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.

Listen now!

In this episode:

Working with with people who aren’t located in your office can be a pain!

Tom helps you make this process go more smoothly by prompting better communication and building relationships.

• Work with remote teammates more effectively
• Learn what FORM is and how it can help you in your out-of-office projects.
• Use these concepts with your in-house team as well!

Resource Download:

Download the Making a Personal Connection one pager for specific ways to apply F.O.R.M.!

Here’s a short video on how to apply F.O.R.M.

Transcript

Sponsored by Geek to Great

Man: [00:00:00] Becoming a Geek Leader, Season 1, Episode 5.

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 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] This week’s episode is all about how to get the most out of working with a team that’s remote. Now, I find this happens a lot with many of my clients, that they put together teams, whether they’re internal teams or external teams from multiple organizations working on a project, and they struggle because the teams are not co-located. So in today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about things that you can do that will make a difference with your team members who are not local to you. I am looking forward to hearing from you about what you have applied from today’s podcast.

Coach’s Mailbox

Tom: [00:02:36] Today’s email comes from David. David says, “I’m responsible for making sure the work gets done. My team is spread out. I’ve got people a few states away, I’ve got some across the Pacific, and even some across the Atlantic. What can I do to get the most from my team?”

[00:02:55] Well David, thanks for asking the question. I find that this is a key challenge, particularly today. So many times we find ourselves working with vendors or working with partners, or servicing clients who are not local to us. And sometimes the team is an internal team, just like yours, where resources are spread out all over the globe. I worked in similar teams when I was working as a geek professionally, and we had employees, or contractors, or vendors, and all of them had different priorities and different agendas.

[00:03:34] Now, we struggled through many of common challenges that you’re probably facing now. Things like miscommunication, not enough communication, no connection between the people who are doing the work. We saw all kinds of cultural differences. Language issues, problems with translation and nuance between languages when people’s native language was not the same. Time zones, and yours in particular, must be challenging where you’ve got people on one side of the Atlantic who are several hours ahead of you and on the other side of the Pacific they are several hours behind you. And I know there’s this idea that, “Oh, we’ll work 24 hours a day. We’ll get the requirements on this side and we’ll hand it off and everything will keep going.” But the challenge is that it’s very difficult.

[00:04:24] And the final one that we ran into a lot was norms about quality, verbosity, depth of communication, and feedback. Those are the kind of challenges I ran into, and I suspect that those are similar to the kinds of challenges that you run into. The first thing I want to say about this is that working with remote team members is essentially the same as working with local team members, but here’s the key difference. The key difference is that when you work with somebody who’s in the same building you’re in, you’re likely to bump into them in the hallway, or on the way to lunch, or in the coffee…taking a coffee break by the coffee machine or the snack machine, or you’re going to run into them on the way to the same meeting, or right after a meeting you’ll probably chat with them a little bit. That’s the difference, that with a remote team member, you don’t have that informal communication opportunity.

[00:05:28] Typically, if you had something that was going on that was a little bit of an annoyance, or it was a challenge that you were facing, typically what you could do is just what I would call poke your head into their office. Stop by, just have an informal communication. But with these folks who are remote, it is much more difficult to do that because it just seems like a barrier that you have to overcome to make that connection. And I will tell you that it’s more than it seems like it’s a barrier, it’s an actual barrier to communication. So working with remote teams is the same as working with local teams, but you have to be intentional about making a connection with them.

[00:06:16] All those informal, subtle, brief communications, and that includes things like facial expression and body language, all of those things that comprise the totality of your communication when you’re face to face, they’re just not naturally there when you have a remote team. What that means is, you have a responsibility to go the extra mile. You have to take the initiative to make that connection. You’ve got to look for opportunities. More than even look for them, I’ll say, more than look for them, you have to make those opportunities.

[00:07:01] Now, I’ve heard that all business problems are people problems. And by extension, I think it’s true that all technical problems are actually people problems, too. Let me say that again, all technical problems are actually people problems, too. That’s not to say the technical problem is…there’s no such thing as a purely technical problem, but what I will say is that 90% of the problem is not the technical solution, 90% of the problem is defining what the problem is, making sure the customer is comfortable that you understand what the problem is, and dealing with the emotional stuff that goes along with that. So the technical solution is never completely sufficient.

