Listen now!

In this episode:

In this bonus episode, Tom talks to Charles Rutstein, a geek turned CEO, in a 2013 interview. They discuss questions like:

• How can you be considered for higher level leadership roles?
• How do you bridge the divide between geeks and corporate leaders?
• What does a CEO think about?
• What should you do to build a really effective network?

Transcript:

Tom: Welcome to a special bonus episode of Becoming a Geek Leader.

Sponsored by Geek to Great

This episode of Becoming a Geek Leader is sponsored by the Geek to Great 101 course. We all want to grow our skills and improve the work we do, but who has time for that? In this online, blended learning program, you and your team will gain practical skills in topics like time management, dealing with difficult people, improving communication, and so much more.

00:00:33

Train your whole team for less than $500. Each lesson is 30 minutes or less, so it fits right into your current team-meeting schedule. Find more information and get immediate access to your first free lesson at brighthillgroup.com/helping geeks. That’s brighthillgroup.com/helping geeks, so that you can get access to the Geek to Great 101 course.

00:01:02

Welcome to the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast. My name is Tom Cooper. As a geek, I’m on a mission to figure out better ways to lead others at work, and at home. Through the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast, I’m sharing what I’m learning, so I can help make you more effective at leading people, too. Ready?

00:01:21

Introduction

Joel: Hi, my name is Joel Cooper and today I will be your guest host for the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast. Normally you’d be listening to my dad, Tom Cooper, introduce the episode. Unfortunately he has been sick for the past week or so. So I will be filling in for him. However he is overseeing me, so you aren’t just listening to the ramblings of a teenager.

00:01:49

This week we’re bringing you some special content from the archives. This is a re-release of a 2013 interview dad did with Charles Rutstein. During this episode, you’ll learn the answers to questions like, “How can I be considered for higher level leadership roles? How do I bridge the divide between geeks and corporate leaders? What does the CEO think about?” It turns out it’s a lot more math than you might think, and also, “What should I do to build a really effective network, if you’ve ever wanted to have more success as a technical expert in influencing others?”

00:02:32

Dad wanted me to point that this interview is really a master class on how to think and how to act. A deep dive on what it takes to transition from being a technical hotshot to being a head honcho. A leader of a team or an organization from someone who has been there, and done that. They cover a lot of information in a short time, so this is one of those episodes that you’ll want to listen to multiple times in order to get the most from it.

00:03:04

You’ll hear more about Mr. Rutstein’s background in the interview. He has been a hardcore techie and has moved to the top of the ladder in his career. He is currently the CEO of a Boston based company called RISI. RISI is a global information provider about the forest products industry covering pulp, paper, wood, timber and more. So let’s jump right into it.

00:03:33

Thought Leader Segment.

00:03:41

Tom: Today I have the privilege of welcoming Charlie Rutstein to our series. He and I go back a long way. In fact, I’ve been able to observe his journey from hotshot to head honcho, and Charles I think we’ve known each other for what us it, 20 years now?

00:04:06

Charles: It’s probably about that, Tom, yeah.

00:04:08

Tom: Hard to believe that. One of my first memories of working with Charles was when he joined us at Price-Waterhouse. We were both doing geeky consulting there, and one of the directors came up and said, “Tom, you’re not going to believe this guy. He is unbelievable. This guy actually has a network installed at his house.”

00:04:26

Charles: At which point you said, “So do I.”

00:04:30

Tom: Yeah, I did. It’s tragic, but true. Tragic, but true, but it really does speak to the kind of at the time that was an unusual thing. Now we all have wireless devices and wireless networks in our homes. But what was that? Thinnet that you had installed in there?

00:04:48

Charles: Absolutely yeah, and that with a Network 331 server.

00:04:53

Tom: Right on, and then Charles went on to write the book on Windows NT security and then went on to Wharton for an MBA, and then after that moved along with Forrester and spent was it 12 years at Forrester?

00:05:08

Charles: Close to 14, yeah.

00:05:11

Tom: Oh, my goodness. See, time gets away from me, unbelievable. And then you just recently wrapped up your tenure as Chief Operating Officer if I’m not mistaken. Is that right?

00:05:19

Charles: I did.

00:05:20

Tom: So you have been on a journey from nerd to somebody who’s been really leading an organization, and what I really want to dig into with you is about that journey. So I’m curious to know as you were building your Novell network at home, were you thinking about how you might be stepping into a leadership role.

00:05:44

Charles: Not even a little bit. Not in those days, no. I think like a lot of people, I was enamored of the technology from an early age, and found I had a knack for picking it up. So mostly I was interested at that point, in enjoying the journey. Discovering the latest and greatest technologies, and figuring out how they could be useful, and I would say leadership was not foremost in my mind at that point.

00:06:13

Tom: So there came a time when you started to think differently about those things, and I remember I was really impressed with you that you had said at that time, “Look. I’m doing a tour of duty here for Price-Waterhouse, but I’m moving on. I’m going to get an MBA.” At the time, I mean we were a bunch of young bucks who were trying to figure out our space in the tech world, and I thought that was unusual. So what was the thing that really caused you to say, “I think I want to go explore something that’s not specifically technology?”

00:06:43

Charles: Yeah, sure. So at that time, Tom, it certainly appeared to me as though there was a great divide, and in fact, maybe there still is a great divide between the technologist who really understand how this stuff works and the business leaders who need to make the decisions to invest in those technologies, and of course, care primarily about the impact of those technologies on their business. And so being able to have one foot on either side of that divide, having the opportunities to bridge that gap was what I saw as my ticket, my way to differentiate myself, and I think candidly that is probably still true. I think for many technologists today there is still a gulf that they can help to bridge.

00:07:30

Tom: That’s a really interesting point because I think that…I’ll get your take on this. My thinking is that there are an awful lot of technologists who love to build technology because it’s technical.

00:07:43

Charles: Sure. Sure, I think that’s the initial draw for many techies, right?

00:07:49

Tom: But not necessarily getting that there’s a reason that businesses buy technology.

00:07:54

Charles: Yeah, yeah. In many ways, it’s the why should I care question, which fundamentally I can tell you what’s going through the mind’s of most senior executives when they’re talking to techies. What they’re wondering in the back of their head is, “What is this person talking about,” first, and foremost, but more importantly, “Why do I care?” I think many senior executives have begun to recognize the power of technology. They understand that everything is digital in their world’s, whether they like it or not. If you go around the company today and start unplugging wires, you’re going to hear screaming very, very quickly.

00:08:34

Tom: It won’t take long.

00:08:35

Charles: Yeah, they know and they appreciate that. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have a clear view as to the new ways that technology can help them to shave costs, to serve customers, and new ways to run their business in a more efficient and more effective manner. And so it’s a rare technologist indeed, who’s able to bridge that gap and that, I think, is what’s essential to make this transition, that you’re talking about.

00:09:02

Tom: So I’ll flip it around then and say from the technical perspective. I mean who cares about all that marketing and sales rot, right? Why should I care as a technologist about that stuff?

00:09:14

Charles: Sure, I think the answer is ultimately is if you pop the head of CTO and look what’s in there, what you find is that person cares only about two things. They care about growth and revenue and they care about expansion of margin. That is to say can I make the business bigger? Can I make it more profitable for whatever scale it’s at? So those are the things that we in turn need to think about sales and marketing, and therefore, in turn must we technologists think about the same thing is they to be on the same page.

00:09:53

Tom: Yeah, it’s interesting. I was just having a conversation this week, with a woman who said, “I’ve been doing this stuff for 25 years, but I’m not considered for the C-level and I want to know why. I think you put your finger on that. That he was not looking at those aspects in the way that the C-level folks look at that. Now since you’ve been on both sides of that divide, isn’t the stuff that the C-level people do, isn’t that mostly schmoozing and BS?

00:10:27

Charles: It turns out that there is a lot of schmoozing and BS, but it’s a means to an end. There is certainly some of that. But the reason that these guys and women get paid what they get paid is to make some very big important decisions that are fundamentally about resource allocation. So when you sit in a senior leadership chair and you look at a technology investment, you’re weighing that investment against all of the other uses of that capital.

00:10:59

If you have a technologist that comes to you and says, “Look, I have this really cool thing and mobile is really hot and we’ve got to have a mobile app. So hey, can I have the money to do it?” That’s one thing. If that person is coming and saying, “Hey, look, I can drive revenue higher by building a mobile app, I think we can drive revenue of X in the first year and Y in the second year.” Now I have that in a language that I can understand, and I can weigh it against an alternative investment. So for example, an expansion of my sales force is another way to grow revenue, which is going to provide a better return. Now I can go and do the math on it. That make sense?

00:11:37

Tom: Yeah, and it’s interesting you’d put it in those terms. Because really what you’re saying is it’s math. It’s arithmetic.

00:11:46

Charles: It is.

00:11:46

Tom: It’s not BS. It’s arithmetic.

00:11:48

Charles: It is, but you will get the curriculum and [inaudible 00:11:55] by leaving the business schools these days, and what you find there is that it is largely quantitative, which is to say that there is a quantitative, and numerical answer to most business questions. You just have to apply the right tools to get there. The problem I think in so many technologists is that they’re not able to help senior leaders to translate what they’re saying into terms that they can put into those ways of thinking about problems.

00:12:24

Tom: So obviously you went down that path, and you’ve found a way to do that. So what was it that you did that helped you bridge that gap? Because it wasn’t an overnight thing. You didn’t just wake up one morning, and all of a sudden you could speak that language. So what was it that helped you in that process?

00:12:40

Charles: Well, what helped me was undoubtedly the business education that I got because there are a set of tools that are in the leaders toolbox if you will, and if you understand them well, again, this is about communication. It’s about an ability to be able to talk to that senior leader. So for example, understanding how to do a discounted cash flow to get to a net present value. If you can present your technology wishes and dreams in that way now you can have a conversation with the senior leader in a really effective way because you’re talking the same language.

00:13:23

I think an investment in learning some of those analytical tools is first, and foremost. Second is maybe asking yourself this question of, “What is this other person across the table care about? The stuff I’m going to talk to my technical peers about is almost certainly not what this person cares about.” You remember a moment ago when I talked about looking inside the CEO’s head and seeing what’s there? If you can tie it back to one of those two drivers, whatever the conversation is that you’re having, you are far more likely to be successful.

00:14:00

Tom: Wow. That’s really insightful. I think about a conversation I had with a technologist. I was working for a software company and he said, “Tom, the reason it’s going to take me a long time to build this module is we’ve got to implement Microsoft distributed transaction coordinator.” At that time I was VP of products and definitely far from being a technology guy and I said to him, “Okay here’s my problem with that. We’re not transactional and we’re not distributed.”

00:14:32

Charles: Right. And I think even equally important, Tom, you can ask the question that says, “So what?” That’s a pretty effective tool. As you think about, for the preplanning, maybe a conversation with a senior leader, think about what you’re going to say and say, “Well, who cares? Why does that matter? What does it tie back to in the business that this person actually cares about?” Because they don’t care about distributed processing. They don’t care about how the technology works or how long it takes to implement. They care about, “Hey, does it accelerate revenue or does it grow margin?”

00:15:09

Tom: That’s a really good point, and I think you raised something even more fundamental there. Because you said, “Prepare to have a conversation with a leader.”

00:15:22

Charles: Yeah, right. I recommend it.

00:15:25

Tom: Well, and not only that, but specifically preparing to have that conversation in the context of what that person cares about.

00:15:33

Charles: Yeah. Well, let me give you a window into my experience. It certainly is not universal. But in the last seven years or so I spent as COO at Forrester I would have typically somewhere between 8 and 12 meetings a day. So I’m chock-a-block from 7 a.m. until late in the afternoon, one after another, and all I’m trying to do in those meetings is figure out, “Is there an important decision to be made here, and if so, do we have the information required to make the right decision?”

00:16:09

So I’ve had a lot of people, especially technologists want to do a big preamble. There’s a big setup and there’s a big backstory and so forth. Personally I just want to get to the heart of the matter. So it was always for me much more helpful when a technologist would come in and just say, “Look, here’s the bottom line. We have a decision. We can do A. We can do B. Here are the implications. This one’s going to cost more money, but it’s going to be more profitable in the long run. This one we can do that,” etc. I think if you get to that, boy, I was incredibly receptive to that conversation.

00:16:46

Tom: So that’s interesting because really what you’re talking about is twofold, if I’m reading correctly. On the one hand you’re talking about putting it in a language that you can understand, and the other is putting it in order of importance for the things you care about.

00:17:02

Charles: Yes, yes, and getting to the point quickly.

00:17:08

Tom: But we care about the technology. Don’t you care about the technology?

00:17:11

Charles: The truth of the matter is, when I’m on company time, I actually don’t. Now at home I may be tinkering around in the basement on the PC or what have you. But at work, as a senior executive, no, I just don’t care about the technology. I care, and of course this is the important bit, I care about what that technology can do for the business. I care about if it can accelerate revenue or expand margin. I care about whether it can differentiate me in the long run, and give me a capability that my competitors don’t have and can’t match. I’m interested in what comes next. If I want to be ahead of the curve and meeting customer needs, and in those fundamental drivers, I just don’t care what the technology is.

00:17:59

In fact, underneath the covers of these technologies that I would know or care about, I don’t care what’s in them. In other words, I might look at a mobile app and say, “Yeah, hey. You know what? I really need that for my customers.” What language that’s written in, high-level language, lower level language, how it’s interpreted, what kind of server’s behind it, I just don’t care.

00:18:25

Tom: Wow. That’s a pretty challenging thing because as a leader then, how are you going to communicate that to your team members without horribly offending them that you feel like they don’t matter?

00:18:36

Charles: Well, it’s not the question of whether they matter or not, in the sense that, I care that it gets done. I know there’s a lot of complexity that goes with it. I know we have to have great people who are doing it and I know that we have to pay them a fair competitive market wage. But the details of how we do it frankly are somebody else’s problem. And so that’s I think, the difference between an individual contributor and a leader. An individual contributor their responsibility is to manage those details. The leader’s responsibility is to pick the right technologies to implement, to do the right research allocation, and then get the right people on the job.

00:19:24

Tom: That’s really interesting. As a person who has been involved with business leadership, I totally understand the language that you’re using. But when I think back on those days of our youth when we were working together on projects and traveling and that sort of thing, how different a perspective that is.

00:19:43

Charles: It is.

00:19:44

Tom: Because there were so many times we were trying to figure out how to get the server to talk to the client or we’re trying to get the wide area network thing to blah, blah, blah, buzzword, buzzword and it didn’t enter into our day-to-day conversation. More than that, I never had anybody in my career who said, “You know Tom, what you need to do is you need to learn to speak the language of business.”

00:20:05

Charles: Yeah, I wish that there was more of that going around. I think we’d be more effective as a community of technologists if that were the case.

00:20:15

Tom: Yeah, it’s interesting. Did you have somebody in your career who said, “Charles, here’s what you need to do?”

00:20:21

Charles: No, I don’t think it was quite like that. It was more evolutionary for me. As I got more and more senior you start to have a little trial and error here. You have conversations with senior execs and some of them maybe go well, and some of them maybe go not as well. If you’re attuned to that, then you learn to tune your message and tune your language and that sort of thing.

00:20:48

Tom: Right. Either that guy’s just totally clueless or he’s a jerk to, “Oh, he resonated with this. Let me try and put it this way.”

00:20:57

Charles: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there’s a little experimentation there, right? You never know exactly what’s going to happen when you get into a meeting, but certainly we observe people and adapt to them. Maybe that’s another thing that’s important for technologists here, Tom. Is to recognize that it is they who are going to need to do the adapting. If they wait around for the senior executive to adapt to the way they think about the world, they will be waiting in vain.

00:21:26

Tom: That’s an interesting point. I’m just processing that. You’re right. You’ve got the opportunity to choose to adapt to the other side.

00:21:42

Charles: That’s right.

00:21:42

Tom: Now the one thing I admired about you and have always admired about you is that your sensitivity to people, and your humility even when you were the smartest guy in the room, which was often. You didn’t act like you were the smartest guy in the room. And I watched a number of guys, and we could name names, but we won’t, who didn’t have that perspective, right?

00:22:07

Charles: Right.

00:22:08

Tom: Who would make it clear to you just how stupid you were, if you didn’t understand the buzzwords.

00:22:12

Charles: Right.

00:22:13

Tom: So I’m curious about your thinking when it comes to people skills Because even when we met, you had already a set of skills that you had refined over time and you’ve continued to do that. As I’ve watched your communications over the years, and the way that you’ve handled yourself, it’s been obvious that that’s something that’s important to you, and it’s not always important to the technical folks. So how did you get plugged into that concept of being attuned to the needs of other people?

00:22:41

Charles: So number one I’m not as think as you smart I am, so it was easy to hide that. Let me tell you in a different way. One of the single most important attributes in my view for a senior leader is the ability to understand people and the ability to communicate to them. Now that sounds like super trivial and super obvious. It turns out that it is much more complex than most people think. Another reason why a senior executive in that position is typically they are great communicators. That means that they’re able to communicate in lots of different venues and lots of different contexts and adapt their message and their style to what people need to hear which is to say what they need in order to hear the message that that person wants to convey.

00:23:49

So in order to accept that, in order to say to yourself, “Yeah, I need to do that,” but you’ve got to respect the person who’s on the receiving end here. You have to respect them and say, “Look, they have a different worldview than me. They have a different perspective than me. Maybe they’re smarter than me, but I need to find a way to make them understand what it is I’m asking them to do or asking them for.” And so I think at root this is about understanding what’s in the other person’s head, respecting where they’re coming from. But again, it’s that bridging the gap. Being able to talk to them in their language.

00:24:22

Now in this particular relationship, the adaptation really needs to come from the technologist because that’s the way the power structure works, especially in larger companies. So you just have to do that adaptation. But I think, regardless of whether you make the shift or not, whatever conversation you’re going to have, understanding the nature of that other person and what they want, and what makes them go, what makes them tick, whether they’re tiresome. I think it’s central to business.

00:24:55

Tom: Okay. So I just have to stop you here. Because this is a pretty profound shift in thinking. It sounds to me like what you’re saying is, “If I’m a technologist, and I’m working hard, and learning technology and implementing that technology well, and solving hard problems that the business desperately needs solved, that’s not enough for me to get promoted and move up into a leadership role.”

00:25:24

Charles: That’s very well said. Yep, it’s maybe required, but it’s certainly not sufficient. Because look, the skills that you’re going to need at any level in the hierarchy are going to change. I remember Tom, I’m a pretty direct guy and that carried through from when I was an individual contributor to when I was first leading the initial teams that I led. And then I stepped up to running much larger teams, hundreds and hundreds of people around the world, and I carried through that same style. And I had a boss who came to me early on and he said, “Look, you’re going to have to change the style.”

00:26:11

It turns out he was right. Because what’s happening was that people were trying to figure out the message behind the message because nobody else in that position had ever been quite so direct. So they were all, I’d have an offhand comment, and they would go off and be panicked about we’re going to step product line or we’re going step on the process or what have you. So I had to learn to attune my communication style to a different context, and a different audience, and so forth. I was able to keep that direct nature of communication, but the style had to change.

00:26:47

What I found was that style had to continuously change as I moved up, as I moved geographically around the world, different audiences, different types of people, whether it’s cultural differences or functional differences. Talk to a finance team differently than you’d talk to a technology team and so forth. So I think that ability to be a bit of a chameleon to adapt a style is required, whether you’re a technologist coming up or anybody else. The earlier you learn that the better.

00:27:21

Tom: Wow. That’s an interesting observation. It has to do with, I sat down with a client the other day and they said, “Well, we could hire a management consulting firm to come in and do this stuff. But you speak our language and we feel very comfortable with you, so want to have you in here.” I think you’re tapping into that. Even the idea of using the terminology of finance when you’re talking with a finance person.

00:27:42

Charles: Oh, you bet.

00:27:43

Tom: It’s a huge shift in the marketplace. I remember when I first heard the term net present value it made my eyes roll back in my head. I have no idea what that is and I don’t know why I care. The same thing that you were saying.

00:27:59

Tom: Yeah, right. That’s it. Look, it’s no value judgement here, at least from my perspective, Tom. Some people will maybe heed this message and say, “I really do want to make this transition, and move into a senior leadership position.” I’m telling you, you better do these things. On the other hand, there are going to be many people who say, “Having looked over this cliff, I’m not really interested in jumping,” and that’s fine, too. I think there are a great many people who have wonderful careers as technologists, all the way through, so it’s a choice. I’m being rather emphatic about having to do these things, if you decide to go this direction you have to do these things, but it doesn’t mean that you have to go in this direction.

00:28:48

Tom: Yeah, it’s a good point and I think what’s interesting though, is that I would suggest to you that very few technical people recognize it’s a choice they’re making.

00:29:00

Charles: You’re probably right. Do you think that people, that technologists that you spend time with these days, Tom, do they think about the long term, as they should?

00:29:11

Tom: I don’t know. I think that an awful lot of the folks that I work with generally have felt like, “You don’t really understand the technology the way you may once have understood it.” I was in leadership for a while in that world, and they would, “Well, you don’t really get it because this is harder than it was when you were…” whatever. It may be true. They may be smarter than me, but they’re so enamored with the digital bits of it that they struggle with the other pieces of understanding how that fits into the overall playbook. So I think just the idea that these are areas that you need to look at. Now the one thing that you talked about that was relatively frankly a bit abstract is this concept of business expansion and increasing profitability of business. What are your thoughts about the technologists beginning to learn about how the company operates, and then also the industry that they’re in?

00:30:10

Charles: Well, I think that those tools are a means to an end as well, and those ends are those two things that you referred to, the revenue and profit. What is it that governs the ability to grow the business? Well, obviously it’s the environment in which the business operates. It’s the types of product the business sells. The ability of the customers to pay for or interest in the customers and paying for additional products or services. So all of those are certainly contributors. I think the reason that I focus on the two, the profit and revenue growth is simply to say that, look, every thing else is a means to an end. It’s to do one of those to things. So there’s a lot of contributors, but make sure that you don’t lose the forest for the trees here.

00:31:01

Tom: Well, it does kind of boil it down, right? How are the projects, that I’m doing, directly related to revenue growth and what if they’re not?

00:31:09

Charles: You bet. So I’ll give you an example here, Tom. As I changed the way that I managed our technology folks, we used to do at Forrester a big prioritization of projects every quarter and always lots of stuff in the hopper. What I asked for was we change the nature of the prioritization conversation that we would do roughly every 90 days, and I wanted a couple of columns added to the spreadsheet that they were using. What they were tracking in the spreadsheet was typical and IT stuff. It was about the project, and the cost, and the timeline, and the phases, and all of that stuff.

00:31:55

I asked them to add to that spreadsheet, “What is this going to do to revenue, and what’s it going to do to margin?” And many, many times I’d look across the spreadsheet and what was in those columns would either be blank or it would be not very meaningful and I’d say, “Look, we’re not doing this project.” There’d be a great outcry and they’d say, “Oh, we have to do this,” and blah, blah, blah. I’d say, “Guys, if you can’t find something meaningful to put in here, I’m not doing it.” So I take a kinetic stream in saying, “Look, you better be clear as you’re thinking about what it is that you’re developing or what it is that you’re enhancing, so what’s it doing for the business?

00:32:43

Tom: So I’m intrigued by that. So let’s say that I’m a senior database administrator and I’ve been doing and I’m the guy who’s now in charge of the DBA’s and I’m thinking, “Okay. I want to move into a more leadership role,” and I know everything there is know about database tuning and spindles and all those kinds of things, and I’m starting to see there are some of these things out there. How in the world would I begin to get started even thinking about how I would tie the database, which is a core infrastructure piece, to profit and revenue?

00:33:16

Charles: Okay. So first things first, you’ve got to think a little bit beyond that core technical expertise. Obviously to get higher your purview is going to expand, so what’s a click up from one individual technology? Well, maybe it’s a collection of technologies. That is to say maybe the next step is to an architecture role. So hypothetically if you’re going to map that, you’ll say, “Well, where I want to be after being in charge of the database operation, it’s in architecture.” Well, what’s the purpose of architecture? A couple things. Number one, it’s to make sure that the environment operates efficiently, so that is it saves money, drives money down to the bottom line or it allows us to create new products or services, more quickly to get in front of our customers to drive revenue. So you can pretty quickly once you get up to that level, tie it back in a very direct way. I think to your point it is harder at an individual technology level, but necessarily, “Hey, you’re going to have to go that higher level, as your next step in any case.” Does that make senses?

00:34:26

Tom: It does. It does and I think that’s a great next step natural progression piece. So for you Wharton was a model, right, to go in and get equipped to do some of these things. How about the people aren’t destined for Wharton? Do you have some suggestions about areas that they would even begin to consider? Are there bloggers or are there books or courses you could take online? Any of those kinds of things that you might even think, even in the general direction that might be helpful for folks?

00:34:57

Charles: Well, all of the business schools, especially at this point, have executive education, and so that’s a place where you might think about taking a course or two. Most of them do nights and weekends and this sort of thing. I think it’s important personally to have that experience because again, you’re building your toolkit. It’s not anything specific that you learn there. It’s a toolkit. It’s a set of capabilities that you’re building in yourself. But that set of capabilities, as I pointed out earlier is also a language, and so you can read books, and so forth, whatever online or what have you, but immersing yourself in it, is a very, very good investment of time and energy.

00:35:51

Tom: Well, the challenge is, I like the points that you bring up about the executive education. Because an awful lot of folks don’t have the guts to do what you did which was to quit a job where you were doing very well, and you were getting paid nicely for your contributions to say, “I’m going to now go to school and fund that,” and that was a bold decision that you had made about your career progression. So I think the concept of the executive education is that.

00:36:20

Charles: Well, it turns out to be less bold maybe than it might first appear, Tom. The reason why I’m hesitating to recommend that all techies go get a business degree is that, I think at a certain level, it’s not worth it. So I’ll tell you what I mean. If you go and you take your GMAT’s and you have your college grades and so forth, if you can get into a top 20 B-school, I’d say it is absolutely worth doing. You should do it. You should do without hesitation because actually it’s not that big of a risk. If you look at all of the numbers on that, what you tap into at those schools is a very good out placement for your next gig, and also typically a very big jump in salary when you do so.

00:37:13

So the odds are in your favor if you can do that. The story’s a lot less clear if you’re not able to get into one of those schools. You go to the regional B-school, I think if you can swing it, that you can afford it, you’ll be well served by it, but it’s not exactly a financial slam dunk in the same way. If that’s the case, my recommendation is maybe you should think about just taking some classes.

00:37:40

Tom: Well, that’s interesting insight. The one thing that I’m curious about as well, and it hasn’t come up in our conversation is the idea of the people that you meet in your journey. So the folks that you met in business school, are those folks that you have stayed in touch with?

00:38:02

Charles: Oh, yeah. Yeah, you bet and many of them have gone on to very impressive things, and started companies that you’ve heard of, and all of this sort of thing. But the power of the network is a big reason to go to one of those schools. The ability to pick up the phone and say, “Hey, look. We went to the same school,” and be able to at least get your foot in the door to have a conversation. Yeah, it’s a significant factor.

00:38:31

Tom: But I would suspect that your network is not limited to those folks that you went to school with. If I know Charles, I know that you’ve been building your network for your whole professional career.

00:38:49

Charles: Oh, absolutely and I think that’s hardly unique. I think we all do that, especially in this age of Facebook and LinkedIn, and so forth. It’s essentially become easier than ever to do so. Personally I’m all about collecting smart people. People who I look at and I go, “Wow. I can learn a lot from that person,” so those are the kind of people, like you Tom, that I keep in the network over the long haul here and say, “Look, I want to understand what this person is up to and maybe I can learn some things.”

00:39:25

Tom: Well, that’s an interesting point, and you’re really looking at how are the people, selecting the people intentionally that you want to have in your network as opposed to just letting it happen by accident.

00:39:36

Charles: Oh, sure. Yeah, for me, I’ll give you an example with LinkedIn which is great tool, of course. I think a lot of people just say, “Hey, look. Anybody that sends me an invitation, come on in. More connections is better.” But that sort of dilutes the value of it, both for you and for everybody else. To me, I try and think of the future and say, “Look, if somebody came to me and they said, ‘Oh, this person’s in your network. Would you recommend them to me?'” If I don’t either know them well enough to make a recommendation or frankly wouldn’t recommend them, I’m not putting them in the network. So I have hundreds and hundreds of invites sitting in the inbox that I’m not sure what to do with because I’m not going to put them in network. And so I think being a little bit selective there is a win because the quality of the network then becomes a powerful tool. Quality in my view is more important than quantity.

00:40:38

Tom: Well, that’s a very good point, and I think for most of us, we meet the people we meet in the projects that we do, and it doesn’t occur to us that we might weed some of those people out of the network.

00:40:50

Charles: Yeah, I think you have to do that.

00:40:53

Tom: So what are your thoughts on this concept that you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with?

00:41:00

Charles: That’s interesting. I’ve not heard that before.

00:41:03

Tom: Is that right?

00:41:03

Charles: The average of the five people I spend the most time with. Well, the people I spend the most time with, I suppose are in my family. So I’ll take that as win.

00:41:15

Tom: Choose your family well, right?

00:41:16

Charles: Yeah, right, exactly.

00:41:19

Tom: Well, I think that the idea of being selective and intentional about who you want to be around, whether those people are going to suck the life out of you or whether they’re going to encourage you and build you up, whether they’re going to challenge you. I liked what you said earlier about finding people that you can learn something from.

00:41:37

Charles: Yeah, you bet. I’m sort of ruthless about that. I’m always looking to find the angle where I can have somebody teach me something. So obviously I’m there for people as well, to maybe teach them something, if there is something that I know that they don’t know. But I’m always looking to learn from others.

00:42:00

Tom: So I’ll do one more question here and it really speaks to the question of mentoring relationships or having people who have been influential for you. Have you had any formal or informal mentoring relationships and how did they get started?

