#4 June 2007
From Technologist to Leader
your path... your process... your success...
STCerri International Newsletter
Dear Reader,
Welcome to the June 2007 edition of my Newsletter, "From Technologist to Leader". Once again you will find useful tips and information to help you with your career advancement. In this month's newsletter you'll find the third tip in each of three categories: Being an Exceptional Technical Professional; Transitioning from Technologist to Manager; and Technical Manager/Leader... and you'll find other useful information as well.
Be well,
Steven Cerri
In This Issue
A New Way of Thinking About "Your Path to Manager and Leader"
I want to put forth a new model that I believe is a better and faster way to move from technologist to leader.
Much of the difficulty with the typical process of transitioning from technologist to leader rests in the idea that in order to become a manager, the technologist must move from the technical individual contributor role to the manager role by passing through an intermediate phase as a part-time technical individual contributor and part-time manager. This 3-step, schizophrenic process is difficult for anyone and it typically looks like this:
Step #1: Individual Technical Contributor
Step #2: Part-Time Individual Technical Contributor and Part-Time Manager
Step #3: Full-Time Technical Manager
The result of this process is often a technical professional who falls back to performing individual contributor work when under stress and a technical manager who has difficulty with the people issues necessary to be a successful manager.
While the "dual-hat" mode of Step #2 is definitely required of each of us in order to move from technologist to manager, there is a way to minimize the difficulty of this phase and increase your success rate in becoming a manager. A much better approach is to introduce an intermediate step between technologist and manager, a step I call "Organizational Contributor".
My approach looks like this:
Step #1: Individual Technical Contributor
Step #2: Organizational Contributor
Step #3: Part-Time Technical Individual/Organizational Contributor and Part-Time Manager
Step #4: Full-Time Technical Manager
The result is a smoother and more successful transition to technical management and leadership and here is why:
Step #1: Individual technical contributor.
This is the position at which you probably started your career. Right out of college or training you begin as a technical professional. Or more accurately, you began as an individual contributor. Maybe you are still an individual contributor. You do your own work and you get rewarded for your own work.
Step #2: Organizational technical contributor.
This is a position in which you expand your perception of your role in the organization. You no longer contribute merely your own work. You contribute to the team as part of the team, sometimes leading, sometimes following, sometimes invisible, and yet always contributing beyond yourself as an individual. In this position you don't just solve the problems that are presented to you. You attempt to integrate your solution into the solutions of the whole team in a way that makes your solution so much a part of the whole solution that your contribution looses it's individuality. This requires a new way of thinking. Not the thinking of an individual contributor, but the thinking of a team member, a team contributor, an organizational contributor. From this position, the transition to manager/leader is an easy and much more comfortable step.
Step #3: Part-Time Technical Organizational/Individual Contributor and Part-Time Manager.
This the position all of us have to pass through. It can be a difficult and confusing passage with mixed responsibilities. However, when you the technologist, have spent some time as an "Organizational Contributor" this passage can be experienced as a much smoother process. The time spent as an Organizational Contributor can also increase the probability that you will successfully transition to management and that you will actually enjoy it.
Step #4: Manager & Leader.
This is obviously the position in which you manage tasks and lead teams to the achievement of a desired outcome. As I indicated in Step #2, the transition from my proposed Step #3 to Step #4 is a much easier step than from the "old" Step #2 to the "old" Step #3 which is typically the way it's done. It's time to change!
By inserting this new Step #2, Organizational Contributor, the new thought processes and mental maps necessary for management and leadership can be practiced without risking your career or a major embarrassment.
Summarizing:
(Notice the overlap. This overlap is what makes this approach smoother and more successful.)
New Tip #3 for being an Exceptional Technical Professional! (Steps #1 and #2)
Tip #3: "Self Management: Getting Things Done"
Most people think self management is about time management. They think it's about things-to-do lists, action items, and the like. That's NOT what I'm talking about here. Self Management is NOT time management. Self Management is the ability to focus on what needs to be done and then doing it. Being able to accomplish what is necessary to accomplish.
