Sep/092
Leader of the Future?
For a while now, I have been reading this book: The Leader of the Future by the Drucker Foundation. The foreword, by Peter F. Drucker, was written in 1995, which is a long time ago. Back then a few people, like Peter F. Drucker and Peter M. Senge, understood that the way we practise leadership must change tremendously.
They are right on the requirements of a great leader. But, I disagree with them in one point, they didn’t describe a leader of the future, they just described a great leader. Though, they probably ment that it takes a while to get all leaders to act like this.. anyway, to talk about about the past:
Like I have always said, the world is changing all the time and the biggest problem are people who resist it. Back in ‘the old days’ leaders were trying to stick with the old habits when the world was changing away from that. And, they had loads of problems when something like that happened, they just didn’t understand it back then, or didn’t even want to. Now after years and years of research we are starting to understand it and share the knowledge. Sharing this idea is hard because people are.. umm.. just people: we all have egos, we all have our habits and so on. We don’t just want to let go something that is safe and familiar. In short, it is hard to get leaders to get out of their comfort zone to try out new ideas.
Now, go and do yourself a favor and buy at least these two books: The Leader Of The Future and The Fifth Discipline. While thinking about how to change your leadership style you can listen to AC/DC – Back In Black.
Sep/090
Steve Jobs
Very good and inspiring speeches from Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together: Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5Z7eal4uXI&feature=related
Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc
Aug/090
Personal Goals
This is again one article from my eBook, Challenging The Way To Manage. I thought I should post this as this will help managers to understand how to share the responsibility among the team. Responsibilities should be shared by what motivates team members, some like to think about processes, some to lead projects, and so on. There is no sense to give responsibility to someone if he doesn’t want it, in the end, this is always the best solution.
Overview
The idea behind setting personal goals is to praise learning. At the same time it provides a good tool for management to track how people are performing, what they want to do and what problems are in their way.
How To
The way I run this is that I interview each team member personally; together we define the goals for the next 3 to 6 months and answer to four questions for each goal: how could management help me to achieve this goal, current and target status of the goal estimated by the team member and what problems are in the way. We use scale from one to five for evaluating the current and target status. Remember to give the team members enough time to prepare before having the interview. After the interview I will give my own estimation of the current and target status below the ones done by team member. Goals should be aligned to what is the person’s vision of his career, say in the next two to five years.
Management Support
Idea is that management will help the team members to reach their goals, by providing tools (working groups), more responsibility (e.g. let some one study processes and make improvement proposals), and anything else that might be needed. By giving this kind of commitment to team members from management will make them feel like
somebody really gives a damn about what they want. This in my experience boosts team members motivation, which again reflects to everything they do.
Study Time
You’ll also need to reserve some time for the learning. Don’t assume that all the team members are like you and work 24 hours a day and use their own spare time for learning. I solved this by giving four hours for each team member a week.
Results
Here are the things that happened during a few weeks:
- Team members were more motivated and learning
- Presentations about the things they learned for other team members – sharing the information (very important)
- Continuous improvements – challenging the Status Quo, finding better ways to do things
- Now after three months, when second round of interviews are coming, around 80% of the people have really spent some time to really reach for their goals, which is a very good, but not perfect.
This is a real working tool to strengthen learning environment and build a better team.
Aug/090
Sharing Responsibility
This is one article from my eBook: Challenging The Way To Manage. Enjoy!
Overview
One of the biggest questions that leaders nowadays ask is: how to grow the organization without destroying the dynamics and fast reaction times? Well, as far as I’m concerned the answer is pretty simple: sharing the responsibility – organizing the team to be able to answer to these two things by themselves.
What Is The Problem Then?
In the end, the real problem is anybody with a lot of power, they are afraid to give it away because it makes them vulnerable. Well, guess what? That is the whole freaking point of it!
After you start sharing the responsibility your actions will be questioned, which makes you a human again, which is the way it should be. What I mean is that whenever somebody has too much power in their hands they become some kind of ‘gods’ whose orders will not be questioned. If you know somebody like that, in the long term, that kind of setup is going to fail. Challenging each other or more commonly said ‘sparring’ is one of the most important tools you’ll ever meet for learning and making better decisions.
