Tom Cooper

Priorities – How to Get Your Most Important Work Done

June 18, 2015 by Tom Leave a Comment

Are You Working On The Most Important Stuff This Week?

Stephen Covey said in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” that we experience stress when our “circle of concern” is BIGGER than our “circle of influence.”

Ever Get Frustrated By All The Problems At Work?

Many years ago I worked as a hands-on technologist and frankly I was pretty frustrated. I could see lots of things that were “broken” around me, and I wanted to fix them. Unfortunately I didn’t have the formal power or budget to tackle them, and I found myself blocked at every turn from REALLY making a difference at work. That bugged me. A lot.

Joe’s Story

I was reminded of my experience as I sat down with a client this week.

Joe is in his early thirties, has done some solid work in his career, and now finds himself in charge of a team of geeks.

On top of the typical day-to-day challenges in his job, Joe sees that there are fundamental disconnects between what the organization SAYS it wants, and how it behaves.

Joe is struggling with how to really make a difference.
He’s passionate.
He’s hardworking.
He cares about the company.
And Joe’s on the road to burnout.

Joe’s Big Challenge

Joe sees problems that he does not have the budget, staff or political support to tackle.
Joe feels overwhelmed by the fact that he wants to fix ALL the problems.
On his own he simply can’t make it happen.
Joe’s been losing sleep over the frustrations, pain and failed projects.

Joe’s circle of concern is FAR larger than his circle of influence. In some ways, that’s good – he wants to help the company win, not just himself or even his department.

Concern is a good thing.

What Can Joe Do?

Should Joe stop caring? NO!

Joe needs to adjust his circle of concern to be closer – FAR closer – to his circle of influence.

I advised him to sit down with his boss and pick 2 or 3 areas (no more than 3) where he and his team can commit to REALLY moving the needle in the next 90 days.

When he’s picking which things to work on, Joe and his team will heavily prioritize these projects over the other areas.

When management refuses to fund (or see) a problem area, Joe will keep a log of issues.

Once he’s put it in his log – or mentioned it once – he will have to stop thinking about it. That’s someone else’s problem – and Joe needs to let it be that way.

What Happens If Your Circles Don’t Match?

I used to work with Steven. Steven is a very smart guy who knew Windows XP inside and out. He was passionate, hard working, and committed to excellence in his engineering work.

Steven filed more bug reports that subsequently became Microsoft KB articles than anyone else I’ve ever heard of.

The problem? The company didn’t really care about having a perfect desktop OS.

Steven’s circle of concern was big enough to include all of the users whose machines might not wake up when they went to sleep, or machines that might blue screen when they plugged in a new device.

Steven didn’t want HIS name on any helpdesk tickets caused because he didn’t find the problem before the customer.

Because the company didn’t care, it refused to hire a team large enough to do the level of work that Steven demanded of himself.

Steven worked long hours – he skipped vacation. He worked weekends to make sure that the system was as good as he could make it. In spite of this, he missed things.

Customers complained of problems. Steven took their complaints personally. He vowed to work harder. He was burning out.

Steven’s Performance Review

When it came time for Steven’s annual review, the company gave him an average raise. AVERAGE?!?!?!?!? he roared? Average? Didn’t they know how hard he had worked? Didn’t they see all he had sacrificed? Didn’t they appreciate what he had done for the company? For the customers?

Actually, no. They hadn’t noticed. They were not measuring that. It was not personal – it was that they had other priorities, other investments.

His bosses thought it was good that Steven did good work, but his “above and beyond” effort had zero effect on his compensation.

What Happened to Steven?

Steven became frustrated and bitter.
He worked hard, but was harder to work with because of his latent anger. Promotions? Not for the grumpy guy.
Who wants to work with an angry person?
Who wants to listen to someone who takes every opportunity to vent about how the company is stupid and makes bad decisions?

I felt bad for him. The last contact I had with Steven was about 8 years ago. I just looked him up on LinkedIn. He’s doing the same job today that he was doing then. I’d bet he’s still unhappy.