00:42:16

Charles: Yeah, so I’ve had maybe both. The informal ones have occurred organically as they do. Where you get to know somebody and through time you pick their brain, and bring problems to them and so forth. I think that’s an important thing to have a sounding board like that, professional sounding board beyond the family sounding board. Somebody maybe understands the context of your business life a little bit better. Then also on a formal basis, I worked for some years with an executive coach which was a terrific experience. It’s a top guy who coached basically our entire executive team and helped to create a more effective, more functioning, higher functioning team. From somebody who was able to give us some very direct advice and feedback about what to do in particular situations. So my advice would be if you have the opportunity to do some of that do it.

00:43:31

Tom: That’s a great recommendation says the guy who’s in the coaching business.

00:43:37

Charles: So Tom is a great coach. If you’re thinking about looking for a place to start, I think you might’ve just found it.

00:43:47

Tom: Well, I think it’s helpful to get some dispassionate perspective. Our families tend to be very much on our side, as they should be, and having somebody who’s just not on the boat with you, but somebody who can see where you’re boat is going to say, “Hey, there’s a waterfall over there. You may not want to go over there.”

00:44:04

Charles: Yeah, well said. Well said, I like that.

00:44:07

Tom: So it’s really I think just an idea that folks do have the answers, but it’s a question of perspective and if you look at it from a different perspective, frequently I find with clients they’ll say, “Oh, I didn’t frame it that way.” “Well, maybe if you didn’t interpret it that they were attacking you…because they aren’t thinking that much about you.”

00:44:30

Charles: Right, well said. Maybe the corollary to that is if you’re going to go that direction, make sure you listen to the coach. There’s nothing worse than having somebody give you that outside perspective and just say, “You know what? They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

00:44:47

Tom: Yeah, really.

00:44:48

Charles: They probably did know what they were talking about.

00:44:51

Tom: Oh, my. Well, I appreciate very much your investment of time with us today and I know that there are folks who are going to really get a huge amount of value from this conversation. Do you have any final thoughts about somebody whose a technical person who’s saying, “Yeah, I really am ready to make that jump?” Any insights from the COO that you might want to bring to say, “Here’s what I think you could do that would be a great first step?”

00:45:13

Charles: Well, I’m just going to reiterate maybe, Tom, what I mentioned for the course of the conversation here. Which is, understanding how the person across from you thinks about the world, what they care about, what they need in the world, is just incredibly important. So at the most senior level, as I mentioned, revenue and profit, and there are derivatives of that as you go down the chain. I think if people could take one thing away from this, if they could do more active thinking about what that other person needs and wants, they’re going to be better off.

00:45:48

Tom: Well, that is hugely valuable advice. I can tell you, it applies in marriage. It applies in business. It’s worthwhile in so many different areas. So I think this has been an incredible investment of time for our listeners, I know to able to get that perspective from an expert like you, Charles. So I appreciate your contributions here and I’m excited to watch to see what’s happening next for you. You’re involved with some climbing adventures as well, are you not?

00:46:19

Charles: I am, yeah. When I’m not working, I’m hopefully up in the mountains somewhere.

00:46:26

Tom: So what’s your next challenge to conquer in that respect?

00:46:30

Charles: So let’s see. In January I’m doing, I want to ascend up Mt. Washington, up in New Hampshire, home of the world’s worst weather. One of their official taglines and then March, [inaudible 00:46:45] and June up Mt. Ranier. So I’ve got them stacked up here.

00:46:49

Tom: That sounds fantastic. I’m sure you could talk about some leadership lessons from mountain climbing, as well. We’ll have to do another call on that one.

00:46:55

Charles: All right. Fair enough. Well, thanks for the time, Tom.

00:46:59

Tom: Yeah, thank you. Take care.

Episode Hack.

00:47:20

Joel: Here are some key ideas from the interview. Number one, brilliantly solving key technical problems very well, is not enough to get me promoted. Number two, leaders think differently than technical experts. Someone has to adapt and it’s not going to be the leadership people. And to number three, understand how the person across from you thinks. What do they care about? What do they need? Today’s episode hack is for you to make a plan, for you to make that next level. What is the next level? Who do you need to influence? What do they care about? What are one or two areas where increasing your business knowledge will help? Who is a person that already speaks that language? Can you ask them to help you? And that is today’s episode hack.

00:48:31

Closeout

Tom: Thanks for listening to this episode of becoming a geek leader. You can play a part in helping the podcast to grow. If you enjoyed it, please do me a favor. The way to get the podcast to grow is for you to go to iTunes and give it a rating. If enough of you give me a good rating in iTunes, this podcast will show up in their New and Noteworthy section. Being in New and Noteworthy is a great way to attract more listeners, and having more listeners, helps me have the support to keep the podcast going. There are three simple steps to giving me a rating. One, go to the iTunes store in the podcast section. Two, search for Becoming a Geek Leader, and three give the podcast a great rating, and while you’re there, why not write a quick review as well? Thanks. This is Tom Cooper. Thanks for listening. Be sure to join me next time for another episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. Join me in my mission of discovering better ways to lead others at work and at home.

Listen now!

In this episode:

• How to prepare for the conflict so it doesn’t escalate, and
• Exactly what to say to that other team member to help you resolve the conflict completely.

Resource Downloads:

Conflict Resolution Worksheet – Got a conflict to work out? This worksheet helps you figure out how to use the CORE and XYZ methods for your specific situation.

Case Study – the 30 Percent Solution – This story demonstrates the 30 Percent Solution being put into practice, letting you see how it might unfold when YOU use it.

Transcript:

Announcer: [00:00:00] Becoming a Geek Leader, season one, episode nine.

Sponsored by Geek to Great

We all want to grow our skills and improve the work we do, but who has time for that? In this online blended learning program, you and your team will gain practical skills in topics like time management, dealing with difficult people, improving communication, and so much more.

[00:00:33] Train your whole team for less than $500. Each lesson is 30 minutes or less, so it fits right into your current team meeting schedule. Find more information and get immediate access to your first free lesson at brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks. That’s brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks, so that you can get access to the Geek to Great 101 course.

[00:01:04] Welcome to the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast. My name is Tom Cooper. As a geek, I’m on a mission to figure out better ways to lead others at work and at home. Through the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast, I’m sharing what I’m learning so I can help make you more effective at leading people, too. Ready?

Introduction

[00:01:25] Hey, thanks for joining me today. I am so excited to talk to you. What I want to talk about today is, how can you resolve conflict in a productive way? I’ve got some practical tips for you on that and I’m really excited about sharing them with you. Also I’ve got a worksheet that you can download from the website. I think it’s going to be a big help to you and I’m looking forward to going over that material. Also I want to introduce you to a better way of delegating work. I call it the 30% Solution.

[00:02:00] Also I just want to call out a quick shout-out to another podcast that you might want to check out. For those of you who aren’t theology nerds or followers of church history, you might not realize that we are rapidly coming up on the 500th anniversary of the date that Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door at Wittenberg. As it happens, that turned out to cause a major shift in the Christian church and in church history.

[00:02:32] For those of you who have any interest in thinking about how things were 500 years ago or about the factors that may have affected Martin Luther’s decisions to go the way he did…and there are good and bad in all the things that he did. Man, that guy had some pretty powerful insults. The guy had a kind of crazy tongue, too…but what you might want to check out is a terrific new podcast called The Life and Times of Martin Luther. I’ve gotten acquainted with the creator of that podcast, Steve Fogle, and his content is great and it’s an entertaining and informative podcast on the life and times of Martin Luther. You can check out more information about his podcast on www.martinlutherpodcast.com.

[00:03:24] I know I’m frequently interested in checking out different podcasts and different types of content, and I just wanted to let you know this is one I enjoy and suggest you might want to check it out as well. He recently got picked up in New and Noteworthy and there have been an awful lot of folks who’ve been interested in it. So I hope you enjoy it.

[00:03:43] So I’ve got a lot to cover with you today and I’m looking forward to getting started. So let’s jump right in.

Mentoring segment.

Tom: [00:04:07] For the Mentoring segment today, I want to talk about something that is one of my most requested areas. How to resolve conflict. This is something that I get feedback from people on all the time. If there’s something they want help with, it’s, “How do I resolve conflict with that guy who is just a jerk?” I like to say, “When you’ve got people, you’ve got problems.” The thing is that most of us haven’t had any guidance about how to resolve conflict since kindergarten, right? We know we’re supposed to be nice and supposed to share and try and work it out, but we really haven’t had a lot of guidance about how to do a great job resolving conflict with others.

[00:04:53] But you know what’s interesting? Studies show that people who are more skilled at conflict resolution tend to be happier at work. One of the things that my wife and I learned when we were in our premarital counseling is that conflict, when handled properly, conflict can be a gateway to building a better relationship. So in the mentoring segment today, I want to talk about the specifics of, how do you go about having a difficult conversation with somebody?

[00:05:21] Now this breaks down into two phases. The first phase is preparation. You’ve got to get ready and then I call it engagement. How do you engage with the other person? Now the fact is that if you prepare before you engage, you’re going to have far better outcomes. In the middle of a dispute, you just are not going to be able to remember a complex process. So what I’m laying out for you today is really simple.

[00:05:50] So let’s talk about preparation. The more preparation you have for the conflict, the less likely you are to have it go south on you. The challenge we all face is that conflict is always, always an emotional thing. When you’re dealing with people, conflict is inevitable and it is always going to be emotional at some point. But you cannot let your emotions hijack your brain.

[00:06:21] There’s a part of your brain called the amygdala and it is the part that helps you determine how you’re going to respond to things that upset you. When you get into a highly charged emotional situation, your brain lights up and your amygdala helps process those inputs. If your fight or flight response kicks in, if your amygdala says, “Whoa, we’ve got to either fight or get out of here,” your rational thought is gone. You need to get a handle on your emotions before you get into that difficult conversation.

[00:06:54] Now it turns out that it’s easier than you might think. Remember I said there are two phases. Phase one is preparation. For the preparation phase, I want to introduce you to an acronym, CORE. I recently attended a workshop with Dr. Les Parrott. He’s a relationship researcher who’s spent decades doing academic studies on conflict resolution. In his workshop, he taught me about the CORE of conflict. Before you have that conversation with the other guy, spend a few minutes thinking about CORE. CORE is an acronym that stands for cooperation, ownership, respect, and empathy.

[00:07:38] So C, cooperation. Connectors connect on common ground. How can you cooperate with the person you’re having a conflict with? What is something you can both agree on? What’s a goal you can both buy into? You want to start out with that. You want to find that common goal so you can lead with your intent. You want to have that positive outcome defined for both of you. Your goal is not to win and it’s not to be right. It’s to try and find something where you can both walk away feeling like it’s been valuable, it’s been a win for you. So that’s cooperation.

[00:08:16] Now let’s talk about ownership. You have to own your piece of the problem. There’s never a conflict that’s 100% the fault of the other guy. Even if your responsibility is only 1% and the other guy is 99% wrong, you have to own 100% of your 1%. Dr. Parrott says, “Humble pie is a pastry that’s never tasty.” What you want to do is think about your goals cooperation, and you play a part in that. Is there anything that you did that helped contribute to or helped escalate the conflict? You want to have some ownership, you want to recognize your part of the problem.

[00:09:07] Now we go from cooperation and ownership, now we’re going to talk about the R, respect. You’ve got to keep the conversation respectful. It’s not personal. It’s not about the character of the other person. It’s not even about their intent. You might think you know their intent, but you probably don’t. So you’ve got to find a way to frame the conversation around their behavior, not about who the person is. And we’ll talk in more detail about that in just a minute. But your goal is to be able to focus on the behavior and focus on the outcome, not focus on their intent or upon their character because you need to be able to show respect. You’re going to focus your attention on specific actions, not your interpretation of those actions.

[00:10:06] So we talked about cooperation, ownership, respect. E, empathy. You want to step into the other person’s shoes. Do you think that guy set out to be a jerk? I doubt it. It almost never happens that somebody wakes up and says, “I want to be evil today,” or, “I’m going to make it my goal to really annoy you.” Most of the time, people are so selfish that they don’t think about you very much. I heard Dr. Phil say, “You wouldn’t be so concerned about what other people think about you if you knew how rarely they did.” Get in the other guy’s shoes. Try to understand their perspective. So phase one is CORE, cooperation, ownership, respect, and empathy.

[00:10:58] Now let’s turn the corner and talk about phase two, engagement. Now this engagement part is where you need to keep it simple because as I mentioned before, if you start to get into that highly charged emotional situation, it’s going to be very easy for you to let your emotions run away with you and not be able to work your way through it. So we’re going to try to keep it as simple as we possibly can. We’re not going to go with any kind of complex game plan.

[00:11:30] So in order to help you be able to easily remember what you were going to do and what you were going to say, I’m going to give you a framework that I’m certain you’re going to remember. In fact, I was just chatting with my niece and she heard me share this idea. It must have been seven or eight years ago. She’s a young woman and we were talking about it, she’s preparing to get married. We talked about conflict resolution and she said, “Oh, yeah, I remember. You shared this idea.”

[00:11:58] Here it is. It’s the XYZ Formula. The XYZ Formula. I told you I was going to keep it simple, right? So XYZ. In situation X, when you did Y, it had Z impact. Let me repeat that. In situation X, when you did Y, it had Z impact. It really is as simple as XYZ. So situation X, when you did Y, it had Z impact.

[00:12:30] So let’s walk through an example. You’re in a meeting. The boss asks for your suggestions and one of your peers is sitting there, he’s looking at his phone. While you’re talking he looks up at you and then he starts making faces, disapproving faces. Eventually he folds his arms and he rolls his eyes and he sighs. Then he looks away. Can you imagine any more disrespectful situation than this? Finally he picks up his phone and he just fiddles with his phone for the rest of the meeting.

[00:13:03] Now worse than being disrespected in public is your boss seems to be kind of following cues from this team member and your boss’s reaction to your great idea, it’s lukewarm at best. Now the thing that’s super-frustrating is that this is a good idea. You know it’s going to work. It represents some of your best thinking on the problem. And in fact, just the other day you mentioned it to this disrespectful team member and he responded positively. Why in the world would this guy do something like that? You feel like he yanked the rug out from under you and you are so angry that he was disrespectful and even contemptuous towards you. Why was he being such a jerk?

[00:13:49] Now this is one of those moments where your amygdala can hijack you right into fight or flight. But rather than decide to respond in the moment, you choose to take the two phase approach that I just discussed. So you get some distance physically and time-wise from the experience and you start thinking about the CORE. So cooperation. What could you do, what could your goal be, how could you cooperate, how could you both agree on a direction that you need to go? Well, what if your goal was you want to have a good working relationship with your peer and you want to work through this conflict? That can be your cooperation. It’s as simple as that. It doesn’t have to be complex.

[00:14:37] Now let’s talk about ownership. Now this one is a little unclear. You really don’t know what was happening with that team member other than what you observed. What part did you play in this conflict? One possibility is that your interpretation of what you saw affected what you perceived and how you responded. Maybe you were seeing something that wasn’t there. Maybe there was more to it than that. And again this may be your part of the problem, is just your reaction to what happened.

