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?
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: