January 31st, 2015
Reflecting back to the days when I first started my career in Information Technology as an eLearning developer I must admit, compared to what I do today as an Information Technology Officer, I do occasionally miss doing programming as a full-time job. A day in the life of a developer was very straight forward. Usually the week would start off with a stand-up meeting to report our progress, recap the work assignments, and be reminded of upcoming deliverable/milestones. From there, the rest of the week was all about me just doing my job, how I liked to do it, and when I chose to do it, so long as I hit the delivery dates with the work product that was expected. Being a technical professional, the expectation was you were the expert, proficient in the field. Most of the time your manager or supervisor would not interfere with ‘how’ you would carry out your work. The few times they did try to set standards, performance metrics, or were involved in directing ‘how’ each developer should be doing their work, those meetings tended to not end well with all of us (developers) disagreeing and feeling micro-managed.
It was during those types of sessions that my thought about working my way up to a management position started. One characteristic about me is once I set my eye on a goal my planning starts and I am committed to reaching it. Little did I know what started simply as a belief that I could probably do better than others as a manager, because I was technically skilled, turned out to be many years of trial and error, with a lot of lessons learned on my journey. As I continue to learn how to be a better manager today, even with over 12 years in this role, I wish to take this opportunity to share some of my experiences, beliefs, and more importantly some very valuable words from my mentors that guided me throughout the years. I hope you will find value in some of these suggestions as you plan your own career.
Quantify & Measure: When I was promoted to supervisor for the first time overseeing a development team, a perspective was shown to me by my manager. You are not given a team of four people by the company to just do work for you as you see fit, you are allocated $500,000 (my team’s salary) of company’s money a year that you need to make good decisions about allocating it with regards to what the team should be doing, how they do it, and when they do it so to make sure the value of the team’s output at the end is higher than $500,000 to the business. Obviously the statement was simple to understand but it took me a few years to actually comprehend and master. There will be more on this concept in future newsletters.
Decisions vs Directives: During the same period of time as a supervisor, I received some sound advice from another manager. As a first-level supervisor or manager, you have to accept the fact that 75% of the time you are executing decisions/directives that you don’t get to make. Some directives you will understand while others you will never comprehend. However your promotion to the next level of management depends on how well you motivate your team to deliver on those decisions. Within the same discussion, he cautioned me that with supervisory authority there is a responsibility to act upon and enforce those decisions on behalf of the organization. Simply put, if I have issues with a decision or directive close the door and talk it out with my manager. Whatever the final outcome is, I have to direct the team to carry it out as if it was my decision. He went on sharing that as one moves up the management chain, the proportion of executing other people’s decisions decreases while the proportion of decisions you get to make increases. The caveat is the accountability level to the judgments being made also increases with rank.
Conveyor Belt Phenomena: As an ITO at the Department of Public Social Services, an observation made with one of my supervisor, which became a regular lecture topic of mine, was the ‘conveyor belt phenomena’ within large organizations. The phenomena can surface within any level of the organization, not typically associated to just management. However, the impact to business is much greater if it does happen in supervisory and management ranks. What we observed was at meetings, there were occasions where team level decisions got escalated up the chain-of-command ‘as-is’ from lead to supervisor then from supervisor to manager, and so on. In other words, when a decision was needed, but it was a hard call to make at the team level because there were multiple constraints to consider with no visible optimal solution, often the problem and constraints were pushed up the chain so the boss could deal with it and tell the team what to do. It is always easier to just do as told, than to figure out a path, recommend it, defend it, and own the execution when approved. In this situation the conveyor belt was moving the problem and constraints up the stations (ranks) where the teams at the stations were not providing any value-adds to the situation, and letting the next station deal with it. We all have a role to play being in charge of a ‘station’, and we are expected to add value (in this case decisions) at each rank. So yes, it is scary to make those determinations with a lot of unknowns as a supervisor or manager, and having to be accountable for them is even more frightening not knowing the result. However, not making one and forfeiting the added value is far more detrimental to the organization. In a learning culture, as long as we continue to push our limits, listen and learn more from all sources around us, and devote our mental capacity to the problems at hand, the decision made will likely not be far off from being the right one. The story goes that Thomas Edison did not successfully create a working light bulb on his first try, he figured out 2,000 wrong ways to make a light bulb before he figured out the right way to do it.
Auto Pilot: Lastly, we are all hired to perform a certain function in the organization. Depending on the units and positions, some work is more repetitive in nature while others deal with far more uncertainty on a day-to-day basis. However, regardless of job class or rank, we are compensated not just for doing the work as assigned, but also based on the mental capacity we bring to doing the work accurately, timely, efficiently, and effectively. This means devoting our mind to what we do, and work as a team to collaborate, improve, and deliver work results as opposed to being on ‘auto pilot’ simply going through the motions of doing work. This is important from my perspective because when one operates in an ‘auto pilot’ mode, the organization does not improve but remains stagnant. In addition, an ‘auto pilot’ attitude towards work is easily recognized by others, and is unfair to those that do bring their mental capacity to work every day. As mentioned earlier, as one moves up the ranks the work requires more dedication of mental abilities and that will only come from having the right attitude. So never under estimate the attitude you bring to work every day as it may be the determining factor for getting the next promotion or not. I always say to my team no matter what your role is, if you adopt the attitude of treating your everyday work like an interview day for the next promotion, you are learning, perfecting and demonstrating your abilities to take on the next job and are therefore better positioned to compete for the promotion. However, if you come into an interview and state ‘if’ you get the job you can show what you can do, then you’ve not really demonstrated your readiness to assume the responsibilities.
I hope sharing my few thoughts on this topic will help those who have a desire to advance their careers into management. Again, this is one man’s perspective, and there are always different approaches to the same goal. You will just have to find what works for you, but I am confident that in finding your own path, you will need to devote your mental capacity to think it through, have the right attitude and discipline to plan and execute the path, and learn a lot more skills than you have today along the way to get there.