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#69-8/11/08: Brave New World-Revisted!

2008-08-11T23:09:00Z

Brave New World Revisited!
But what exactly will you learn?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, August 11, 2008

Hello everyone!

For those of you who do not read my blogs regularly, this blog is a follow-on to last week’s blog. So if you haven’t read last week’s blog you might want to read last week’s and this week’s.

That said, here goes.

Last week I wrote about how we humans are very efficient learning machines. And I said that much of what we do in our adult life is a function of what we learned when we were children… the non-technical stuff I mean. Like how we treat others, what our concept and relationship is to authority, management, conflict, etc. These early learnings drive our movement through the world in our professional lives. These early concepts generate the structure that ultimately leads us to our professions.

So this week, I want to expand this concept a whole bunch! I want to talk about the implications of what I wrote last week on managers, how we train managers, and how we teach and train our engineers and scientists.

Let’s agree that we behave… toward each other in regards to conflict, creativity, change, uncertainty, authority, management oversight, people’s voices, being told what to do versus being asked what to do, and being appreciated, to name just a few categories, in ways that are greatly a reflection of what we learned during our “formative years”.

Then, some of us become engineers, scientists, technologists. Some of us look at the world and say, “I want to understand how it works and I want to create and predict how my creations will behave. I want to have some control over my world!” That’s great!

And, it is fair to say that, in the past, science and engineering produced advances that changed our world at a moderate pace.

However, scientists and engineers are now producing change through their discoveries and products at a break-neck pace. The world is getting smaller and smaller. And this process will only accelerate.

The implications of this rapid change are overwhelming for our societies. And the responsibilities for the impact of this change does not only rest on the shoulders of the politicians and social leaders, it should also rest on the shoulders of the men and women in technology.

In the past, most scientists and engineers could work free from political and social implications of their work until after they did the work. They produced the science and the engineering and it was the politicians and the social leaders and the military who decided to use it for ill or good. A scientist or engineer could do their work, release their work and then, when the world used it for whatever purposes, the engineer or scientists could effectively wash his or her hands of the applications. They only did the engineering and science. They only did the “pure” part of the work.

Those days are gone. Oh, to be sure, we’ve had our scientists and engineers who spoke up when their inventions or science were not used for wholly honorable purposes. But they were the exception.

We must now have engineers and scientists who can join in the discussion and debate with politicians, social leaders, and the general population regarding their work. They can’t just do the work, release the work and wash their hands. They must be citizens of the world they help to create. But not just typical citizens. The engineers and scientists of the world are much more listened to than average people and perhaps more so than politicians.

We must have engineers and scientists who are “techno-social” members. They must be able to think about the social and political implications of their work. And they must be able to articulate their work and the implications of their work to and on the greater social, political, and ecological arena. They must have a heightened interest in their fellow humans and in the social structures they help to create.

The days of working in the lab or in the dark or free from social-political-environmental considerations are gone.

I often hear young engineers and young managers tell me that they joined this company or that company because, “I wanted to change the world”. I would suggest they change their wording. Their phrase has no “value” in it. Change for better or worse? They apparently don’t care. They just want to create change.

The phrase ought to be, “I wanted to create a better world”. Now at least we can begin a discussion of what “better” means and how we would recognize it.

So how do we train our engineers, scientists, and engineering managers to move in this direction? What should be the fundamental underpinnings of their education, in addition to their engineering and science courses?

They must have courses in the following disciplines:

1. Communication. Not the typical theoretical communication courses that give a survey of different ways of communicating. But communication processes tied to neurological understanding of how all people communicate. Our future engineers and scientists and technical managers must be comfortable communicating across social, political, and religious divides. We must begin early to train our young engineers, scientists, and managers in successful ways to communicate with a wide variety of people in a wide variety of situations.

2. Management flexibility. The days of managing with one management style, or at most two styles are gone. With outsourcing, immigration, teams dispersed all over the globe, and teams made up of people of different cultures, educational backgrounds, and values and beliefs, managers must be able to manage and lead a wide variety of people in a wide variety of situations. We must train our young engineers, scientists and managers in successful ways to manage early in their educational process and early in their careers.

3. Implications of membership in the Human Community. Until recently, many engineers became engineers because they didn’t want to necessarily spend a lot of time with other humans, or at least time with humans who were not similar to them. Those days too are gone. We must begin to train our engineers and scientists what it means to be a member of the human community. Companies will demand more and more positive social interaction and we do a great disservice to our young people by not throwing them in the social river earlier rather than later. We must train our young engineers and scientists in successful ways to effect the social directions of their work and to be willing to enter a discussion/debate of the implications of their work.

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.

#68-8/4/08: You Are Efficient Learning Machines!

2008-08-05T06:50:00Z

You Are Efficient Learning Machines!
But what exactly have you learned?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, August 4, 2008

Hello everyone!

This weekend gave me pause.

I once again realized how unique we human beings really are. We are just incredible learning machines. We absorb and learn like sponges. We live in this ocean of information, of patterns, of data, or chaos, and we absorb and work very diligently to deduce and hallucinate patterns. We find patterns everywhere.

And rest assured, learning requires patterns. No patterns equals white noise. White noise is no useful information. So our job, our nature is to cancel out the white noise in existence and find patterns. And once we find patterns we prioritize those patterns in terms of what is most useful to us.

We are “pattern identifiers extraordinare” and we should applaud ourselves. Our evolution, our genetic structure gives rise to an extraordinary pattern recognition machine, us!

It’s what led Newton to his three laws… patterns.

It’s what led Einstein to relativity… patterns.

It’s what led Heisenberg to his uncertainty principle… a pattern in the contradiction of patterns.

It’s what allowed us to evolve tools… patterns of successful hunting, building and social interaction, including war.

We are, bar none, the most efficient and effective, pattern recognition machine on this planet.

Sounds wonderful doesn’t it? Sounds like we ought to pat ourselves on our collective backs.

Well, not so fast.

In some respects it is our greatest strength. And in other ways it is our greatest weakness.

As the creator of the Matrix told Neo in the last film of the Matrix movie series… “It is at once your greatest strength and simultaneously your greatest weakness.”

This might be the perfect place for you to ask, “What the heck is Steven talking about?”

Well, let me explain.

We all know that pattern recognition is one of our strengths. Great. Applause please!

The weakness, if we can call it that, is that at a certain point in our life, that ability to learn and absorb is extremely critical, but we don’t have any “discernment”. In other words, we can’t distinguish what we learn as good or bad for us.

And what I’m talking about is your childhood. My childhood. The childhood of everyone.

Up until very, very recently, it was not a big deal. It was very important for children to learn, learn well, and learn quickly everything their parents could teach them. Because it meant survival. People didn’t get around much… think before airplanes. Parents had to raise their children to survive. To succeed. And to do so within the close proximity of where the parents, families, and the children lived.

