http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/index/ Excellence in Technology Management and Performance en steven@stevencerri.com Copyright 2009 2009-09-10T14:21:00-08:00 http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/90_9_10_09/ http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/90_9_10_09/#When:14:21:00Z How Do You Manage? “Do you manage for the sprint or the marathon?” Posted by Steven Cerri on Thursday, September 10, 2009 Hello everyone! Do you manage for the sprint?...or .... Do you manage for the marathon?… or ... Do you manage for the race? What is a sprint? Imagine a Summer Olympics bicycle sprint race around a track.  The racers are poised on their bikes.  Their leg muscles are tense.  Their hearts are pounding.  Their muscles are ready to consume incredible amounts of energy and oxygen.  Their heads are up and their eyes are looking forward.  They are full of concentration, of tension.  They are thinking about leading at the beginning, leading in the middle, and leading at the end. The gun goes off and away they go. They are full out until they cross the finish line.  They have either won or lost and that’s the race. Now consider the Tour de France. The racers are poised at the starting line.  Their legs are relaxed.  Their heads are up and their eyes are looking forward.  All their support personnel and vehicles are standing by. The racers are thinking about pacing themselves.  They are thinking about the early part of the race as well as the middle and the end portions of the race. The gun goes off.  They begin the race.  The support cars and motorcycles follow along.  The support people communicate important information to the racers.  The racers grab nourishing liquids along the route.  They stop at various locations for rest and food. This then is the “marathon” race.  It goes on for days, even weeks. How do most managers and leaders do their jobs? Most managers and leaders do not know how to manage or lead for a race that is a combination of sprint and marathon.  Who runs a race that is a combination of sprint and marathon, anyway? Most managers and leaders I have met, worked with, or coached, tend to manage or lead… for the sprint.  More rarely, I have found managers and leaders who manage and lead for the marathon.  But seldom have I met managers and leaders who manage and lead “for the actual race”.  Most manage and lead as if their job is to put their direct report(s) on the bike, fire the starting gun, and sit back and watch the employee race, full out, around the track until they cross the finish line; until the task is done.  They expect their job to be done after the starting gun goes off.  If the direct report(s) fail it is “their fault”. When you hear leaders talking about their job being to “inspire” you know they think their job is just to fire the starting gun.  They think their job is to make the employee “excited” and “fired-up” to do the job and then they are supposed to get out of the way.  Their goal is to let the race run it’s course.  They sit back in order to let the employee feel “empowered”. You should at least manage and lead for the marathon The better managers and leaders manage and lead for the marathon.  They not only inspire and excite their employees, they also work with, monitor, and help their employees succeed during the entire project.  Like the pace cars in the Tour de France, like the people who provide nourishing drink to the racers, the marathon manager and leader is there to help and advise their direct reports along the way.  Why is it that we assume that Lance Armstrong, who won the Tour de France seven times still needs and deserves pace cars, nourishment, and advice along the route, while on the other hand, we think we should “empower” and “cut loose” our employees to do their work alone and on their own? Ideally you should manage and lead for the sprint AND the marathon. The best way to manage and lead is to manage and lead for the “race being run”.  That is, it is important to understand that every task has both a sprint portion and a marathon portion and maybe several portions of each.  The sprint portion can vary from an hour to a month and the marathon portion can vary from a month to several years.  Be well, Steven Cerri P.S. By the way.  If you’d like to leave a comment, and I’d sure be interested if you did, I’ve changed the comments software.  Only your comment and your name will show up at the end of the comment.  I have modified the software so that your email address will not show up anywhere. “What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question.  More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/ Copyright©2009 STCerri International and Steven Cerri.  You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it.  If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you. 2009-09-10T14:21:00-08:00 http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/89_9_1_09/ http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/89_9_1_09/#When:06:15:00Z Keeping Your Job “The difference that makes the difference” Posted by Steven Cerri on Tuesday, September 1, 2009 Hello everyone! Last week I attended two very interesting and significant events.  In the morning I attended the commemoration of NASA Ames Research Center as an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Historical Site, honoring all the great work that has been accomplished at that world-renowned facility.  Work in the areas of aeronautics, astronautics, computation, spacecraft and satellites, wind tunnel research, to name just a few of the technologies. As the chair of the San Francisco Section of the AIAA, I was honored and pleased to have been invited to make a short presentation. For those of you who don’t know much about the NASA Ames Research Center, it has been the pre-eminent NASA research facility on the west coast for many years. NASA’s Ames Research Center has been in existence since the early 1940s and has been involved in wing deicing systems for early aircraft right through to modern-day spacecraft. Ames was initially know for wind tunnel design and testing, flight testing, and supersonic and hypersonic aerodynamics.  