[00:15:14] Now we go from cooperation and ownership to respect. Now your reaction was he was being a jerk and I’ve got to tell you, if I was in that situation…and I have been…it has definitely been tempting to think, “Man, that guy’s a jerk.” But you don’t want to name-call. So how can you deal with it? Well, what was it that he did exactly that was upsetting?

[00:15:40] Well, it really was the body language, wasn’t it? It was the eye-roll, the folded arms. How can you in your communication, rather than conclude you were being rude or you were being disrespectful or you were being a jerk, how can you focus respectfully on the behavior of the other person rather than the intrinsic nature, rather than his character or who he is, his essence as a person? Focusing on the behavior rather than your conclusions about the behavior.

[00:16:08] So cooperation, ownership, respect. Now let’s talk empathy. What was going on with that person? Is it possible that you don’t actually know? I would suggest that there’s a strong likelihood that you don’t actually know. Maybe he was physically in the room but he wasn’t actually listening to you at all. All right, so we’ve walked our way through identifying CORE, the cooperation, ownership, respect, and empathy. You’ve had some time to think about it and you’ve got the CORE nailed down. Now let’s talk about engagement.

[00:16:46] First pick a time that’s going to be good for both of you. Don’t do it in public. Don’t do it on a short deadline, “Hey, we’ve got two minutes before the meeting. Let me try and work this out with you.” Make sure there’s time for you to talk. Now it doesn’t have to be an hour. Set up 15 minutes on a person’s calendar or grab a cup of coffee or go to lunch. Do it in a way that can be private to just the two of you in a spot where you’re comfortable and can have good interaction. That’s going to set you up for more success. If either one of you is feeling time-crunched or in an awkward place or time, it just isn’t going to work. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. This can be over very quickly and very efficiently.

[00:17:27] So think XYZ. In situation X, when you did Y, it had Z impact. So what was the situation? It was during the team meeting. Not, “You always,” or, “You have a tendency to,” or, “People say you,” no. In this specific situation, it was during the team meeting when the boss asked for my ideas about the project. So that’s situation X. You did Y. You rolled your eyes, you folded your arms, you sighed, you looked away. It had Z impact. I felt like our boss rejected my idea because of your reaction, at least in part. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the way it felt.

[00:18:13] Now let’s put all that stuff together. When you go see your coworker…let’s call him Joe…you can say, “Joe, I want to have a great working relationship with you and something happened recently that upset me. Can we talk about it? The other day when we were in the team meeting and the boss asked for my input, while I was talking, I noticed that you rolled your eyes, you folded your arms, and you sighed. And man, it just seemed to me like the boss was watching your reaction and he shot my idea down. Now I’m really confused and frustrated about it because I thought you liked my idea when we talked about it before. I didn’t like the way that worked out and it felt like you were kind of shooting my ideas down, too. Can you help me understand what happened?”

[00:18:57] Now you’re not attacking him, you’re not criticizing him, you’re saying, “You did this thing and it had this impact. What was going on?” And notice that you’re asking, “Can you help me understand what happened?” Now one possibility is that he will say, “Yeah, that was a stupid idea and the boss should have hated it.” I’ve actually worked with some engineers who would say that, but I’ll tell you that that’s actually pretty unlikely.

[00:19:24] The more likely outcome is that you’re going to have a different conversation altogether. In fact, he might say something like, “I don’t know what you mean. I didn’t mean that towards you. I’m sorry if it came across that way.” Now that might actually be the best you ever get. That might be the best you ever get and you have to be willing to accept it. Even if they say something like, “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings,” or, “I’m sorry if I upset you.” Obviously you’re upset. But remember a lot of people haven’t had any guidance about conflict resolution since kindergarten and it’s very difficult for all of us to admit when we’re wrong.

[00:20:02] But what if his reaction is different? What if he looks at you and says, “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. I did what? Oh. Oh, my dad texted me that morning during the meeting. I knew he needed to go to the doctor, that he was waiting on some test results, and it was bad news. Gosh, after I got that text from my dad, I wasn’t paying attention to anybody during the meeting. I was…when I was looking at my phone, I was looking up…Googling options for my dad’s treatment. I didn’t have any idea that it was having an impact on you. I’m sorry about that.”

[00:20:43] Here’s my point. You really don’t know what was going on inside the other person’s head. Even if you think you do, even if you’ve worked with him a long time, even if you think, “Oh, yeah. I know exactly how that guy is,” you really, really don’t know. All you saw was what happened on the outside and your reaction to what happened on the outside.

[00:21:03] So to wrap up, I want you to think CORE, cooperation, ownership of my part of the problem, respectful, and empathy. And then the XYZ Formula. In situation X, you did Y, and it had Z impact. That’s the core about how to have a difficult conversation.

[00:21:22] Now I’ve got a worksheet that’s on the website for this podcast episode and I would encourage you to download that worksheet to help you think through some of these ideas as you go through resolving a conflict. I’m telling you, if you take this approach you will be astonished at how powerful it is. You’ll be amazed at just what an impact it makes on your ability to resolve conflict and really improve your working relationship with your coworkers. That’s today’s mentoring segment.

Coach’s Mailbox.

Tom: [00:22:26] In today’s Coach’s Mailbox segment, I’m looking over an email from Rashid. Rashid asks, “Tom, I have way too much on my list. I’m leading a team now and I want to delegate work to others, but I’ve got a problem. When I assign work to my team members, it takes too long and they deliver work that’s not good enough. So I end up working late nights to redo the work that they were doing. It’s a lot easier to do it myself, but I know that doesn’t scale. I’ve got to find a way to be able to delegate work to others, but it’s just not working. Help.”

[00:23:03] Man, Rashid, I can relate to that. It is really frustrating to feel like you’re the only one who gets it and the only one who can get it right. What’s worse is, if you’re like most of us, you’ve made your career so far on your ability personally to deliver great work. So the easiest thing is just to do it yourself. But unfortunately as you’ve noticed, that doesn’t really work. It works because you deliver the specific things that you need to get done, but it doesn’t work because you aren’t able to do every single thing that needs to be done.

[00:23:42] Well, I want to share an idea with you that I think is really going to help. I call it Delegation, the 30% Solution. This is a paper that I presented at PMI’s Global Congress North America this year, and it was well-received by the attendees and I think you’ll find that it’s a helpful, easy way to reduce the amount of time you spend working on rework and at the same time, it will help you train your team members to be able to focus on the right things and do the work that needs to be done.

[00:24:17] In today’s model, you invest some time handing a project off to one of your team members and they bring it back to you when they think it’s done. But as you look at it, they’ve made some progress, but you were hoping not to have to do any of the work because you were trying to delegate it, right?

[00:24:33] I think about a client who said…he’s the technical account manager for a technology company working at a client’s site. The senior management wanted a report on, “Hey, we’ve spent a bunch of money, a couple hundred thousand bucks, on this implementation. What did we get for our money?” The technical account manager was looking for a presentation that would help the senior executive and the client recognize, “Oh yeah, I’m getting business value for this investment that we made. I’m getting a return on my investment.”

[00:25:10] What he found was the highly technical team members who were working on the project reported out all the nerdy stuff that they had done. “We did this many networks and this many servers and we converted this much equipment, and we blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” But none of it was translated to business-speak and here my client is saying, “This is crazy. I need to give a report. Now I’ve got a bunch of data. I’ve got to translate that data into knowledge and put it in a way that my client understands. Man, this is a waste of my time. Why did I even ask them to try? I should have just done it myself from the beginning.”

[00:25:45] Well, I’ve seen that happen. It’s certainly happened to me and I’ve seen it happen with my clients as well. So what I want to do is help you figure out how you don’t end up doing 70 to 80% of the work on the project. Because that’s what happens. You get this work delivered to you, it’s not really good enough, and you have to go back and scramble to get it done because of course they deliver it to you on the deadline. Or close to the deadline. And it wasn’t on your list to have to scramble through and try and get it all done at the last minute, but now it’s dumped in your lap. And that is stressful, right?

[00:26:19] So in the 30% Solution, we’re going to take a slightly different approach. For the first phase of the project, you’re going to spend time working one-on-one with them. Once they’ve gotten off to a good start, in phase two, they run with the ball. You’re available to answer questions, but they’re handling it. They own it. Then when they’re almost done, you get to phase three and they’re going to bring the project back to you and you will finish the work together.

[00:26:48] So these three phases are the 30% Solution. Phase one, the first 20% of the project you spend working directly with them. Now what’s the advantage of this? Well, you’re going to help them understand the goal. You’re going to help them develop the approach to solving the problem or achieving the goal. And then you’re going to identify for them the resources they need to help them move forward. At the end of that first 20%, at the end of that phase one, you’re going to start phase two.

[00:27:22] Now for phase two, they’ve got the goal. They’ve got the approach, they know about the resources, and you feel like they’re pointed in the right direction. So they run with the ball in phase two and they carry most of the weight of the project. They do 70% of the work on their own. Now again you’re available to answer questions, but you’re not making the decisions, you’re not driving the bus. You’re there to support them as they drive the bus. Then as you get close to being 90% of the way through the project, when you get to that last 10%, that’s phase three.

[00:27:58] Phase three is you finish the work together. Now that doesn’t mean that when they get to 90% of the way done, they throw it over the fence and then you have to clean up their mess. Wrong. That is not it at all. In fact, it’s the working together at the very beginning of the project and the very end of the project that makes such a huge difference. So you’re going to finish together. That means you’re going to sit down with them, you’re going to go over their reports and their deliverables, and you’re going to help them wordsmith or clean up or finalize the work and get it to that level.

[00:28:33] What happens in this process is you’re getting the quality to where it needs to be and you’re giving them direct and specific guidance about how to improve their delivery so that next time, you don’t have to work so hard on that. If you want them to be able to do it, you’re going to have to train them. The 30% Solution provides a good way for you to give them that training without sending them to a class. It also helps you to really understand where the gaps are in their understanding.

[00:29:05] So is it worth it? Well, you go from doing 70% of the work to doing 30%. Now of course you’d like to do 0% of the work, right? But this approach is going to reduce your workload and help train your team members. And they’re going to be better equipped for the next project to take even more off your plate. The more you use this approach, the smaller that number gets. It starts out at 30% and it moves down from there. So you do the first 20% together, then they do the next 70%, and then you do the last 10% together. That 20% plus 10%, that’s the 30% Solution for Delegation. I hope that helps as you’re handing off more work to your team members, Rashid.

[00:29:50] By the way, do you have a question for me? Feel free to send it to me at coach@brighthillgroup.com. That’s today’s Coaching segment.

Episode Hack.

Tom: [00:30:23] In today’s episode, we covered two important topics. The first was how to manage conflicts with a team member and the second was how to delegate work to other folks on your team. In the conflict section, we talked about the core of conflict and the XYZ Formula. In the delegation section, we talked about training your team, equipping them to take on more work using the 30% Solution.

[00:30:50] For today’s hack, I want you to think about a team member with whom you’ve had a recent conflict. How could you use the XYZ Formula to discuss that issue with them? Think about the situation, exactly what they did, and exactly what the impact was, and then make time to go talk it out with them. Now as I mentioned before, there is a worksheet on the podcast page for this episode that you can download to help you get your thoughts in order before you go meet with them. Download that and then go have that conversation. I’ll be excited to hear how it works out for you. And that’s today’s Episode Hack.

Closeout

[00:31:26] Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. You can play a part in helping the podcast to grow. If you enjoyed it, please do me a favor. The way to get the podcast to grow is for you to go to iTunes and give it a rating. If enough of you give me a good rating in iTunes, this podcast will show up in their New and Noteworthy section. Being in New and Noteworthy is a great way to attract more listeners and having more listeners helps me have the support to keep the podcast going.

[00:31:52] There are three simple steps to giving me a rating. One, go to the iTunes Store in the Podcasts section. Two, search for Becoming a Geek Leader, and three, give the podcast a great rating. And while you’re there, why not write a quick review as well? Thanks!

[00:32:12] This is Tom Cooper. Thanks for listening. Be sure to join me next time for another episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. Join me in my mission of discovering better ways to lead others at work and at home.

Listen now!

In this episode:

• Listen in to hear about:
• Does the best engineering solution always win?
• What does it take to make better connections at work?
• How can you get the most out of even a boring project assignment?

Resources:

Download this free “Questions for Your Leadership Lunch” one pager for questions to ask your boss or leaders in you company when treating them to lunch.

Article: Harvard Business Review – How Successful People Network

 Transcript:

Sponsored by Geek to Great

Announcer: Becoming a Geek Leader, Season One, Episode Eight.

Tom: [00:00:05] This episode of Becoming a Geek Leader is sponsored by the Geek to Great 101 course. We all want to grow our skills and improve the work we do, but who has time for that? In this online blended learning program, you and your team will gain practical skills in topics like time management, dealing with difficult people, improving communication, and so much more. Train your whole team for less than $500. Each lesson is 30 minutes or less, so it fits right into your current team meeting schedule. Find more information and get immediate access to your first free lesson at brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks. That’s brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks, so that you can get access to the Geek to Great 101 course.

[00:01:03] Welcome to the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast. My name is Tom Cooper. As a geek, I’m on a mission to figure out better ways to lead other at work and at home. Through the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast, I’m sharing what I’m learning so I can help make you more effective at leading people too. Ready?

Introduction.

[00:01:25] In today’s episode, I’m going to talk to you about the question, is engineering enough? Is developing a great engineering solution sufficient to solve the business problem? Second, I’m going to talk about the importance of developing relationships. And finally, I’m going to talk about what it means to really get experience. Let’s get started.

Tech segment.

Tom: [00:02:09] In today’s tech segment, I want to talk about the question of whether a great engineering solution is enough. And to set the stage for this, I’m going to tell a story from the deep archives of tech history. And I call this story, The Best Engineering Solution Always Wins, Not. In 1957, there were two engineers who were part of the MIT research lab, and they had a great idea about building computers that could be used interactively instead of processing batches of cards or data, which is how IBM, the market leader, had designed their systems to work. What they noticed is that students would line up and wait to use the interactive system, a TX0, rather than get immediate access to the much faster batch based IBM computer.

[00:03:05] With a focus on interactive computing, they found funding and started Digital Equipment Corporation. Now DEC was a company with hardcore engineering roots. These guys were engineers just fundamentally, and the company was founded by engineers, they had an engineering culture, and they did produce some of the most innovative and high performing computers the market had ever seen. IBM was the market leader and yet DEC was eating their lunch in the mini-computer market. And over the years, DEC became a major force in the marketplace.

[00:03:45] Now one thing that we engineers pride ourselves on is that we are not emotional in our decision-making, that we let the facts decide. Ha! One of the things I’ve seen is we use the facts to justify our emotional position. And let me give you a specific example. Now Ken Olson was one of the founders of DEC. Ken was not a believer when it came to personal computers. He thought the personal computer was a pointless toy, that it was useful only for playing games. In fact, at one point he said and I quote, “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”

[00:04:29] Now you might imagine at Digital Equipment Corporation that personal computers were not given a lot of R&D money, and you’d be right about that. However, by the late 1970s, it was becoming more and more clear that there was going to be a huge market for personal computers. And in the same way that Google’s engineers spent some time on pet projects, the DEC engineers had some time they spent on pet projects too. And some of their engineers had been working on personal computer projects.