Each son learned the profession of his father. Each daughter learned what to do as a woman from the mother. That was it. No body ventured much. If they did they were adventurers, conquers, etc. For the multitude of people, sticking close to home was it. Grow up like for father, grow up like your mother and you were successful and happy, whatever that meant in those times.

So learning everything you needed to know from your parents was good enough. The world changed slowly. Evolution only applied pressure on the fringes.

And then the world changed. The renaissance arrived. The industrial revolution came about. Flight became a reality. Medicine changed our world. Democracy changed how we saw ourselves in that world! Heaven forbid. People living together outside of marriage. Children being conceived just because one person wants to have a child. Goods and services being exchanged around the world. Traveling faster than the speed of sound. Living in outer space. Cell phones. Hip hop.

Soon it became clear that the following statement was true; “There is no way parents can prepare their children for the world the children will live in because the world the children will live in will be so different from the world in which the parents grew up that the teaching of the parents will no longer apply. But old habits, old genetic codes, are hard to break.

So here’s the deal. Those of us living now were raised by parents who could not conceive of the world in which we now live. They attempted to teach us, since we are all such good sponges. But what they taught us, to a large extent, was good for them. Probably not so good for us. But we still learned it. And now the question is, is what they taught you still good for you?

Here is an example.

Think about your concept of authority. How do you respond to authority figures? Policemen? Your boss? The President of the United States? A government official? Are these your own responses or are they the responses you were taught by your parents? Or by others in your life who had a great influence on you when you were young? Can you even answer those questions? Can you even tell the difference between what you were given in your youth and how you could behave now?

Odds are, your responses are not your own… they are the responses of your parents. The best way to say it is that your responses to authority are those that were given to you when your were growing up, very young. And you are still using them now.

They influence how your respond at work. They influence how your respond to your boss. They influence how you manage other people. They influence how you deal with people across the oceans. It’s all driven by what you learned, as a great sponge, when you were a child. Are those patterns you learned way back then still serving you… or not.

Is it time to change? Is it time to be different? Is what your parents and others taught you long ago, still applicable now, or does it all need to be updated? Where you prepared to live and function in “their world” or the world in which you find yourself now.

We are very efficient learning machines. Perhaps too efficient. If you could learn just what you needed to make you successful now, what would that look like? What would you need to learn? And could you? Would you? How would it be different from what you leaned back then?

Look in the mirror. Ask yourself, “Am I behaving in a way that advances my career” or “Am I behaving in a way that is a reflection of what I learned as a child that might not be so useful today?”

Nine times of out ten, for most people, the answer is the latter.

Be well,

Steven Cerri

#67-7/28/08: How Technical Should A Manager Be?

2008-07-29T02:41:00Z

How Technical Should A Manager Be?
Should a technical manager be a technical expert?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, July 28, 2008

Hello everyone!

There seems to be an on-going debate about how technical an engineering manager ought to be.

Some say that any manager worth his or her weight in salt has to understand the technology they’re managing well enough to actually have answers and be capable of doing some of the work themselves.

Others say that any manager worth his or her weight in salt doesn’t have to understand the technology. They just have to know how to “facilitate” the technologists who are the experts in the technology.

So who’s right? What’s the answer?

And the answer is: Neither is right? Or to put it another way: Both are wrong!

An example of the first answer is Bill Gates. It’s pretty clear that Bill Gates was up on most of the technology in Microsoft. By all accounts he was capable of doing a good deal of the technical work performed by the technologists in the company. Obviously he couldn’t because there was only one of him, but he was capable.

Because Microsoft was so successful, many come to the erroneous conclusion that Microsoft was successful because Bill Gates was at the helm. They conclude that because Microsoft was so successful and Bill was such a technologist, there must be a causal relationship here.

Not so. Bill only had this influence when Microsoft was small. The reason Microsoft became a powerhouse and was so successful was because it had a monopoly, not because Bill was a geek. The CEO of Microsoft would have had to have been a rock to drive Microsoft into the ground, at least up until recently when it finally got some competition. So Bill Gates is not a valid nor good example of how technical a manager has to be in order to be successful. The causal relationship in the success of Microsoft is not with Bill Gates but with it’s lack of competition.

If you want to read in interesting article that erroneously supports the idea that the technical Bill Gates made Microsoft successful, then read the article titled “How Hard Could It Be? Glory Days”, by Joel Spolsky. The article appears in Inc. Magazine, dated July 1, 2008.

In it, Joel talks about when he was a young Program Manager at Microsoft and had to give a presentation to Bill Gates. Joel wrote a specification and had to run the specification by Bill Gates. Joel talks glowingly about how Bill actually read his spec and how this was a testament to Bill’s technical prowess. Joel’s bottom line conclusion by the end of the article is that a good technical manager must be technically savvy. The more technically savvy the better. And as far as Joel is concerned, the Bill Gates he presented to was extremely technically savvy and therefore Bill represented the epitome of good management.

And of course, this myth persists still. People still believe that Microsoft was successful because Bill, the ultimate CEO-geek, was at the helm.

I don’t think so. This is not management. This is self-aggrandizement.

At the opposite extreme are those managers who don’t know anything about technology and therefore manage to drive their teams in the wrong direction. This usually happens when managers attempt to make decisions when they don’t have the minimal technical knowledge to make intelligent decisions.

I know plenty of managers who think that because they know management they can manage any technical team. Their position is that because they can manage, they think they can take any number of highly technical people, in any technology, and turn them into a successful, high performance team. Their fond of saying, “I don’t need to be the technical expert. I know how to manage technology and therefore I can manage any technical team. These are the managers who say that their role is to “facilitate” the team. They don’t need to know the technology because they are really only “facilitators”.

I don’t think so. This is not management. This is self-deception.

So what is the right answer? How technical should a manager of technical people be?

The answer, Einstein famously said, is, “Just enough but no more”.

Actually, when Einstein was asked how simple things should be made, he responded, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.”

The same applies here. How technical should a technical manager be, “as technical as necessary, but not one bit more”.

So exactly how technical is “as technical as necessary?”

Technology is changing rapidly. In fact, so rapidly that few people can keep up with it for more than a decade. In fact, keeping up with technological advances for several decades is very difficult. The kids coming out of college have the latest knowledge and it’s only good for 5 to 10 years at the most, unless it basic technical and engineering knowledge they’ve been trained in.

So the technical managers’ job is not to have the latest technical knowledge. It’s not to know how to do the work that his or her direct reports are doing.

Here is the way I look at it. When I’m managing a team, my goal is to give my direct reports as much independent latitude as possible and no more. That means that each person is treated differently and each person gets a certain amount of independence, depending upon their expertise, and the situation. My goal it to keep them from failing. Put positively, my goal is to help them to be successful.

