Inter-Personal People Skills
Inter-Personal People Skills for technical professionals
#79-1/12/09-Trust Your Experiences
Trust Your Experiences
“How do you recognize good management advice?”
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, January 12, 2009
Hello everyone!
“Who do you trust and what is the truth in management?”
This last week I was reading some of the blogs on the people skills necessary for successful management. One blog, in particular, caught my eye. It had to do with “behaviors” that are necessary for a good manager.
Some of the behaviors put forth by the author included things like these soft skills:
1. When you are managing, never show your emotions.
2. When you are managing, never raise your voice. Always have a calm voice. If you get frustrated you can scream into a pillow in your office.
3. Always have a smile on your face.
4. Walk around and talk to your direct reports. Ask them how they are doing and give them suggestions on how they can do their job better.
These were just a few of the “best practices” that this author put forward regarding how to behave if you want to be a good manager. The author had been a manager for five years and wanted to share what he had learned.
Fair enough.
What I find interesting is this; “How is a new manager who is reading this information, to use and apply these suggestions and to know which suggestions are true and which are false?
But wait… the truth!
How do you know that the information put forth is accurate? Is there any way that you might know if 5 years as manager is enough to give authoritative knowledge? Is the equivalent of two years of engineering school enough to allow someone to sign off on the design of a bridge or analyze the orbital velocity requirements for rendezvous with the International Space Station?
Actually there is a way to know.
In our own personal experience we know what works for management and what doesn’t. In our own personal experience we have a sense of what good managers do and what bad managers do or don’t do.
And yet, many, many people choose to discount their own personal experience in order to follow the “leader”. They discount what they know in their gut to be true, because the “leader” says that something else is true, instead. And yet, we know it’s not.
So lets take some of those “gems” put forth on the blog post and see if they align with our personal experience.
When you are managing, never show your emotions.
My experience: Not true.
It’s not a question of showing emotions, its a question of what emotions you do show and the degree to which you do so. It’s not very useful to be a tyrant and yell at people and insult them in public. But it’s certainly useful to show compassion, and determination, and even sternness, and maybe levity, politeness, and at times frustration, disappointment, and even anger. It’s impossible to not show emotions. The key is to show the right ones and at the appropriate level. (I could write a book on this.)
When you are managing, never raise your voice. Always have a calm voice. If you get frustrated you can scream into a pillow in your office.
My experience: Half true, half not true.
Never raise your voice… well it depends. I have had direct reports with whom I would never raise my voice. And I’ve had direct reports with whom a good, hearty, give-and-take, with raised voices and even yelling was the only way to build the rapport and connection that the direct report (and I for that matter) wanted. To be always calm with this direct report would have actually adversely affected our professional relationship.
And the idea of always having a calm voice… come on. Have you ever been really upset and in need of help? So you called a customer service representative and the person at the other end of the line sounded as if they were as calm as could be. What was your response?
I know that my response has been to be annoyed with them. They were too calm. They didn’t understand that my situation was important.
Always being calm is nearly as bad as always yelling, almost.
And yes, if you are going to go off on someone… go scream into a pillow until you calm down.
Always have smile on your face.
My experience: Not true.
First, have you ever been around someone who always has a smile on their face? Have you ever thought to yourself, “What are they doing… always with a smile on their face. It can’t be real.” And often it’s not real.
No one wants to be around a doom and gloom person (except other doom and gloom people) but it’s important to be authentic and yet appropriate.
So rules like “always have a smile on your face” are just not useful. A better suggestion is to always be appropriate and effective in any given situation so that you and the team can achieve your/their desired outcome. (This is a topic for another book).
Now the important point about my comments is this; the suggestions put in the blog I read were a decent attempt to quantify behaviors that would make a manager a good manager.
However, management is not a simple process. It is not given to quick and simple rules. In engineering, F=ma. The laws of physics are clear, stable, repeatable. Unfortunately or fortunately, management doesn’t have similarly clear, stable, repeatable rules. The biggest rule in management is “it depends.” The best way to know if what someone is telling you is true, is to match it to your experience. And if you have no experience in a specific are, then take it “one-step-at-a-time”.
With respect to every suggested soft skill behavior I listed from the blog, we all have personal experiences that contradict what was suggested.