[00:05:04] Now their reigning philosophy in this hardcore engineering company was let the best engineering decision win. And during that time, multiple products were conceived, designed, and built. In fact, in 1982 Digital launched three completely different personal computers to the marketplace. They created the DEC Professional, the Rainbow 100, and the Vax Mate. Three personal computers, all of them were incompatible with the original IBM PC and all of them were completely incompatible with each other. The engineers had made design decisions based on their preferences, on their understanding of what was superior. And each of the computers had good points, and each of them had limitations. And DEC’s leadership was content to let the market decide based on the engineering merits.

[00:06:04] Now I remember I had a friend who had a DEC Rainbow. It was cool. It was far better technically than IBM’s stuff. It was a dual processor system. It’s disks held more data than PC floppies could hold. It had an optional graphical display that could support two monitors. But here’s the problem. Being better wasn’t good enough. Just because your solution is more elegant, that doesn’t mean it’s the right answer to the business problem you’re solving.

[00:06:36] The Rainbow ran software only from DEC that DEC had designed specifically for that system. And because it wasn’t IBM compatible in any way, there was very little software available for it. Over time, all three of those systems died, and let me just ask this question. What if, instead of launching three completely incompatible products, what if the leadership at DEC had had the courage to say no to two of the projects? They pool their resources, and then focus their attention on the marketing and sales of the system they wanted to get behind. They tried the best engineering solution and the case of the PC, that failed massively.

[00:07:19] Now I’m not suggesting that we need to go with substandard engineering. That’s not true. Great solutions many, many times have fantastic engineering. But there are other factors that lead to success. When it comes to compatibility, DEC absolutely could have solved the compatibility problem. They had the money to do that research, but they squandered their skills and their time and their money on internal squabbling. While they were arguing and wasting their time, Compaq spent a record $1 million to reverse engineer the Black Box of the IBM PC BIOS. And you know what happened? Eventually, Compaq bought what was left of DEC. The fact is that sometimes the right answer is to say no to a great, even an elegant, technical solution. DEC didn’t do that, and DEC paid the price. And that’s today’s tech segment.

Mentoring segment.

Tom: [00:08:33] For today’s mentoring segment, I want to talk about one of the factors, besides engineering elegance, that goes into decision-making about solving business problems. That factor, relationships. Let me start out by asking, who do you know? And perhaps more importantly, who knows you? I remember when I was a kid, my dad shared lots of life lessons with me. And when he wanted to share a lesson that he had learned through hard, painful life experience, he used to say to me, “Son, I’m not telling you what I think, I’m telling you what I know.”

[00:09:15] Today, I want to be a little bit like my dad. I’m not telling you what I think. I’m telling you what I know. One of the things that I absolutely did wrong when it came to my time in corporate America was that I focused on being the best whatever I happen to be at the time. I worked hard to understand my job and do that as well as I possible could. So you might be asking, “Well, how could that be wrong?” Well, it’s not wrong to be good at your job. But one critical mistake that I made was I didn’t make enough connections with other people along the way.

[00:09:54] Let me suggest that when it comes to career opportunities, it’s not just about how competent you are at your work. In fact, I’d argue it’s at least equally important who you know, and who knows you. Now when you think about who knows you, how do people know you? I recently went on a brief trip with a group of folks from my church and we spent a few days working on projects together where we helped an organization that provides disaster relief. While we were working shoulder to shoulder, one of the other participants said to me, “Tom, I’ve learned more about you in the last two days working beside you than I have in the last six months seeing you every week.” He was right. We did learn about each other when we were working together.

[00:10:46] So let’s get back to my professional work. I spent a decade at Marriott. I have many good memories about being a part of that company. I had good opportunities and I learned a lot, and during those ten years, I essentially held two positions. Two! Looking back, I’m sure that I would have found more opportunities if I had been willing to branch out and do different things. But I liked being good at what I did, and I liked being in my safe space. And it was risky and unsafe to try different things so I didn’t do it.

[00:11:20] But there were about 1,200 people in the IT department. Surely, I could have found another job that I could have taken. In fact, both of the jobs that I had were in the same part of the IT department. I reported to a couple of different VPs over the time that I worked there, but I lived in a pretty small world. And eventually, I decided that I wanted to branch out. But here was the problem. I hadn’t made enough contacts. I hadn’t reached out and worked with enough other people to give me the opportunities that I wanted to have. And I only had a couple of options when I wanted to change roles.

[00:12:01] So what could I have done to fix it? Well, there were two things that I could have done that would have made a big difference. And one of them was actually pretty easy. The first one is, what if I had been intentional about reaching out to other people? One strategy for reaching out to others is what I call the leadership lunch strategy. Now it’s as simple as this. It’s about taking someone in leadership out to lunch. You can start with your boss. Here’s how it works. You invite them to lunch, you pay for lunch. During lunch, you ask them tons of questions. You listen closely to their answer and you take notes.

[00:12:47] I’ll give you a couple of questions you could ask. Here’s one. What’s one important thing you learned, or you wished you had discovered earlier, in your career? You can ask them, in your career, who are people you’ve learned from? Who’s been a mentor, either in person or a virtual mentor through books or webinars or podcasts or conferences? You can ask them, what’s something cool that you picked up from a mentor? You can ask them, how’d you get started in this line of work? And there’s so many other questions.

[00:13:18] Now, you ask the questions, you listen closely, you take notes furiously, and then you say, “Thank you for your time. Wow, this has been fantastic. I appreciate you for sharing so much with me. I’ve learned a ton. Now as I’m working on learning and growing, I’d like to learn from other folks. Who do you know that I should connect with? Who should I talk to next, and would you be willing to make an introduction?”

[00:13:52] If you keep doing this every month or two, you will be amazed at the opportunities that come before you. Now if you check the website, there will be a list of questions you can ask, you can download it, it’ll be a one pager that has your leadership lunch strategy. It describes it a little bit and gives you a list of questions you can ask. Your goal is to build your network, your network of people who know you, who like you, and who trust you. It’s about relationship where you seek somebody out, you ask questions, and you listen intently to what they have to say.

[00:14:30] When I think about this idea about making the connection and listening closely, I’m reminded of a story from over 100 years ago in politics. There was a young woman who went out on a date two nights in a row with different politicians who were running for office. And the two political rivals were William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. Now reporters were very anxious to get insights from her about what she had learned about the two men, and they asked her what impressions these two celebrated men had made upon her. The young woman replied, “When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in all of England. But after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in all of England.” Your goal is to build relationships. You want to have your leader that you have lunch with walk away feeling like they are the cleverest person you’ve ever met.

[00:15:36] Now this is not about flattery. It’s not about sucking up to them. It’s actually about being really present and seeking to learn from them. And you will be amazed at the things that you learn. So that’s the first strategy, the leadership lunch strategy.

[00:15:55] The second strategy, and this is one that I really, really wrestled with, is change jobs inside your company probably about every 18 to 24 months. Now that one was really hard for me. I remember talking to the HR people, and they advised me to do that, and I said, “But it takes 12 to 18 months to be competent, just about the time that I start becoming really competent in the role, you want me to change jobs? That’s dumb.” The thing is, I was optimizing for competence in the role and they wanted me to be more well-rounded, to understand more about what was going on, and to know more people.

[00:16:37] Here’s the thing. If you take advantage of the leadership lunch strategy, you will find out about jobs that could be a great fit for you. Now I mentioned that I was in one small part of the IT department. I was in the shared services part. But I could have experimented with Marriott.com or hotel property systems. I could have looked for jobs in lodging operations because my knowledge of the IT systems would have been hugely valuable to helping get more business value from the technology investments that lodging was making. I could have been a part of architecture and construction. My understanding of technology would’ve been a fantastic broker or force multiplier to help them get more from the money they were investing. And even if I stayed closer to home, I could have taken a job in operations or help desk leadership, or a ton of other places.

[00:17:34] Here’s what I learned. When I worked in different departments, or even when I worked on projects that required me to work closely with other in different departments, I learned a lot about them and they learned about me. Just like going on that mission trip where I got learn about these other guys, I could’ve learned about others by doing these types of projects. I liked staying in my comfort zone and I stayed in my comfort zone way too long. I want to encourage you to think about stepping out of your comfort zone to connect with other intentionally. Now as I said a minute ago, I’m not telling you what I think, I’m telling you what I know. And that’s today’s mentoring segment.

Family segment.

Tom: [00:18:35] In today’s family segment, I was reflecting recently on something my nine-year-old said. He was not happy about the chores I had assigned, and he made it very clear to me that he wasn’t happy. He said to me, “Dad, why are you making us work?” I said, “Son, it’s my job as your dad to teach you how to work hard.” He replied, “Dad, I’m not really the working type, because I’m kind of skinny.” Have you ever felt that way about a work assignment, that you’re really not the working type when it comes to that assignment?

[00:19:14] I like to say experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. Many, many years ago, I had a job where I was working for a mom and pop company. And more than once, when I was responsible for making payroll, the wife would get mad at her husband and she would go out and spend company money on something she wanted for herself, cleaning out the checking account. Now this seemed to happen usually a couple of days before payroll was due, and I would have to scramble to collect from customers so I could make sure the team would get paid and that I’d get paid too. Let me tell you, I got a lot of experience working at that job. I did lots of things that I found difficult, frustrating, stressful, and exhausting. But what did I take away from that work? And is there something that my son was actually about to take away from his chores?

[00:20:15] When you think about the work assignments you have, and you find that some of them are really annoying, or frustrating, or just crummy work, is it possible that there’s something that you could learn from that experience? Maybe it’s something about communicating with other people or maybe about assigning work to other team members, something about how to deal with customers, or resolve conflict, or how to grow your skills.

[00:20:43] Looking back, I’m going to say every job in my career that came with massive challenges and massive frustrations also brought with it learnings that helped me be ready for what was coming next, or that would help me in future work assignments. Even if I was going to pick a new boss, or pick a new job.

[00:21:04] So getting back to my nine-year-old. He was serious about not working. He’s brought up that idea up several times when chore time comes around. And I’ve told him, “Son, ain’t nobody going to pay you to lay on the couch and pay video games. So I better help you get some skills to pay the bills.” So in the process, whether it’s planting trees, or building a tree fort, or even shoveling ice from the driveway, he’s learning the things he needs to know to help him get ready for what’s next. Looking back at that job at the mom and pop company, I learned a lot about how to manage money and how to manage expectations, and about how to communicate and resolve conflict. I made a lot of mistakes in that job. It was my first job out of school and, boy, I messed up lots of things. But I learned a ton, and I learned a ton from making those mistakes. So for you, when you’re looking at your to-do list, and you’re thinking, this is a crappy job assignment. Let me encourage you to ask yourself, “How can I get the most from this so that I’ll be ready for what’s next?”

[00:22:15] Wrapping up this segment, that same kid told me another time, “Dad, everything’s edible.” I said, “Son, no, some things will kill you. Those are not edible.” He replied, “Dad, it is edible. It may kill you, but technically, you could eat it.” Not going to argue with that. And that’s today’s family segment.

Episode hack.

Tom: [00:23:01] For today’s episode hack, we talked about the importance of elegant technical solutions, and how not only are they important, but they might not be sufficient for the overall picture. We also talked about how do you know, and more importantly, who knows you? We also talked about reframing your attitude about your work assignments to think about how can this work assignment make me ready for what’s next? For today’s episode hack, I want you to think about how you can make a connection at work. Is it through a leadership lunch? Is it through taking a project or work assignment that’s outside your comfort zone? What I want you to do for the hack is decide what you want to do to make a connection and then take the first step to make that happen. And that’s today’s episode hack.

Closeout.

[00:23:58] Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. You can play a part in helping the podcast to grow. If you enjoyed it, please do me a favor. The way to get the podcast to grow is for you to go to iTunes and give it a rating. If enough of you give it a good rating on iTunes, this podcast will show up in their New and Noteworthy section. Being in the New and Noteworthy is a great way to attract more listeners, and having more listeners helps me have the support to keep the podcast going. There are three simple steps to giving me a rating. One, go to the iTunes store in the podcast section. Two, search for Becoming a Geek Leader. And three, give the podcast a great rating. And while you’re there, why not write a quick review as well? Thanks!

[00:24:42] This is Tom Cooper. Thanks for listening. Be sure to join me next time for another episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. Join me in my mission of discovering better ways to lead others at work and at home.

Listen now!

In this episode:

It’s that time of year when many people think about, plan for, and prepare for the rest of the work year. In this episode, Tom talks more on career planning, for you and your team members!

• Stuck in a promotion rut? You don’t have to be!
• Advice on how to plan for advancement.
• How to get your boss to notice you!
  

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Transcript:

Sponsored by Geek to Great

Announcer: Becoming a Geek Leader, season one, episode seven.

Tom: [00:00:05] This episode of Becoming a Geek Leader is sponsored by the Geek to Great 101 course. We all want to grow our skills and improve the work we do, but who has time for that? In this online blended learning program, you and your team will gain practical skills in topics like time management, dealing with difficult people, improving communication, and so much more. Train your whole team for less than $500. Each lesson is 30 minutes or less, so it fits right into your current team meeting schedule. Find more information and get immediate access to your first free lesson at brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks. That’s brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks, so that you can get access to the Geek to Great 101 course.

[00:01:05] Welcome to the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast. My name is Tom Cooper. As a geek, I’m on a mission to figure out better ways to lead others at work and at home. Through the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast, I’m sharing what I’m learning so I can help make you more effective at leading people, too. Ready?

Introduction

[00:01:26] On today’s podcast, I’ll be talking about two big ideas. The first one has to do with strategic planning for your career. You think, I want to understand, where should I put my time in order to deliver great value and grow my career? How can I be intentional? How can I work on exactly the right things? Number two, how do I put together a development plan either for myself or maybe, for my team. Maybe I have never done that before. How do I go about putting together a plan that’s helpful, that’s measurable, that’s going to be able to help my team members grow and I’m going to be able to say, “Yes, this definitely working?”

[00:02:04] I’m looking forward to sharing this with you today, and I also love to hear from you. So let me ask, how has this helped you? Are there other things you’d like me to cover? Let me know. Feel free to reach out. Now, let’s jump right into the mentoring segment.

Mentoring segment.

Tom: [00:02:36] I want to talk about how to be strategic when it comes to thinking about your career plan. Now, this is one of the problems that I ran into, in my career, was…I didn’t really think through how to create my career plan, and I didn’t know where I should be putting my time. And one of the mistakes I made was I took myself way too seriously, and I took my projects way too seriously, too. As I think back on this, I remember I was really passionate about the projects I worked on, and as I got engaged with them, I get excited about it, and I would think about the vision of the potential impact that my work could have, would have, and did have on the team, and on the department and the company. And man, the more I bought into that, the more excited I got, the harder I worked. It was all working together and things were going.