Self-Management is best defined as the following:
This is also not about having a clean desk. In fact, there is no evidence that people with clean desks are better self-managers than those buried under paper. Every self-managed producer has self-organizing processes that work for him or her based on who they are and how they work best. There is no one perfect way for everyone. So don't let someone tell you they know how you should be organizing yourself. Look at how you work best. Feel what works for you and what doesn't.
Do not measure your productivity by the number of check marks on your things-to-do list. Instead, rate what you do by its contribution to the critical path. One or two tasks on your critical path completed in an hour, can be worth a day spent checking off non-critical items from your things-to-do list.
The more you embrace the concept of self management, the more you will find yourself making your own decisions regarding how you do your work and how you prioritize your time within the requirements of your tasks. As you become better at this you will find you will be given more and more independence. This is the path to organizational contributor, and it is ultimately the path to manager.
One word of caution. Self Management does not mean that you work while keeping your boss in the dark. It doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want. Self Management means that you know how to focus on what your organization thinks is important and someone doesn't have to look over your shoulder all the time to make certain that you are doing it.
New Tip #3 for Becoming a Technical Manager/Leader (Steps #2 and #3)
Tip #3: "Do You Want To Be Right or Effective"
As a technologists, how many different ways were you conditioned and taught to seek the right answer? Here are just two:
1. In school, in college or in your technical education, you were taught to provide the "right" answers on your exams. The right answers meant good grades. The wrong answers meant poor grades. The right answers often had to be given to two or three decimal points. Ambiguity was not allowed. Your exams were not "blue-book, essay" exams. They were rigorous tests to find that one and only right answer.
2. At work, when you provide the correct answers you get a positive annual review and a good annual raise. If you provide wrong answers too often you're let go.
As you succeeded at work and began to take on bigger and more complex tasks, you began to notice that the "team" became more and more important. At some point your best or right answer wasn't what was necessary. All of a sudden, your best answer was supposed to integrate into the "team" answer in a way that made the team's answer the "right" answer. The right answer literally went from being "your right answer" to being the "team's right answer".
I can tell you that for most technical professionals, this shift is a "big deal"! It's not easy going from being rewarded for "your right answer" to being rewarded for giving it up for the "team's right answer". However, this is the shift I talked about earlier in this newsletter when I talked about "individual contributor" versus "organizational contributor". This is what I mean when I ask technical professionals whether they want to be "right" or be "effective". If they want to be right they are thinking like an individual contributor. If they want to be effective, they are thinking like an organizational contributor (and, significantly, like a manager).
This is the shift that must be made to make your successful transition to management and leadership!
New Tip #3 for Technical Managers (Steps #3 and #4)
Tip #3: "Secure Resources and Remove Obstacles"
Here I want to introduce the third of Six Functions of Successful Executives©. Regardless of whether you are a supervisor or a CEO or an entrepreneur or any level in between, one of your functions is to secure the resources your team needs to do their jobs. Who else is going to do that? Who else has the power and the authority and the knowledge needed to know what resources are needed and how to obtain those resources?
Likewise, along with securing resources, the successful executive also is required to remove the obstacles that stand in the way of the team doing their jobs. With these two tasks, the successful executive paves the way for his or her team to apply their expertise to the task or tasks at hand.
Securing the resources may often take the form of purchasing equipment, or office space, or health insurance, or capital, or additional people. The successful executive is constantly asking "What is it my team needs that they can't get for themselves?"
Removing obstacles may take the form of talking to other departments to secure cooperation, working with vendors to secure shipments or commitments, or working with manufacturing to schedule processes. The successful executive is constantly asking "What obstacles are in the way of my team completing their tasks successfully?
In either case, the executive may be working within the company's formal or informal organizational structure or may be working outside the corporate structure altogether. The key to understanding this third executive function is to understand that the executive stands at the boundary between the team and the resources necessary for and the obstacles hindering the team from achieving their objectives.
On-Going Tele-Seminars to Choose From!
As I said in my last newsletter, I've been working on scheduling more teleseminars. I've done it. I've scheduled a teleseminar per month for the remainder of this year.