The metaphor I use is that my job is to keep them from “falling off the cliff” and yet, I want them to get close to the cliff. Getting close to the cliff means that they are pushing the boundaries of their own capabilities. It means that they are learning. But I don’t want them to fall off the cliff and fail.

Therefore, my job is to know “where the edge of the cliff is.” My job is to know when my direct reports are heading for disaster. That’s as technically savvy as I need to be. My job is to know when my direct reports are making technically sound decisions, but operationally poor ones. That means they and we are all close to falling off the edge of the cliff.

That doesn’t require that I have 100% technical knowledge. It requires that I have a combination of technical knowledge, interpersonal communication skills, and an ability to integrate facts as well as unrealized potentials. It means that I have to be able to integrate the known and the unknown in a model that can be projected into the future.

Instead of looking for managers that are technically savvy or for managers who can facilitate, we ought to be looking for managers who can integrate what they know about the technology and what they know about their team and what they know about the environment and be able to use their frontal lobes (where decisions are projected into the future) in a way that they can make sound decisions.

If you want to really understand how this is done just compare and contrast Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Bill Gates is smart but he doesn’t project unknowns into the future well. Just notice how Microsoft delayed entry into the Internet because Bill was so technically savvy he was sure he knew what was up. In fact, a great majority of the success Microsoft has experienced has been the result of its monopoly.

Now look at Steve Jobs. Apple, with it’s small market share, has been projecting far in advance of the current state. And all with a CEO who is not a geek. Go figure!

The primary requirement for managers is not to be able to “do”, but to be able to “see’.

The technical manager must constantly ask himself or herself, “what do I need to know and understand in order to point my technical experts into the future I see?”

Ask and answer that question consistently and often and you will be just technical enough.

Be well,

Steven Cerri

#66-7/21/08: On The Shoulders Of Giants!

2008-07-22T05:34:00Z

On The Shoulders Of Giants!
Can you think your way through management?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, July 21, 2008

Hello everyone!

How does science progress? On the shoulders of giants, so the saying goes.

Those of you who have taken my classes have heard me say that for the typical engineer, management is a new career. That’s my saying.

You’ve also heard that science progresses on the shoulders of the giants who have come before us. All knowledge builds on the foundations of the past. Algebra is the foundation for the calculus which is the foundation for differential equations. We must understand one level before we can understand the next. And so it goes… until things get stuck.

Yes, stuck. In fact, science doesn’t move in nice progressive steps up the ladder of knowledge. Nor does it move in chaotic fashion. Science advances in logical, incremental steps with each level using the previous level as foundation, until progress can no longer be made. And then, a completely new way of looking at the world must often emerge. If science continues to rest on the known knowledge as it’s foundation for the next step, it will ultimately fail to model the world.

Therefore, for progress to ultimately be made, science must embrace that which has never been seen before. It must embrace a totally new way of understanding the world and it must abandon, to varying degrees, that which came before.

This has happened and is happening with relativity, as one example. Einstein developed the general and special theories of relativity. That worked well enough until it didn’t. Then we got quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. Those theories worked well enough until they didn’t and now we are seemingly moving toward string theory as one possible alternative.

So what does this have to do with engineering, engineers, and management. Well, it’s exactly the same process. As an engineer you think you can “think” your way through management just as you “think” your way through technical challenges. But the process of management is as different from engineering as quantum mechanics is from relativity. And whatever theories, rules, processes, and strategies you use to solve the engineering issues, I can guarantee you they will not work in the arena of management.

In fact, engineering is as certain as relativity at predicting the future. Management is as uncertain as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle at predicting the future.

The question is, which way of being in the world can you live with?

Be well,

Steven Cerri

#65-7/14/08: Managing Projects Half A World Away

2008-07-15T05:52:00Z

How To Manage Projects Half-A-World Away
Can I make a contractor part of my team?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, July 14, 2008

Hello everyone!

I have a coaching client who has a big challenge. He is attempting the development of a website by hiring contract website development from overseas independent contractors and companies. He is finding programmers who are technically competent. In some cases very technically competent.

He uses instant messaging (IM) and emails and in some cases phone calls to communicate with his contractors. In most cases these are one-person shops. In one case it’s a small contracting company that has perhaps 100 independent contractors available to it.

However, he is having a difficult time “managing” them. They don’t return his emails in a timely fashion. Sometimes they’ll disappear for a week without a trace. When they finally show up again on the email radar screen they’ve finished their task and it’s well done, but my client is frazzled because he was out of contact for a week and didn’t know if the project was being worked on, or if the contractor was dead, or drunk, or on vacation, or.....

So my client contacted me and said, “What do I do?” “How do I manage these people?” “They’re driving me nuts.”

I asked my client what he wanted… and it boiled down to the following items:

1. He wanted the contractors to return his phone calls, IMs, and emails in a timely fashion.

2. He wanted the contractors to behave as if they were part of his team. He wanted them to be invested int he success of the project not just behave as “hired guns”.

3. He wanted to feel comfortable by having the contractors keep him informed as to what was going on regarding their part of the project.

My gut response to these requests is the same as Matchbox 20’s Rob Thomas sings in Santana’s song, Smooth; “Forget about it.”

Well, not quite. There is a solution.

Let me pose the question succinctly: “What is the best way to manage contractors who are located overseas and are doing programming work for you or your company?”

There are several steps that must be taken simultaneously, as follows:

Expectations: Lets get really clear about expectations. My colleague wants his overseas contractors to be part of his American team. In 90% of the cases that isn’t going to happen. Separated by thousands of miles, oceans, continents, languages, cultures, values, and beliefs, the expectation that your contractor will be committed to your project as much as you are or as much as your American employees are just isn’t going to happen. So don’t expect it. Expect that it’s going to be a job for your contractors and nothing more and prepare accordingly.

Genius or Hard Worker Here is the big one: Would you rather have a brilliant genius working for you overseas who you can’t control, does really brilliant work but causes you grief because you can’t track him or her down… or would you rather have someone who does work a little slower, is not quite so brilliant but gets the job done and is willing to keep you in the loop?

My coaching client has, up until now, opted for the genius who can get things done quickly but can’t be found to hand it over until my client has pulled out his hair. Unless I absolutely have to have the genius, I’ll always opt for the less brilliant but more cooperative team player. Remember, we hire people for their expertise and fire them for lack of fit.

Project Management Next, make sure that your projects are very well “contained”. By that I mean don’t make the projects too big. Make them small enough that you can control the design and functionality.

Who Does What?Next, you, the hiring entity, must decide on the functional requirements of the software. You must decide on what you want. The contractor/programmer decides on the implementation but you decide on the requirements.

