#63-7/1/08: Managing Millennials
Managing Millennials
Manage groups or individuals?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, July 1, 2008
Hello everyone!
There was an article published recently in CIO magazine (http://www.cio.com, June 24, 2008, “Coaching Style Matters in Managing Millennials). It stated that those employees that are classified as the Millenial generation are best managed by using Coaching as a management style. It went on to list certain approaches the author thought best for this specific age group.
While there may well be behaviors that people of a similar age have in common, generalizations like that are for managers who don’t have the competence to be managers. (How’s that for a provocative statement?) Classification of people in an attempt to make management “manageable” is not the solution.
The reality is that no one is “managed” as a group. Each person is ultimately managed as an individual. Think about your own situation. When you are being managed by your manager do you feel there is a one-on-one connection to your manager and his or her direction? You aren’t managed as a group. You are managed as an individual.
Try this on. If you are thinking about voting in this years’ presidential election, how have you decided for whom to vote? Have you decided because your friends are voting for him? Have you decided because he represents your party? You may answer “yes” to one or both of these questions and yet here is the question that is most important. Are you casting your vote because the candidate most closely represents, in your mind, who you are?
I’m sure the answer is Yes to the last question. We all vote for the candidate that most closely represents us. Who we are. Voting for a candidate is a personal, one-on-one, individual process.
The same is true for management. All management is one-on-one. Even when we, as managers, are managing a large group, the only reason people decide to follow us is because they “see” something of themselves in us and it’s enough for them to say, “Ok, I’ll follow you.” If it were as easy as grouping people the issue would go away. We’d know how to do it. But the issue doesn’t go away. So the grouping of people must not be working. How about a different approach?
Therefore, as much as we’d like to group people into groups like Gen-X, or Gen-Y, or Millennials, it doesn’t help much. The best approach I’ve found is obviously my approach. I think I’ve developed the best approach and I call it “Contextual Leadership©”. It is composed of two major functions: Contextual Definition© and Hierarchy of Contextual Leadership Styles©. I take a fundamentally different approach.
Contextual Definition looks at seven parameters regarding the direct report, the manager, and the situation and determines the context to be managed. The Hierarchy of Contextual Leadership Styles is a set of eight leadership and management styles that are then selected based on the Contextual Definition. This process will lead to the best management approach for a given individual, manager, and situation.
This negates any concern for what group or generation we are working with, including gender. I keep harping on contextual leadership because I believe it makes management more successful and it makes management much more “manageable”.
Enough said.
Be well,
Steven Cerri
“What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question. More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/
Copyright©2008 STCerri International and Steven Cerri. You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it. If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you.
Posted by Steven Cerri on 07/01 at 04:53 PM (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
#62-6/23/08: You Know You Side With Your Feelings!
You Know You Side With Your Feelings!
Intellect versus emotions. Which rules?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, June 23, 2008
Hello everyone!
Human beings are quite the creatures aren’t they… or more accurately… aren’t we?
That’s a loaded question though… isn’t it?
Here’s what I mean.
The human being. Part primitive emotional throw-back to a creature without language, without the ability to project into the future, without the ability to build complicated tools through higher-order reasoning.
And part advanced intellectual, sentient being, able to project into time forward and backward, with complex written and spoken language, and capable of using higher-order reasoning to leave the planet and explore lands beyond this one.
What a complex, beautiful, disorderly, intricate, elaborate, contradictory, finely honed, mess. We are capable of such horrific deeds and such beautiful accomplishments. We need only look around the world to find evidence and examples of both the heroic and the beautiful and the despicable and the ugly.
And this drama of the duality of our souls is played out in grand vistas of nations and states as well as in the individual episodes of each of our lives. It has seemed to me for a long time that the thoughts, feelings, lives, and journeys of each human being is a microcosm of the macrocosms of our families, communities, states, nations, world, solar system, galaxy, and universe.
The world of duality is the one in which we live. Perhaps the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful are not just concepts in our minds, but actually functional laws of this universe.
So where am I going with this? What the heck am I talking about?
The easiest answer is that I’m talking about life. Work life will do. We would like to think that there is a better way to run companies. We would like people in organizations to “all get along.” We wonder why people get so emotional with a tone of voice, with a look, with a person asking a question a certain way. I’ll tell you why… “because you side with your feelings.” “That’s right Johnny. You know you side with your feelings.”