Let’s take a quick example: you give the responsibility of coding guidelines to somebody else as you haven’t had time to think about them in a year. Very soon, this person will most likely come to you and ask what do you think if we would change this, or even better don’t come to you, instead he brings these things up inside the team and ask about what they think about the ideas. If everyone agrees, there should not be any reason why these could not be implemented (the change comes from inside the team). Remember that when you are sharing the responsibility to a person, he must understand to iterate the changes through the team – make sure he doesn’t become the ‘god’ person.
There is nothing more dangerous than a person who holds too much information and power, because in the end we are all humans – he cannot do more than me or you! This means that he will not be able to do all the tasks he is assigned in to. That is where the trouble begins and people start talking about like: “He is not doing anything about that issue! He doesn’t care!”
Do you see the problem? It reflects both to the management and to the team. Management doesn’t have time and the team thinks they do not do anything because they don’t care. Ouch…
Where to Start?
Talk to the team members and find out what they are interested in. This way you’ll be able to share the responsibility to right people, motivate them and you’ll most likely get them closer to their personal goals. Also do not forget to support them and make sure they understand what their responsibility is!
Results
Simply put, succeeding in this will create a self-managing team. There will be a point where you notice the team starting to make decisions of its own without your help. This is also a very good way to grow new leaders.
Aug/090
What Is Leadership?
Have you ever wondered what this means? Has anyone in your organization ever defined it?
It is very important to understand what is real leadership and what is not. Here is a check list:
- Leadership is about producing results. Exactly, being cool and charismatic is not enough. Is your team doing the right things?
- Leadership is about responsibility. It is not about money, title, age (see http://www.dawnbringer3d.com/?p=174).. Do you take responsibility or are you shifting the burden to others?
- Leadership is about honesty, we are humans after all. A great leader understands he cannot do everything by himself instead he shares the responsibility. Can you be honest?
- Leadership is about visibility, set examples. By the way, this is one of the most important things to remember during changes. Do you practise what you preach?
- Leadership is about trust, people trust him and you trust your team. Sharing the responsibility again for one and, for example, not shooting the messenger who brings the bad news. Are you able to trust to your team members? What about your boss?
Aug/090
Classical Tip: Write to Learn
During my journey as a blogger and as an ebook writer I have learned a lot about writing, well, that should not be a surprise. But, I have also learned a lot more about the topics I have written. I cannot even describe how much it has helped me to clear my thoughts and find solutions for different problems. When you have written something down you can look at it from many perspectives, which allows you to compare the solutions or at least to get a more extensive look at it.
I really encourage everyone to try writing your thoughts down, it helps to get a better picture of your own thoughts. This is a very classic tip, but people tend not to do it because they think it doesn’t help or because it takes too much time. I was one of those persons before I started blogging and writing ebook. Five to ten minutes a day is enough at start, that is not too much to ask, just take a topic that has been going through your mind and start writing about it: what do you think is the problem and what could be the solution?
Jul/091
Age Racism in Choosing the Right Person
Overview
From time to time I see and hear about age racism when leaders need to select between people. I could almost say I hate people who do this because this way they destroy so many good things for the organization and for the people who work for them… well people=organization, right? Why don’t some leaders get this fact?
The Classic Example
You don’t get the position because you are too young. Because your age makes the people think you are not experienced. In reality you could be teaching the one older than you.. and in the end you probably will and he gets all the credit. People are different, no one can define that kind of a age limit, and if someone does, that is bullshit!
How To Do It
What you need to understand is that the way to really choose between people is to look at their references, and no, not just the name at which company they did work at. You need to look more deeper, in to what they really did. Another good addition would be to add a test. When I choose people for different positions I compare their references and try to find out how they have improved themselves during the last year. If there is two people to choose from: one with not so much work experience, but a lot of talent and improving. And, one with loads of work experience, but nothing to show he has improved. I would choose the first one, because he is still improving and I can help him to keep it up.
People who think they have learned everything are not good for any company, they do not drive the company forwards, the world is changing all the time and you need to keep up with it or your organization cannot take it when does change. These people, are usually those who use age racism, why? Because they want to get people similar like them to work for them, people who don’t challenge the status quo, e.g. “I do not need any young guys running around here and asking questions. I need people who do things.”. Those young guys running around will probably get you through the change, why? Because they challenge you to change.