We all know of times when emotion displayed by our managers was just what we wanted to see, hear, and experience. Therefore, when to display what emotion is context dependent. It depends.
We all have experiences when we didn’t want our managers to display a smile. We want to be able to “read” our managers by hearing the tone of their voice. We don’t want them to be smiling when they are laying people off. Once again, it depends.
And, there are times when we certainly don’t want our managers to come around talking to us, looking over our shoulders and giving us suggestions about how we can do things better. There are times when we will welcome the advice and other times when we’ll probably consider it micromanagement. So once again it depends.
The bottom line is...
So the bottom line is this. Management, leadership, even contributing your maximum to your organization is not something you learn in five years of on-the-job training. (How long was the intense training your received for your engineering degree?)
It’s also not something you learn from a simple set of rules.
In basic terms…
Engineering is about knowledge; Management is about judgment.
Engineering is about rules; Management is about context.
Engineering is an application of knowledge in search of certainty; Management is the application of judgment in search of an outcome.
Very different worlds.
Be well,
Steven Cerri
By the way. If you’d like to leave a comment, and I’d sure be interested if you did, I’ve changed the comments software. Only your comment and your name will show up at the end of the comment. I have modified the software so that your email address will not show up anywhere.
“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 01/12 at 11:15 PM Engineer to Technical Manager • Becoming a manager • Technical Manager • Leadership • Engineering Leadership • Management • Engineering Management • Management for engineers • Inter-Personal People Skills • Soft Skills for engineers • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
#77-1/1/09: New Year Future
New Year Future.
“What future pulls you to it?”
Posted by Steven Cerri on Thursday, January 1, 2009
Happy New Year everyone!
In point of fact, we are pattern recognition machines. All we do is recognize for patterns. Here’s an example. The only reason you can read these words is because your eyes notice where the pattern of black (of each letter) begins and ends and where the pattern of white, your screen or paper begins and ends. It is at the boundaries of these patterns that experience exists. Were it not for our ability to notice for and recognize the beginning and ending of patterns, all of existence would be one field of white noise, (or black noise since there would be no distinction) and then actually there would be no awareness or more importantly, no knowing-ness of existence at all (and by that I mean self-reflection.)
So now that I’ve sufficiently convinced you that we are pattern recognition creatures, and we are very good at it, with all our senses, and our very survival and even existence depends on that ability, what patterns are you going to recognize as the new year unfolds?
Because patterns don’t just exist in what we see or hear, they also show up in the type of world view we construct in our minds and in our consciousness. And unless one is “in the moment” and therefore, takes the world as it “shows up” moment by moment, each of us creates and sustains a world view that allows us to navigate through life on a daily basis. By necessity we use our detected patterns to notice for what to include in our world view and what to not to include.
What patterns will you therefore notice in the world, going forward? What future will pull you into time going forward? What is it you expect the world to become the next moment, and the next?
Of course two major patterns that many people sort and filter for, and they go by various names, are: “good” versus “bad”; or “problem versus opportunity”; or “glass half empty versus glass half full”. Most people don’t realize that which pattern one takes into the brain, which pattern we actually go looking for… is a choice. And even the choices of what patterns we sort for and filter for, can themselves, be patterns that have developed over years. We can however, become aware of those “choice patterns”, and by being aware of our own patterns, choose something different.
Many people are very unaware that they consistently look for the things in the world to support their concept that their “glass is half empty”. It doesn’t matter to them that the person next to them may think that the “same glass” is half full. For them it’s half empty and they can identify all the things in the world to support that position. They look for and sort for the data and patterns that support the glass being half empty.
On the other hand, there are those who look at the world and sort for and locate patterns that support the position that the glass is half full. In most cases, it’s the “same world” that the “glass half empty” person lives in. The only difference is what each person notices.
You’ve heard the saying “If you think you can or you think you can’t, your right”. It’s the same thing. But being an engineer, I’m not willing to accept a flippant phrase. I want to understand how it “works”. (That’s one of my patterns.) My pattern is to look for supporting data. And the supporting data to the flippant phrase is this: The reason “If you think you can or you think you can’t, your right” is a true statement is because we human beings perform certain functions as we take data through our senses and into our conscious and unconscious minds. We “distort”, “delete”, and “generalize” the incoming information. Therefore, if we have a tendency to look for evidence that the glass is half empty we will actually delete and distort and generalize the positive information we see, hear, and experience so that our ultimate experience supports a half-empty glass.
Conversely, if we have a tendency to look for evidence that the glass is half full we will actually delete and distort and generalize the negative information we see, hear, and experience so that our ultimate experience supports a half-full glass.
We always get what we want!… not necessarily what we ask for.
What will you be creating in 2009? More opportunity… around every corner? What opportunities will you take advantage of? What positive efforts will you make? Where will you look for help, a leg up, a supportive word? Who will you give a hand too? Will you walk so the wind is at your back? What future pulls you to it? What will you choose.... since we make it all up anyway....
Be well,
Steven Cerri
By the way. If you’d like to leave a comment, and I’d sure be interested if you did, I’ve changed the comments software. Only your comment and your name will show up at the end of the comment. I have modified the software so that your email address will not show up anywhere.
“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 01/01 at 10:14 PM Inter-Personal People Skills • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
#76-10/14/08: Context and Communication.
Context and Communication.
“Context-Static questionnaires don’t work.”
Posted by Steven Cerri on Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Hello everyone!
I was teaching a management class at the University of California, Santa Barbara, this last Friday.
I was talking to the class about the way in which each of us is “programmed” to behave in certain ways.
I gave the students a questionnaire and one of the categories surveyed by the questionnaire had to do with being oriented toward “details” or toward “big picture”. Those people who prefer to focus on the “big picture” have a tendency to detest details and vice versa. Some people prefer a balance and some people prefer one extreme or the other.
In response to the questionnaire, some of the students displayed preferences for details or big picture, while others displayed a balance.
They got the very clear message that their preferences are real and strong. Students were acknowledging that they either had no real preference or they had strong preferences and they were able to give examples of how these preferences showed up in their lives.
As our discussion progressed, one of the students asked if the scores recorded by the questionnaire ever changed. Essentially, “Do they remain constant or do they change?”
Now here is the very interesting part. Once the students clearly understood that every human being has these “internal programs” that run, often outside of our conscious awareness, my answer to the question was that not only do the preferences change over time, they actually are different depending upon the situation; different depending upon the “context”.
I’ll take myself as an example. When I take my own questionnaire, the survey comes back indicating that I have a very high preference for “big picture” and I have a very low tolerance for details.
Don’t give me details! My eyes glaze over. I want to focus on the big picture. I’ll let someone else attend to the details.... That’s how I answered the questionnaire. And it’s TRUE....
Unless, I’m being creative. If I’m designing a rocket engine, or designing a new training, essentially doing something I consider to be very creative… then I’m all over the details.
So our internal programs actually shift depending upon the context.
Now not everyone has such a strong shift depending upon the context as I have. But most people will display some shift based on context.
This is why I don’t use Myers-Briggs, Disc, or Enneagram. They are context independent. They are great to convince people that people have programs, but then there are a lot of questionnaires that do that. The issue with most systems out there is that they set the internal programs in place assuming that the context is static.
We all know that the context shifts. We all know that situations change.
I’ve developed communication, influence, and leadership processes that allow for a real-time shift in the context, which is exactly what happens in real life. The communicator can actually determine what the context is that is “driving” the interaction and alter the messages so that they can take into account the internal programs of the people listening. It’s a real-time, context-sensitive, communication and leadership process that allows the communicator to adjust the communication process to match the context.
Now I know this sounds like a blatant marketing piece… sorry. But I don’t know how else to talk about what I consider to be a fundamental issue in human communication. And that is that people and the communication and leadership processes are dynamic. They are not static and if we are going to be highly effective in communication, management, and leadership we have to understand that we must engage with people in a real-time “dance”. A real-time give and take that takes attention and awareness and an understanding of all the levels of communication that are taking place simultaneously.
How else can effective communication, influence, and leadership be accomplished?
Be well,
Steven Cerri
By the way. If you’d like to leave a comment, and I’d sure be interested if you did, I’ve changed the comments software. Only your comment and your name will show up at the end of the comment. I have modified the software so that your email address will not show up anywhere.
“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 10/14 at 09:32 PM Inter-Personal People Skills • Communication for engineers • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