[00:07:48] So, assuming that all technical problems are actually people problems, here’s the thing. If you want to get the most from your team members, you’ve got to know what matters to them. Now, as I’ve said, it’s easier if you work in the same office, because you’ll have those clues. The things that are…the indicators you’ll see, things like how they decorate their office. Do they put certificates on their wall or do they have pictures of their pet on their desk? Maybe their desktop image on their computer or their phone, and you have that opportunity to grab lunch with them, or get a cup of coffee, or bump into them in the hall, just as I said. And in those small, casual interactions, you have an opportunity to learn a ton about how they work.

[00:08:36] It’s funny, I recently shared this idea at a speaking engagement, and I want to share with you an example of how I learned something about a colleague and how that might help our future collaboration. The lady who introduced me, Beth, before we started up this presentation, she was showing me this adorable picture of her puppy that she has on the home screen of her phone, right? Now, I didn’t know she owned a dog before that. I’ve known Beth a little while professionally but I didn’t know about her dog. It’d be a good idea when I talk to Beth again to ask her how the puppy’s doing, right? Because that matters to her. It mattered enough that she took a picture, she put it on the phone, and she said, “Look at how cute my puppy is! My puppy’s so cute!” So that’s the kind of thing, if you can find out what it is for them, that’s a big deal.

[00:09:18] So apparently Beth loves her puppy. And I have to say, I love dogs and I can appreciate her love for her puppy. And because I have a dog too, we have a way that we can connect at some commonality that we can use to connect on common ground. But if you’re not in the same office and you’re not going to be able to have lunch with them, and frankly it’d be a little bit creepy for you to show up at their house to see how their home office is decorated, what can you do? How can you make a personal connection with somebody who’s not anywhere near you? You’re going to have to be a little bit creative because you’re going to have to make an opportunity to have a couple of minutes of personal conversation with them. So maybe it’s between status update meetings, you schedule a meeting with them about an issue that came up in the meeting, but you make it a point at the beginning of the conversation to ask them things like, “What did you do over the weekend?” It’s a simple opening and you can begin to connect with them on the things that matter to them.

[00:10:31] Now, you might think, “Look, I am really not good with small talk. I don’t enjoy it very much and I don’t think of things to talk about.” Well, let me help you with that. On the website, you’ll find with this podcast episode, one of the resources is a one-pager I call Making a Personal Connection, and I’ve got a whole long list of things you can ask people about, and they’re organized into categories. So, for example, you can ask them about their family, you can ask them about their occupation, you can ask them about recreation, and then you can ask them about message or mission. And on the Making a Personal Connection download sheet, there are probably two dozen topics or questions that you could ask people about. And because you’ve got that organized into family, occupation, recreation, and message or mission, you can think of it the acronym FORM. “F” is for family, “O” is for occupation, “R” is for recreation, “M” is for message or mission.

[00:11:38] And so I’m going to encourage you to get the Making a Personal Connection download sheet and take a look at that. Once you have that in your hands, let’s say you start to talk to somebody and they don’t want to talk about one topic. No problem, jump to one of the other topics and find one that they care enough about that they’re willing to talk about. This is critically important, if you can begin to understand what the motivators are, what the drivers are, what interests that other person, it’s going to make a huge difference in the way that you interact with them, and their willingness to help you get things done. But the tricky part with remote teams is you have to take the initiative. It won’t happen magically, and so you want to look for those opportunities to connect with somebody.

[00:12:26] Now, once you know something about those people, you have an opportunity. For example, I recently talked with a client and he told me that he was very passionate about rugby in South Africa. Now, I don’t know anything about that sport, but I do know about Google Alerts. So what I can do is set up a Google Alert on that topic and any time some information about that topic comes across the news wire, I can scan it, and if it looks positive and interesting, I can shoot it over to him and say, “Hey, I just happened to come across this, I thought you might be interested in it.” When we begin to show interest in the things that other people are interested in, even if we’re not specifically skilled in it…you know, I wouldn’t pretend that I know anything about rugby. I would say, “Gosh, I don’t really know anything about this but I saw this news story and I thought you might like to see it.” It’s as simple as that.