The center conducted pioneering research in rotorcraft and vertical flight aircraft.  Then expanded into spacecraft engineering, supercomputing and information technology, air traffic control, thermal protection for re-entry vehicles (the Apollo ablative shield was developed there), astrobiology and space life sciences, and Earth and planetary sciences.  Ames led the development of simulators for human factors research, and has made major improvements to air traffic management. Even with this great history, several years ago, there was some question as to whether NASA Ames would remain open or be closed.  Budget cuts were placing in question the future of the facility. It was clear that NASA Ames needed to adapt.  To not only bring in more technology but to be more than technology.  The world had changed.  New relationships had to be developed.  New ways of doing business.  As I like to say it, “a new way of moving through the world”. With a plan for keeping the best of technology and people, coupled with a plan for changing their relationship with the outside world, several years ago, NASA Ames was told that it would not be closed. One of it first assignments was to build a new building. The building plans began to develop along a typical path.  The building envisioned was a 20th century building.  It was just another building. Enter new leadership and management in the latter part of 2008 regarding the building.  One of the first orders of business was to scrap the “first” new building plan.  Management then challenged the team to come up with a building that was a 21st century building, one that was completely sustainable.  One that didn’t use more energy than it produced.  One that used geothermal energy sources; recycled all it’s water; and used the environment to cool and heat the building.  One that was a net-zero energy building.  A building that was the most sustainable government building in the United States. Apollo 11 When the astronauts of Apollo 11 landed on the moon Neil Armstrong named the landing area Tranquility Base.  The new sustainable building has been named “Sustainability Base”.  The ground breaking event took place last week and when completed, this building will be the most energy efficient and most sustainable government building yet built.  It will set the standard. NASA Ames didn’t close; it didn’t lose it’s job.  It kept it’s job. NASA Ames not only didn’t have to close, but has become a reinvigorated organization that will set the standards for many sustainability technologies going forward. A lot like people. In a very significant way, NASA Ames is a lot like people.  NASA Ames is a lot like engineers and technology managers and leaders. We love our technology.  When the world around us changes we think the best thing to do is to be “better” at our technology.  But very often, the world wants something different from us.  The world wanted something different from NASA Ames.  The world didn’t want NASA Ames to abandon all of it’s technology.  The world wanted it to add something it didn’t have to the technology it already had. The same holds true for engineers and technical managers and leaders.  Your organizations don’t want you to abandon your technology.  They want you to add to it.  And 99% of the time, what they want you to add is the ability to communicate effectively.  They want you to be able to integrate yourself and your ideas into the ideas of the team. They want you to be able to have a wide variety of conversations with a wide variety of constituents.  Your communication skills, your management and leadership skills (which ultimately also boil down to communication) can be the determining factor as to whether you get laid off or keep your job. Be well, Steven Cerri P.S. By the way.  If you’d like to leave a comment, and I’d sure be interested if you did, I’ve changed the comments software.  Only your comment and your name will show up at the end of the comment.  I have modified the software so that your email address will not show up anywhere. “What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question.  More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/ Copyright©2009 STCerri International and Steven Cerri.  You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it.  If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you. 2009-09-02T06:15:00-08:00 http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/88_8_17_10/ http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/88_8_17_10/#When:18:45:00Z Un-Conferences “What is an Un-Conference and can it help?” Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, August 17, 2009 Hello everyone! The Un-Conference This weekend I had the opportunity to attend an “un-conference” for freelancers.  While I am not a freelancer, I thought it would be interesting to attend an un-conference and see how they work.  For those of you who have not attended an “un-conference”, they work this way. A group of people arrive at an event.  (In this case we arrived between 8 AM and 9 AM.) The leader(s) introduced the day and the general, overarching topic for the day.  In this case the un-conference topic was “Ideas to help people who freelance”.  The event was titled “Freelance Bootcamp”.  The event leaders then passed around blank tablets of paper and people wrote a topic they were either interested in learning more about or a topic they believed they were qualified to teach others about, and they signed their name on the paper. All these papers/topical ideas were gathered and the leader then read each topic out loud.  Participants, by a show of hands, indicated their interest in that topic.  If a topic had 10 or more interested people (out of 200+ participants), then it was selected as a topic.  