[00:03:25] The problem I ran into was that I was sometimes too close to the trees to see the forest. I was so deep in the weeds on the work that I was doing that I didn’t see the business value of other projects or other things I was working on. I was so intensely connected to the work that I was working on that I didn’t realize how…well, there were limits to how valuable the work was that I was doing.

[00:03:52] And I ran into another problem later in my career. I was working for a software company. We had a product that would deliver 5x ROI. We could get, for every dollar you gave us, we could give you $5 in savings. And this was something we could absolutely demonstrate, and if you paid us $1 million license fee, we could show you at least $5 million in savings. And so when we go out to sell this system, we really couldn’t understand why we had such difficulty getting people to buy. I mean, we could prove that we could save them that kind of money. They would have to be nuts to pass up 5x ROI.

[00:04:28] Well, we did have successes. We could prove it. The system was really good, and our customers were happy. And we could show that 5x ROI. But here’s where we failed. Our customers were happy to save money, but in their world, a $5 million savings was helpful, but they were fighting battles that were $100 million or more than $100 million. By comparison, that $5 million savings was okay, but it just wasn’t a priority for them.

[00:04:55] So what does that have to do with you and your work? Well, it’s all about the context. How do you put your work, your projects, up against the other projects that are going on? Does that really matter? I have to say, I struggled with this when I was in the corporate world. I got frustrated when the company wouldn’t staff my projects with enough team members to achieve my vision. Now, the problem there was two-fold. First it was my plan, not the company’s plan. And two, my stuff, while useful, would generate that $5 million savings I just talked about, it was unfortunately small potatoes compared to the big problems my company was facing. I was just too close to it. I just didn’t see how it tied in.

[00:05:38] I remember I had a co-worker who was in a similar situation. He was the guy who was supposed to make sure that the operating system worked properly on all the computers in the company. And he was brilliant when it came to Microsoft operating systems. I don’t think there’s anybody who knew more about the hardware we bought or the software that we were using, and how it was configured. And man, did he get frustrated because the company didn’t invest enough to get great results. And he found himself constantly feeling overworked, and under-appreciated, and very, very stressed.

[00:06:10] So my problem, in my career, his problem, in his career, and the problem I just described to the software company was we weren’t thinking like customers. We weren’t thinking about the cost versus the benefit. It’s not that what we were doing was bad, it just wasn’t as high a value or not as much of a priority as we thought it should be, and we couldn’t get the support for or the credit for the work we did well.

[00:06:32] So when it comes to your career strategic plan, what you want to think about is how do you solve problems that the company really values in a big way? In order to solve those problems, first you have to understand what those problems are. And that comes down to looking at the strategic priorities for the company. Then once you understand what those are, you find a way to link the work you’re doing directly to those strategic problems. Now, in some cases, there’s not a link or there’s a not enough of a link, and that might be a time from a career planning perspective, to start to think about shifting, potentially shifting into a different role. But I’m kind of getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back and talk about understanding what the company’s strategic priorities are.

[00:07:22] So what are they? Now, I’ll tell you, from my observation, most companies actually struggle with this. I mean, they might have some kind of vision statement or even some set of expectations they have, but they don’t have clear strategies and they don’t align their projects to those strategic goals. If you’re thinking, “Oop, that’s my company. We don’t have any idea what we’re doing.” That’s okay. If the projects you’re doing are not directly linked to strategic goals, you don’t have to wait for your bosses to do that. That’s something that you can do yourself.

[00:07:59] The first question you have to answer is what problems is your company trying to solve? So are you in a big customer acquisition framework now, where you’re trying to get new customers, and you’ve got a big push on acquiring new customers? Are you in an operational efficiency world? Are you trying to make things better, stronger, faster for your existing customers? Is there a big project that’s going to be critical to success? I’ve got one client that has a big operating agreement going on right now. They have to hit their project cut-over in the right time frame, or there are massive financial consequences to the company. That one’s on the strategic list for this year for that company.

[00:08:42] So you try to look at what problems the company’s trying to solve. Now, you can ask your boss. If your boss doesn’t know or doesn’t give you a clear and concise answer, ask your boss’s boss. Look at company press releases. Think about the goals or objectives set for your department or your division. Look at the initiatives that are going on and look for some themes. There are some big rock problems that you’re company is trying to solve and if you can identify what those are, that’s going to help you in a pretty significant way.

[00:09:12] I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you’re working on operational systems and you’ve heard the company is trying to increase revenues, and one of the things that the leaderships has been complaining about is it takes too long to get new customers set up and working. Now, take a look at the projects that you’re assigned to right now. Do any of the projects that you’re working on right now solve that problem? Do they help get new customers up and running, or do they help get new customers up and running faster? If they do, then those become a bigger priority for you, because you want to align your work with the strategic priorities.

[00:09:45] Now, when I was working for the Fortune 500 company, I was working on software distribution. How do we push software out to systems all over the company? Now, that was a good project and we did some really cool technical stuff, but it really wasn’t strategic for the company, and I’ll get into that a little bit more later. But in my situation, I felt like, “Man, management just doesn’t get it.” So what can you do if you’re working on a great project but management just doesn’t get it?

[00:10:13] Well, if they don’t see how important a project is, there are a couple of things you can do. First, you want to align that work that you’re doing with the strategic imperative, or you want to invest your time in a different project. That’s really what it comes down to when you start to think about the strategy. So let’s talk for just a minute about aligning with a strategic imperative.

[00:10:34] Is there a way that your project directly supports the big company goal? And so, maybe it’s about customer acquisition or customer set up, just that key thing that I was just talking about. In which case, you’ve got a clear and bright line that defines why this is really important. And I think you’re already in the right spot. But what if it doesn’t? What if what you’re working on is not about new customers set up, but it’s really about operating efficiencies, how to make things go faster with less care and feeding? So you’re not directly responsible for customer set up, but is it possible that your project, when it gets launched, is going to reduce maintenance enough that the people who would be doing the maintenance are now free to focus their attention on the customer acquisition or customer set up problem? And if so, then tell people that. “Hey, as soon as we deliver this, or in the process of delivering this, we’re going to be able to empower, extend, expand our capability.” You want to let people know.

[00:11:37] And if not, then can you think of a way it could contribute? Maybe today, the scope of the project doesn’t include that, but what if you change the scope just a little bit? Is there some way that you could move just a little bit one way or another that would allow you to tie into that strategic problem, and then give you the support that you need organizationally.

[00:11:57] Now I have to say, when I was working for the hotel company and I was using software deployment to solve problems on computers with viruses, as well as get a reservation system up and running, I loved that project. I loved that work. I could see exactly how it was helping our customers, and it was helping with our sales, and it was fantastic. But the problem was that I was part of a hospitality brand. I wasn’t part of a technology firm. And the company saw value in the software distribution stuff but really, it was fairly limited in terms of the value that it brought. And I invested a lot of energy in that, thinking that it was a strategic help to the company. Don’t get me wrong. It helped the company, but it didn’t help the company enough to continue to get the support that we needed to do it organizationally, or to help me from a career standpoint.

[00:12:49] And what if you’re looking at your projects and you’re looking at the strategic problems the company’s working on, and you just don’t see any way that your project is tied into a strategic problem. Well, I have to tell you, it was painful for me to recognize that when I was working on software deployment. And there’s only so much value to those solutions, no matter how elegant they are, no matter how cool they were, no matter what great things they did. They only did so much. And if that’s the case, maybe what you’re working on just isn’t that important to the organization, and if you want to have your career continue to move forward, you probably are going to need to look for opportunities that you can work on projects that really do tackle the big rock problems that the organization is having.

[00:13:35] I spent too long working on projects like software deployment that just didn’t have enough value to the organization, and I missed out on career opportunities because of it. In the time that I worked there, I was there for ten years for heaven’s sakes, I could have changed jobs, I could have changed departments, I could have even changed major divisions, and I could have continued to help the company solve big problems. I stuck around because I loved what I was doing and it limited me. I think I could have found a job that I loved in another part of the company that I would have been happy with, too. I just wasn’t looking because I thought, “Ooh, this is really important.” Unfortunately, it wasn’t important enough.

[00:14:12] I had a client conversation this week. He’s working for a company, a big tech company, and he’s overseeing internal reporting systems. Now, these are important for decision making. The company looks at the metrics and sees the reporting and makes decisions based on that, and he’s done a great job of helping to improve the discipline, and improve the quality of the solutions to make them reliable and consistent. But he’s done a great job of solving that problem, but now he’s hit a wall. The company does need that stuff, but they need other stuff more than they need that. And he’s been challenged by his boss, “I need you to take a position in an unfamiliar part of the business.” Now, that’s way outside his comfort zone, and his leadership has told him, “We need you to run with this and make it a success.” It’s really not optional for him. He’s going to have to move forward in the new role. Now, it might have been better for him to have been looking for that opportunity earlier, rather than wait until the bosses finally said, “Hey look, we’ve put enough money and time into this area, it’s time to move on.”

[00:15:17] Now, one other thing that was a painful for me to learn was, after I stepped out of a role, I needed to let go of it and let the company do with it whatever they wanted to do. In some cases, they actually decided to dismantle some of the things that I was doing, and that hurt my pride a little bit. But that’s not my job anymore, I needed to let it go. Something to think about.

[00:15:39] So to wrap up on this topic, what are the big problems the company’s trying to face? How can you arrange your work so it aligns with solving those big problems rather than some cool elegant niche problem you’ve been focused on? And already, can you see a natural alignment between the work that you’re doing and these big rock problems? And if not, can you find a way to have that alignment be there? And if that doesn’t work, maybe it’s time to start looking for a project that really does align with some of the big rock challenges that you’ve got. So when it comes to career strategic planning, you want your time, your energy, your talents applied to the stuff that the company considers most important. When you’re doing that and you’re delivering, the company’s going to value you very highly. It’s going to help your career move forward. And that’s today’s mentoring segment.

Coach’s Mailbox.

Tom: [00:16:58] Today’s Coach’s Mailbox segment, I got an email from Jeff. He says, “I’m new to a leadership role and I’ve not had to be responsible for creating professional development plans for people. I’ve had them for my bosses before, but I’ve never been super thrilled with them. And I want to do a good job. How do I create professional development plans for team members?”

[00:17:17] Well, Jeff, it’s a great time to be asking. As I’m recording this episode, it’s the time of year when folks start thinking seriously about annual goals for team members, and how do we create development plans, and what are we going to do? In some of these cases, you’re responsible for a team, and you’ve got to come up with ideas about how to help team members to grow and I’d be glad to help you with that. In other cases, you might be thinking about yourself, and how to pick which things you want to work on this year to help grow your skills. Either way, I’ve got a couple of quick ideas that may be helpful.

[00:17:50] But let me just take a step back for a minute and talk about a couple of principles. First, nobody in the history of time has ever gotten a bad review because they made their bosses life too easy, all right? If you can make your boss’s life easier, it’s going to make a big difference for you. So when it comes to your personal development plan, if you look for ways you can take work off your boss’s plate, it’s almost always going to pay off for you.

[00:18:19] Secondly, it is far easier to edit something that’s already in existence than it is to author something that doesn’t exist yet. Whether you’re talking about a plan for yourself, or a plan for your team members, if you’ve got something written down, it makes it a ton easier to get it actually implemented.

[00:18:41] So let’s talk about your personal plan. The first thing you want to do is come up with some ideas that stretch your skills in a specific area that also happen to make your boss’s work life easier, and write it down. It doesn’t have to be a huge breakthrough, but it could just be incremental improvement. See, the thing is, most of the time when we’re evaluated, there wasn’t objective evaluation criteria defined at the beginning. And so, it’s a very subjective experience. If you can help provide some objective information, some objective measurement, it’s going to make a big difference for you.

[00:19:20] So, think about it, come up with a plan, and write it down. When you do that, you’ve already made it easier for your boss, and you may be astonished. There’s such a strong likelihood that what you put on the plan will actually become your plan. So let’s walk through a specific example.

[00:19:42] Let’s say that you’re creating a professional development plan for one of your team members. And the first job of a leader is to define reality. That’s lay the baseline. What is it that you need done? Where are we now? How does this work? So first, what we want to do is define what needs to happen this year. I got a client who says he’s got a major software development effort happening this year and he wants to come up with a development plan for one of his team members. Now, the project’s important. If everything goes at a minimally acceptable level, what would minimum success look like? First job of a leader’s to define reality. What we want to say is what does minimum success look like?

[00:20:27] Now, in this case, it’s a couple of different items. First, delivery of required new functionality to the production system before the regulatory compliance deadline with very few unexpected outages or fire drills for the team between now and that deadline. If we’re going to deliver minimally acceptable work, what skills does a developer need to stretch to make that happen? Now, for this particular developer, it’s not a lot. They need to think a little bit better advanced planning, a little more coordination with their team members so they know, “Hey, I’m making this change in two weeks and we’re going to have to work the weekend to make that happen.” And also, give the boss a heads up about plan changes. And the developer’s already doing a decent job with that. But that’s minimal acceptable level and that’s to get an average review.

[00:21:16] Now, what would exceptional work look like? See, we start with the baseline of what would minimally be acceptable, then what does exceptional look like? In this case, the features are delivered on time, just as they are in the minimally acceptable level. There are no fire drills. And again, there could be overtime or weekend work, but we got to be able to plan for that. Next, we’re going to spend less time in ping pong between the customer and development about the details of the requested features. And finally, the customer needs to be happier. So exceptional success is we’re going to deliver all the functionality but it’s going to be no fire drills, and the customer interaction is going to be more efficient, and the customer’s going to be happier.

[00:21:59] Now today, the boss is pretty heavily involved in nailing down requirements from the customer and the business analysts. So if the developer gets the requirements and as long as the developer understands the requirements as written, he writes the code. But doesn’t really take a lot of ownership in making sure that the code delivers business value, or if there’s any ambiguity about what the requirements mean, rather than chase that down, what he does is ask the question in the comments and assign the ticket back to the business analysts. So essentially, the developer is expecting the boss or the business analysts to handle that.

[00:22:35] Now, one specific way that this developer could help his boss, help his customer, and deliver more value, is take ownership of the product itself. Now, not become the product manager, not become a business analyst, but rather than acting as an order taker, he can engage with the business analyst. He could take ownership of the set of features and collaborate with them to make sure that the work really adds business value. Again, not talking about becoming a business analyst, we’re not talking about becoming product owner or a product manager. But rather than just saying, “Hey, I don’t understand this,” and throw it back over the wall and wait for an answer, what we’re talking about is taking ownership and follow through.

[00:23:18] So this is what the development plan might look like for that coder. First, take personal ownership of feature delivery. That means you reach out to the customer or the business analyst depending on the relationship, rather than wait for them to come to you. And you respond, you’ll take initiative. Second, you’ll be proactive in reaching out. So you’re going to set up meetings, you’re going to make calls, you’re going to do the follow ups to make sure that what we’re doing is actually delivering value. And number three, during the regular one-on-ones that the developer and the boss are going to have, the developer’s going to be responsible to let me know, let the boss know, about your progress with those outreaches, meetings, and follow ups. It helps keep the boss in the loop, and also makes sure that the boss is not having to do that work.