My client has been giving himself a huge amount of grief because he has not been defining the functional requirements of the software well enough before giving the project to his contractors. He has been leaving it up to the contract programmer to decide not only the implementation but also some of the requirements and the design. This has left my client out in the cold. The best approach is to clearly, with structure, forms, documents, and change processes, lay out the requirements of the software. One can even go so far as to develop dummy screen shots of how the website is supposed to look. Where are the buttons to be placed? What text should be included and where do you want it placed? How are the users to move around the pages? How are the pages to “respond” to the user’s requests.

It’s the job of the hiring firm to design to a very specific level of detail what the website is to look like and what it is to do. For sure there can be adjustments as the design gets implemented, but the hand-off from the hiring firm to the programmer should be very detailed, very clear, and very structured. The only thing the programmer should do is make the requirements “happen”. My client should design and decide, and the programmer should implement and provide feedback. Obviously there can be some “give and take” here but not nearly as much as if the programmer is located down the hall from the manager.

My client has been managing his overseas contractors too loosely. He has been managing them as if they are part of his team. They are not. They don’t want to be and he should not expect them to be.

That means that he must go through the following steps:

1. Establish a clear visual representation of what the web page(s) and system are to look like.

2. Establish a written document that explains how the various functions and operations in the web page(s) are to perform their functions.

3. Provide clear milestones with timetables, and feedback events (i.e., meetings, documents, emails, phone calls, etc.) Work this out in conjunction the the contractor BEFORE work begins.

4. Establish incentive payments along the way so that when deliverables AND communications take place as planned, payment is made; otherwise there is some appropriate penalty. Don’t make the penalty punitive of you may not get anything back.

5. Select programmers and contractors who will work with you the way you want. Find those who can do the work you want done and do it the way you want it done. Don’t sacrifice the process by assuming that it will all “come out in the wash”.

6. Finally, when you find contractors who you work well with, ask them if they know of other contractors who they would recommend. Remember the old adage, “Birds of a feather flock together.”

When people are separated by thousands of miles, different languages, different cultures, significantly different values and beliefs, it is imperative not to make assumptions that they will work the way you work. It’s challenging enough to find that in your own company office building, why would you expect it with someone halfway around the world from a completely different country.

Remember: “Keep your local direct reports close. Keep your overseas contractors even closer.”

Be well,

Steven Cerri

#64-7/8/08: Just Say No or Is It I Don’t Know?

2008-07-09T05:25:00Z

Just Say No or Is It I Don’t Know?
What to do when you don’t have the answer.
Posted by Steven Cerri on Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Hello everyone!

Just say No or is it I don’t know?

How often do you say, “I don’t know?”

How often do you say, “I forgot to do that?”

How often do you say, “Sorry, I didn’t do it?”

To most engineers, scientists, and technical professionals these are deadly statements. No self-respecting engineer wants to say, “Oh, I forgot to do that”. And no self-respecting engineer wants to say, “I don’t know the answer to that”.

I can tell you, after managing engineers, scientists, and technologists for many, many years, if you want to really tick me off, give me an answer when you really don’t have the answer. Give me an excuse when you just forgot. Give me an answer when you were just too busy to get to it.

Probably more than most people, we engineers, scientists, and technologists think we are always supposed to have an answer. And not only an answer, but the right answer. I’ve watched engineers “dance” around topics because they just can’t bring themselves to admit they don’t have the answer, or admit that they just made a mistake.

I learned my lessons and got my chops when I was in college. I was raised on a farm and rather than work on the farm every summer during college I worked for Del Monte Corporation. It was better pay than working on the farm and it gave me exposure to something other than the family farm.

I worked in a “weight and inspection station”. This is the station that receives produce, in this case, tomatoes, from farmers. The trucks that bring in the produce are weighed as they arrive at the station, the produce is inspected and graded, the produce is off-loaded at the station, the trucks are once again weighed empty.

The tomatoes are inspected by government inspectors and inspection tags are attached to the produce load. The farmer is paid for the full tonnage of the tomatoes minus the percentage of the tomatoes that have been found to be rejected during inspection. The process involves a lot of weighing, tagging, inspecting, and reweighing. Numbers and tags are flying everywhere and in those days these tasks were not done in as automated a fashion as they are today. At the end of each 8-hour shift the weights of all the loaded trucks, minus their empty weights, should add up to the total of the tomatoes delivered to the station.

I was called a weight master and, during my 8-shift, I was in charge of weighing the trucks loaded and empty and ensuring the inspection numbers were accurately recorded for each load delivered.

Once or twice a week, during any weight inspector’s 8-shift (there were three of us) we could expect that our numbers, at the end of our shift, wouldn’t add up. Even if we were very, very careful it seemed to happen anyway.

Now at the end of my shift, if the numbers didn’t add up, it meant that I had made a mistake, somewhere, somehow, sometime during my shift. And after looking at the numbers a couple of times, if I didn’t find the error, it meant that we were not going to find the error. It was a recording mistake and that was that.

At the end of my shift I had two choices. I could tell my colleagues on the next shift of the error so they could start fresh with an adjustment, or I could keep my mouth shut and let them wrestle with the error as if it might have occurred on their sift.

I’m not sure I understand why, or what I had been taught, but my approach was to be “straight up” with my colleagues. If my numbers were off, the next shift knew by how much and that it had happened on my watch. No one on the next shift nor my manager ever criticized me for making an error. They knew I was doing my best. I didn’t make many errors, but when I did I told them about it right away. They just acknowledged it and we all went on from there.

It wasn’t until many, many years later that I found out from my father that one of the things my co-workers at Del Monte really appreciated was that when they came in to begin their shift they knew exactly what the situation was. I always told them whenever I had made a mistake and they could take it from there. Apparently that was rather unique. Other weight masters weren’t so forth coming with errors they had made.

I kept that philosophy throughout my engineering career and beyond. I always taught my direct reports that “I don’t know” is a perfectly good answer. I also taught my direct reports that I’m not too concerned about a mistake that happens once in a while. I am concerned about mistakes that are repeated.

So I’m not suggesting that you always answer with “I don’t know”. I’m looking for patterns. If a direct report is “always” telling me “I don’t know” or always telling me “I forgot to do it”, then we are in big trouble. But I don’t expect my direct reports to be geniuses or to have every answer to every question I might ask right at their fingertips. But I sure as heck expect them to be able to find the answer, given time.

So to all of you who think that you can’t answer a question with “I don’t know,.... but I’ll find out” or who think you can’t once in a while answer “I just forgot to do that… but I’ll get on it right away and have it to you ....” think again. If you aren’t being honest with your manager then you either have the wrong manager (you are working for Attila the Hun) or you are underestimating your manager and you need to have a talk with him or her.

Honesty is always the best policy. Straight up information is always the best approach. No one should expect you to be perfect, not your manager, not your customer, not even you.