[00:13:27] I encourage you to be intentional about finding out what they care about and then creating ways to set up and sustain that connection. Find the thing that matters to them, and then begin to foster communication around that topic. If you want to be successful in working with your remote team, it’s about understanding who the people are that make up the team, and once you know who the people are, what things matter to those people. Fostering a personal connection, improving the kind of relationship that you have with them is the key, the single most important key, toward delivering better results.

[00:14:16] David, I hope that helps, and that’s today’s Coach’s Mailbox

Thought Leader Segment

Tom: [00:14:44] So when it comes to working with remote teams, in today’s Thought Leader segment, I want to share an idea from my mentor, John Maxwell. John wrote a book called “The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork”. As you’re working with a team, I highly recommend you pick up a copy of the book. It’s very, very well done, and provides a framework for your thinking about how to improve your teamwork.

[00:15:12] Now, these laws that John identifies in his book are completely relevant to teams that work in the same building, and they’re also relevant to teams that are remote, perhaps even more relevant. The challenge is that most of the time we don’t have clarity about exactly what is needed. I was working with a client just the other day who said that he was frustrated about a remote team, that the remote team’s delivery was weak, that they weren’t doing very much, and he said, “I don’t even know what they’re really working on!” Now, I challenged him to go and look more closely at the work that they were doing and the problems they were solving and their understanding of what the expectations were. And in our next session he said, “You know, Tom, I was pretty upset with them, but now that I’ve looked at what they’re doing I realize that I just wasn’t seeing all the things they were doing. Now that I’ve looked more closely, I have more appreciation for the value that they’re delivering and I was wrong about what I thought.” Until he looked at it more closely, he didn’t know.

[00:16:19] So, John talks about 17 laws, and one of them is the law of the scoreboard, the law of the scoreboard, the team needs to know where it stands. Now, as I said, this is important for teams that are co-located, I would suggest it’s even more important for remote teams. When people aren’t clear on what you want, you’re not going to get what you want, period. If they don’t understand what you want, you’re not going to get what you want, and it’s especially true when they’re in another location, another time zone, they’re from another culture. When it comes to the scoreboard, John says the scoreboard is essential to understanding.

[00:17:01] Now, I don’t know a lot about a lot of sports, but one I do enjoy is football. Now, if I’m watching a football game and one of my sons comes in the room, the first question he’s going to ask me is, “What’s the score, Dad?” The scoreboard tells us who is winning the game, how much time is left in the game, who has the ball right now, and even down to what’s the next smallest milestone. What down is it, what’s the difference to the next first down, they’ve crammed a ton of information into the scoreboard and it helps you understand where you are. So thinking about your team, when it comes to your team, what scoreboard are you using? You need to be able to have that scoreboard in front of you, so that you can evaluate how you’re doing.

[00:17:58] If it’s early in the game and your team’s not doing very well, there’s time to make adjustments, there’s time to make decisions. But the approach that you take in the last two minutes of the game may not be the same approach that you take in the first half of the game. And so understanding where you are and all of the factors that lead to success, we know at the end of the game the only thing that matters is what was on the scoreboard, but during the game, during the game there’s so many factors that influence what you do and how things are going to work.

[00:18:30] If you want to make course corrections, seeing the score, knowing where you are, watching your progress, the rate of change, the rate of improvement, all those things factor in to your success. You can’t win without knowing what the score needs to be, and how do you begin to define that scoreboard? Well, it might be, we’re going to deliver System X, by Y date, but even within that you probably need to go a lot deeper. Just like you have the score, and then you have the down and distance in football, you have to know what’s the next thing the customer’s looking at. What’s the next milestone that matters, what’s the next deliverable that matters, and can we all agree on what that looks like? Making sure that we’re all on the same page about what success looks like is really what the scoreboard is all about. Your team members need a scoreboard to know whether they’re getting it done or not.

