporting to upper management, etc.

Although my team (the functional analysts) was a very cohesive, extremely skilled, high performing group of people (actually it might have been because of that) those were a shaky first three or four months until I grew the antibodies for the job.

However, antibodies are not needed exclusively in the aftermath of promotions, but rather to cope with any situation that you have not faced before and for which your emotions are still unprepared. Again, I was able to experience this, fourteen months or so after that first management appointment, when I faced the first resignation on my team.

To give you some background let’s just say Argentina is a very sweet country for IT job hopping and since this occurred way before the sub-prime crisis surfaced, it was even sweeter. Our universities cannot produce enough professionals to cope with the demand of the market which results in a very interesting battle between companies trying to best one another based on salaries, advancement opportunities, benefits, etc. Think of it as a reverse game of musical chairs, only when the music stops, everyone has a seat and there are a couple thousand extra ones available.

So rotation levels were high but I felt very proud that during that first year and couple of months my team held strong and did nothing but grow in number, even amidst some pretty big attrition numbers in the rest of the company. Intimately – mostly to myself – I wore that record as a badge, so when one of my analysts told me she was leaving it hit me pretty hard.

The month or so that passed after I got the notification I was decreasingly miserable. My misery of course peaked the few days after I found out: I was a nerve wreck, I felt incredibly guilty and I could not face upper management with a straight face although everyone was supportive and pretty much casual about the situation.

It was in that coolness from upper management that I ultimately found peace. My mind put two and two together and realized if they were cool about it, it was because they have lived through the experience over and over. It’s a fact of life that people are going to leave your company at a certain time, and although it’s reasonable to have a grieving period about it, you cannot have it paralyze you.

I found a great statement in a very crappy movie (Top Gun) that illustrated this clearly: Tom Cruise character’s co-pilot had just died and Commander Big-Moustache comforted him by telling him that “First one dies, you die too. But there will be others, you can count on that.”

Since I was then and I am still a touchy feely person who does not relate with subordinates exclusively at the professional level I grew antibodies of two types: Type A to deal with the personal loss of a person I cared for; and Type B for dealing with the professional loss of an excellent analyst.

Eventually more people in my teams left and although it is something I never enjoy, I am now able to deal with it in a more professional manner aided by the antibodies I built way back then.

Bottom-line: Emotional intelligence is a great ally in the workplace; do not build yourself to be a cold-blooded old-school business type. Embrace the small amounts of grief that accompany learning and let your antibodies thrive. You will grow with them.

Shuje

On my next post I will give you a sneak peek of the screenplay for Harry Crapper and the Malfunctioning Toilette.

Recently grown any antibodies? Post below or email me at shuje@holoom.com

8 Comments | Management, Office Life | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by shuje

Office fauna

November 25, 2009

During my ten or so years in the corporate world I had the distinctive pleasure of observing and occasionally meeting some fantastic creatures. Being part of IT companies it would be very easy to single out the “geek” persona. These and other corporate characters (suck-ups, rebels, smellers) you already know pretty well. I’m going to direct your attention to other types you might already know, but didn’t quite figure out how to name, let alone understand their behavior. Hopefully my musings here will help you deal with these creatures when you next encounter them.

Corporate Copycats

Suck-ups are a dime a dozen in any company. It’s safe to say wherever there’s a boss, someone’s face is attached to his ass. The copycat is a different creature. You might say copycats are enhanced versions of suck-ups. Their utmost desire is to become a person other than themselves, so they pick their target (usually his / her boss or a member of upper management) and basically copy their behavior to the extent of their possibilities.

I’ve come across these creatures in more than one occasion. They not only back-up whatever their bosses say, no matter how stupid or unreasonable it might be, they usually adopt it with a passion and blind eagerness to obey more suited to the military than to a business environment.

It is a very dangerous thing to follow rules without thinking, that’s why copycats are potentially dangerous individuals. In case you encounter one and you happen to disagree on a particular subject, be mindful that since copycats have no mind of their own their mind cannot be changed. You will never succeed unless you manage to convince their object of desire (i.e. the person they emulate) of changing his mind instead. This strategy could mean jumping the chain of command, so it must be used wisely.

