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March 10 Eight Reasons Why Omnipotence Makes A Bad ManagerOne of my best friends once said to me: "Julius, you cannot define the point in time in advance, you are going to change important things in your life at. You can only look back and determine it approximately in retrospect." Well, he was right.
When I started to redefine the way I work and live a couple of months ago, I would never have expected the things that happened since then. I really changed a lot of things in various roles in my life and I'm still learning new things every day.
It started with a very profound level by implementing a personalized GTD methodoly for better managing my actions, projects and commitments. I received a benefit from that new level of productivity and growing inner peace, I cannot value enough: Time.
This extra time enabled me to start with a much deeper way of thinking about my life, to invest time and effort for learning and studying and eventually brought me to initialize a process of inner renewal. At that time, I remember to back out from my daily job to some extend to focus myself on my feelings, my goals and my intentions that form the corner stones of my being. This process is by far not finished - it is literally a life long process.
After that initial period, I started to incorporate the habit of learning, excelling and renewing into my dayly schedule and returned with full consciousness to my personal and professional life. At that point, I decided to extend my evolution to my work as manager and leader in my own company.
"The first thing a real leader needs to learn is to manage himself. After that he can learn to manage others." (Steven R. Covey)
I have been a manager for about four years now, and I haven't always been a good one. I learned a lot of things from my parents, they both are very intelligent, reflective and emotionaly strong people - and they both have been managers for a long time. So I always had a strong basis for "management", but to become a really good manager, those basic approaches aren't enough.
I am developing technical IT solutions for more than 13 years now. I wrote my first program when I was 12, so I spent more time with programming, designing and architecting software and systems in my life than I spent without it. The reason I mention that is to make one thing really clear: Sometimes, I am a geek.
And when a geek becomes a manager, he needs to let go on things he usually would never had let gone before. For example, if anything fascinating to work on comes up, the geek inside me starts screaming: "I want to work on that, it is so great! I know how to do it and no one could possibly do it better! Let me do it!". If you are an individual contributor, it is totally okay to follow this inner voice, grab the task and immediately start to work on it. But if you are a manager, you better think twice.
It was such a moment in my life, when I started to think about what my job realy is. My job - as my dad always put it - is to produce results through the members of my team. Right, "through them", not by myself. So am I doing my job by doing certain tasks myself? No, I don't. Every time it did certain things myself instead of effectively delegating them to someone from my team, I created a self-repeating point of failure, because I remained the only one who could handle those kind of jobs now and in the future. Of course, it was nice to know, that they always had to call my when there is something "special" to do. It felt so good to be needed, although I never admited that openly before. So I took my phone on vacation, to family dinners and to nearly all other personal events. And when the phone rang, I said things like "I'm sorry, but they need me. They can't go on without me.". Sometimes, this way of fooling myself did go that far that I started thinking things like "Why can't they do those things on their own?". Of course, that is ridiculous, if I never told someone how to do it.
So let's do a reality check of what happens if you have that "omnipotent manager"-style:
1. Your company suffers. This is the major problem caused by several of the problems below. A "one man show" is bad for every company in many different areas: Performance, productive use of resources, quality and sustainability. Every company needs to make sure that there is no dependency on a single resource whatsoever.
2. Your job as manager suffers. Your job as manager is to have the members of your team produce results by thinking and executing for and by themselfes. The best way to do that is by giving them a goal to reach, a vision to follow, an desired outcome to produce and rules and guidelines to follow, by helping them to launch the project, by providing samples, support, feedback and advice on their way, by clearing their path without babysitting them to much and by shielding them from "other stuff" that may show up.
But it is neither your job to do the work yourself nor to execute your own methods through the hands of someone else and bypassing your team members brains. In the first case, there is absolutely no creation of additional value at all - the complete team is a wasted pool of resources. In the second case, it may look a little bit more like management, but in reality, there is no involvement of someone else's experience, no enhancement of productivity, no delegation of responsibility and no real learning.