[00:19:33] If you ask your team members to fill out a one-question survey and the question is, “How am I measuring your success?” I bet you’d be astonished by the variety of answers that you get back from people, even if you think you’ve been crystal clear. One advantage to a centrally-published scoreboard is that everybody can see where they are and they can agree.

[00:20:00] I think I may have shared this before, but I was working on a project recently where we were doing some volunteer work and we were assembling things as part of the volunteer work. And there were multiple stations that were doing the same job, and what we found was the team that was upstream from us making the stuff that we had to do the next part on, wasn’t getting very much done. And I sat back and tried to not get involved in changing things around, but I watched other teams who were doing the same job being much more productive. And eventually I got frustrated and I went up and I asked them, “Hey, how’s it going?” And they said, “It’s going great! We’re making a lot of progress. We’re moving really fast. We’re working as a well-oiled machine. This is fantastic.” And I said to them, “Wait a minute, wait. Do you realize that other teams are producing more than you’re producing?” They said, “No way! There is no way that other teams could do more than we’re doing.” They didn’t have a scoreboard, and without a scoreboard, their internal feedback mechanism told them everything was going well when it really wasn’t. And I’d be willing to bet that you probably have some of that going on within your organization as well, so how is your team being measured?

[00:21:19] Now, one thing that you may get frustrated by when I share this is, you might say, “Look Tom, I’m not the boss. I’m not able to make them do anything. They don’t have to listen to me at all.” Well, first of all, let me assure you that even if you were the boss, you couldn’t make them do anything anyway, so what you need to do is get clarity about the scoreboard. How is your customer keeping score? What measurements are relevant for your team members to know? Are they producing enough widgets fast enough? Are they solving the right business problems that your customer cares about? What are the things that matter to the customer? Not the things that matter to you internally. The people that are paying your paycheck, what do they care about? The people that are buying those services, what matters to them? And those are the items that need to go on the scoreboard, particularly when you’re working with a remote team.

[00:22:30] I shared with you a minute ago about my client who was frustrated with his remote team’s production. Until he got on the same page with them about what the expectations were, he just didn’t know exactly what they were working on and he didn’t know how productive they were, whether they were actually delivering value, the kind of value that he needed. Let me just encourage you to think about what can you do to document what matters. What matters to the customer, what matters to your management, and find a way to put that into one place, a one-page report, some indicator of how things are going. Once you have the scoreboard identified and you get people to agree what the score is and what the score should be at the end, now you can get everybody making the right kinds of decisions.

[00:23:30] Let me give you just a few more things to think about from this law of the scoreboard. First, what is the scoreboard for your team? How are you measuring progress? Is it modules of code delivered? Is it business problems solved? Is it revenue? Is it the level of excellence or innovation? How do you keep score? That’s a critical question to answer, and it’s a good one to talk to the whole team about. What are we measuring today? Heck, what should we be measuring? Once you’ve decided from a team perspective what those measurements looks like, now you can start to measure yourself individually and you can challenge your teammates to measure themselves individually. What should you be keeping track of to make sure you’re doing your best? How can you be on your A game to deliver for your team?

[00:24:30] Now remember, leadership is influence, it’s not title, it’s not role, it’s not position. It’s your ability to influence other people. You can be a team leader even if you’re the person on the bottom rung of the ladder that you’re on. And let me just read to you some ideas that John shares about becoming a better team leader. John says, “If you lead the team, you have primary responsibility for checking the scoreboard and communicating the team’s situation to its members. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to do it all by yourself, but you do need to make sure that team members continually evaluate, adjust, and make decisions as quickly as possible. That is the key to winning. Do you have a system to make sure that happens, or do you generally rely on your intuition? Using intuition is fine, as long as you have some fail-safe backups to make sure you don’t let the team down. Evaluate how consistently and effectively you consult your scoreboard. If you’re not doing it as well as you should, then create a system that helps you to do it or empowers others on your team to share that responsibility.” I think that’s a great suggestion from John Maxwell about how to improve teamwork by leveraging the law of the scoreboard, and that’s today’s Thought Leader Segment.