[00:24:06] Now, you come up with your development plan for Joe, your developer, and when you sit down with Joe, you might say something like this. “Hey Joe, we’ve always asked you to deliver great work as a developer.” As you know, there are three parts to deliver great products. First, using strong technical skills to deliver those products that solve business problems. Number two, working with other people to make that happen. And number three, understanding our client’s business problems so well that we actually know that we’re solving those. So this year, I’m going to ask you to stretch your skills when it comes to the business problem part of the picture. I want you to take ownership of answering a couple of questions for each of the feature requests that show up in your work queue.

[00:24:54] “The first question is what business problem does this feature solve, and how valuable is this feature? And the second one is when the requirements are unclear, rather than just assign the ticket back to the customer, I want you to work directly with the business analysts or with the client to make sure that you understand what they’re asking, and what they’re asking for actually delivers business value? So specifically, that means I want you to pick up the phone, or poke your head in their office, or set up a meeting with them to talk through the details. Don’t just wait for a response. Finally, this year, the last part that’s going to be a little bit different is that when we’re having our regular one-on-one meetings, I want you to come to me and let me know what you’re doing to take that initiative, as well as let me know where I can help you. Do you think you can do that?”

[00:25:49] Now, the beauty of this approach is that it’s not rocket science. It’s relatively straightforward and you can easily document whether he’s giving you the updates during your meetings. And if he’s not, you can remind him that he agreed to do that. You can also talk to the business analysts, talk to the customers, and assess how well-prepared Joe is to help them achieve their success. Once you’ve got some clarity about that, you can talk about how to help him do things differently. “Hey, next time I need you to call them. Next time I need you to go see them.” When you’re defining your professional development plan, you want to make the behaviors that you need to see small, measurable, and easily achievable. Once you’ve done that you want to write it down, and then just hold them accountable to deliver. And I’ll tell you, it’s not rocket science but you will be shocked at how effective this is.

[00:26:46] So Jeff, I hope this answers your question about how to create a professional development plan for team members. And that’s today’s Coach’s Mailbox segment.

Episode Hack.

Tom: [00:27:15] So we talked about two big ideas. The first big idea, how to decide from a career planning perspective where should you invest your time and how can you decide which project should be a priority for you. Making great decisions requires you to understand what the company’s trying to achieve and that includes knowing how painful those problems are, and how big the value of the projects is to the company. Now, the other big idea we talked about is how do I develop a professional development plan for myself or for a team member? For this, success requires you know what matters to your boss, and you look for ways to take work off your boss’s plate and ways to make your boss look good. Once you know what things you need to do, you write it down, and you ask for their input.

[00:28:04] For today’s Episode Hack, I want you to take some initiative. I want you to find out what the major goals are for your company this year. Once you know what the goals are, I want you to look for ways that the projects that are already in your work queue, the stuff that’s already on your plate, how does that relate to those big problems the company is trying to solve. Today’s hack is for you to be able to say out loud how the work that you and your team are doing maps into what matters to the company. When you’re able to say out loud how the work you’re doing is tied to company goals, it will help you make all the other decisions you need to make about how invest your time, how to balance competing priorities, when and how to assign people to projects. And that’s today’s Episode Hack.

Closeout

[00:28:55] Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. You can play a part in helping the podcast to grow. If you enjoyed it, please do me a favor. The way to get the podcast to grow is for you to go to iTunes and give it a rating. If enough of you give me a good rating on iTunes, this podcast will show up in their New and Noteworthy section. Being in the New and Noteworthy is a great way to attract more listeners, and having more listeners helps me have the support to keep the podcast going.

[00:29:19] There are three simple steps to giving me a rating. One, go to the iTunes store in the podcast section. Two, search for Becoming a Geek Leader. And three, give the podcast a great rating. And while you’re there, why not write a quick review as well? Thanks.

[00:29:39] This is Tom Cooper. Thanks for listening. Be sure to join me next time for another episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. Join me in my mission of discovering better ways to lead others at work and at home.

Listen now!

In this episode:

Leadership responsibility can be confusing and frustrating the first time someone asks you  to do it. What do you need to do as you move from being an individual contributor to a leader?

Also included are steps to using ticketing systems and a couple of bloopers from Tom’s brand new speaking videos!

• Change your mindset to lead well!
• Start using ticketing systems or use your existing ticketing systems more effectively!
• Go behind-the-scenes with some deleted video content.

Resources:

• How to set up your Ticketing System to support your software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

• How to report bugs effectively

Links to Ticketing Software:

• Zen desk
• Zoho support

• VersionOne
• Clear quest – (part of IBM’s Rational software suite)
• Gemini (from countersoft) – Windows

• Mantis – for unix/linux

Transcript:

Sponsored by Geek to Great

Man 1: [00:00:00] Becoming a Geek Leader, Season 1, Episode 6.

Tom: [00:00:04] This episode of Becoming a Geek Leader is sponsored by the Geek to Great 101 course. We all want to grow our skills and improve the work we do, but who has time for that? In this online blended learning program, you and your team will gain practical skills in topics like time management, dealing with difficult people, improving communication, and so much more. Train your whole team for less than $500. Each lesson is 30 minutes or less, so it fits right into your current team meeting schedule. Find more information and get immediate access to your first free lesson at brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks, that’s brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks, so that you can get access to the Geek to Great 101 course.

[00:01:04] Welcome to the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast. My name is Tom Cooper. As a geek, I’m on a mission to figure out better ways to lead others at work and at home. Through the Becoming a Greek Leader podcast, I’m sharing what I’m learning so I can help make you more effective at leading people, too. Ready?

Introduction

[00:01:26 ] Welcome to episode 6. I’m glad you’re here. So, today’s episode, I want to talk about a few different things, and I just want to give you a quick heads up. First, in the mentoring segment, I’m going to be talking about how to create a new mindset to help you succeed. Next I want to talk about something that has come up recently with several of my clients, and it’s all about using a ticketing system. And if you’re not using one, how you can start right away.

[00:01:50] If you are using one, what are some things you can do that will be better, that’s going to make your use of that system richer? And is the third section today is a behind the scenes segment. I just launched a new version of my speaking page, promoting my speaking services, and I have some things to share with you including some bloopers as well. So, I’m looking forward to this episode and I’m glad you’ve joined me. Thanks.

Mentoring segment.

Tom: [00:02:35] So for today’s mentoring segment, I want to talk about mindset and a way of thinking that may be affecting your success with your work. I know a lot of us are totally overwhelmed. Sometimes we feel like, “Man, there’s just no way I could do one more thing.” And I think that’s probably true. If you feel like, “I can’t do everything on the to-do list and I’m swamped,” then I think you need to start thinking differently about what it means to do great work. And here’s what I mean by that. So you have a story in your head that talks about what does it mean for you to do great work. And if you’re like most of us, the story that’s in your head, the story you tell yourself today is the secret to your success has been because you can deliver great work as an individual contributor.

[00:03:23] It’s your understanding of the technical issues, your understanding of the requirements, your ability to overcome challenges, your ability to make connections between systems and components, how you can define problems, how your brain is in you at work to diagnose the root cause. For you to consider the different options available, troubleshoot problems, and then finally deliver a great work product. Now I’ll tell you, all of that is true. It is your brain. It is your capability that makes a huge difference in your productivity and in the value that you deliver. But here’s the thing, as you move up in your career, as you have more responsibilities in the work that you do, you have to start to think differently. Rather than seeing yourself merely as an individual contributor who has other stuff they have to do, you’ve got to start to think about how to intentionally lead your team members and delegate work to them.

[00:04:23] And I’ll give you an example. I’ve got a client who has for all of her career been very successful because she’s smart, and she’s hardworking, and she does a great job. And then she was put in a role where she’s supposed to oversee people. And now she’s trying to manage all the work stuff that she was doing before and then kind of bolting on the people stuff on top of that, bolting on managing these other projects, bolting on. And how long does it take before she is totally burned out? I , not that all really. And just because the story that she had is probably similar to the story that you have, that, “My real job is to do hands-on geek work, and this other stuff is kind of an add-on thing.” That’s the mental shift I want to challenge you to make.

[00:05:13] There’s a story you may have heard about, a man who approaches some guys who were laying bricks, some bricklayers. And he’s fascinated. He watches them for a while, and he walks up to one of them and he says, “Say, can you tell me what you’re doing?” And the first guy has been working hard, and he’s pretty annoyed. And he looks over at the guy and he snaps, he says, “I’m laying bricks. What does it look like I’m doing?” Now, our hero here decides he’s going to talk to another guy. And he walks up to him and he says, “What are you doing?” The second man looks at him and says, “I am building a cathedral.” Now see, in this example, you have been a great bricklayer. The walls you build, they’re tall, they’re strong, they’re straight. But now the time has come for you to see yourself differently.

[00:06:02] Everything you’ve done up to this point, it’s still relevant, it still matters. Your personal contribution as an individual contributor has been that story of your success. And now, your story’s got to develop a little further. Everything you’ve done still applies, but you have to apply them a little bit differently. Rather than seeing yourself as a bricklayer, you need to see yourself differently. And Marshall Goldsmith says, “What got you here, won’t get you there.” And this story, you’re thinking about what made you successful, if you’re going to get to the next level, you’re going to have to change your thinking. You’re no longer that individual contributor, just the bricklayer. The first step in being successful is thinking differently, and you’ve got to change your mindset.

[00:06:53] So you don’t measure yourself anymore by the number of bricks that you laid, or the quality of the work, the strength, and height, and straightness of the wall, or how timely you were able to put the bricks down. Now, you have to see yourself differently. Now you have to think about being the general contractor who’s building the cathedral. Of course you know how to lay bricks. Of course you do. And you’re still in the business of getting walls built, but they are the means to the end, they’re the not the end themselves. The Grand Cathedral is the end. And it’s made up of the walls and the other pieces that are created and assembled by various craftsmen all over the organization. Your job is to orchestrate the work of others.

[00:07:37] You see, it’s not enough if you merely deliver a great wall. You need to make sure that all those pieces come together to build something really amazing. Now like my client, you might look at this at this point and say, “You’re out of your mind. I’ve already got more than a full-time job just trying to keep up with the work that I’ve got. There is no way I can take on any more work.” And you’re right. What you have to do is you have to start to prioritize your work more effectively, and you’ve got to delete some of it from your to-do list, and you’ve got to delegate a good amount of the things that are on your to-do list. If you don’t do that, you’re not going to have the time it takes to be super successful.

[00:08:22] And I will tell you, I hear this all the time when clients come to me to engage me to help one of their team members. They’ll say, “Man, he is really sharp. He does a great job on the technical stuff, but he gets into the weeds and I just can’t get him out.” That’s because he’s thinking like he’s a brick layer, and his job is to build great walls. Now, I want to be clear. I’m not suggesting that what you ought to do is stop trying to build great walls. That would be ridiculous. Everybody needs us to do great work. And it’s our job to find a way to do that. But I promise you, I promise you, if you spend your time focusing on building those walls yourself, mixing up your own mortar, carrying over your own bricks, it’s going to hurt you.

[00:09:11] Because you don’t want to be in a position where you’re the one who has to try and do all those things, and at the same time, manage other people. I remember one of the first times I encountered this. I was at a project management leadership training course, and they did a simulation. And the simulation was that there were a number of different milestones that had to be delivered for the project, and they were managed by different teams. So we sort of self-organized, and then they nominated me to be the project manager to oversee the teams. The problem was, the way the simulation was designed, all of the first phase of the project had a very short timeline, and it was all due almost immediately.

[00:09:52] And I found myself trying to problem solve. I was in the midst of it trying to figure out each of the subsets, each of the walls of the cathedral. I was trying to figure out how to design and set up myself. And I became completely overwhelmed, and I was totally ineffective. And I’ll tell you, the point was made very clearly to me that day, that my job was to appoint somebody to be responsible for each of those subsections, and then hold those people accountable. But remember, I still thought of myself as a bricklayer. And I want to encourage you, I want to challenge you to begin to question your own thinking when it comes to this. So when you think about this stuff that’s on your to-do list, the things that are rattling around in your brain, even as this podcast is playing, that are distracting you, is there anything, anything at all on your list that maybe just maybe if you had the right person on the team you should delegate? Well, don’t give too much thought to that right now, but I will touch on it later on in the podcast.

[00:10:53] Just to recap, we’re changing our thinking. Up to now we’ve been successful because we’ve been an individual contributor who’s done great work and been recognized for that and rewarded for that. Our pathway to success still includes delivering great work, but now it’s looking for opportunities to intentionally delegate that work to other people because our role is no longer the individual contributor solely. Our roal is primarily the general contractor, and of course, we have the skills to step in and do that plumbing, or that carpentry, or that mason work, whatever it is we need to do. Those are things we have the capacity to do, but that’s not our primary job. Our primary job is to define the overall plan and to coordinate the activities.

[00:11:43] We’re orchestrating the delivery of other individual contributors, and that’s true even if we don’t have the formal positional power to make people do it. But our business value that we deliver to the company comes from the ability to get other people to do some of the work. And that’s today’s mentoring segment.

Tech segment.

Tom: [00:12:20] For today’s tech segment, I really have been hearing some things from my clients recently. And I wanted to touch on it because I think it’s very relevant. Because the clients that I’m working with our frequently in fairly big firms, well-established firms, firms that have adequate budgets to buy the tools that they need, and for some reason, one of the tools that is critically important to success, for some reason that’s just not being used. And so I just want to spend a few minutes today talking about ticketing systems. So in the tech world, we are in the service request business. People are asking for our help and we respond. Back in the dark ages, back when the dinosaurs of technology roamed the earth and I was early in my career, I was a help desk guy for a 30-person company. Everybody who needed any help with their technology would reach out to me.

[00:13:13] And it came in the form of a phone call or an email which was relatively new. We had internal email but not necessarily external emails then. But I would get phone calls, I would get emails, I would get hallway conversations, that says, “Oh, Tom, there you are. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about my…” And it was almost a nonstop stream of requests for help. I knew it had gone too far when I was standing in the men’s room using the facilities, and a coworker asked for computer help. I said, “Wait, I’m sorry. I’m happy to help you later, but I’m not taking tech support requests right here, right now.” So what did I do? Well, I would handle those requests as they’d come in. And what would happen? Well, the squeakiest wheel would get the grease.

[00:14:00] So whoever had the current urgent problem would get my attention. Now, a lot of times, I would remember what people asked me for. But if I’m honest, I’m going to have to confess that all too often I would forget what you asked me to do, or I would forget that I talked to you, or if I saw you in the hall, “Oh, rats. I was supposed to do something for them.” And so I would just totally forget, or I would forget what problem, “Now, they were having trouble with something. What were they having trouble with?” Or I would remember that it was a printing problem but I wouldn’t remember exactly what it was. “They were having some kind of problem with printing from Excel. I don’t know.” I’d have to go back and start all over again.

