Guiding Decisions in the Direction you Wish

During my years in being an IT consultant, I have developed somewhat of an art to guide clients (and sometimes team members) come to the conclusions that I would like them to have, but in a way where they think that it either sprang from their own head or that we developed the idea together, as a team.

Some portions of this art has developed from my readings of Dale Carnegie's book "How to Win Friends & Influence People".

One of the short lists that come from this book is this:

12 ways to win people to your way of thinking

• The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.


• Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say, “You’re wrong.”


• If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.


• Begin in a friendly way.


• Get the other person saying “yes, yes” immediately.


• Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.


• Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.


• Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.


• Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.


• Appeal to the nobler motives.


• Dramatize your ideas.


• Throw down a challenge.

The one of these that I have utilized the most and with greatest success is the idea of "Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers." While this is not overly difficult to accomplish, it does take a little bit of preparation from your part. Not only do you need to know what conclusion you wish to have, but you also must think about logic steps that you can use to lead the other person to this conclusion.

In order to lead the other person, you can use a couple of the other items in the list to help: "Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view" and "Let the other person do a great deal of the talking." By using the point of view idea in your preparation of the discussion, you will hopefully be able to identify the question or concerns that the other person may derive during your discussion. Knowing where they may have issues, will help you either guide around the issues or enable you to alleviate the issue. By allowing the other other person to do most of the talking, but interjecting your own ideas to help guide the conversation, you allow the other person to connect the dots logically, working out a solution for themselves.

A key aspect to all of this is that you must let go of the fact that once you have guided the other party to the conclusion, that it will no longer ever be considered your idea. This is sometimes hard for people to do - give up credit for a really great idea. But in the consultant world, the final result, and the clients feelings about the entire engagement, is much more important than who gets credit for the idea.

The Art of Managing Young “Rock Stars”

One misconception among IT managers is that they should be better at everything than everyone working for them. Nonsense—it’s the manager’s job to determine the team’s strengths and weaknesses and create a strong team, not to do it all the work yourself.

Now picture this: Some 23-year-old developer fresh from Microsoft U. is telling you how the basic applications you helped architect two years ago, the one that you’ve been able to scale and maintain through the past 24 months—well, that solution is pretty stupid, according to your junior report.I’d like to say most managers understand that you can’t just snap back and tell your inexperienced team member to shut up, even with nice words. Getting defensive about your own accomplishments, goals, and motives is a natural human instinct that you’ve got to contain as you initially respond to such criticisms. But checking your ego doesn’t stop at just refusing to get into an argument with some smart-aleck kid.Because the kid may be right.

Recognizing, and even rewarding, employees who have better ideas than your own while maintaining your position as the team’s leader is absolutely one of the toughest challenges in management, especially in an industry where bright young talents are often referred to as “young guns” or “rock stars.” You want to hold on to these rising stars, and take advantage of their good ideas and passion to demonstrate how smart they are. Those are their strengths. Rock stars can drive you and other team members crazy with their rash comments, careless bravado, and resistance to constructive criticism. Those are their weaknesses. Drawing a map that makes these two routes converge at success can be a nightmare.Here are a few tricks that have helped to contain young employees’ ego without undermining leadership positions.

· Remember that you were once the kid that’s now staring across your desk at you.
Look back at past conflicts you had with your own bosses and use those experiences to build empathy with the frustrations that your junior team member is probably feeling.

· Let your young employee try out a bad idea and fail—or maybe succeed. Nothing teaches like experience, particularly in the case of headstrong young talent. Consider developing a controlled environment in which he or she they can try out the idea. The kid may be right, after all.

· Make the employee explain what went wrong, and how we can do it better next time.. Don’t be mean, but don’t be overly gentle of mistakes, either. Allowing a team member to try something new for a time is a gesture of respect on your part, and it entitles you to be candid in evaluating the results.

· Go out of your way to give credit where credit is due. If a team member’s idea pays off, make sure everybody knows that it was that team member’s idea. Nothing erodes the basic trust between a manager and an employee than the notion that the boss is taking all the credit for the employees’ contributions.

· Don’t be afraid to draw the line. Just because you are willing to entertain challenges does not mean that standards will not be enforced. Revert to “management” mode to establish a line between “practices” and “business values.” Clearly laying out the ground rules will give the employee the parameters for constructively challenging your ideas and you won’t find yourself backed into the “Because I said so” argument.