The originator of the topic indicated whether they wanted to teach the topic, moderate a discussion, or have someone else lead the session. Each selected topic was scheduled for a duration of 1 hour.  In a day lasting from approximately 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM with an a short lunch, about 5 hours can be devoted to sessions.  If 8 separate locations/break-out rooms are allocated at the venue, then 40 different topical sessions can be presented.  People can move around during a presentation period if they choose, but generally speaking, people will select a topic of interest and stay for the hour.  We had 40 different session topics spread over 8 different locations.  Therefore, a participant was able to attend and/or present 5 different sessions. So there you have it.  That is the structure of our un-conference. The Un-Conference and the Internet There was something about the un-conference that brought me back to the birth of the internet.  Here is what I mean. When the internet was gearing up to hit the big time, the general consensus was that the internet would allow people to share “expertise”.  We would have access to “people who were experts” in specific disciplines and we would have more access to them than we had in the past because the internet would make that access easier.  Expertise would be much more available. The Promise Not Realized As most people have learned by now, the internet allows us to have more access to experts and also more access to mediocrity.  And it is not always easy to tell the difference.  When searching the internet for expertise, it is up to the seeker to validate and verify the validity of the expert.  People who really do not know what they are talking about can come across as an expert. However, there are certain situations in which a person may not want expertise but the opinion of someone who is an average person with average competence on a subject.  For example in the case of restaurant reviews.  We may not want the opinion of a professional food critic but rather that of an average patron. The Un-Conference Un-conferences function pretty much the same way. Un-conferences allow us to have access to experts, if they are there, and also access to people who are not experts, and they will definitely be there. Now I want to be clear.  This was my first un-conference, so this is a sample of one.  I want to compliment all the people who put it together.  They worked very hard and they did a great job.  By any account the un-conference was an overwhelming success. However, and here is the caveat.  It depends upon what one expects to get from an un-conference.  I could have taught many of the sessions that ultimately got selected.  (Sorry if that sounds not-so-humble, but that is the way I see it.) Remember, I’ve been in this business for many years.  I decided not to facilitate any sessions except one.  And I chose not to teach it but rather to facilitate it in order to bring out the level of expertise of the group members.  My goal was to learn about un-conferences and the people in them.  The Expertise The bottom line is that in this un-conference, the expertise rose to only a certain level.  And there it stopped.  And the expertise was at a relatively low level in comparison to what I was looking for. So why am I bringing this out in my blog.  Because there were two important take-aways from this event.  I think they are generally self-evident, but they were definitely reinforced by attending this un-conference. The first is that “expertise is really expertise”.  You know it when you see it, hear it, and get it.  You cannot expect people who are not experts in an area or are not experts in transmitting their knowledge to be able to teach others expert information.  For some people who were just starting out in the “freelance world”, probably much of the information they received was useful.  It gave them a sense that they were not alone.  It gave them an indication of some of the early hurdles that free-lancers face.  But those who had been in the business for a while, were not going to learn too much.  They were more likely to run a session.  But that did not necessarily guarantee that they were experts who could give “expert information” in an “expert way”. Second, it is very difficult, bordering on impossible, to get anything really useful in 1 hour.  People, especially the younger generations think that the world can be placed in bite-sized segments.  “Just give me the nugget”.  “The top 10 things....” And yet I met many people there who, it was clear, had been told the nuggets but had not implemented them.  The Conclusion Un-conferences are good for networking and hearing what others are doing and not doing.  This is important, especially if you are just starting out in a certain business, industry, or technology.  An un-conference will expose you to the first-level of information.  But “un-conferences” are not places for training, facilitation, and coaching.  They are rarely places to find expertise that can be translated to others.  They may not be places to find experts to tap later, either (remember this is a sample of one only).  They are great places where people can learn and hear what others are doing and find “contacts” that they can access, usually for a fee, at a later date to help them be more successful.  These “contacts” may be experts or merely people who have been in the business longer which does not necessarily mean “expert”.  They are also places to find people who are just starting out in whatever endeavor they are undertaking. My Next Step I will definitely seek out another un-conference just to validate or refute my sample of one.  And the next time I will facilitate more sessions.  And I would urge anyone who wants to know what others are doing in a specific field to attend an un-conference.  They can be fun.  You probably will not find a high level of expertise there.  But if it is, you will probably only get a taste of it and then you can exchange business cards and access it later. The bottom line is, if you want high-level expertise seek out known experts. Apologies to anyone at the un-conference I attended who might think I am dissing the un-conference.  