I just completed a teleseminar titled Models of Human Communication. It will be available on my website, www.stevencerri.com in July.
Another teleseminar is scheduled for July 19th at 2PM (Pacific Savings Time). This upcoming teleseminar is titled: Personal Behavioral Sub-Routines (PBSRs).
Here is what the upcoming teleseminar is about.
We all have a pretty good idea of the software that runs on our PCs. While we might not know the details, we know that software is running somewhere on our computers. Sometimes we interact with the software directly, such as when we use our web browser to access email, like you did to access this email. Other times, the software is running in the background as when your browser decides, based on your input settings, which "cookies" to let into your system and which to exclude. You don't actually interact with the software, but you do see the effects of it running.
Human beings, I believe, run pretty much the same way. We have our obvious programs. We like certain foods; we drive our cars to work and back home in a certain manner; we use our speaking voice in a certain way to emphasize and de-emphasize specific ideas. We interact with our world through the conscious choices we make.
However, we also have those programs that run in the "background", like the "cookie" program on your PC. These background programs control a wide variety of apparent choices we make much of the time that are really not choices. They run our bodily functions such as our respiration; they run the way we respond to a challenge at work; they run the way we feel when we are in front of an audience giving a presentation; they run the way we feel when we are in a sky scrapper looking out the 60th floor window. These hidden, behind the scenes programs have a great deal of control over our behaviors and yet they often go unnoticed (until, of course, we do notice them... often too late to do anything about them). These hidden programs are the programs that dictate how we respond to new challenges as we advance our careers. I call these hidden and important programs, Personal Behavioral Sub-Routines (PBSRs).
In the July 19th teleseminar, I'll discuss some of the more common useful and not-so-useful PBSRs that affect our world as technical professionals. Join me and your teleseminar colleagues for a very interesting and eye-opening discussion. You'll learn how to notice your own PBSRs as well as those in other people and you'll learn which ones will help you become a manager and which ones will stand in your way. See you there!
Steven's Blog
You can check out my latest blog entries at http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/index/
CDs
There are several CDs available and in July I'll be adding my latest teleseminar CD: "Human Communication Models"
Some of the CDs now available are:
CD #1: "Delegation" teleseminar
CD #2: "10 Success Criteria for Becoming A Manager" teleseminar
CD #3: "Transitioning from Technologist to Manager" (2-CD set)
To purchase CDs click on the "Products" button.
Free Stuff
Check out the page http://stevencerri.com/index.php/articles/index/ (also known as the "FREE STUFF" button). There you'll find several articles and other useful information, all of it FREE.
Some of the Free Articles include...
Coaching
Coaching is one of the fastest ways to accelerate your career advancement. Coaching can be used....
If you are an Individual Contributor and you want to be better or more rapidly advance to Organizational Contributor.... or....
If you are an Organizational Contributor and you want to be better or more rapidly advance into Part-Time Organizational/Individual Contributor and Part-Time Manager/Leader... or....
If you are a Part-Time Organizational/Individual Contributor and Part-Time Manager/Leader and you want to move fully into Technical Management and Leadership...
Then coaching is probably a good bet for the "fast plane" to your next professional destination!
To learn more about coaching, click on the coaching link on my website.
Skype Has Been Added
For those of you who would rather use Skype for our coaching sessions, especially those who are international, Skype has now been added as a capability. Just download Skype to your computer and set up an appointment, and we can conduct a tele-coaching session with both voice and video!
STCerri International is focused solely on helping technical professionals transition to management and leadership and on helping technical managers and leaders build environments that allow this process to continue on an on-going basis. The difference that makes the difference is that Steven Cerri is an engineer, a scientist, and a businessman. He teaches, trains, and coaches technologists from the point of view of having done it himself.
I hope you find the information in this newsletter and other products useful in your career advancement. Send questions, comments, and suggestions to: steven@stevencerri.com
Be well,
Steven Cerri
STCerri International
Copyright 2007© STCerri International and Steven Cerri. You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it. I only ask that you reproduce sections in whole and you give attribution to STCerri International. Thank you.