Friday morning, I woke up with a horrendous cold. My throat was sore, my sinuses were stuffy, my ears hurt, and my nose couldn't find the "off" valve on the snot spigot. (Hope you weren't eating...) I couldn't sleep, and my brain was as stuffy as my sinuses. I decided to stay home, since I was non-functional and felt pretty crappy.
Mid-morning, I had to troubleshoot a minor (but extremely annoying) issue that some of the users were having. I felt like it was a Sisyphean task with my stuffy brain, but got it done. The next issue, however, I could not in any way solve, and I had to leave that to my extremely capable staff.
Obviously, I found it frustrating that I wasn't operating at 100%. I knew that I had disappointed people, who were hoping that I had some insight to add to the technical challenge.
After my nap, I realized that I tend to assume that my geeks will always be operating at 100%, and so do our customers (the infamous "users"). And this is a fundamental fallacy that many leaders tend to follow, because not everyone can be 100% all the time. In fact, in today's stressful world, it is probably rare to find someone at 100% any part of the time.
I haven't yet figured out a way to communicate this to the users ("Please be patient--we're human and trying our best, but we can only do so much" doesn't play well), but I can certainly keep it in mind while leading my geeks.
Monday, November 24, 2008
On Assumption
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3 comments:
I think it's actually important not to try and operate at 100% under normal circumstances. Most of what we do in our lives is a marathon, not a sprint, and you have to set a pace that's sustainable.
But perhaps more importantly, the only way that you can respond to an extreme event is if you've got excess, unused capacity that can be brought into play. This is what turns random fluctuations into crises: the closer to your limits you're operating, the smaller the outlier that will push you outside the bounds of what your buffer can handle and make the system have to drop something to accommodate it...
*Very* good point about slack. Although there are ways around it, like having SLAs with consulting firms...
I find it much easier to communicate the "we're trying our best" message when people know you. If the IT department is nameless and faceless to your users, it's much harder for them to be seen as human, and the expectations go up.
When the people trying their best are the same people you had lunch with last week, play poker with, or spent some time chatting about your kids with in the hallway, you are much more understanding of the fact that they don't always have the answers right away. You're best served finding ways to bridge the gap so that you don't have "users" and "IT", you have a group of people working together, just in different roles.
Of course, that's easier said than done!
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