I am not.  It was a good event, as far as it went.  I believe it did the job it was intended to do.  Not everything in life fulfills it’s purpose well.  I am convinced that this Freelance Boot Camp un-conference did indeed fulfill it’s purpose well. Be well, Steven Cerri P.S. By the way.  If you’d like to leave a comment, and I’d sure be interested if you did, I’ve changed the comments software.  Only your comment and your name will show up at the end of the comment.  I have modified the software so that your email address will not show up anywhere. “What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question.  More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/ Copyright©2009 STCerri International and Steven Cerri.  You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it.  If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you. 2009-08-17T18:45:00-08:00 http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/87_3_10_09/ http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/87_3_10_09/#When:02:06:00Z Finding a Mentor and Coach “How to find the right mentor and coach” Posted by Steven Cerri on Tuesday, March 10, 2009 Hello everyone! This week I was interviewed by Dice (the IT job portal) for an upcoming on-line resource they are preparing to assist young IT professionals in advancing their careers.  I was asked what my three top suggestions were for IT professionals who wanted to advance their IT career.  We ended the interview on the topic of what makes a good coach or mentor. The interview got me thinking about how to select a really good mentor and/or coach, whether inside your organization or outside. I know my own coaches and mentors were extremely instrumental in helping me with my career.  So I thought I would share with you some of my thoughts on what are the important qualities to look for when selecting a mentor or coach. “Mentoring and Coaching IS What You Think!!” There is a lot of discussion about the importance of mentoring and of coaching for engineers regarding their careers.  Many want mentors and coaches to tell them “what to do”.  It seems our world is filled with people who want to know “what to do” in order to be successful.  As engineers and technical managers, we often believe that if we just know what to do, we can do it and we will therefore be successful. Knowing what to do seems to be the key. And yet… the world is filled with people who know a great deal about what to do and yet things don’t change. Here are some examples. How many people want to change something in their lives? How many want to exercise regularly, loose weight, stop smoking, save money… the list is almost endless. And for those who want to know what to do in order to exercise regularly, loose weight, stop smoking, or save money, there are more books and more courses than one can read or attend in a life-time (primarily because there are more and more coming onto the market every day.) But gaining knowledge about “what to do” does not seem to change behavior in many situations.  People read books and attend workshops and nothing seems to change.  They diet endlessly.  They exercise for a while then keep paying their gym memberships but never attend.  They stop smoking and then start again.  They save, paying themselves first, while running up their credit cards. In the final analysis, it seems that changing behavior is not just about “knowing what to do”.  There seems to be more than one variable to this equation. How do we change behavior? The question then is how do we change behavior and how do we move our behavior toward that of a successful long-term engineering career or toward successful engineering management? What are the important characteristics in a mentor or coach? And how does this relate to your career? The answer to these questions is embedded in the “way you think”, or more precisely, the way you and your coach or mentor think. Another way to say it is that it is in your way of “being”.  And let me be clear, the way you think and the way of being are not the same as attitude.  Attitude is the by-product of the way you think and your way of being.  So someone telling you to change your attitude is putting the cart before the horse. Think of it this way Your way of being … leads to and produces ... what you do … which leads to and produces ... what you have. Summarized it becomes:  Being --> Doing --> Having Most people focus on having.  They think they want to have, have, have. Some, especially we engineers and technical managers, think that knowing what to do is the key.  But alas, doing is not the key either. So what’s up? The first step in the process is the most important step.  And that step is accessing a state of Being that will produce the doing.  It is the state of being that drives what we will do and the doing, in turn, leads us to what we will have. If you want to read more about this topic, you can get it in my Ezine at:  Steven’s March 10, 2009 Ezine And once you are there look for the heading: So What’s Up?  to pick up where you left off. Be well, Steven Cerri P.S. By the way.  If you’d like to leave a comment, and I’d sure be interested if you did, I’ve changed the comments software.  Only your comment and your name will show up at the end of the comment.  I have modified the software so that your email address will not show up anywhere. “What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question.  More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/ Copyright©2009 STCerri International and Steven Cerri.  You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it.  If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you. 2009-03-11T02:06:00-08:00 http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/86_3_2_09/ http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/86_3_2_09/#When:17:59:00Z It’s Easy To Become A Technical Manager “You are worth gold!” Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, March 2, 2009 Hello everyone! Two or three weeks ago I received this comment to one of my blog postings that read, in part, as follows: “My question is how do I get back to a position of manager vs IC? (Individual Contributor) When new managers came into play - change happened and because I had the safety of a paycheck I became and now am an IC. However I am unhappy and I would like a suggestion on how I can get back to a manager position (title not important) but leading people is. Because I let the paycheck manage my career I am now working for an organization that is all I and no WE. Your assistance and coaching is appreciated.” J I truly understand everything J is asking and experiencing.  So I’m going to answer his question(s). “It’s Easy To Become A Technical Managers--Honest It Is!” Over the last several weeks I’ve been writing in my Ezines and blogs that young people are restless and they often want the world much sooner than many would think they deserve. Often when I coach young engineers I give them advice as well as some sense of how much patience they ought to exercise. What I often don’t say quite this way, is:  Becoming a technical manger is probably one of the easiest things to do. Now notice I didn’t say becoming a successful technical manger is one of the easiest things to do.  I said becoming one is. You are rare indeed! Finding an engineer who can successfully manage and lead people is very difficult.  It’s a very difficult combination to find in one person.  And therefore, most organizations are so eager to find someone who can, that they are constantly trying to entice engineers to make the transition. Unfortunately, most organizations don’t understand what is needed for the successful transition, so they just grab someone who is a decent engineer and who “seems” to have some aptitude for management and presto, he or she is a manager, or sort of. I recently was published in Mechanical Engineering, the flagship magazine of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).  The article was titled “The 5 Myths” and lists the five myths that many organizations use to justify the selection of engineers to be managers. Often the selection and transition process fails because the myths are just that, myths and they are false. Companies and organizations are constantly trying to fit engineers into the management role before they are ready, and this often leads to problems. All of this leads to the situation in which we often find ourselves, and that is, good technical managers are difficult to find. So what does this have to do with J? If you want to read more about this topic, you can get it in my Ezine at:  Steven’s March 2, 2009 Ezine Be well, Steven Cerri P.S. By the way.  If you’d like to leave a comment, and I’d sure be interested if you did, I’ve changed the comments software.  Only your comment and your name will show up at the end of the comment.  I have modified the software so that your email address will not show up anywhere. “What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question.  More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/ Copyright©2009 STCerri International and Steven Cerri.  You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it.  If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you. 2009-03-10T17:59:00-08:00 http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/85_2_23_09/ http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/85_2_23_09/#When:07:13:00Z Engineers Are Natural Leaders “Engineers Are Natural Leaders--Say What?” Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, February 23, 2009 Hello everyone! Engineers Are Natural Leaders… Say What? I know this week’s blog may cause some controversy but I’ve got to put this out there because by being silent, I believe it’s only making the situation worse. You see, recently I had dinner with a friend of mine. During the conversation he made a comment that nearly required that someone administer the Heimlich maneuver to me. I was chewing on some delicious French bread when he said; “You know, a lot of people I work with think that engineers are natural leaders”. That’s when I nearly choked on my bread. Fortunately I recovered quickly and asked, “You said what?” He repeated his statement and this time, without food in my mouth, I laughed out loud. Then I responded, “You’ve got to be kidding me, right?” He responded, “No, I’m not.” “Engineers Are Natural Leaders...” I’ll begin this discussion at the beginning. And as a beginning I will state that no one is a “natural leader”. No one is a “born leader”. I listen, often with great frustration, to people who make proclamations about leadership.  They might say that “so-and-so is just a born leader”. Or how someone “is a natural leader”. Or how “everyone can be a leader”. Well, which is it? Are leaders born? Are they natural? Can everyone be a leader? The bottom line is that most people who talk about leadership don’t understand the term or the concept and are merely repeating some old phrase that others have spoken.  They often make statements like: “Leaders inspire and managers perspire"… or… “Leaders know what to do and managers know how to do it.” Actually, these are generally useless phrases. I wouldn’t mind in the least if someone wanted to tell me who was a born leader or a natural leader if they spent time up front defining leadership. But most don’t.  They assume that everyone has the same definition and understanding of leadership. And all I have to do is discuss leadership and leaders with these people for a while and I can quickly determine that we don’t all have the same definition of leadership. My definition of leadership Therefore, I’ll begin here with my definition of leadership… and it’s not a simple definition. Leadership, in my book, is a multi-faceted term that has a complex definition.  