In reality you of course think about if the selected one would fit in to the team and other things. But, you should not solely base your selection on one thing like age, culture or anything like that. Be smart and think about what is good for your organization, not only what is good for you – there is a big difference. Get ouf of your comfort zone.
Jul/090
Virtual Management
Great article at GameDev about virtual management:
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/business/features/virtualOffice/
The programmer in me says: Yes, this is the future and the way I always loved to do it.
The management guy in me says: I would love to try this as it really puts the meaning of sharing the responsibility and trusting to others people in to trial – this is how it should be in the real office too, but many cases it is not. I think this is the future.
Why I love doing work at home or anywhere else than office is because:
- I can choose the environment. I know where I like to work at. This is the same thing as not trying to force processes to people. Don’t force people to work at some place.
- Power. Responsibility. No one is watching after me all the time. I can answer to the phone or respond to e-mails when I’m ready to do that, this means I do not get interrupted so easily, when again in office people tend to wonder around chatting or quickly popping up to ask questions. No one cares when I do the work as long as I get it done on time.
This is why people want to be entrepreneurs, the freedom to work anywhere they feel like being most effective doing the thing they love to do.
ps. If you happen to have a small project using virtual management and you are in a need of a project manager, please, let me know. I’m more than happy to spent my spare hours helping you guys out and learning at the same time – that is a win-win situation.
Jul/090
Challenging The Way To Manage
And so I continue my journey in the land of writing.
After learning a heck of a lot about writing since my last eBook I wanted to see how much better I could do this time. At the same time I changed the topic from programming to management tips & tricks as I currently work as a manager. This time I used a lot more time for writing than the last time, and I’m happy with the end result!
My new eBook, as the topic says, contains tips & tricks that will continuously challenge the ways of management, and some other good practices. Currently many organization is going through huge changes and have to learn to learn – when did we lose that again? Most of my tips are aimed for building an open learning environment which will help your organization to get through changes by adapting and learning, by challenging the existing status.
Enough of talk, here are the links you want to click:
Jul/091
Training Leaders
I thought I should release one sample chapter from my up coming eBook. So here it goes, I hope you enjoy.
Overview
Let’s first go through a one fact: no one is born as a leader. It is ridiculous to think that somebody is born with some skill set, no they aren’t. Being a leader is a profession as all others, you’ll need to learn the tips & tricks of the trade before you are a good one.
Now, the problem in training leaders is that there really isn’t any very well defined process to do that, and it would be really hard to do that, because organizations are different – or more to the point, people are different. And, different people require different leadership skills.
My Short Story
From my experience training a leader requires throwing the person in to the ‘flames’, in middle of the action. Over a year ago I had to go this through. I was given a responsibility to lead a team that had loads of problems: communication didn’t work out, processes lacked… all the classic symptoms of a start-up team. But, let’s not go deeper in to what caused those problems.
I didn’t really know much about leading a team nor anything else related to management. It was really scary time as I did not have any support from anybody. I didn’t have the trust or respect of the team. Now this is about as hard as it gets to start: no support, no experience. But, I started executing: trying new processes and ways to do things, at the same time trying to take the team more and more in to the process of creating new ways to do things.
During the process I basically threw everything old away. What happened was that I understood what good was in the old ways as the team was complaining that we were missing some things that worked before. So I continued trying new processes and adopting the ones that worked, but at the same time I reflected against the past to understand what good ways had already been in place. It took about a year to gain the trust and respect of the team.
Points To Learn From My Short Story
- Throw the leader in middle of the action
- Give him the responsibility and power to change things. He must learn that all of his actions have consequences. This helps him to at least learn change management, people management, and communication skills.
- Upper management support
- Someone must be regularly supporting new leader and challenging his actions. I didn’t have anyone to challenge me so I had to throw everything away and learn from the hard way. If someone is challenging and teaching the new leader you are able to avoid some of the problems during the transition. Remember that upper management is there to only support him, not to make the real actions for him.
Conclusion
And in the end, everything comes down to point that people only learn by doing, but also with the help of other people. You might have heard about team learning, well, that is exactly what the support in this case is all about, it is a team: the new leader and the upper management.