One of my favorite shows on HBO has been Deadwood. Once I got past the swearing I found it to be a fascinating and incredibly well-written and well-acted series.
In one episode, Al Swearengen’s ex-girlfriend, Tricksie, shoots and wounds an important and powerful character in the series. The important and powerful character wants revenge and so orders Al to kill Tricksie. Al can’t kill his ex-girlfriend and so he orders one of his employees, Johnny, to kill his girl friend who looks like Triksie. Johnny can’t do it. Al orders Johnny knocked unconscious and tied up and then Al murders Johnny’s girlfriend. When Johnny comes too, Dan explains what has happened and Johnny is obviously upset and can’t understand why Al wouldn’t kill his ex-girlfriend, who after all, was guilty of the crime. (Remember, it’s HBO!) Dan explains that Al still has feelings for Tricksie. And then, in a southern draw, Dan explains, “You know Johnny, you side with your feelings. Al has feelings for Tricksie. You know you always side with your feelings.”
When that line was said in that episode it resonated with me like few other statements about feelings had in the past. It’s true, we side with our feelings. We like to think, especially as engineers and technical professionals, that we are as close to Mr. Spock of Star Trek as we can get. And yet we are probably as far from Spock as we could possibly be.
As engineers and technical professionals, just like everyone else, we side with our feelings. It’s the way we are wired. Sure we engineers and technical professionals camouflage it better than most. We pretend that we don’t let our feelings run the show, that we are intellectual and we reason our way through things, and yet it’s just not true. As humans we are constantly in that tug between emotion and reason. Between the lower brain and the cerebral cortex. Between our ability to feel and our ability to reason.
This then, is our lot. It is what we have been given. It is our curse and our saving grace. It gives us compassion that Spock never had and it gives us reason to question what life there might be after this.
And when we work together in our organizations, which will rule? I’ll tell you which rules. I’ve worked and continue to work with companies made up of human beings (it seems they are the only companies in town). Mostly technical professionals or people closely tied to technology. And probably more than other professions we vacillate between “reasoning” our way through challenges, problems, and questions, and “feeling” our way through everything else. We feel our way through interactions with our colleagues. If you think you are “intellectually dispassionate” when you are in a meeting think again. I deal with companies and people who, every day, wrestle with the conflict that their emotions create, not their intellect.
Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t have emotions. Nor am I saying that we should live our lives solely through our intellects. I don’t want to be Spock.
What I am saying is lets not fool ourselves. Lets be clear that unless we are in touch with our emotions, unless we understand that our emotional programs, what I call our Personal Behavioral Subroutines, can “run” our lives, we are at their mercy.
Knowing how your physiological and emotional states structure your reality and your actions within that reality is what a friend of mine, Joseph Riggio calls, “running your neurology”. He also calls the result of this, “Being Fully Human”. When you run your neurology instead of letting it run you, then you have choice. Then you can take action that is aligned with your core and with achieving your outcomes. When you learn to run your neurology, you learn how to access you “at your best”, anytime, anywhere.
I deal with people who constantly tell me that they are extremely logical and that they make their decisions through reason. And yet, when they talk to their colleagues, their words drip with condescension, with arrogance, and with attitude. All attributes that others pick up and all attributes that find their source in the emotions “running” in the person speaking.
I deal with other people who are conscious of their emotions and can do nothing about them. Their anger is palpable in their conversations with others.
And I deal with others who understand their emotions, understand their motives, and know how to access their best state. This allows them to move smoothly through a variety of situations achieving the results they want.
This is not a judgment on my part. It is an observation. It is an observation of humanity.
As engineers, if we want to become managers, leaders, and be capable of adding more than just our technical knowledge to our organizations, then we must become comfortable with both sides of our being. We must realize that we “side with our feelings” and then we can decide what to do next.
Far too many engineers, who want to be managers, think they are driven by their intellects when it’s their emotions running the ship.
There is a third choice. Not run by emotions. Not even run by intellect. But a choice to access a state where you are at your best. From this position your actions are aligned with what you want. Accessing what Joe calls your “ready state” allows you to transcend limiting emotions. It allows you to transcend limiting intellect. From this position your power, flexibility, and ability to achieve what you want are vastly increased.