The definition of leadership has multiple parts (six to be exact) and if any part is missing it’s not leadership. However, for this Ezine and this discussion, there are only two components of the definition that are necessary. The first component is that leadership is about the relationship between the leader and the context. This may well be the most powerful component of leadership. The leader and the environment must be in a mutually supportive relationship. If the environment doesn’t “need” or “want” the leader, the leaders seems “out of touch with reality”. If the leader is exactly what the environment “needs”, the leaders seems to magically appear, as if out of thin air. They seem to be “born” for the job. In reality, they’ve always had these traits and now the environment has shifted and their traits are perfectly matched to the occasion. (There are those situations where the leader can “morph” to match what the situation needs as well, and this kind of leader has become more common in the last 40 years or so.) Therefore, what looks like “magic”, what looks like a leader born to the job of leadership, is actually an individual living their life, waiting in the wings, off stage, until the stage is set for them to step forth fully formed or nearly so. As long as the environment is aligned with what the leader can provide, then the leader will flourish. However, when the environment shifts, the leader will often vanish or be significantly diminished in stature. There are many examples of this “match-up”, and then a lack of it, throughout history.  They include many military leaders, such as Napoleon, General George Patten, and many political leaders such as Boris Yeltsin, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush just after 9/11. We must wait to see how the leader-environment match-up plays out for President Barack Obama of the United States as well as President Nicolas Sarkosy of France. Both were elected in environments that were making a major transition. This leader-environmental match-up is is exactly why successful “serial entrepreneurship” is so difficult to achieve. How many times can a match-up occur between an entrepreneur and the environment?  Apparently not very often. It is the rare entrepreneur, indeed, who can start-up several successful companies. Only the leader who can morph to match the environment can be a leader in a variety of situations. General, and later president, Dwight Eisenhower is an example of a leader who was able to cross contextual boundaries. And Elon Musk is an example of a successful serial entrepreneur. All one has to do is look out in the world and it becomes clear that there aren’t any born leaders or natural leaders. The phrase, “He (or she) is the leader of their time” is a truly accurate statement. Leadership is about the leader and their “time” being in alignment. If you want to read more about this topic, you can get it in my Ezine at:  Steven’s February 23, 2009 Ezine Be well, Steven Cerri P.S. By the way.  If you’d like to leave a comment, and I’d sure be interested if you did, I’ve changed the comments software.  Only your comment and your name will show up at the end of the comment.  I have modified the software so that your email address will not show up anywhere. “What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question.  More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/ Copyright©2009 STCerri International and Steven Cerri.  You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it.  If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you. 2009-03-06T07:13:00-08:00 http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/84_2_16_09/ http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/84_2_16_09/#When:07:18:00Z The Young Are Restless--Once More! “Young people and the manager” Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, February 16, 2009 Hello everyone! Is it a bad rap? Last week I wrote “The Young Are Restless” and I received a number of emails commenting on my evaluation of the situation.  All were positive and in agreement with what I had written, and yet, there two sides to the story.  In this blog I want to address the other side. “Young People and The Manager” Last week I told the young people, the young engineers, they had three choices.  They could either “suck it up” and deal with the fact that they are playing by the manager’s rules… or… They could join a small company or start-up where the rules for advancement are not so structured.... or… They could start their own company or be a contract employee and not be responsible (so much) to the organization. But that’s only half the story. The other half of the story concerns the role of the manager of the team in this equation. No Pulled Punches Management is about getting results with and through a variety of resources.  Sometimes those resources include people. Most managers tend to treat people like other resources… like money, or land, or equipment. Most managers will modify the land to fit the need.  Or they’ll get enough money or use the money to get what is desired.  Or they’ll buy the right equipment to due a job or perhaps alter the equipment to do the job better or alter it to do a slightly different job. Whatever the exact requirement, generally speaking, we often secure the right resource for the job and when we don’t need the resource any more we through it away.  Or we get a resource that is close to what we need and then we modify it to fit the job. Unfortunately, many managers treat people the same way.  If the human equipment doesn’t do the job correctly, or doesn’t do the job the way the manager wants, many managers often blame the equipment and try to make the person fit the job.  “Oh, Bob is just not suited to this job.  We’ll have to let him go and find someone who can do this job.” or “I was told to put Mary on my team and I gave her a job and she just can’t do it.  I’m going to have to let her go; there’s nothing here she can do.” Now I understand completely that sometimes people are not suited to the tasks we have available for them.  