If your work environment can’t abide an honest “I don’t know” or “I forgot to do it” then it will grind you down in the long run any way.

Be well,

Steven Cerri

#63-7/1/08: Managing Millennials

2008-07-02T00:53:00Z

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

#62-6/23/08: You Know You Side With Your Feelings!

2008-06-24T06:31:00Z

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

#61-6/16/08: Why Do Women Leave Engineering?

2008-06-17T08:10:00Z

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".

#60-6/9/08: How Important Are Soft Skills for Engineers?

2008-06-09T06:57:01Z

How Important Are Soft Skills for Engineers?
Are they as important as hard skills?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, June 9, 2008

Hello everyone!

Here’s a question for you; “How important are “soft skills” in your long-term success as an engineer or as an engineering manager?”

I guess first I should define “soft skills”. My answer is that “soft skills” are all those skills that have to do with everything OTHER than your engineering topics.

Soft skills are all those skills that have to do with “being human”. They are those skills that are NOT focused on engineering, physics, dynamics, geology, biology, electronics, etc. Soft skills are those skills having specifically to do with being human and with being “in relationship” with other human beings. Specifically, communicating with them, working with them, influencing them, getting along with them, fighting with them, arguing with them, being angry with them, agreeing with them, laughing with them, and the list goes on. It’s called “life”.

We define “hard skills” as those skills having to do with quantifiable physical scientific and engineering disciplines, and “soft skills” as those “squishy”, “nebulous”, “difficult to quantify” factors that pertain to being a human being.

So, now having gotten the definition out of the way, lets get back to the question: “How important are “soft skills” in your long-term success as an engineer or as an engineering manager?”

If you answered anything but “VERY!" you flunk.

Oh, believe me, I know what we’d like the answer to be… “NOT MUCH”. In fact I know engineers who think that soft skills are useless and it shows in their communication skills and in their interpersonal skills. No one likes to work with them. And they continue to be engineers for one reason and one reason only; they have developed a niche that no one else can satisfy and so they are tolerated. But if the company ever finds another person who can do the work they are doing and do it with a better attitude and a greater capability to work with other people, they are going to be out on their ear.

I not only work with a lot of companies who seek me out, but I also attend a lot of meetings and engineering events. Everywhere companies are complaining about two things most of the time. The shortage of qualified people and the shortage of people who can work with others smoothly. One is a complaint regarding hard skills, engineering skills, and the other is a complaint about soft skills, interpersonal people skills.

And companies ideally want both qualities in their people. They’ll take a person with good hard skills and poor soft skills and put them in a technical position. They’ll take a person with minimum hard skills but good people skills and put them in a management position. But they’ll always take a person with good hard skills and good soft skills and put that person wherever they want to be.

You learn your hard skills in college, and then you’re expected to learn your soft skills.... in....

Be well,

Steven Cerri

#59-6/3/08: Why Do Bad Managers Succeed?

2008-06-03T20:39:00Z

Why Do Bad Managers Succeed?
It seems that bad managers go on and on and on.
Posted by Steven Cerri on Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Hello everyone!

Last week I published my May ezine/newsletter. It was focused on a specific management question, namely;

“Why is it that bad managers are successful?”

In the ezine/newsletter is referred to bad managers as managers who were mediocre and incompetent. Now I know those are relatively harsh words; “mediocre and incompetent”.

In fact, one of the email responses to my ezine was a very thoughtful and interesting response suggesting that a more appropriate label might be “naive".

Naive may certainly be a reasonable label for some managers. However, naive implies a positive and good intention toward management. My experience is that there are also plenty of mediocre managers, those who just haven’t the training or the experience and are beyond their level of competence.

I’ve also worked for and with those managers who are absolutely certain that, through a gesture of power and authority, they are right in their actions toward management, no matter what. These, I label as the incompetent managers. (For more detail on this check out my ezine/newsletter that was sent to you last week if you were on my mailing list or you can subscribe at the right on this page.)

I have met plenty of managers in all three categories; naive, mediocre, and incompetent.

The next question one might ask is, what are the motivates for the actions of managers in these three categories? How do they view their direct reports? Is there a difference in the way they consider their relationship with their employees?

Lets look at how employees, the direct reports, are thought of.

Most of us are taught one of two philosophies regarding the motivations of most people in the workplace (even though our experience tells us that there are many different philosophies that ought to apply). The idea that there are two or at most three “groups” of employees seems to begin early in our education and continues on into college and beyond. It’s in our classrooms, in our media, in or textbooks.

That is, employees are placed into one of three categories when it comes to their workplace motivations…

The first group of employees is considered lazy and unwilling to take any initiative and therefore, must be managed closely and forcefully. This is often the way “less educated or less trained employees” are thought to be best managed.

The second group consists of those who take initiative and pride in their work, are usually better educated, and need little management and supervision.

And finally the third group consists of the entrepreneurs who take “ownership” of their work and don’t want any supervision and are best left alone to “create”.

These three “groupings” of employees often lead us to specific types of management behavior.

The first group, those who are lazy and don’t take initiative must be managed closely, forcefully, and constantly.

The second group, those who take initiative and pride in their work must be managed only a little, with some distance.

And the third group, those entrepreneurs, shouldn’t be managed at all ... OK.. maybe a little, once in a while.

Schools teach this approach either overtly or covertly. Books present this approach. Other managers tell their management trainees this same message. Consultants and trainers teach this approach.

Except me. You won’t hear this refrain from me.

I don’t believe it.

Early in my management career I began to notice that there were times when, with the same employee, I was most effective if I left them alone and at other times more effective if I managed them closely. The same employee! Sometimes close management was best. Other times distant management was best. What was the difference that made the difference?

Slowly through my experience in the real world, starting in college, I began to develop a very different philosophy about management. Unlike most systems that attempt to reduce everything down to a simple rule or maybe two, I allowed my imagination to wander.... and.... I came up with seven parameters! Imagine, seven factors that determine the success of a management situation. Many people would cringe at the idea of a manager having to take into account seven different parameters in order to decide how to deal with a specific situation. It’s too complex! Well, not everything can be defined as a simple two-variable equation. (You should be interpreting significant sarcasm by now.)

You engineers, technologists, and scientists out there.. answer this question for me? Why is it that we can easily buy into the idea that spacecraft, buildings, biological systems, and quantum physics can be defined with complex, multi-variable representations, but “systems of people” are supposed to adhere to “a couple of simple rules”? The answer of course is that they don’t.

In my world, seven “contextual parameters” must be evaluated in order to define the best management style for a given situation. I call this process Contextual Definition©.

And once those seven parameters are accessed there are eight management styles to select from, one or two of which will be optimum for that given situation. This I call The Hierarchy of Contextual Leadership Styles©.