Action Point

What can you do right now to “right size” your circles of concern and influence? How can you set priorities that matter to your boss and to your company?

What 2-3 things can you and your team deliver over the next 90 days?

What’s your plan to under-promise and then over deliver on all of them?

Getting important things done will make you and your boss a LOT happier.

Communication: Do you see the indicator lights?

June 2, 2015 by Tom Leave a Comment

How’s your engine?

A friend once was on a road trip and her car’s temperature gauge kept climbing. As she kept driving, the needle pointed to the red zone. Eventually a light came on, and she kept driving. As you might imagine, shortly after that, she needed to buy a new car. She missed the indicators, and it had a big consequence.

Do you see the lights?

I recently met with a client who was in trouble. She told me that her boss said she was doing a terrible job of communicating.

My boss says it’s my tone and word choice, but I really don’t know what he means. Why can’t he be more specific?

Just like warning lights on your cars dashboard, people give you indicators. Not specific warning lights, but just as useful. She was missing the indicators.

dashboard indicator warning lights scion

What do they look like?

At another firm, I worked with the senior leadership team.

One of the lead guys is a hard core scientist-type. As we talked about communication challenges on the leadership team, he sat with his arms folded across his chest.

One of the other leaders said “Why are you so opposed to this? You’ve been sitting there with your arms folded the whole time!”

His response? “What? You’re looking at nonverbal communication? Seriously?”

In the leader’s case above, he did not MEAN to send a negative message – he was comfortable with his arms folded. He was not aware (or didn’t care) that this had a negative effect on others.

Here are some indicators you might want to look for when you’re talking.

Does the other person:

Sigh?
Glance at their watch repeatedly?
Looking at phone/computer instead of looking at you?
Fold their arms when you bring up ideas?
Fail to make eye contact?
Lean away from you when you’re talking?
Change the subject after you start talking?

Now what?

Now that you know what to look for – what do you do when you see it?

When my friend was driving and the temperature indicator showed increasing temperature – it was a warning. If she had understood the meaning of it, she could have made different choices.

When you see the warning signs, it’s a good opportunity to say

I think I see a warning light. I’m guessing that we’re not connecting. What information do you need? Is there something that I need to know?

Then be quiet and LISTEN.

You might find out that your engine is overheating!

Geek communication: “Your word salad needs more gibberish”

May 5, 2015 by Tom 1 Comment

Do people understand what you’re saying?

“Hi. My name is Tom, and I’m a geek.”

I figured I should get that out of the way at the top of this post.

The other day I was reminded of this fact when I dashed off a quick note to a colleague.

I needed to put something in the postal mail to him, but I didn’t have a street address for him.

What are you talking about?

My email said something like “Can you please send me your snail mail address?”
It didn’t occur to me that this was not perfectly clear. I didn’t hesitate – even for a second – before sending it.

A little bit later, my colleague wrote back “forgive me, but what’s a snail mail address?”

Am I communicating?

Wow. I was surprised. Then I spent a few minutes laughing at myself. It’s only communication if the OTHER PERSON knows what you mean!

Do people understand you when you “communicate” with them?
In what ways are you using jargon, lingo, acronyms or short cuts in your speech or writing?
Are you SURE that those listening to you know what you’re talking about?

It happens all the time, especially to those of us in technical fields – we are experts who get used to talking with other experts – perhaps we’re reaching them, perhaps not!

Bonus – can you decipher this jargon?

BTW – IMHO YMMV. FYI the ETA is TBD. WYSIWYG. TTYL. CU. (If so, re-read this post before sending your next message!)

Tom

Data Scientists: Sexiest job of the 21st century – How to move from Analyst to Data Scientist

April 28, 2015 by Tom Leave a Comment

big data smaller version binary-715813_1920

According to Harvard Business Review, Data Scientists have the sexiest job of the 21st century.

There’s a HUGE need for Data Scientists

A McKinsey study says

By 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions.

What will it take for you to move from being an analyst working with BigData to becoming a Data Scientist?

MIT Sloan Management Review recently posted an article about how to get value from data scientists.