Episode Hack

Tom: [00:26:27] In today’s episode, we’ve been talking about how can you get better results when you’re working with a remote team. In the Coach’s Mailbox segment, we talked about how you have to be intentional about making a personal connection with people to make a difference at work. In the Thought Leader segment, we talked about the law of the scoreboard and how having an agreed standard for performance is critically important to getting the team to deliver the things that are most important.

[00:26:59] For today’s Episode Hack, I want to ask you, who is the most difficult person on your team? Who frustrates you? Who is it that just makes you crazy? What personal connection have you made with them? What is it you know about them, their family, their occupation, their recreation, their message or mission? What do you know about what makes them tick and what they want? For today’s Hack, I want you to decide what you can do to improve that connection. Think about what you can do to make the time to reach out to that one person and learn more about what matters to them so that you can be more personally connected with them, more relating to the things of their world. Remember, I mentioned that on the brighthillgroup.com website, in this episode there is a link to the Making a Personal Connection one-pager, and that would be a good place to start when you want to look at how can you improve the connection you make with somebody else. And that is today’s Episode Hack.

Closeout

[00:28:15] 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 “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.

[00:28:39] 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:

We all know difficult people. In this episode, Tom helps you learn how to work with the ones in your life!

• Help your employees and coworkers recognize and focus on the right goals
• Beware of “the Bozo Bit”.
• Learn to make difficult people understand you!

Resource Download:

Appreciation Starter Script – This guide helps you get people on your side by giving you ways to compliment them. The script contains positive things you can say to others when you can’t think of any!

Transcript:

Sponsored by Geek to Great

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[00:00:57] 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

[00:01:20] Today, I want to talk about something I know is relevant. It’s a problem that I face all the time and I’m sure it’s something you’ve had to deal with. It’s dealing with difficult people. Now, I worked in tech for a long time and I understand that technology is not simple. In fact, when technology works, it’s fantastic. And when it doesn’t work, you’re hating life. And as hard as technology is, in my experience, people are harder. As challenging as it is to do the technical work that we do, dealing with people sometimes can be the most frustrating thing that we have to do. So in today’s episode, I want to talk about a couple of things that you can do to make a big difference in the way that you interact with others and will help you significantly in the way that you deal with those difficult people.

Coach’s Mailbox.

Tom: [00:02:50] Today’s email comes from Jeff, one of my clients. Jeff writes, “Tom, I’m supposed to be leading some team members to get work done. But instead of focusing on the work, they seem to bicker over stupid little stuff. It makes me crazy. I mean, aren’t these people grown adults? How am I supposed to get work done when they spend their time arguing over nothing?” Well, Jeff, I’m really glad you asked that question because it’s an important one and it’s one that many of us struggle with. In fact, I would suggest to you when you ask the question, “Aren’t these people grown adults?” The answer is, “Actually, no.” No, they’re not grown adults. They’re actually grown children.

[00:03:45] Now, a lot of times, parents think that their children will watch what they do and just start doing what they do. Now many times, that’s true, but many times children don’t know what to do. And when it comes to parenting, we want to give our kids specific and direct instruction about every little thing. Now, how does that translate in to the work place? Well, the fact is that most of the time, people have never been given specific and clear instruction about what it is they need to do to be successful. Common sense is not common practice. Common sense is not common practice. And one of the things that I am passionate about is when it comes to leading people, you have to teach them every little thing.

[00:04:40] Now when I say, “Every little thing,” I mean things like “Here’s how we shake hands: we make eye contact, we give a firm grasp, we pump three times. That’s our handshake. And you might say, “Isn’t that ridiculous? Don’t people know how to do it?” The fact is unless we give them specific and direct instruction, clear instruction about what we want, we are not going to get what we’re after. Now, the other thing we run in to that’s a difficulty is we tend to think about what we think is important and they think about what they think is important. So one of the things we have to do as leaders is make sure that everybody’s on the same page about what’s important.

[00:05:28] Now, I know you’re probably thinking, “Isn’t it obvious what’s important? I mean, how crazy must it be for people not to know what’s important?” But I will tell you that people often are confused about what’s important and it’s our job to make it crystal clear. We need to be specific and direct. So let me give you an example here. So, let’s say for the sake of argument that you’re responsible for managing a reporting tool kit, that your job is to work on creating enhancements to that reporting tool kit, and your team members are the ones who either define the business processes and document those, or they’re the ones who actually write the code that implements the changes in reporting. This happens all the time, that whatever part of the work I do, I think is the most important, and I think that’s what matters the most. So if I’m the business analyst, I think that the business analysis work is critically important. If I’m the developer, I think the development of the code is the most important stuff.

[00:06:38] Here’s the problem: they’re both wrong. They’re both wrong. It’s critically important that you do the business analysis. No one would argue with that. It’s fundamentally important that the coding be done properly. Nobody would argue that. However, you need to lay out the vision for the work. So, if you’re responsible for the reporting tool kit, why does the business need the reporting tool kit? What is the business reason behind the existence of the reporting tool kit? Well, reporting tool kits are to help business leaders make good business decisions. Our job is not to document business processes or improve business processes, or write great code. Our job is to solve business problems and work as a team to deliver great value to the business.

[00:07:33] When I focus on optimizing why the coding is so important, or I focus on optimizing why the business analysis is so important, all of a sudden I miss the big picture. And I just want to encourage you that people don’t see the big picture. They don’t understand it unless you make it clear to them. What seems like common sense to you is not common sense to them. Common sense is not common practice. You’ve got to teach them every little thing. So you need to sit down and lay out the vision with them. Our job is to make enhancements to the reporting tool kit so that our senior leaders can make great business decisions. Anything that doesn’t contribute to that goal, it’s not what we do. It’s not where we need to invest our time.

[00:08:21] When you lay it out that way, now there’s a rule of thumb, or a guideline that people can use to help determine whether the work that they’re doing is on target or off target. And it’s a great way for you to ask the question when you find yourself in a conflict with people fighting over stuff that doesn’t really matter, “How does this contribute to our goal of helping our business leaders make better, well-informed decisions based on actual data?” When you reset it for them, now they’ll stop fighting so much about that petty little stuff and be more engaged on the bigger picture issues.

[00:09:00] So, Jeff, getting back to your question, “Aren’t these people grown adults?” The fact is they’re not. They don’t know what they should be thinking about. They don’t know what they should be focusing on, and they don’t know what they should be fighting for. When you lay out for them the vision and you help them redefine what they should optimize for, to optimize around what matters to the business, you’ll be able to overcome many, many of those little issues. And that’s today’s Coach’s Mailbox.

Mentoring Segment.

Tom: [00:09:54] In the Mentoring Segment, I want to talk about a different kind of difficult person. This person is the difficult person who just doesn’t get it. They really don’t get it. I was talking with a developer the other day. He said, “Tom, you don’t understand. My manager doesn’t get it. I mean, we spend our time writing code. We’re developers. And we write in a language that my boss doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know the difference between Java and JavaScript, and we spend our time working on one of those languages and not the other. How am I supposed to deal with somebody like that? He really doesn’t get it.”

[00:10:49] Now, before you just think that that person is a hopeless idiot…I mean, statistically speaking, there is a chance that the person you work for is a hopeless idiot. But before you land on that conclusion, let’s talk about something else. I mean, they are your boss, right? If they really were a hopeless idiot, they probably wouldn’t be your boss, right? So they’re doing something that’s working for them. And I just want to ask you to start to think about, when you think that person’s a hopeless idiot, maybe they’re being measured on something different than you think they’re being measured on. Maybe what you’re looking at is not the thing that matters the most to them. For example, if your boss is your boss and doesn’t get it, maybe you need to ask the question, “What does their boss want from them? What’s their boss looking for? How would their boss decide if they were being successful?” That might give you some clues about what it is that your boss is doing that’s working.

[00:12:00] Now, there is another topic that I want to touch on here, and it’s a danger. It’s actually something that we do mentally that can be a big problem for us, and the concept that I want to share with you is the idea of the Bozo bit. And we know that bits are either 1 or 0. They’re either on or they’re off. And if a bit is on, then it’s 100% on. And if it’s off, then it’s 100% off. Sometimes, what we do is we decide that somebody is a Bozo. Here’s what that looks like. You’re in a meeting and they say something that is completely off topic. They refer to the language that you write in as the wrong language. They misunderstand something that you think is foundational to the technical work that you do and you think, “How could they possibly be in this position and think or believe or act like that? That person is a Bozo!”