The Un-feedback-able

I’ve spent half of my professional life as a manager, and as such delivering periodical feedback has always been one of my duties. In all of my teams without exception there has always been a person that no matter how much I tried to explain things to, would always wind up not listening or not caring and ultimately doing whatever they wanted to. Also, they would rebut every single piece of negative feedback, finding a very reasonable justification for every single thing you dare consider a flaw in their performance. These are the un-feedback-able.

Coincidentally or not, in my teams, these were always brilliant people with authority issues and stubborn to the bone. I remember dreading the moment in which I had to deliver them feedback and in more than one occasion I would purposely schedule the appointment at the end of the day because I knew my mind would not be good for much after it.

Finally (after a few years) I came up with the formula to deal with the un-feedback-able: pulling rank. If you know me or have read my previous post on management you’ll know that I discourage this type of method unless necessary. This is one such occasion.

I found that time and brain cells could be saved by using phrases such as: “I can see you are not in agreement with my position, but I’m your manager and I will be evaluating you according to what I just told you.”

Sadly, most times they carried on doing exactly what they wanted to, but at least, if on their next evaluation I had to shave points off their final score I could do so without so much as an “I told you to do things in a different way”.

Showoffs

In a recent comment to one of my posts, one of you inspired the species I’m about to describe. The comment described those developers that just can’t do something in a straightforward fashion and wind up unnecessarily complicating things in order to prove to others their vast knowledge. These are the tech showoffs you can find in almost all development teams.

The behavior of these creatures is clearly derived of insecurity. Not long ago men resorted to their cars to make up for their shortcomings elsewhere. Later, cars were replaced (or accompanied) by gadgets such as laptop computers, cell phones or smart-phones. Nowadays, for developers, penis size can be measured by the amount of unnecessary frameworks they are able to pile up in order to create a single “Hello World” application.

It doesn’t matter if something that could be done in fifteen minutes took five months to build, or that it has the hardware requirements of an electric power plant; showing off to your peers justifies almost anything.

When confronted with one of these creatures you need to know this is almost always a sin of youth and will eventually fade away. Anything you can do to speed up the learning process could help, but remember no matter how much you try to teach life experience, there is nothing like experiencing by one-self. Working a five-day rush will teach any showoff that sometimes a smart architectural or design choice will pay off big at a later stage.

Self Promoter 2.0

I know self promoters are no novelty, but social networking has helped engineer a completely new breed of this fascinating species. They don’t just brag about their accomplishments (whether real or invented) in office halls anymore. They have expanded their domain and now spend most of their time building their 2.0 personas to be the very reflection of the perfect professional, something of course they could accomplish by doing some actual work once in a while, but… why bother?

This creature is cunning, let’s face it, there is no way a person with no smarts can pull this off. However, they tend to build as much enemies as fans, since subordinates or peers of these individuals often feel social self promoters are full of it and take credit when they don’t deserve it or just plain don’t do the job they are supposed to and more work falls on their laps.

I have yet to figure out a way of dealing with social self promoters. I can’t say I have had direct interaction with any of them, but I keep hearing about them from acquaintances. Boy, do they sound pissed off. I eagerly await to see what happens when one of these individuals falls from grace. I believe that given their exposure they could immediately become pariahs. The bigger they are…

Flavor Combination

Any one person could simultaneously be more than one of the creatures described above. Surely a showoff has some traits of an un-feedback-able individual, and a traditional suck-up or self promoter could easily have the characteristics of both a copycat or a social self-promoter.

If you see a person that combines the four, please send a picture to both me and National Geographic. You could have an amazing discovery on your hands.

Shuje

On my next post I will explain why you should not feed developers after midnight. In the meantime, I would very much like to hear about the fauna in your workplace. Any creatures I should know of? Comment below or e-mail me at shuje@holoom.com

16 Comments | Management, Office Life, Social Miscellanea | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by shuje

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 158 other followers