Data science is a HUGE thing right now. There’s more demand than ever before for data scientists. If you’re a data scientist, there’s probably a great job available for you right now.

I’ve been in software, and have worked on analytics for very large datasets. I’d say that I’ve worked with Big Data. Was I ever an analyst? Could I call myself a data scientist? (For those of you who know me, the short answer is NO WAY!) 🙂

The Skills to move to being a Data Scientist

If you’re an analyst, how do you make the transition from analyst to data scientist? Based on the research, here are some key differences:

Fundamentally, it’s all about the BUSINESS VALUE. The higher you go on the business value chain, the more you can make and the more opportunities you’ll have.

According to the article, Data Scientists are generally better programmers than most statisticians, and better statisticians than most programmers.

What if you’re an analyst who wants to become a data scientist? What are some skills to work on? It’s more than the math! In fact, you’ll need to think in terms of technical skills and non-technical skills

Technical skills:

According to the research “Analysts” tend to work with structured and semi-structured data to evaluate, report, predict, prescribe and optimize information.

In addition to structured and semi-structured numeric data, Data scientists also work with unstructured numeric data, images, audio and text. Their work involves exploring, investigating hypotheses and visualization of data.

To accomplish this, you may need to expand your toolkit to include more tools – including open source tools, mathemetical languages such as R and Python, and machine learning, natural language processing, and tools that manipulate data from multiple repositories (such as Hadoop.)

Data scientists are using these tools to look for surprising business insights using all of these forms of data, and that can pay off in a big way.

Non-Technical skills:

What’s interesting to me is that the article talked about some pitfalls, too. Some of the main limiters on the impact of these brilliant contributors have to do with dealing with people.

Specifically, business leaders complain about data scientists being

Aloof and uninterested in the professional lives and business problems of their less technical team members.
They don’t see the need to explain the implications of what they are discovering (or translate their insights into actionable information which can be quickly applied by business team members, and
They have a lack of interest in partnering with business leaders to address the challenges outside the technical realm.

Want to move from Analyst to Data Scientist?

What can you do?

1. Make a plan about improving your technical skills.

Look for data sources outside your traditional repositories that may relate to the business problems your company is facing.
Pick a tool to explore over the next few months – set up a small project where you can experiment with a new tool to help you understand your data better.

2. Make a plan to improve your non-technical skills!

1. Think about how to get the information and insights you have into language that non-technical people can easily understand.

More than “here’s the data” or even “here’s a graph of the data” take a look at how to tie the data to the pain points that your business team members are experiencing.

2. Read a great book on communication.

One of my favorites is “How to Win Friends And Influence People” by Dale Carnegie.

3. Do the difficult work of keeping it simple

My guess is that you’ve already got access to great data that can be applied to difficult business problems – the time you invest in strengthening your communications will pay off in a big way.

Learn how to translate the speeds and feeds into actionable information. Listen to your business colleagues talk about the problems they are facing, and work to re-craft your messages using the same terms that they regularly use.

Is it harder than “just sending them the data”?

Yes – and your work to cross the communication chasm will dramatically increase the value you deliver to your company.

Additional reading

What’s Your Plan?

Growing technical skills and non-technical skills will lead to a big payoff on your journey from analyst to data scientist.

What’s your plan? What’s the next step for you on your journey?

It happened again this morning. Don’t let it happen to you!

April 21, 2015 by Tom Leave a Comment

It happened again. Just this morning.

A colleague had a defection of sorts.

Two key tech employees independently gave their two weeks’ notice.

I’m close enough to have some insight into what happened in this particular case.

This is a growing, vibrant technology firm. The leaders are smart, nice, hard working people. They want to do the right thing for their clients, and for their team members.

Each employee decided to leave the company. Why? One key factor: senior leadership.

Project Oxygen- 8 keys to being a great boss - google — Click here to download our FREE Infographic – Google’s 8 Keys to Leading Technical Team Members

One of the “defectors” was an up and coming leader himself. His key frustration is that his boss was unwilling, or perhaps unable to let him lead.