[00:13:06] When you have set the Bozo bit in the on position, now, all of a sudden, it doesn’t matter what they say. If they say anything, as far as you’re concerned, you have a filter and your filter says, “A stupid person said this.” And when you believe that a stupid person said this, all of a sudden, you don’t hear them anymore. It doesn’t matter. They might come up with something that is insightful, something that is useful, something that is helpful. But you won’t be able to hear it because your filter is going to say, “A stupid person said this.”

[00:13:50] Now, as I said, in some cases it’s true that whoever is talking has no idea what they’re talking about. But let me challenge that because, statistically speaking, it’s a very small percentage of people who are hopeless idiots. It is more likely that they are doing something that works for them, they’re optimizing for something different than what you’re optimizing for. They’re being recognized and rewarded for different things than you’re being recognized or rewarded for and it’s your job to figure out are they a hopeless idiot and you were correct to set the Bozo bit. Or, maybe, just maybe, you’ve made a mistake. Maybe you shouldn’t have set the Bozo bit for this particular person. So if you’re analyzing whether you’ve incorrectly set the Bozo bit to the on position, here’s some things to think about.

[00:14:51] What is it that has led them to success so far in their career? What is it that they are being measured on that’s rewarding them? People do what works. What is working for this person? Why is it that they are successful in the role that they are in? You need to start thinking about that, because when you start to think about that, it’s possible, very possible, that what you think matters actually is not as important to your organization as you formerly thought. And when you start to look at what’s working for this person, now you’ll be able to change what you’re doing to do what’s working for the organization. Now, I’m not suggesting that you stop doing great work, or that you just suck up to people. That’s now what I’m saying at all. What I’m saying is sometimes the organization values things that are other than what we want.

[00:15:57] I had a colleague one time who was passionate about doing an excellent job of doing desktop engineering, making sure that the operating system on all the computers worked as perfectly as could be made to work in the imperfect world in which we live. He spent hours and hours and hours working on that. The problem was that the organization wanted the desktop engineering done, but their standard for quality was far, far lower than my colleague’s. He was so frustrated. He was angry about the fact that the organization was just stupid for not understanding how important it was to get the desktop operating system configured properly. And he was mad at his boss, who was an idiot, for not understanding why it was so important.

[00:16:47] Now, the thing is we were not in a technology industry. We were in the hospitality industry and our organization fundamentally did not value precise, elegant engineering of the desktop. The organization was very happy to tolerate imperfection and problems on the desktop because it wasn’t worth it to the organization to fix that. They accepted the fact that it was suboptimal because the cost for engineering it to the level that my colleague wanted to do it was too high. So the organization deoptimized around desktop engineering. It wasn’t as good at desktop engineering as we could have been. Did optimize, prioritize their optimization around cost to deliver these systems. That was a reality we lived in. And my colleague spent a lot of time being angry. And he thought the bosses were pretty stupid. So you want to ask, “What is working for them? What are they being measured on?”

[00:17:50] The next thing I want to encourage you to do is recognize that they may be good at something that you’re not good at. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn from him. Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn from him.” So even if this person seems to be less than competent, even if they seem to be less than enjoyable to be around, I want you to think about in what way are they good at something? What is something you can praise in them? Now, I know from my work with people that sometimes you find a co-worker and you think, “Tom, really, seriously, man. There is no way. There is nothing, absolutely nothing that I could say that’d be positive about that.”

[00:18:53] Well, John Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller was the richest man in the world for a long time. He had tremendous success. He had a business partner who was overseeing a venture and that venture lost some money. In fact, it lost a lot of money. This business partner of John Rockefeller’s managed to lose a million dollars of John Rockefeller’s money. And that was when a million dollars was really worth something. I found an online calculator and did an inflation adjustment on that money. It was about $70 million of money that was lost. Seventy million dollars. Now, you can imagine, if you had a business partner who lost $70 million, that let’s just say it would be challenging to find anything positive to say about somebody who made that kind of mistake.