There is no escaping our humanity. So we might as well make it an ally. We might as well constantly move from a position of us at our best. It can be done.
Be well,
Steven Cerri
“What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question. More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/
Copyright©2008 STCerri International and Steven Cerri. You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it. If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you.
Posted by Steven Cerri on 06/23 at 10:31 PM (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
#61-6/16/08: Why Do Women Leave Engineering?
Why Do Women Leave Engineering?
How do we keep women engineers in their careers?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, June 16, 2008
Hello everyone!
On June 16, 2008, Computerworld Careers published an article on the website linked below:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=
viewArticleBasic&articleId=319212&intsrc=hm_ts_head
(you’ll have to cut and past this link into your browser window because it’s so long)
The title of the article was:
Why Women Quit Technology Careers
More than half of the women in science, engineering and IT leave the field at mid-career. Here’s the reason.
By Kathleen Melymuka
The authors of the original research recently published their work in the Harvard Business Review. They conducted their research by interviewing women in science and technology from a variety of countries. I want to take some space to reiterate what they said and give a male perspective. And just for the record, my perspective comes from years as an engineering manager, one who had both male and female engineers, program managers, and directors working for me, and one who successfully mentored and developed successful female and male managers, executives, and leaders. So here we go....
The article begins with the provocative question in the following way: “What if half the men in science, engineering and technology roles dropped out at mid-career? That would surely be perceived as a national crisis. Yet more than half the women in those fields leave—most of them during their mid- to late 30s. In this month’s Harvard Business Review, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Carolyn Buck Luce and Lisa J. Servon describe the Athena Factor, their research project examining the career trajectories of such women. Hewlett, founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York, told Kathleen Melymuka about what they learned.”
The research concludes that in the ages between 25 and 30, 41% of the young talent with credentials in science and technology are women. Pretty good numbers, I’d say.
The article goes on to quote that “a short way down the road, 52% of this talent drops out. We are finding that attrition rates among women spike between 35 and 40.”
When the article asks the question how many women we are talking about the answer is “maybe a million well-qualified women are dropping out in that age range.” Not a very good answer for a number of reasons. First, a million over what time period? Second, how many women does the initial 41% amount to? But this is just nit-picking on my part. Since I used to teach statistics I’m very sensitive about information that shifts the reference point for data in the middle of a comparison as this article does.
However, what is really important, is that women don’t stick with their engineering careers as tenaciously as men do. So now lets ask two really important questions, “Why do women leave the science and technology professions?” and “What can be done to keep them?”
Lets look at the first question: “Why do women leave the science and technology professions?”
Many men may think or like to think that women leave the technology professions to start families. The study did not find a desire to start a family as the main reason. And my own experience bears this out. I’ve worked with enough women engineers to know that they can juggle family and work just fine if that is what they choose to do.
So what are the major reasons women leave the sciences.
Apparently, from the study, the most important reason women leave is the machismo that continues to permeate the science and technology work environments. The study found 63% of women in science, engineering and technology have experienced sexual harassment, rude and crude jokes, and a general attitude of male superiority.
While I never tolerated any of this kind of behavior in my groups, I’ve worked in enough companies as a consultant and trainer to see it still taking place. It can be subtle or overt, but its common. We might hope that we are beyond this now but we are not. It takes good management to stamp it out.
In my groups I did two things to make sure everyone understood that men and women were equal. The first was I walked my talk. In meetings, in decision processes, wherever I could, I made it clear that “I was the same person” regardless if I was dealing with a male or female. Everybody saw my behavior as the model that I expected everyone else to emulate. Men and women were equal in my organizations. I only evaluated my direct reports based on their performance.
The second thing I did was I talked about how I wanted each of us to treat each other. I actually discussed that I didn’t want anything other than complete respect and equality regardless of gender, race, educational level, or position in the organization.
These two behaviors displayed by me made it clear to everyone very quickly how we were to behave toward each other. So my message to my male direct reports was the same as my message is to engineers today; “Guys, knock it off. This is 2008. The world is filled with prejudice and look at what it’s producing. As engineers and scientists we all know that we respect the knowledge and the intellect that people possess, whatever the gender.”