A manager that is only "delegating" his own actions and methods to someone else can at best "manage" a maximum of ten to twelve people. A manager that helps his team to manage themselfes by providing guidance, goals and support can handle fifty or a hundred people.
3. Your job may be at stake. Despite the fact that you don't do your job very well at all, you will force your manager to decide whether to tolerate an incapable member on his management team that isn't executing well -or- to take the risc of having trouble for a relatively short period of time by replacing you with a new manager. There are only two reasons why you are not performing well as manager: You don't known how to do it or you refuse to do it on purpose. So what's it gonna be? Either way, eliminating the dependency is the way to go here: It's best to get unpleasant things over and done with.
4. Your future career suffers. Even if your manager isn't going to replace you because of your lack of effective delegation and management skills, he surely will never promote you. There are a lot of wrong reasons why some managers doesn't resolve dangerous bottlenecks (missing ability to see the problem, missing ability to deal with conflicts, etc.) but in that case, those people cannot work without you. Because you don't qualify someone else from your team to do their job, there is no way your boss is going to let you go. So most likely, you will do this job for the rest of your career in that company.
5. Your team suffers. If you continue to do all the important and interesting jobs by yourself - for whatevery reason - you will eventually send the following messages to your team: I don't trust you to do it right, I don't trust you to learn how do it right, and I don't tolerate you making mistakes by learning how to do it right.
Regardless of your intentions, that is the message everyone gets. And how can you expect from your guys to work with their minds, their hearts, their spirit and their consciousness on a project if you fail to communicate your appreciation for them and their work?
6. Your time and inner peace suffers. Because you do most of the important things by yourself, your workload is obviously increased exponential. So the time you spent at the office doing the work of your whole team instead of recharging your batteries at home, the stress to complete those things might kill you sooner or later, simply because so many other people depent directly on your actions.
7. The quality of your work suffers. Most of the work you are doing on your own is most likely supposed to be done by several people. So you will never enough time to finish your stuff with quality - by the way: the same quality that might have been the reason why you chose do it yourself in the first place.
8. Your schedule suffers. Doing everything on you own is not really a very smart way to get those things done very soon, even by making drawbacks in quality, which should never be an option in software development.
There are other implications as well, but those listed above are the most significant in my oppinion.
Of course, there are a lot of reasons to justify this "omnipotent way of management": Most people on your team may lack the experience, the knowhow, the performance or they cannot see whole picture (by the way: Whay can't they?). But seriously, how are you going to change that by not changing the way of handling those things? And is it really true, that your way is the only way to do things right? Probably not...
I started to change this wrong way of "management" (and really, we shouldn't call it that way anymore) somewhere in the past. I'm not done with it, I sometimes struggle and then I need to recall my motivations, particularly if there are setbacks. But living by correct principles and executing on the basis of accurate paradigms always means to hold on to the right way of seeing things, adjusting to the current situation and fulfil inner commitments, especially in tough situations. I learned that this is the best way to work with my team and to produce sustainable results, extensible value, strong knowhow, growing experience and superior performance.
Learning how to manage those things and delegate effectively is one of the most important steps from management to real leadership. March 05 Process Your Outlook Inbox in GTD Style: Ctrl-H-MThe new Ribbon interface of Office 2007 is not only much better for unexperienced users, it has even greater functionality for "hard core" powerusers as well. I use it in good old UNIX keyboard shortcut fashion (reminds me of my old Emacs days, somehow) and process my email inbox with Ctrl-H-M to quickly sort my emails into appropriate GTD folders. March 02 Wrong SignalsFrom time to time, I make mistakes. Yes, I do and I'm adhere to that. Sometimes I need to revoke a decision, I need to apologize for something I said, I need to fix something I did wrong or I just need to admit, that I fooled myself.
In these moments, although they are usually everything else than delightful, I realize that I have come one step closer to doing things right and becoming better in everything I do.