And I also know that people can learn, which in a way, is like modifying a machine to do a different job than originally intended. However, lets be clear, people learn and people are flexible. “No, no you say.  I’ve met people who were completely inflexible” and not willing to learn. While I would agree that there are people who are inflexible, my experience tells me that people are much more desirous of being successful than of being stubborn.  So the question I have for the manager who wants to blame his or her direct report for being stubborn is; “What have you, as the manager, done to amplify or diminish that stubbornness?” Cut to the chase 9 times out of 10, the responsibility of the manger is to help the direct report be successful.  IT IS NOT to make the direct report FIT the job, but rather to find a way to fit the job to the direct report so that the direct report can be successful. Now I know… I can hear some managers complaining that my suggestion is unrealistic… and sometimes it is.  Guess what?  In those cases where my approach doesn’t fit, don’t use it.  Do something different.  Remember, I said 9 times out of 10. So where am I going with this? If you want to read more about this topic, you can get it in my Ezine at:  Steven’s February 16, 2009 Ezine Be well, Steven Cerri P.S. By the way.  If you’d like to leave a comment, and I’d sure be interested if you did, I’ve changed the comments software.  Only your comment and your name will show up at the end of the comment.  I have modified the software so that your email address will not show up anywhere. “What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question.  More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/ Copyright©2009 STCerri International and Steven Cerri.  You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it.  If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you. 2009-03-04T07:18:00-08:00 http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/83_2_9_09_the/ http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/83_2_9_09_the/#When:03:30:00Z The Young Are Restless! “Young People Want Everything Now!” Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, February 9, 2009 Hello everyone! Is it a bad rap? I often hear managers and training departments in corporations complain about how young people don’t want to wait for their career advancement. They want to get pay raises after 6 months.  They want to be managers 1 year after graduating from college.  They don’t want to work 5, 6, or 7 years in one position to earn the “right” to be promoted to the next career level. This last weekend, in my class I heard it again.  One young person said that after joining a company, they found that they were given more and more work, and working longer and longer hours.  They were also doing the same work as others who were getting paid much more and who had been with the company many more years.  When this person asked for a raise, the manager said “No”.  The person subsequently left the company. Another young person told me that even though they had not yet graduated from college (they would soon) and even though they had been an intern with a large company for several summers, they wanted to be a manager upon graduation.  They didn’t want to wait the seemingly standard period before promotion to management...7 years as an engineer. Equal pay for equal work. For most of my career I have believed that equal pay should be given for equal work.  Although, during my career, I was usually focused on equal pay for women who were doing work equivalent to that of men, my first response to young people who want equal pay for equal work has been to agree with the young people. And yet, this weekend, when I heard my students talking about their perceptions, their expectations, and their experiences, while I initially responded that it was reasonable to expect equal pay for equal work, on the way home, what I had said just didn’t seem to sit well with me.  Did I really believe that equal pay for equal work was always the correct yard-stick?  My head said “yes”, but my gut said “no”.  I felt that it was more complicated than that. Here’s my story and I’m sticking to it! You see, when the baby boomers began their careers, most of them began as “employees” of companies.  They even expected to stay employees for most of their career.  They expected to get health benefits, paid vacations, and even fixed benefit retirement plans.  AND they expected to “work their way” up the organization. You see, “in those days”, when an organization hired an employee there was an unwritten agreement that the company would do it’s best to keep the employee.  That might mean that you might be moved around a little and that you’d do jobs you might not be perfect for, but in return, you’d do the work, you’d gain experience and that experience would actually come in handy over the long haul because you’d be even more flexible and capable of doing other jobs. And then along came… technology. The last generation to feel this way and to have this unspoken agreement with the company was the baby boomer generation. With their children everything began to change.  You see, technology began to put a lot of the “organization” into the hands of individuals.  For baby boomers there were secretaries who wrote memos.  For their children, they wrote their own memos.  And so it went, on and on. The upshot of this gigantic shift was that work became something that could be “packaged” into much smaller and smaller, quantifiable packets.  With the emergence of the global economy this trend only accelerated.  At this point, equal pay for equal work took on a very new meaning.  If I could pack my task into a tight, neat package, and define it well enough, I could send it to a variety of workers and now experience wouldn’t matter.  The only question that mattered would be, “Can they do the job?”.  Experience didn’t really matter.  Knowing who was doing the work didn’t even matter. It didn’t matter if the person doing the work was a 12-year-old kid working in her bedroom after her parents thought she was asleep.  