The second reason women leave is the sheer isolation they cope with daily. In many male-dominated organizations, women are not welcomed into the organization. They are isolated and left outside of the “circle”. Some men can experience this as well, but it’s most often something women have to deal with. It is real and I can tell you it is devastating. I have coached women engineers in this topic and there are ways to counter it, but the best solution is for the males not to behave this way. It’s childish. It’s the behavior that the little boys displayed when they were on the playground and they kept other boys out of their group or they teased the girls and wouldn’t let them play in the boy games. It’s passive-aggressive bullying. It’s over guys. This is the adult world. Welcome the women engineers into your organization as equals. Move on past the “playground mentality and behavior”.
The third factor is that women don’t have a mentor. If they are not welcomed into the organization, it stands to reason that they also don’t have a mentor. They don’t know what a career ladder looks like. They don’t know how to move through the organization. I’m always suggesting to people to find a mentor. I often function as a mentor through my coaching processes. Men are often encouraged to find mentors and women should be too. In my classes I’m always harping on my students to find a mentor and/or a coach regardless of their level in the organization… and I never mention gender, because I’m talking to men and women equally. And mentors for women don’t have to be other successful women. Mentors for female engineers can be successful males.
The fourth factor is what the study calls, “the risky behavior patterns that are rewarded.” This one is close to my heart because it was a hallmark of my behavior that opened doors for me early in my career. The article goes on to say, “We found, particularly in the tech firms, that the way to get promoted is to do a diving catch: Some system is crashing in Bulgaria, so you get on the plane in the middle of the night and dash off and spend the weekend wrestling with routers and come back a hero, and there’s a ticker-tape parade, and you get two promotions—you can actually leap a whole grade if you rescue a big enough system.” Something similar to this worked for me when I was a young engineer. It worked for a lot of us.... all of us guys, by the way.
The article went on, “But what does that have to do with gender? Women have a hard time taking on those assignments because you can dive and fail to catch. If a man fails, his buddies dust him off and say, “It’s not your fault; try again next time.” A women fails and is never seen again. A woman cannot survive a failure. So they become risk-averse in a culture where risk is rewarded. Women would rather build a system that didn’t crash in the first place, but men enjoy that diving catch and have a system of support that allows them to go out on a limb.”
The article is “right-on” regarding risk-taking. I’ve seen it over and over again and I know it helped in my career. In fact, I quickly cultivated a reputation of taking on the broken or difficult or risky projects. It may be true that women tend not to go after the “diving catch”. However, I am certain that women are not given as much leeway if they fail as men are. This has to change.
The article is “almost” correct. A women CAN survive a failure if she has a mentor to protect her. My female direct reports were encouraged by me to risk a “diving catch”. The “deal” was, “you go after the diving catch and I’ll protect you if you fail and put you in the spot light if you succeed. Sooner or later they would learn enough to be extremely valuable to the organization because of what they learned either from success or from failure. The stipulation… I did the same for promising men AND women.
The article goes on to list work-life balance and long hours as two other factors down the list that cause technical women to leave the engineering and technology fields.
Finally, the article suggests a solution, one that I am wholeheartedly in agreement with. “Find mentors to pair up with the female engineers.” There is one modification I would make however. The article implies that the mentors should be other female engineers. I don’t agree. I think that young female engineers should be paired with male and female mentors. Female mentors who have been and are successful as engineers, scientists, and technologists. And male mentors who have succeeded as well and who have an understanding of what has to happen in order to deal with the general male attitude. The more knowledge the better.
I know that my male and female direct reports understood that doing the job was not in any way connected to gender. It was only tied to competence. Also, in my coaching practice, I find that once women engineers and women engineering managers get that I understand both the male and the female perspective (after 25 years of managing engineers of both genders) we can often work out processes such that their career track becomes relatively smooth and straight forward.
It’s unfortunate that I’m writing about this, because it means that the issue still persists. But all we need do is look around the world and at our own technical environments and it’s clear we have a ways to go. Gentlemen, get over it. The world has changed, it’s time for the male technical population to catch up.
Be well,
Steven Cerri
P.S. If you were to ask me who were the best program managers who worked for me my answer would be: “There were two people who were, by far, the best program managers who ever reported to me.” In my mind, they’re tied for the title of the “best”. One was female and one was male, and they were as different as two peas in a pod, and yet they were both “the best".
“What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question. More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/
Copyright©2008 STCerri International and Steven Cerri. You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it. If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you.
Posted by Steven Cerri on 06/17 at 12:10 AM (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink