#3-09/18/06: Can People Change?
Can People Really Change?
The Million Dollar Question.
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, September 18, 2006
Good morning!
Recently I was in a coaching session with a high level technical manager at a high-technology company. This manager has been struggling with a difficult direct report. In the course of our session the manager asked me point blank: “Can people really change. I’m beginning to get to the point where I think we really can’t change people.”
Now that’s the $1 million question, isn’t it? As managers, can we change people? Should we change people? Do we have the ability or even the right to contemplate the phrase; “Can I change this person?
Have you changed? Have people close to you changed? When you think about whether you have changed are you looking at a time frame of months, or years, or decades? When you ask the question: “Have I changed?” what’s your answer? Do you respond, “Well I’m the same person but I’m different too.” “Different in what ways?” “The same in what ways?” If you focus on what’s the same, does it mean you haven’t changed? If you focus on what’s different, does it mean you have changed?
Can we change people only if they want to change? Do we change at the “surface” but not at our “core”? What is the core anyway? If I’m a technical person am I a “technical person” for the rest of my life? Do people need a life-altering situation in order to change?
Frankly I don’t know the answers to these questions. These are age-old questions, aren’t they? I like to think that people change and yet for every example I can give you of how someone has made a miraculous change I can give you another example of someone who has resisted change. Is there a “truth” in there somewhere or is it just my perspective? I believe that anyone who tells you they know the answers to these questions is full of hot air.
Having said all that you might ask, “Well, as a technical manager, what’s the use of trying to help people to be successful? People come to work as who they are and that’s that. They either do their job or they don’t. It’s not my job as their manager to change them.”
Now that last paragraph is one I really don’t agree with. I do think there are certain boundaries and generalities that we can make about the possibility of human change. I’ve seen people make radical shifts or changes in behavior in my years as a manager. Is a shift in behavior a change in them or just a change in behavior? Remember, as a manager, you ultimately manage a person’s behavior; you don’t manage changes in a person’s personality. What you want as a manager is a specific behavior from an individual, not their soul. Let me explain; let’s take this a step at a time:
First, we probably all know people who fall into the category in which they are not going to change, no matter what. They are set in their ways and they’ll gladly say so to anyone who will listen. They like themselves just the way they are, and it’s clear, just in conversation that they are not interested in changing one bit. These are not the people I’m talking about here. We can exclude them from this conversation.
Second, we also probably know people who don’t seem to have a sense of themselves. They adopt whatever demeanor, behavior, and personality are best suited to the situation. They are also not the people I am talking about here. We can exclude them from this conversation as well.
The third group comprises the people I am talking about and they are those people who have some sense of themselves in a way that is stable and identifiable to the outside world. Their way of moving through the world, their way of being, for them, has worked well enough in life. Perhaps things have moving along just fine and now they are coming up against some “personal life force or situation” that requires them to change in order to deal with it. They can either change and deal with the situation successfully or they can revert to old behaviors and get hammered by the situation. The bottom line is that we probably have enough experience in our own life and in our observations of others to know that about 50% of the time people change and 50% of the time they get hammered.
From this third situation what are we to conclude? Are we to conclude that people don’t change, that people do change, or that some people can change and some don’t? As I said earlier in this blog, to this question I must say that I don’t really know the answer. But I do have a different way to think about this that makes a great deal of sense to me and explains the observable facts better than the black and white answers, “yes” or “no”.
I’ll elaborate in Thursday’s blog. See you then.
Be well
Steven Cerri
Posted by Steven Cerri on 09/18 at 08:41 AM Engineer to Technical Manager • Becoming a manager • Management • Technical Management • Inter-Personal People Skills • Communication for engineers • Soft Skills for engineers • (0) Comments • Permalink
#2-09/14/06: Using Your Skills?
Are you using all your skills at work?
Most technical professionals aren’t.
Posted by Steven Cerri on Thursday, September 14, 2006
Hello,
I want to introduce you to what is probably a new concept for you. The name of the concept is, “The Fully Integrated Technical Professional©”. I’ll explain what that means in this blog.
You go to college to learn your trade. You learn how to be an “individual contributor”, a technical professional who can solve specific technical problems. That’s all well and good.
Then you work at a company for a number of years and slowly or perhaps not so slowly you are given greater responsibility, especially responsibility for the management of projects and the management of a small team. You are expected to contribute positively to the team and maybe even display a little leadership in meetings. You are expected to be able to compromise and find the most effective solution in collaboration with your colleagues, those down the hall and those halfway around the world. You are expected to communicate and communicate well with a wide variety of people.
And from this situation there are two possible paths your career can take. You either do all this well and you succeed and therefore move along a path to management, or you don’t succeed, you crash, and you get relegated to doing “technical work” only. Now don’t get me wrong, you may choose to be the manager or you may choose to remain completely focused on the technical work.
The operative word here is “choose”. If you choose the path you want, fine. But many technical professionals, who get relegated to the technical world after attempting the management path, don’t get to choose. They find they haven’t measured up and they are disappointed, frustrated, and bitter. In fact, it’s mostly for this reason that many companies have developed the “dual-track” for those technical professionals who want to stay technical and those who want to become managers. The dual track allows technical people to “stay technical” throughout their careers, and while some choose this path, some end up there because they didn’t know how to make the successful transition to management.
Here is my position; let’s throw this whole concept of two paths and failing on any one of them out the window. Let’s make what we do with our careers a choice… a conscious choice, made because we understand what we want to do and what we are best suited to do.
That means that when you graduate from college and enter the work force as a technical professional you have one of two major paths to take; either you remain primarily technical or you move into technical management. However, whatever path you take you will contribute ALL of your capabilities. Regardless of whether you stay technical or you become a manager you will develop your skills at communicating with anyone in any situation. You will develop your ability to manage and lead be it in a meeting or with a company wide project. You will learn how to think systemically. You will learn how to vary your communication style so that you can motivate people whether in a small meeting down the hall or when talking to an auditorium full of your employees.
This then is what it is to be a Fully Integrated Technical Professional. It is to be a fully developed contributor to your organization either as a technologist or as a technical manager. It’s to continue your personal development process after college. It’s to be able to live your professional career from a position of choice not from of position of limitation. The Fully Integrated Technical Professional is a technical professional first. It’s someone who understands to varying degrees technology, its implications, and its capabilities. And it is someone who can also communicate and interact with, understand, and motivate people and situations so that things can get done, not just by one person, but also by many people. Remember, the days of living in the corner lab and working alone to accomplish what needs to be done are mostly gone. Look around. Nothing of significance gets done anymore without the contributions of many people. To me, the Fully Integrated Technical Professional is the only way to be a technical person in the 21st century. Like I often say, the Fully Integrated Technical Professional is a technical professional who is more than technical.
Be well
Steven Cerri
Posted by Steven Cerri on 09/15 at 10:25 AM Inter-Personal People Skills • Fully Integrated Tech Professional • (0) Comments • Permalink
#1-09/12/06: My First Blog
My Introductory Blog
Who is this guy?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Good morning,
You’re probably wondering… who am I and why do I have this blog? The answers
to those two questions are very important to me as they are to you.
To the first: I’m an engineer, a scientist, and a business person and entrepreneur. I have degrees in each area: a BS in aeronautical engineering; an MS in geophysics; and an MBA. I’ve done international training, I’m an author, and I’m an adjunct professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the
Technology Management Program Department. I have over 30 years of experience in aerospace engineering, software development, and printer manufacturing companies, in both the technology and the management areas. And that experience has been in commercial, government, and in department-of-defense business arenas. So I’ve gotten a taste of how all three of these environments function.
I began my career as an engineer and ultimately became a general manager. I’ve made the transition from technical professional to technical manager and beyond (product manager, general manager, and corporate trainer). By most standards I’ve been very successful and yet, I got very little help along the way. By that I mean I got very little help that would have made my transition to management easier. Primarily this was because there was no one who really, and I mean really, understood what a technical person goes through when they become a manager. Technical people either make the transition to management or they don’t and if they succeed their success is attributed to some “innate” ability.
Oh, for sure, there were the psychologists who could teach me what they thought I should know about people and management. But they were psychologists; what did they know about what was going on in my head, the head of an engineer? And there were the engineers and technical managers who would teach me about project management, schedules, and budgets. But those were the easy functions. No one was there to teach me what I really needed to know to make management “comfortable” for me. There was no one there who was willing to discuss the “transition” from technical professional to technical manager. And while I was lucky enough to be successful, I made the trip pretty much on my own, so to speak.
In fact, I was extremely successful in building teams. I was able to turn projects and organizations around, even in situations where others had failed. Somehow I had learned how to motivate and move people to achieve results that others could not. And I began to help those who worked for me make the transition from technical professional to technical manager. I began to groom program and project managers to take on their own major projects. Some even started their own companies.
To the second question: From these results, I more and more began hearing myself say; “I want to teach technical professionals how to do this because I really think I understand what they need to know that no one is telling them. Most of my approaches to building teams and managing people and projects went against the accepted practices, and yet the results were fantastic. So I had to ask myself what was going on here and why was I successful building technical teams and grooming managers while others weren’t as successful?
I decided about 15 years ago to embark on a consulting, training, and coaching career. I decided that it was important to me to get what I considered to be my message out to technical people. And so while I’ve continued to work inside corporations on and off since I started my consulting, training, and coaching company, my main interest has been in training technical professionals to have successful long-term careers, either as technical professionals or as technical mangers and helping them make a smooth transition if they decide to become technical managers.
The message of this blog then, is really my message. It’s based on my experience, and on my ideas about what works and what doesn’t work in technology management. It’s about the personal development of the technical professional required to become a truly long-term success as a technologist or a manager in their organization.
You won’t find a compilation of other people’s ideas here. You won’t find any straddling of the fence either. You won’t find me giving you several ideas about a management topic and then telling you that it’s up to you to decide what to do. If that is what you want, there are plenty of good blogs that you can visit that will provide that kind of information. That’s not this site and it’s not me. I definitely have an opinion developed over a long career. I have strategies that work in a wide variety of technology management situations. They have worked for me and they have worked for the people I’ve trained, coached, and taught. This is not about theory, it is about practical technical management.
On this site, my message will consist of my ideas, my experience, and my suggestions. Try them out. If they work, please come back. If they don’t work then please feel free to let me know. I encourage you to ask me questions; pose specific situations you might be facing; get specific. This can and should be a powerful learning process. And that’s what we do as technical professionals, we learn and we apply what we learn. You’ve learned about the physical laws of the universe. It’s time you learn about the “laws” or maybe “theorems” of technical management.
You’ll find that my message consists of three parts and three parts only. Part one is that I help technical people be better and more effective as technical people in their technical organizations. Part two is that I help technical managers be better technical managers. And part three is that I help technical professionals make a smooth and effective transition to technical management. All three of these components comprise a program I call “The Fully Integrated Technical Professional” (more on this in future blogs.)
I’ll update this blog twice a week; on Mondays and Thursdays. Enjoy and much success.
Be well
Steven Cerri
Founder of “The Fully Integrated Technical Professional©”
“Training and coaching technical professionals to be as good with people and management as they are with their PCs”
Posted by Steven Cerri on 09/10 at 02:23 PM Engineer to Technical Manager • Leadership • Management • Inter-Personal People Skills • Fully Integrated Tech Professional • (0) Comments • Permalink