Together they define the best management style for a given set of employees in a given situation and I call that Contextual Leadership©.

The best management approach is only incidentally dependent upon the employee being managed.

So I don’t subscribe to the idea that the best management approach is to group people into two basic categories; people who are lazy and people who work hard. Although I certainly agree with the email that there are people who fall into those two categories and they generally trigger one of two management approaches.

But not everyone falls into one of these two categories. And there’s the rub. What to do about them? My seven parameters of Contextual Definition cover, at least as far as I can tell right now, the range of important parameters that a manager need consider when deciding how to manage a given situation.

Whatever category we can lump our employees into represents only one of seven parameters that must be taken into account to achieve management success.

Be well,

Steven Cerri

#58-5/27/08: Is It Just Old Age?

2008-05-27T15:39:00Z

Is It Just Old Age?
Do all engineers either become managers or get pushed aside?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Hello everyone!

Over the years, I’ve been asked by many clients, the following question:

“As engineers, what is it that drives us to become either less successful over time in our engineering organizations or pushes us into management as we age? It seems we are doomed to not be able to be successful just doing our engineering. What’s going on?”

I’ve been asked this flavor of question by senior engineers; by engineers who felt compelled and pressured to become managers; by young engineers who were surrounded by much older engineers doing the same work as they were doing; and on and on. It seems that companies want something different, over time, from their engineers. And I keep getting asked what it is and why it is so.

* Is it that we get older?

* Is it that the company wants something different from us as we age and gain experience?

* Is it that our salary gets too high?

* Is it that technology leaves us behind?

* Is it that things are changing so rapidly that we can’t keep up?

* Is it that there is no where else to be promoted to?

Do any or all of these factors “force us” into the management ranks or make us stumble as we get older as engineers?

What does it take for us to be successful throughout our careers as engineers and what is it that seems to relentlessly push us toward engineering management?

The answers to these questions all fall into the same bucket and yet seem quite different and somewhat complicated.

It’s not just a one-line answer. It’s a complicated process and it’s a combination of several factors.

The situation I’m describing probably develops for 80% to 90% of engineers to some degree. It’s starts early in your careers by the small steps taken but doesn’t often show up until 10+ years in the business.

Lets look at some of the more important factors one by one.

Factor #1: First, as time goes by and you get older and get more experience, if you remain a technical professional, an engineer, your salary increases in comparison to those who are graduating from school. The new graduates can do the technical work you are doing just as well as you, or nearly so, and at a much lower salary. Not withstanding the “experience” you have gained in your years as an engineer, unless you have “important” experience, the young people coming out of school can do what you do. And, as I’ve stated, at a much lower salary.

When I joined Rockwell International in 1969, right out of college something hit me like a ton of bricks the first day on the job. There were people there twice my age (and more) who were doing the exact same work I was. No doubt they had more experience than me, but in most cases and on most tasks, we were doing the same work, and their salaries were twice mine. At some point, this doesn’t make good business sense. And as the Apollo program began to ramp down, most of the expensive people who were doing the same work I was doing were laid off. I was kept because I could do the work and I wasn’t as expensive as others. It wasn’t a pleasant time in our aerospace history, but it was driven by business considerations. It is also what drove me to get two more advanced degrees in broader areas of discipline. I didn’t want to end up like my older colleagues competing with the college graduates for tasks.

So, from the company’s point of view, the goal is to make that increased salary pay for something that is not obtainable from someone just out of school.

And what is it? It’s Judgment! Experience doesn’t always equal judgment, but judgment requires experience.

Companies are willing to pay for judgment; that intangible element that comes from experience and yet is difficult to quantify. Turn your experience into an ability to see what others do not see, into an ability to predict outcomes that can’t be calculated and you become valuable.

Factor #2: Technology is changing very rapidly and the speed of technical change is increasing. If an engineer is to keep up with technology, he or she must constantly be learning the latest in technological knowhow.

The bottom line is that if you want to stay an engineer, if you want to stay out of management, then you must stay abreast of technological knowhow.

This is difficult to do. Because even if you stay abreast of technology, your salary creeps higher and higher. Without developing judgment, the young people just out of school will still have an edge.

Factor #3: Most organizations believe that as an engineer ages, they are acquiring something that is not taught in college. Most companies believe that the work environment will teach you how to communicate effectively with others, how to work on teams, how to work with and lead teams, and how to work with people all round the world.

Unfortunately, that is not what is taught to employees. Many of the best engineers don’t learn how to communicate while at work. They don’t learn how to work on teams either and most engineers don’t realize this is missing from their resume until they reach a certain age. And then they hit the “wall”. Their careers slow down. Their manager complains to them about their inability to communicate effectively with others. Their manager tells them that they ought to be promoted but they just don’t have the people skills necessary to make the next transition.

Managers and company organizations actually believe that the appropriate people skills, the effective communication skills, the team building skills can be taught “on the job”. It just doesn’t happen that way. Actually, the WRONG behaviors are taught “on the job”. And often, these people skills are the most important of the three factors I’ve discussed so far. Master the people skills, and the other two factors often come along.

These are the three top factors driving the typical engineer into a career corner. There are other factors, certainly, that depend on specific situations. But generally speaking, these three factors are driving engineers either into management, or into frustration, or out the door… in the long term. And if you are going to adjust any of these parameters in order to strengthen your career, you must adjust all three of them, in the following priority. Number 1, master communication and people skills. Number 2, translate your experience into “judgment”. And Number 3, keep up with technology as best you can.

Even if you don’t want to become a manager, adjusting these three factors, will go a long way in securing a long-lived, engineering career.

Be well,

Steven Cerri

#57-5/21/08: Micromanagement To The Rescue!

2008-05-21T17:27:00Z

Micromanagement To The Rescue!
The case for “close-in” management.
Posted by Steven Cerri on Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Hello everyone!

What would you do if you were managing a direct report who complained much of the time? A direct report who “spewed venom” in conversations with other employees, complaining about the company, or about management, or about work conditions, or about work in general? What would you do if this employee went into the offices or cubicles of colleagues and consumed 30 minutes or more at a time, bending the ears of colleagues with rants about how “this isn’t working” or “that’s not working”, or “did you hear about....”?

How would you handle this direct report?
… Would you just ignore him or her?
… Would you talk to them?
… Would you talk to his or her colleagues?
… When this employee’s colleagues complained to you, (some are also your direct reports and some are not) would you tell them to just ignore the tirades?

I’ve had this situation in my management career enough times to loose count. Here is the approach that has worked for me.

