by becki on February 28, 2010
I take my inspiration where I can find it, and this time it is from an episode of Star Trek Next Generation. Please bear with me as I briefly recount the episode, because I believe it is very appropriate to many people who want to be a leader but do nothing to become one.
In this episode,Tapestry, Captain Picard is severely wounded and his artificial heart is damaged. Picard drifts off into a white light where he finds Q, the meddling, omnipotent, troublemaker. Q asks Picard if he has regrets and Picard eventually says that he was too brash, arrogant, and reckless in his youth. In fact, that is how he came to need an artificial heart. Picard took on three large, nasty tempered beings known as Nausicaans. In a flash back we witness one of the Nausicaans as he runs a large knife through Picard’s back, through his heart, and out his chest. The young Picard laughs at the site of the knife blade sticking out his chest as he falls to the ground.
Q grants Picard a second chance to be less reckless and arrogant. Then Picard sees his life as it would have been, which is a low level science officer. No one notices him and the senior officers have a difficult time recalling his name.
Picard asks Troi and Riker to give their assessment of him. They use words like, “thorough”, “reliable”, and “punctual”. Picard asks why he is not considered command material. Troi says, “You’ve had lofty goals but have never been willing to do what is necessary to attain them.” Riker says he needs to, “Take chances. Stand out in a crowd. Get noticed.”
Picard talks to Q and Q says that this Picard, “Drifted from one assignment to the next without a plan.” “Played it safe and never got noticed by anyone.” This Picard took none of the risks that Captain Picard had.
How about you? Are you a risk taker, do you take on assignments that are outside your comfort zone? Do you take any kind of ownership, especially when it technically is not your responsibility? Do you fix things you find that are not up to standard even if you didn’t make the mistake? Do you hold your peers accountable?
If you don’t take risks, if you don’t take ownership even (especially) when it is not assigned to you, you are not command material. Act like a leader if you want to be one. Do the job you want before you have the title, and when the job is available, everyone will know that you are the right person for it.
Don’t drift along and just take what is given to you. Don’t end up regretting missed opportunities as Picard did when he saw what might have been: “I would rather die as the man I was than live the life I just saw.”
by becki on February 20, 2010
One of the most difficult things that I had to learn as a new IT manager was how to say no. It literally caused me emotional grief to say no when asked if I could take on a new or ad hoc task. After all, I didn’t get promoted because I couldn’t deliver results. I also like to help people, so it was particularly difficult to say no to someone when I knew that what they were asking was important to them.
I also started to notice that if I was in a meeting with the senior leaders and I said that I couldn’t do something because I either didn’t have resources available or didn’t have a budget, the senior leaders were visibly disappointed. It was at that time my boss taught me how to do what I call “say yes sideways”. He told me that it doesn’t matter what we work on, we just have to let the decision makers know the consequences of one choice versus another.
For example, let’s say that you have several new system installations going on, you are testing a new version of your primary application, and are maintaining your deployed systems. All of your people are occupied and working 45-50 hours per week. Then you are asked to work on a new project that has no known business model with half-baked revenue projections. The evaluation will take six weeks of your best engineer and two junior engineer’s time. This is one third of your manpower.
You may be tempted to say no to such a request. Instead, say “Yes, we can do that but we will have to stop work on one of our other projects. Our installations are contractual and revenue earning, so you might not want to stop work on those. Our software evaluation is required to roll out the new product feature that several customers have requested and which we have promised to deliver by the end of the month. We could extend our response time for customer requests or service interruptions, but that would negatively effect our customer service. It’s a manpower availability problem, so one option might be to borrow engineers from another group, but hiring contractors probably will not be an option due to the time it takes for them to ramp up. ”
Your response indicates that you are trying to find a solution but are also letting them know that each choice has a cost. You might be asked follow up questions about the revenue that you will lose by shifting priorities, so it is a good idea to know the revenue projections for each of the projects you are working on. Frankly, you should know this anyway.
The senior leaders attitude toward me changed once I learned this lesson. I was viewed as a valuable contributor who knew how technology supported our business goals and how what I did affected the bottom line. I was trusted as someone who was making decisions based on business rules rather than being slavishly devoted to “my” project plans.
So next time you are tempted to say no to a request, instead say “Yes, but here are the costs. What choice do you want to make?”
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