[00:19:47] Now, I don’t know how long John D. Rockefeller spent thinking about what he was going to say, but I’m going to share with you what he did say. When he spoke with his business partner, he said, “Well, at least you saved 60% of our investment. That’s splendid. We don’t always do as well as that upstairs. At least you saved 60% of our investment. We don’t always do as well as that upstairs.” Look at what he did. He found something, ever so small, that he could praise about the fact that the guy hadn’t lost even more money. And then in a self-deprecating way, he said, “Look, we screw up some times, too.”

[00:20:28] That is powerful. Now, it’s powerful for a couple of reasons. One reason it’s powerful is that it lays out for people that their mistake is fixable. It also is something that you could say that they did well. And when you do that, when you find that thing that they do well, “Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn from him,” when you do that, it changes the way they think about you, because you’re all of a sudden valuing the things that they value, recognizing their contribution, appreciating the things they do and the things that they believe matter, and it’s going to change their way that they interact with you. It’s going to change the way that they think about you, the way they communicate with you. It’s very powerful. Not only that, but when you start to find those things that really you can appreciate about the other person, it changes the way that you think about them.

[00:21:32] You see, when you’ve got the Bozo bit in the on position, it doesn’t matter what they say. It doesn’t matter what they do because they are a Bozo. And when you are able to begin to flip that bit off, and then really intentionally think about what it is that they’re saying, and see whether it is valuable or not valuable, it changes you, and it changes them. It’s very powerful. Now, one of the resources I’m going to be sharing as a part of this episode is what I call the Appreciation Starter Script. Sometimes, we just don’t have the words to say to recognize people. So for example, some things you might be able to look for are things like, “You are really good at being customer-focused. Sometimes we get caught in the details and we don’t see that.” Another is, “You do a great job of defining what the business problem is.” A third one might be, “You’re really good at understanding how the political winds blow around here.”

[00:22:45] I heard a quote from Ghandi. He said, “A man who says he is not interested in politics is like a drowning man who says he has no interest in water.” Politics happen all around us, and we would be wise to understand those politics. Another one might be, “You’re really good at getting us all on the same page, making sure that we’ve communicated clearly where we’re going and what needs to happen.” Now, in the Appreciation Starter Script that I’m going to include on the Resources page with the podcast, that’s just a few of the ones that are in the list. There are a whole bunch of them and they’re just different things you can look for and some ways that you might say it. Now, don’t necessarily copy word-for-word what I would say, but think through how you would say it. Take what I’m putting out there and…you can use it word-for-word, but it’s more authentic if you put it in your words. I’m just giving you some examples of things to look for and things you can say.

[00:23:48] So I just want to wrap up by saying it’s possible they’re a hopeless idiot. But something’s working for them and you should look for things you can appreciate about the things that they’re doing, because that will help you in your relationship with them, and it’s going to help you work with them more effectively. And that’s today’s Mentoring Segment.

Episode Hack.

Tom: [00:24:34] On today’s episode, I talked about how people are not grown adults. You’ve got to teach them every little thing. Common sense is not common practice. And also, people do what works, period. People just do what works. So whatever they are doing that’s working for them, they’re going to continue to do. So for today’s hack, I want you to think about what’s working. What are they measured on? What are they optimizing for? If you can figure out what they’re optimizing for, then you can frame up your requests, frame up your interactions around things in a way that matches what matters to them, in a way that matches what they’re being measured on. When you can talk about the things that they care about, you’re going to have their attention. And that’s today’s Episode Hack.

[00:25:29] Now, as I’m wrapping up today, I want to say, “Thank you.” I want to thank you for bringing me with you, because I know that when you’re listening to a podcast, you might be driving in your car or going for a run, walking the dog or any other of a thousand activities that you want to be involved in. And I just want to say, “Thank you.” I appreciate you for giving me some of your time. Now, go figure out how to deal with some of those difficult people, would you?

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[00:25:58] Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. You could 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.

[00:26:43] 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.

In this special Christmas bonus podcast episode, I take you along with my boys as we work on building an old school game console from some parts we ordered online.  We had a great time, and I think that you’ll enjoy hearing about our adventure.