On My Values

My values as an IT Director and as a human being:

1. Everyone is equally deserving of my respect (until they do something pretty extreme to lose it). My staff, my co-w0rkers, the end-users at my firm, my family, complete strangers across the world, and absolutely everyone is a valuable person to me. My references to "geeks" or "users" are not meant to be condescending in any way.
2. I shoot straight. I value complete honesty, and hold myself to that standard. What I say is what I mean; there is pretty much never a hidden meaning. One drawback is that I might not "get" that others read negative meaning into my statements.
3. I work hard. I am an incredibly driven person. If I don't pay attention, I will work myself until I am absolutely sick. Do you see a tweet at 10:12 AM? Chances are that I took 30 seconds to tweet between tasks, but since I'll work through lunch and far into the evening, I hope you don't begrudge me that 30 seconds. Do you see a blog post at 10:13 AM? Well, chances are that I wrote it at some obscene hour in the middle of the night and set it to post during business hours so that more people would see it.
4. I take care of my staff. I rarely ask anyone to work harder than I push myself, and I usually have much more sense when it comes to their sanity or health than I do with my own. I also consider it to be part of my job to get to know who they are inside and outside of work. Maybe you'll come across a non-work conversation once in a while, but as I mention in my post On Geek Socialization, this is a good thing for the team and the firm's IT service.
   
5. I care about the customers. I have my job so that I can provide the best service possible to the end-users at my firm. I call them "users", not to be condescending, but because that is the common term used in IT, and this is a blog for and about leaders of geeks.
6. My family is important to me. I almost always put work first, but I've learned that there are certain things I need to do in order to keep my family speaking to me and keep myself sane.
   
7. Laughter is important. I like to have fun at work. Heaven knows, we all spend enough hours there... I go into more detail in my post On Humor.
8. I have feelings. Yes, they get hurt sometimes. Especially since I'm a generally positive person, and I greatly dislike it when people misinterpret things that I do and say as hurtful. I get stressed sometimes. I make mistakes. I'm human. I try to apologize and move on.
   

As a blogger, I should mention that none of the geeks mentioned in any post on this blog is a real geek. Do you think you see one of my staff here? Sorry, but you're wrong. Maybe something might resemble something one of them did one time, but it could just as easily be based on a news article or anecdote from a colleague.

On Good Management

Recently, I was reading an Inc magazine column by Joel Spolsky on Servant Leadership. The first page of the article made sense to me. Other than thinking, "Yuck--toilet cleaning," and then, "Okay; way too much info on bolts and plaster dust," the first page made sense to me, because it talked about leading by example. Clicking over to page two, however, is where the article hit a couple of discordant notes.

First odd note: Joel pulled his CFO off of an important customer-facing project in order to hang blinds and demonstrate to his staff that it's management's job to help their employees get work done. Is that management's job? Absolutely. Was pulling the CFO off a customer project in order to demonstrate a point a good idea? Not so much. In pulling the CFO, Joel told his staff, "What happens inside this office is more important than customers or making money."

My problem with this is that it shows an inherent lack of balance. I firmly believe that staff, customers, and revenues need to all balance each other out in order to keep morale up, keep people working, keep customers happy, and stay in business. Is it tricky to maintain this balance? Yes. Does it look to me like Joel knows about and maintains this balance? Certainly not from his actions with the CFO.

Second odd note: You want to run your company like a research university? Really? The goals of a company (create value for the shareholders; don't go under) are really not the same as the goals of a research university (education, research, scholarship). In a university, there's also a wide divide between the "haves" (the research faculty) and the "have nots" (the administrative staff who "gets stuff done)--do you really want to create such a culture divide in a company. Especially in a start-up?

It's hard enough sometimes to be part of the non-legal staff in a law firm (although my current firm's attorneys do an excellent job of treating IT with respect and like human beings). Once upon a time, however, I was a medical secretary at a university. Let me tell you, the class divide was gigantic, and it was quite clear that I wasn't empowered to do a thing other than file, schedule, answer phones, and gossip in the lunch room.

Once I got through those two giant issues in the article, I found myself wondering about Joel's two management trainee examples. It looks, to me, like he was looking for lead engineers or architects, and probably missed true management potential. Good managers and leaders don't necessarily have the greatest ideas; they just know how to enable others to get the job done Joel said this at the beginning of the column, but his management examples don't support his statement. The "good" example was of someone who decided that his way was the best way,and dragged everyone along for the ride. Not my style. Effective sometimes, but also not servant leadership.

So I had to wonder about the "bad" trainee. Was he truly waiting for the title, or was he busy building relationships with the developers in order to get stuff done in the future? Was he not "thinking about new features we should develop" because he already identified that the developers already had great ideas? Was he working with the developers to flesh out the benefits of those ideas, thereby winning the developers' trust behind the scenes? Was he building a stable foundation such that he could step into a true leadership role upon getting the title?

We may not know the answers to these questions, and each leader has a different style and idea of leadership and management. I can tell you, however, that I won't be modeling my style on Joel Spolsky's. I want to work for the business, inspire my team, and recognize good background work in my staff.

Apologies...

Sorry about the brief blog hiatus; I've been working too hard. And too much. I'll have a post by the end of the weekend, assuming I don't have to work again.

Why did I get an MBA?

I'm glad you asked...

http://www.simmons.edu/reconnect/2008/12/but-what-about-that-mba.html