Get used to it - it never stops
No matter how long you have been a leader, dealing with criticism from your team will always be a challenge. Even as you gain more confidence in you decisions there will be an unlimited supply of up-and-coming stars that will challenge the process. But remember, as those kids learn from the mistakes you let them make, you will be able to place them in project leadership sooner than later. And one final silver lining (and sweet, sweet irony) – they may even become the managers that have to deal with the next generation of “rock stars” themselves.

Boiling the IT Frog

Here is an excerpt from the book “Boiling the IT Frog” by Harwell Thrasher.

“IT people are very focused on the how, not on the what. The most common mistakes they’ll make are errors caused by doing the wrong things, not by doing things wrong.

Tell IT people what you want to do and you can almost see the gears turning in their heads as they evaluate alternative approaches and eventually come up with various options on how to accomplish your goals. IT people are so focused on the how, in fact, that the most common mistakes they’ll make are errors caused by doing the wrong things, not by doing things wrong. That’s why an IT strategy is so important to a business; it’s the only way to be sure that your IT organization is headed in the right direction.

Some of the worst difficulties in communicating with an IT organization are caused by differing definitions of nontechnical words. For example, IT people frequently use the word project to mean the software development part of a larger Project that includes everything necessary for the business deliverable: design, building, testing, documentation, training, implementation and infrastructure additions. Thus the completion date for a project may be viewed by IT as the completion of the software work. If you don’t clarify the deliverable, then there will be a huge misunderstanding.

Similarly, an IT organization might commit to have some work done by the third quarter. The IT customer will assume this means July 1, but the IT organization will assume it means Sept. 30 at midnight. “

Some other aspects to the book refer to the idea of boiling a frog: meaning, if you place a frog in a pot of boiling water he will jump out immediately. But, if you place a frog into a pot of cool water and gradually heat the water to boiling, the frog will not recognize that the water is hot and will eventually be cooked. This is a good paradigm that we, as IT groups, should be aware of. Sometimes we get so involved in the depths of our project work (developing, debugging, data conversion etc) that we do not recognize that the project as a whole is in serious trouble – we fail to recognize the world around us and perhaps the pressure points have changed. We all should get in the practice of periodically taking a step back (or out) from our daily tasks and routines and truly analyze our projects.

· Has the client’s perception changed?

· Has the client’s business direction changed? From a strategic standpoint, is this project still in line with where they are headed?

· Has the project evolved into something other than what we originally planned? This is usually a good thing, but we should reevaluate to see if it is still heading in the right direction.

· What else is happening in your client’s organization? Are there any new efforts popping up that are in competition with your project? Or maybe an effort has started where we can identity new integration points to expand your project.

The point is, if you don’t stop and take time to evaluate your surroundings from time to time, you (and your project and project team) may end up in boiling water.

Keep Your Team On Track with Standups

Are you having a hard time keeping your team members focused and on track? Or maybe you have a team member who gets lost in the weeds for extended periods of time. Or maybe your team does not communicate enough with one another. One technique that I have borrowed from the Agile world is the use of the Standup Meeting.
The standup meeting is a very useful tool to help you – the project lead – keep team members on task as well as get the team in the habit of keeping each other in the loop without spending hours every week in endless, agonizing status meetings.

Standup meetings provide a simple means for team members to keep each other up to date without spending a lot of time in meetings or having to write and read piles of status reports. They focus on quick discussion of progress, plans and problems. This allows team members to get timely updates about others’ progress while you – the project lead (or manager) – quickly determines their tasks for the day by virtue of the team’s obstacles.

There are two key aspects to the Standup Meeting that will make it a powerful tool. The first is in the name of itself – “standup”. Standing encourages concise discussion of progress, plans and problems. When sitting, people get too comfortable and will expand unnecessarily on some points of the update. Standing promotes the feeling of urgency – of a quick hallway conversation and the team will focus on the really critical bits. This is important because if the meetings are short, concise and informative, the team will see value in them and not try to avoid the meeting. A general guideline is to keep the meeting limited to 10 or 15 minutes.

The second key aspect is a little more subtle and will start the team down the path of richer collaboration: encouraging team members to provide updates to each other, not just to the project manager. By doing this, the team starts to see the Standup Meeting as a tool for coordinating their work and keeping up to speed with what others are doing, rather than a necessary evil endured only to silence the constant "are you done yet?" questions.