Think about this: you have a smart, hard-working, emerging leader on your staff. Your vision is for this team member to grow and become a future leader of your company.

You look for opportunities to help them grow.

But:

because you are overwhelmed,
because you are incredibly busy,
because it’s not a crisis for you,

YOU just simply have not made the time to grow your leadership skills.

Your lack of leadership skill is a key factor holding you back, and holding back your team from growing.

Your People Skills Matter More Than Technical Skills

business success 87 percent people knowledge 13 percent product knowledge stanford

The research is clear that our success is tied to our “people knowledge” but time and again, we invest our energy in product knowledge!

I wrote about this a few months ago – the demand for tech talent in Charlotte is high – and unless you set yourself apart, your best folks are going to leave. Period.

The Cost of Turnover

What does this turnover cost you?

For this colleague, some of the impacts that they are dealing with right now are:

Knowledge transfer.
Customer relationships.
Developing a plan to deal with all of this transition.
Follow through on delivery of promises made to current customers.
Reassuring customers that the company can continue to meet their needs during this transition.
Finding time to keep up with all of the commitments that were made to other customers.
Opportunity cost: what deals are lost because leaders are distracted by all of these activities right now?

And none of these costs are related to actually replacing that staff member!

You still have to invest time in:

Updating job descriptions.
Advertising the position on job boards.
Reaching out to recruiting firms to try to identify good candidates.
Scheduling interviews with potential candidates.
Assessing the skills of potential recruits.
And on and on.

This turns out to be a pretty expensive exercise, doesn’t it?

Again, let me emphasize that this is a good company. The owners of the company are decent, hard-working, nice people. They are smart. They care about their team members. They want their team members to grow. And yet they’ve suffered this loss.

What Went Wrong?

mind the gap doormat flickr daveblogs007 cc_license_8488204426_218f1c0a41_o_with_attribution_cropped

1. They didn’t “Mind the Gap” between their intent to grow, and their ACTION to grow.

They talked about personal growth. They talked about a staff development program, but by the time they actually started working on that, the emerging leader had lost hope.

The delay between the company leaders intending to do something and ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING was just too long.

2. Neglecting personal development. The owners of the company were “too busy” to work on their leadership skills.

What Can You Do Now?

There’s a huge gulf between your intent and your action.

Make a plan to grow your leadership skills and then
Take Action!

person jumping across a gap - pixabay public domain leap-456100_1920_cropped_resized_edited

Think you don’t have the time or money? Neither did this colleague.

In this market you can’t afford NOT to invest in your people and your people skills.

Just ask my colleague.

Want help? Give me a call. 240-668-4799

The 5 root causes of bad meetings – and exactly what you can do to have better meetings!

March 31, 2015 by Tom Leave a Comment

Better Meetings

In this Geek Leadership Essentials Podcast, I connect with Bryan Field from MeetingResult LLC.

We talk about making your meetings useful and efficient!

How to make your meetings more effective
The root causes of unproductive meetings (and what to do about it)
One powerful, simple system for making your meetings far better

Bryan has generously offered to provide two great resources for us.

FREE

One chapter from his book Powerfully Simple Meetings. Click on the book below to start your download!

Great Discount!

For our listeners, Bryan has offered a 40% discount on annual subscriptions
Go to meetingresult.com and use promo code “Web-MR” for 40% off individual or team annual subscriptions!

About Bryan

BRYAN FIELD is a senior information technology executive and cofounder of MeetingResult LLC. He has more than sixteen years of experience in Software and Systems Development, IT Security, Business Process Reengineering and Web and Mobile Technology Implementations and has worked extensively in both the federal government and private sector. Before cofounding MeetingResult, Mr. Field built and led a sales organization for a defense contractor. He received his bachelor of science degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Virginia Tech and has been a certified project management professional (PMP) since 2005.

About the Podcast

We host a podcast focused on the essentials of leadership. We interview experts and publish a new podcast every few weeks on topics like project management, sales, marketing, leadership development, and so much more.

Don’t miss out! Sign up here for future podcast episodes to be delivered to you as soon as they are released! (You can also find the podcast in iTunes)