The last time I realized such a mistake was a few days ago. Two weeks earlier I set up a new reward system during the weekend for our team. I wanted my guys to be more interested in reading about new IT stuff and playing around more with new technologies, so I came up with the idea of a quiz. I wrote an email to the whole team and included different questions for different kinds of team members: One question for software developers, one question for project managers, a third one for sysadmins and a fourth one for web designers. They all touched "new ground", like new features of C# 3.0, questions about internal OS structures, SOA-related conceptional knowhow and HTML5.
The plan was to receive answers to one questions from any specialist and to receive a second answer from anyone regarding a "soft skill" questions as well: "What is the most important criteria for a successful customer project?" The replies to the second question were going to be published in our corporate intranet (assuming that answer to the first question was correct) and after that, everyone was going to vote for the best response, only the one he had given was prohibited. The winner with the most votes would gain one hour of free time extra and leave the office early at a certain day.
I was very suprised how few people responded to the survey. I was disappointed and I couldn't believe, how ungrateful everyone seemed to be by not even trying to learn those few things and not appreciating the work I had put into it, as well as the "reward" that he or she could gain, which of course would cost my company some money as well.
Some days later I started to realize what the real problem was. Let me share my insight with you.
At netzkern, we have strong values and paradigms for everything we do. One of these basic paradigms is to focus on Win-Win. Regardless of the various relationships in and around our company, be it within our team, with partners or with our customers, Win-Win is one of our most important philosophies in everything we do. We encourage and strengthen team work, guided by Scrum and other great methods. And we communicate Win-Win to our employees every day, because we expect them to communicate and live it towards their colleagues, partners and customers.
Another paradigm we focus on at netzkern is our working experience. We do that by equipping people with very good work places, fast notebooks which they can use for private pleasure, huge screens, a nice office and drinks for free. We have lunch together, we make jokes the whole day long and we have a lot of team events after hours, like soccer, playing Wii, going to the movies or doing sports together. Every few weeks we do some special event like cocktail parties, poker nights or just watching a movie with the whole crew. Part of everyone's contract is a fitness club membership, free entry to a lot of parties in our city and several other small things. And there is no "Sir" or any hard hierarchy - a lot of people in our team are actually real friends, regardless of their position. Of course, we need to make sure that the work gets done and we are reachable during business hours, but it is no problem to come in the very morning and leave earlier -or- to start your workday at 10am and stay late from time to time.
The result of this paradigm that I inherited from my senior partners and developed it further is very simple: Everyone enjoys their time at the office and to work in our team. Our people like the projects they move forward, because we let them choose most of the work they do and there is no "dropping the pencil at 5pm" or "hoping for the end of the work day before it is even noon" at all.
What I didn't realize a few weeks ago (when I had built that reward system) was that I had created something totally out of line with these basic paradigms. First of all, I created competition. I created Win-Lose. By letting team members compete against each other to gain a fortune, I ignored the spirit behind the Win-Win paradigm. I expected from every individual in my team to be better than the others - to beat their own team. I even expected them to judge the answer of their colleagues by choosing one over the other. And I expected them to choose the answer of someone else over the answer they had given themselves - although I asked them to give me the best answer they could possibly imagine in the first place. So why on earth should they rate the answer of someone else better than their own?
The second problem was the reward itself. Why should I reward someone with extra "out of office" time when my basic philosophy is to have my team to like it being at the office, to be productive and to move our projects foward? Even worse: Underneath I gave my people the impression that I myself would recognize "leaving the office early" as something everyone might desire, because I made it a reward. And seriously, I don't. I myself love being at the office, I like to be with my team and I like to be productive and focussed on interesting projects.
So eventually, my "new" reward system was full of flaws. And when I presented it by asking the first "question of the week", my team responded in a totally appropriate manner. Although no one directly explained to me why he or she didn't like the new idea, they all seemed to feel that my idea wasn't as shiny and excellent as I thought. I had given them a wrong signal. So they didn't respond to it at all.
Now, that I realized that, I will come up with a new reward system. But was everything a waste of time? Not at all. Now I can incorporate my findings into the new system and make sure that it is in harmony with the values and paradigms of our company. |
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