I like to use the analogy of a thumbtack, a nail, my thumb, and a hammer. Lets say I’m putting up a picture and I don’t know if I should use a thumbtack or a nail. At the start, I usually assume that a thumbtack will be sufficient. I assume the least “intrusive” approach until and unless I’m shown that a more intense approach is warranted. So I’ll begin with thumbtack and use my thumb to push it into the wall. If that works, fine. I’f not, only then will I get out the nail and the hammer and pound that nail into the wall.

The same holds true for my approach to this management situation. My first approach is to talk to the employee and if that works, great! If not, then we are going to have an intense process indeed. Here are the details.

The Thumbtack and the Thumb Approach
I tell the direct report that I’ve been getting feedback that he/she has been complaining quite a bit about “xyz” and colleagues are not happy about it.
Next I’d ask what is causing the “ranting”. In this way I can find out more about the “map of the world” of the direct report. My goal here, at a minimum, is to understand the motivation of the employee’s complaints as much as possible. Unless I agree there is something legitimate about the complaints, in which case I’d attempt to remedy the situation, I’d tell the direct report that the complaints have to stop. They are distracting, unappreciated by other employees, and they don’t do anything positive for the image of the direct report either in my eyes or in the eyes of fellow employees.
I would get a commitment from the employee to end the complaining and that wold be the end of our discussion.

Then I’d watch and listen.

If the situation improves or corrects, great!

If it doesn’t, then we go to the next level.

This next level gets everyone involved. Here is what I mean.

The Nail and the Hammer Approach
First I would talk to all the colleagues and other employees who have complained to me about this direct report as well as those I believe the direct report has contact with but who have not complained to me. I would tell them that the direct report’s behavior is not acceptable and that I want their help in dealing with this. I would tell them that I would like them to stop the employee “in his/her tracks”, immediately when he/she begins to complain. Just don’t listen to it. Turn your back. Kick them out of your office or cubicle. Don’t do anything to support the ranting. And I would get a commitment from these employees to support my plan. Also, I would ask them to notify me whenever and as soon as he/she attempts to rant or complain.

I would then have another meeting with the complaining employee to express my disappointment with their previous behavior and their lack of adjustment. I would make it clear that their ranting is not acceptable and that I’ve decided to raise the “temperature” around this behavior. I would tell him/her that I’ve talked to all the other employees and they are not longer going to support this behavior and that if I hear of this behavior again I’m going to come down on them like a ton of bricks. I’d make it clear that this has now become very serious and if it continues it will adversely affect this person’s performance review and perhaps their future at the company.

End of discussion!

Then I’d watch and listen. However, this time things would be different. If the direct report complained and I got feedback from anyone that the behavior was continuing, I go right to the complaining employee and tell them that I heard they were ranting again and to stop it. Every time I got word that the employee was behaving in an unacceptable manner (i.e., complaining) from anyone, I’d go right to the employee and tell them that I knew of their unacceptable behavior and they were to stop it. The only way I’d give the employee any “breathing room” was if they stopped the undesirable behavior.

This approach has worked for me over and over again.

Is it micromanagement?..... Some would call it that. I call it “Contextual Management©” which is my idea of picking the best management approach for a given situation.

Does it work?..... You bet! It’s worked for me over and over again.

Is it necessary?..... It seems to be. No other approach has worked as well.

The Real World
I’ve been coaching several managers who have just the situation I’ve described above. The direct reports range all over the map regarding their age, background, discipline, gender, etc. And in most cases my clients (i.e., the managers) have been successful. Sometimes the “thumbtack and thumb” approach works alone and sometimes the “thumbtack and thumb to nail and hammer” approach works. The only managers who have not been successful raining in their complaining employees have been those managers who began their intervention with the “nail and hammer” approach. It seems that the approach that begins “lighter” and then brings in the heavy hammer (the approach that I’ve always used) works better than just beginning with the hammer.

Be well,

Steven Cerri

#56-4/28/08: Once More With Micromanagement

2008-04-29T04:01:00Z

Once More With Micromanagement!
A direct report wants to manage her manager
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, April 28, 2008

Hello everyone!

Today I was conducting some business. The young woman who was assisting me was very competent with her company’s products, services, and she was great with customers, me. It was clear she was not in a “selling mode”. Her interest was in providing me with service and products that suited my needs.

During our conversation she asked me what I did for a living. I told her that I trained and coached engineers and technical managers to be more successful. I told her I trained in the soft skills, the interpersonal people skills, so that engineers could become managers and leaders and so that managers and leaders could be more successful leading their engineers.

I then told her that I had just completed a 15-CD set on transitioning from engineer to leader and a 3-CD set on the topic of micromanagement, and I was about to send my first book to my editor.

When I mentioned the word, “micromanagement” her eyes lit up. I said, “Oh, do you have micromanagement here?” Her response was “Oh yah!”

I asked her my famous question… those of you who have been following my blogs know this is THE question to ask. I asked her, “How do you know when you are being micromanaged?” I also asked her what she thinks her manager’s reason is for calling her three times a day.

She said, “I am 200% over my sales and revenue numbers. I’m the number one person here. And yet my boss calls me three times a day to get a status of my accounts even though he will see all the information I’m giving him in a daily report that he has available at the end of the day..... I send it to him at the close of business and he can see it .... actually at 3am.

“And he says the reason he calls me is to see if I need any help hitting my numbers.” (This is, in my opinion, an appropriate reason… three times a day, however, may be just a little much.)

So this is really micromanagement, isn’t it? Here is a top performer who it doesn’t seem will falter any time soon. She is doing very well and can be expected to continue. And yet, her boss is calling her three times a day to find out how she is doing. She feels micromanaged.

So, what to do? This is a perfect example of a situation in which an employee ought to be able to manage the manager. How would an employee in this situation actually manage her manager so that he would back off this intense management scrutiny?

Here’s how.

First, we have to determine his motivation. We could assume that her manager is a jerk or a control freak. But I seldom think that people are that simple. I think people are usually attempting to achieve something positive from their point of view with the behavior they are displaying. So my first assumption is that he has a legitimate motivation and we must determine what that is.

So I suggested that she ask him his motivation. She could say something like… “Bob (not his name), I’ve been doing really well here. I’m number one in sales and revenue and I’m 200% over my target. And I know you want to get my status three times a day, which is probably time consuming for you as it is for me. I know you get my report for the day when you’d rather be sleeping, so I imagine you don’t see my reports until the next day at the opening of business. Help me understand what you’d like to know when, so that I might be able to provide it to you in a more streamlined fashion, rather than you and I talking three times a day.”

If I understood what this woman was telling me, I think he’s probably suffering through something like this (just a guess of course):

1. Getting her daily sales and revenue results at 3am the following morning means he doesn’t really see the numbers until the opening of business the day after.

2. That is probably too late for him to prepare his status report to his boss.

3. Instead, he is probably calling three times a day, so that at the end of that day, he will be able to put together a draft status report for his boss and prepare himself for that meeting.