[00:14:38] And a lot of stuff ended up falling on the floor. There had to be a better way because the lack of tracking, the lack of interaction was keeping me from being able to deliver great solutions. And in fact, it was actually slowing me down pretty dramatically because I would have to start over again. Every time I would forget, I’d have to start over again. Now, unfortunately for me, it was many years later that I discovered the concept of a ticketing system. And it was even years after that that I discovered how valuable they are if you use them properly. Now, I just want to say, if you’re providing any kind of customized service to people and you’re using anything other than a ticketing system to track your work requests, I mean if you’re using a spreadsheet, or if you’re using email inbox, or if you’re using any other system, I want you to stop what you’re doing right now and get started using a tracking system. And I mean today.

[00:15:40] On the webpage for this episode, I’ve got a number of links to different systems that you might choose for that. Now, they’re not affiliate links, although that would be a good idea. I probably should get affiliate programs set up with some of these people. The thing is, it’s critically important for you to get to success. Now, I want to point out that I have used a lot of different systems in different jobs that I’ve had. Everything from so-called enterprise tools, like IBM’s ClearQuest and Rational Suite, VersionOne, open source tools like Bugzilla, and eventually built a great process on an inexpensive tool based on Windows, called Gemini from Countersoft. And I’m going to put links to those items as well as other tools that I’m aware of in the resource list, there on the podcast page.

[00:16:31] The point is this is a very valuable system. I’ve got a client who’s a technology firm, multibillion-dollar revenue technology firm, and they’re using email and phone calls to receive and manage requests from customers. Now, it’s a terrible idea. Now, I understand how it happens. We don’t think through that, “Oh, we need to be in the service request business, and we need to have a good service request management system set up.” It’s common. And so what we do? We use a tool that we already have, “Just send me an email. I’m going to forget that we talked about this. Just send me an email.” But what happens? Well, requests get lost. Requests get forgotten. They’re in so-and-so’s mailbox and they ought to be in somebody else’s mailbox. Joe was handling it, and then Joe went on vacation, now Sally’s supposed to handle it, but she doesn’t have access to Joe’s email. So she doesn’t have the information that she needs.

[00:17:29] There’s no centralized place to look for current status on a thing or who made the latest update. These requests get processed when somebody makes noise about them or when there’s some other event that comes up, “Oh, rats. We were supposed to take care of such and such.” And it’s really focused on crisis in response to crisis, not thinking about when is the best time from a business perspective to be able to deal with that. And fundamentally this process, not using a ticketing system, it’s inefficient, it’s inconsistent, and it is frustrating. So, the first thing I want to suggest is if you’re not using a ticketing system today, you should get started using one right away. Now, let’s say you are using a ticketing system. There are probably ways to improve that process.

[00:18:21] And I’ll spend a couple of minutes in this podcast talking about some things you can do to improve your ticketing process and your ticket management. But going back to, let’s say you’re not using a ticketing system. You should be able to get one set up pretty quickly. I mean if you’re on Windows or OSX or UNIX, there are options for every single platform, including lots of software as a service options. So there are lots and lots of tools available. And frequently, people will ask questions like, “What’s the best tool that I should use?” The best tool you should use is one you will actually use, and the best process to implement is something that is really simple to implement. And here’s what I mean by that. Let’s say right now that you’re using a process that goes something like this, “Hey, Tom, I need some help with…” “Okay, can you send me an email?” or, “I’ll make a note.” Something along those lines.

[00:19:16] What you want to start doing is pick a tool, any tool because any tool is better than no tool and get started. And what you want to do is say to people, “Hey, would love to help you. I need you to open a ticket.” You want to write that down. “I’d love to help you, but I need you to open a ticket.” Because what you need to do is get people used to the idea that they need to open a ticket when they want help. So, you simply lay it out there and you say, “Oh, fantastic. You’re having trouble with that? I’d love to help you. Can I ask you to open a ticket for me?” Once the ticket is open, the first thing you want to do is do not get bogged down in defining all the different things that might come from that. What you want to do is when you’re going from no process to implementation of a ticketing process, get everybody using the ticketing system before you do anything else. Before you do anything else.

[00:20:10] So your two ticket states are the ticket is open, the ticket is closed. That’s all you need to implement. Now, when I was working in software, one of the things I did was implement a process, and we refined the process to include all kinds of things because when a request comes in, particularly if you’re talking about software, but when a request comes in and somebody says, “I need help.” The options are either the product was designed to do that or it wasn’t. And if the product was not designed to do that, that’s either, “Hey, our product doesn’t do that.” For example, you might be building a timesheet tool or something, right? And let’s say that you’ve got your timesheet system in place and somebody opens an incident. They said, “Hey, the timesheet system’s broken. It doesn’t make coffee for me.” Well, yes, it doesn’t make coffee, but that’s something that you should have known. It was a timesheet program. It’s not a coffee program, so no coffee for you.

[00:21:11] You might need to account for, “Hey, sorry. It doesn’t do that,” in terms of your ticket state, but don’t start with that. What you want to start with is open or closed. And your response to that is, “Our timesheet tool doesn’t make coffee. Sorry.” And close the ticket. It’s as simple as that. Now, after you’ve had the opportunity, after you have retrained everybody to the idea that the first thing they need to do is open a ticket, then you’ve got the opportunity to improve the process. Now, I mentioned that I was working on this in a small company and as we built out our SDLC. And we actually used it from a helpdesk perspective. People would ask, “Hey, I need help with this part of the product.” And we would have a review system where somebody would go in and say, “Is the product designed to do that from the beginning or is it not designed to do that?”

[00:22:00] And if the product is designed to do that, maybe it’s a user training error and we actually had different ticket states, and we would assign it to different work queues based on the state of the ticket. Eventually we had 13 different states that we walked our tickets through to be able to determine whether it was a bug or a feature request, whether it was a user training problem, or a “Sorry, we don’t do that.” All those different types of things. And the goal is to have a robust system that supports your business process. If you have weak or inconsistently defined business process today, it’s going to be very painful for you to try and go from no process or weak process to a really robust process. So my recommendation because nobody goes from couch potato to running a marathon overnight, what you do is you start with something simple. And the simple thing you start with is let’s get everybody using the ticketing system, and then let’s make improvements from there.

[00:22:59] For those of you who already have some process running, and you’ve already got some mechanism for prioritizing and organizing information, you’re using a tool, some kind of ticket tracking system for your requests, I want to encourage you to think through how to make that process better. For example, one of the things that happened regularly was people would open up a request and they would put insufficient information in. They would say, “XYZ doesn’t work.” But they wouldn’t tell us exactly what we needed to know in order to be successful. So, one of the things that I will include in the show notes is a link to an article called, “How to Report Bugs Effectively.” And it includes the things that it takes to do a great job of reporting bugs. Now, I don’t send this to you to suggest that what you ought to do is send this link to people and say, “Hey, dummy, use this when you report a bug.”

[00:23:57] But what it will do is help you think through how can you make it easy for your customers when they’re reporting things. For example, what we did was we developed a template that had a series of questions that were common questions about, “Does it only happen to you? Does it happen every time?” Those types of things, so that we can reproduce the problem. So we could figure out how to get it to engineering and get the problem fixed. I just opened a ticket with a vendor, I’m using a SaaS tool, and there was a problem. And I opened a ticket, and I sent in the details, and the data, and the reproducible use case. And they kicked it back to me and said, “Oh, that’s user error.” “Man, you’re making me crazy. No, no, it wasn’t user error.” And I went back and said, “Check the ticket. Here’s what I said.”

[00:24:46] The thing is, most people get terrible bug reports all the time. And so I’m sure that the default response tends to be, “Hey, go back and try it again, user.” What I want you to think through though, is how do you make it easy for your customer, easy for your user to be able to report, “Hey, I’m having this problem,” and give you the information in a way that you can be successful? We had to come up with some categorization. So for example, we defined, every ticket when it came in had to be categorized, is it a bug? Is it an enhancement? Or is it a task? Some kind of research project, or I need help with something. When it came to severity for bugs, we had to define what does it mean for it to be a critical bug, or a normal bug, or a minor bug? And we actually defined, for example, a normal bug was a bug that affected just one piece of functionality. We could even release with a normal bug.

[00:25:39] So, an example might be the date filter works on some page selections but doesn’t work on others. We might decide as the product management team we’re going to let that go. The point is, what you want to do is help people have clear definitions because if you don’t, then every issue is critical when I as the customer decide it’s critical. We also talked about whether things should be set up as the priority. So the requester could say how severe is it, but then we, when we were managing it internally, we would set, as the product management team, we would set the issue priority. We would decide how urgently we were going to go after that. We also had tags in our system for what version we were going to use. We had places that people could attach additional information, and then the status. We had 13 different statuses for new, to review, to assigned, all kinds of things, all the way through the list.

[00:26:32] And I don’t have time to go through every single one of those in today’s episode. And then we had resolutions defined for each one of those things. I’m not suggesting that you should do what we did. Entirely, you shouldn’t mimic that. You should build out your business process that works as smoothly and as easily as you can with the people who are using your system. So, if you’re not using a ticket tracking system today, I want you to stop listening to this podcast, go to my website, take a look at those tools, pick from one of those or pick something else. But you should be using some sort of incident management system because it makes it so much easier for you. You will get more work done. Your customers will be happier. You’ll be able to get some analysis of the work that you’re doing if you’re using a system that tracks what’s happening.

[00:27:21] And if you’re already using the system, I want you to think through what could you do to take one baby step to make that a little bit better. I’m telling you, using a ticket tracking system for incident management is critically important. Now, the examples I gave today come from software because that’s the world I grew up in. But this is equally applicable to replacing light bulbs and other maintenance items in your building or any other incident response type thing, reprovisioning somebody with access to a system, or resetting a password. All those types of things. Anything that is a request and a response, having some sort of unique identifier tied to a specific request in a centralized repository where you can get access to that information. I would’ve thought that in 2016, we would have that down, that everybody would be using it.

[00:28:10] But I’m hearing enough for my clients that there are places and times in lots of different organizations where those types of things are not happening. And I even have one client that uses paper for heaven sakes, to track what’s going on. And one other thing that I want to point out here is to realize that this is a journey not a destination. To go from not using a system to using a system is the first step, and try and make it as simple as possible, just open and closed. And then realize that it’s going to take a while to get there. Even if you’ve begun to use a ticketing system, even if you’ve begun to do to get open and ticket closed, it’s going to be a while before you get everybody consistently doing that.

[00:28:54] And you have to realize technology is not the limiter here, it’s behavioral change. And I will tell you as difficult as technology is, people are harder. So, with that in mind, what I want you to think about is if you’re already using a ticketing system, and I mentioned this before, but I want to reinforce it, think of one thing you could do to make it a little bit better. And then try to think about making changes to that on a scheduled basis. So we’re only going to make changes to our business process maybe four times a year. So this quarter we’re going to try and get open, closed. Next quarter, we’re going to start to talk about how we’re going to prioritize those tickets and collect some of that additional information when we get the tickets submitted themselves.

[00:29:38] Don’t try and take it all on at once. It’s way too much to take on at once. But take on something and start making some small changes. Using an incident management or ticket tracking system is critically important for you to be able to plan and manage the work that’s coming into your queue. And I just want to encourage you to take action right away on that, and that is today’s tech segment.

Behind the scenes segment.

Tom: [00:30:16] I’m a geek, a highly technical expert. Well, at least I used to be. Welcome to the behind the scenes segment. So that clip you just heard was a piece from the video shoot that we’ve recently did as part of the total revamping of my public speaking page. And one of the things I’ve been learning in this business is just how much goes into production of media. Now, I’ve mentioned before on the podcast that learning how to produce great quality audio was one of the things that I had to come up to speed on. One of the other things I’m learning about is great video production. Years ago I worked in a photo lab, and I learned that the way that you expose the negative is important, and also the way you print the photo matters. And now, certainly with Photoshop, we’ve learned a lot about how to adjust the way things go, hence the tag #nofilter, right?

[00:31:08] So in this process, to produce the speaker’s video, we had to do quite a bit of work to go back over a number of other sources of data, other places I had spoken, other video that had been shot. We had to try and find a way to craft the story and do a storyboard. It was really pretty interesting. And what you don’t see a lot is really the behind the scenes stuff. So everything from the director yelling, “Take!” to the interruptions that happen on the set. Now in this case, the set was the back porch of my house. And as you know, my kids live here. So, we had a couple interruptions. Things like this, “Sweetie pie, what are you distracting for me back there?” That happened as my daughter who was very interested in the lights, and camera, and action that was happening walked around the side of the house, and came up the stairs, and walked into the area where we were shooting. And it’s definitely distracting trying to focus on how do you do the right work, and at the same time, have people watching.

[00:32:11] Do you ever find yourself at a solemn event? Maybe it’s a graduation, or a religious observance, or something like that. And all of a sudden something strikes you as funny. Happens to all of us. And then the more serious you’re supposed to be, the harder it is to be serious. Well, we had a couple of light moments on our set as well, where one of the kids was going to let the dog out to join us. “Get the dog out here. Oh!” One of the things I’m learning is that no matter how hard you practice or how many times you go over things, it takes multiple takes to be able to get something that’s really production ready.

[00:32:52] And once you’ve done that, there’s still a tremendous amount of editing. I have to say now that I’m in a bit of the media production business, I can’t stop looking at, “How did they light that?” when I’m watching television. Or, “How did they capture that? Where’s the microphone for that?” Or, “Look at those sound effects they did.” It’s amazing how much complexity goes into the things that we see, and we’re just accustomed to production quality stuff. If you want to see the final result of the work we did, please check out the videos which you can find on my website brighthillgroup.com/speaking, that’s brighthillgroup.com/speaking. Hope you check it out. And that’s today’s behind the scenes segment.

Episode hack.

Tom: [00:33:56] Just to review, today we talked about having a new mindset. You’re no longer the bricklayer, you’re the general contractor who oversees the bricklayers. You may lay some bricks yourself, but you are the general contractor. We also talked about using a ticketing system to help you keep track of the work that you’re doing. And finally, I shared a little bit about the creation and launch of my new speaking page. So here’s today’s episode hack. I want you to take 30 seconds right now to think about one thing that’s on your to-do list where you’re the bricklayer but you probably ought to be delegating that out and acting like the general contractor. So just think about one thing that you are doing now that you might need to let go and let somebody else do. Now, I’m going to give you 30 seconds to think about that right now. I’ll be back in half a minute.

[00:35:28] So what did you come up with? What’s the one thing where you’re acting like a bricklayer but you really ought to let it go? If you could take just one thing, move that forward, it’s going to help you a whole lot. And that’s today’s episode hack.

Closeout

[00:35:44] Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. You can play a part in helping the podcast to grow. If you enjoyed it, please do me a favor. The way to get the podcast to grow is for you to go to iTunes and give it a rating. If enough of you give me a good rating in iTunes, this podcast will show up in their “New and Noteworthy” section. Being in “New and Noteworthy” is a great way to attract more listeners, and having more listeners helps me have the support to keep the podcast going.

[00:36:08] There are three simple steps to giving me a rating. One, go to the iTunes store in the Podcast section. Two, search for “Becoming a Geek Leader,” and three, give the podcast a great rating. And while you’re there, why not write a quick review as well? Thanks!

[00:36:28] This is Tom Cooper. Thanks for listening. Be sure to join me next time for another episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. Join me in my mission of discovering better ways to lead others at work and at home.