4. Or his boss actually wants a status at the close of the business day even though the hard numbers won’t be available until the next morning.

5. Or someone is asking him for a status during the day and he needs to contact her by phone to get a status.

In order to keep from being micromanaged, she must find out what is the motivation behind these three call a day from her manager. When she determines his motivation, all she need do is provide him with the information he wants in a way that is agreeable to him AND agreeable to her.

For example she might negotiate with him the following possibilities:

1. She could call him at the end of the day with her numbers. As long as she is hitting her daily numbers she need only call him at the end of the day. At 1pm, if she is having a difficult day meeting her numbers, then she can call him at 1pm and give him a status. Then she can call him again at 4pm or 5pm, but as long as she is hitting her numbers, the agreement is, one phone call at the end of the day.

2. Another possibility is she can send an email to him at 10am, 2pm, and 5pm. They can settle on a format that is concise and provides the detail he is looking for. If she is not hitting her numbers the email is replaced with a phone call initiated by her. The only time he would call her is if there is something urgent and critical that he must discuss with her.

With this approach, she can begin the process of managing her manager. Her goal is to find a way to provide the information he needs, when he needs it, “for the reasons he needs it.” The negotiation process is to provide him with the information in a way that helps her not feel micromanaged.

This approach has worked over and over and over again. In fact, I have another example. I spoke to a direct report who was having difficulty with his manager. After using this approach the whole manager-direct report relationship changed from micromanagement and conflict to team work and trust. But only one blog at a time. I’ll talk about this case in the future.

Be well,

Steven Cerri

#55-4/21/08: Hillary & Obama & Your Management Style

2008-04-22T02:44:00Z

Hillary & Obama & Your Management Style!
Presidential management and you.
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, April 21, 2008

Hello everyone!

I was listening to National Public Radio (NPR) a couple of days ago to a segment regarding the anticipated management styles of Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. The commentators were saying that Hillary has a tendency to be a very “hands-on” manager and Barack tends to be more of a delegator. The commentators continued to wonder how the candidates’ management styles would differ if one of them became president.

Now somewhere along the early portion of this news segment one of the commentators said something that really surprised me. He said and I’m paraphrasing to the best of my recollection, “Barack would probably have a management style that would rely on delegation and Hillary would be very hands-on. In fact, this question, if it’s better to be a hands-on manager or a delegator, is a topic still being debated in business schools. There are plenty of examples where hands-on management works and yet there are plenty of examples where delegation works. It’s still uncertain which is the best approach.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. The idea that someone is still debating which management style is best, hands-on or delegation, is absolutely ridiculous. It shows they don’t understand management.

Let me give you an example that will clarify how I see this whole discussion. Lets assume you are doing research regarding the national spelling bee. Lets say you want to decide what the best age is for children to be in order to win the spelling bee. And lets also say that you’ve got 10 kids who were 10 years old when they won their spelling bees and you also have 10 kids who were 11 years old when they won their spelling bees. And then you say, “It’s not clear which is a better age for winning the spelling bee, 10 years old or 11 years old. The universities are still debating this issue. “

The answer of course is that if you’ve got kids of both ages winning spelling bees, winning is probably not a function of being 10 or 11 years old.

The same holds true regarding hands-on or delegation management styles. If we have cases of both styles being successful (and of course both styles being unsuccessful as well) then the management style is probably not the determinant of success. DAH! Something else is going on.

So what is the determining factor in the success or failure of hands-on or delegating management styles? What should we be looking at?

Those of you who have been following my blogs for a while know I’ve been talking, at various times, about something called “Contextual Definition©”. Contextual Definition says that the best management style is a function of seven parameters which include the expertise of the direct report, the expertise of the manager, and other parameters derived from the management situation itself.

So depending on the situation, Barack’s delegating style might work or it might not and depending upon the situation, Hillary’s hands-on management style might work and it might not.

Let’s take this one step further. Let’s hypothetically assume that they both got to be president. This means that they both have the same “tasks” to perform, governing the country. Lets assume that regarding the things that need to get done they have the same mandates. How would their respective management styles work given that they both have the same “things to accomplish”?

Barack’s hands off, delegating style would work well only if he selects people to delegate to who are very competent in the areas he has assigned them to. He can only successfully step back if the people he selects to delegate to have a great deal of expertise in their respective areas and if they share Barack’s philosophy, mission, vision, and will communicate back to Barack in a way that provides Barack the visibility he wants. If he selects people who are not extremely well qualified he will end up with what George Bush’s administration has encountered. George Bush has placed in positions of authority people who were not very well qualified and then he has managed them with a generally hands-off management style. If we need examples we need only look to Katrina as the first of many examples.

On the other hand, Hillary should select people to manage her departments who are competent but not too competent. If she is going to use a close, hands-on style with her direct reports, then her staff ought to be just competent enough to implement her wishes and her vision, but not so competent as to have their own vision of what should be done. Or at the very least, they must be willing to forego their own vision of their departments’ direction for hers. If she hires extremely competent people and then manages them too closely, they might feel micromanaged. (More about this in a minute.)

So there you have it. It’s actually very simple. I can’t believe the debate about hands-on or delegation is still going on. The fact that both styles can be found to work means that there are circumstances in which each is best suited.

In my career I always did well with delegation because I always attempted to hire people who were extremely competent for the positions I wanted them to fill. In fact, I often hired direct reports who were more qualified than me in many ways. However, if I ever had a direct report that was in over their head and they were having difficulty I didn’t hesitate moving in and managing them very closely (i.e., more hands-on).

And it was the process of Contextual Definition that allowed me to manage closely, to be a hands-on manager without appearing to be a micromanager. And that is the constant balancing act that good managers must deal with. As a manager your job is to manage a the people who perform the tasks. You hire people with certain qualifications. Those people may be well qualified or they may not. You must manage them so that they can be successful. If Barack has a default management style of delegation that’s a mistake if he hires less than “stellar” people. He won’t always be able to find the perfect person to fill the slot. Therefore, his best management style is one that fits the context. He must be flexible at times managing hands-on and at times delegating.

The same holds true for Hillary. If her default management style is to be hands-on that can also be a mistake. She will undoubtedly at some time hire a person or persons who are extremely well qualified and if she manages them closely they will feel micromanaged. Her best approach is to be flexible enough to adjust her management style to the context as well.

And if you want to know what to do in order to avoid micromanaging your direct reports and if you want to know how to avoid being micromanaged by your manager, check out my new 3-CD set.

I just completed a 3-CD set in which I lay out the complete model of Contextual Definition and Contextual Leadership. It explains and puts to rest this debate about which management style is best. In the final analysis, they all work best, but only in their optimum context.

(I have no information on John McCain’s preferred management style).

Be well,

Steven Cerri