Experience just didn’t matter… only competence at doing the job at hand. Thus emerged the profound and newly defined category of “contract worker”. But not the contract worker of old.  A contract worker who was told they could be “independent of the man” (i.e., the corporate boss).The flip side of course is that if you are not beholding to the corporation, then the corporation doesn’t owe the contract worker anything in return.  So where do we go from here? Corporations and baby boomers and older employees (in general) still accept that companies hire “employees” and when you are an employee, experience matters. The children of baby boomers and all those children right up to those born today, have been raised, without any of us or them realizing it, to believe that contract labor is the way all people are being judged Here comes the class! So now we’ve got young people who have been raised on “only performance matters”.  Experience doesn’t matter. These young people are entering a “corporate” and business structure (in most, but not all, cases) where performance is only part of the equation of success. Is it any wonder that we have a clash?  If you want to read more about this topic, you can get it in my Ezine/Newsletter at:  Steven’s February 9, 2009 Newsletter Be well, Steven Cerri P.S. By the way.  If you’d like to leave a comment, and I’d sure be interested if you did, I’ve changed the comments software.  Only your comment and your name will show up at the end of the comment.  I have modified the software so that your email address will not show up anywhere. “What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question.  More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/ Copyright©2008 STCerri International and Steven Cerri.  You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it.  If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you. Coaching, Engineer to Technical Manager, Leadership, Engineering Leadership, Management, Engineering Management 2009-02-11T03:30:00-08:00 http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/82_02_2_09/ http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/82_02_2_09/#When:00:00:00Z Buy-In Once More “Buy-In, Once More With Feeling!” Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, February 2, 2009 Hello everyone! Buy-in is everywhere… it’s everywhere! Most of us involved in business, technical organizations, and teams think of buy-in as a common requirement for our success.  Buy-in isn’t just something that managers attempt to secure from their direct reports.  Buy-in is a requirement for all human endeavors that require more than one person.  Buy-in is the thread, the weave, that holds the fabric of human social structure together. Every time you see an advertisement that seems to appeal to something inherent in your values, the advertiser is seeking your buy-in. Every time a politician appeals to your values, beliefs, or needs, the politician is seeking your buy-in. So how do we get buy-in? My definition of buy-in is:  Buy-in is the “overlap” of one person’s or group’s motivating beliefs and/or outcomes with those of another person or group. That’s it.  There must be an overlap between what the first person or group believes or wants to get with what another person or group believes or wants to get. If there is sufficient overlap there is buy-in.  Insufficient overlap… no buy-in. And what about work? Everyday you go to work.  What for?  If you’re an engineer, what’s your reason and how does it compare to what the company and/or your manager expresses. Do you go to work for a paycheck? Do you go to work to express your engineering creativity?  Do you go to work to creatively solve problems. What do you do now? Well you are certainly not at a loss of choices. Choice #1: You could appeal to their desire to keep their job.  Choice #2: You could appeal to their desire to BE an engineer.  Choice #3: You could appeal to their desire to creatively solve problems, and this is certainly an opportunity to do that. Choice #4: You could pay them extra for the extra effort needed to solve the issue and put the project back on schedule. Choice #5: You could instill a competitive spirit by noting that if your product is delayed the competition will get to the market first. Manager’s mistakes Most managers make two major mistakes when it comes to getting buy-in at a time of crisis (it’s relatively easy to get buy-in when everything is going smoothly). The first mistake is that they think that everyone is motivated by the same forces they are.  That is, the manager thinks that what motivates the manager will motivate everyone else. The second mistake is to think that one motivating force will motivate everyone equally.  The successful manager must be able to step into the team’s generalized map of the world.  He or she must also be able to step into the individuated map of the world of many of the people on the team. Ultimately everyone must be treated as an individual, because buy-in is from each individual, not from the group. How to get buy-in one-on-one. The easiest way to get buy-in is through what I call, “Conversational Management and Leadership”.  It’s a process of seemingly casual conversation that elicits, from each individual, what their motivational drivers are. The take-away! The main message is that buy-in is not a mysterious process.  There is no reason to consider it something that “others can do” but you can’t. Buy-in is in our nature.  The challenge is not getting buy-in, the challenge is understanding where the overlap exists between management and the direct reports.  Once the overlap is found, buy-in is a natural outcome. If you want to learn more about this topic, you can get it in my Ezine/Newsletter at:  Steven’s February 2, 2009 Newsletter Be well, Steven Cerri P.S. By the way.  If you’d like to leave a comment, and I’d sure be interested if you did, I’ve changed the comments software.  Only your comment and your name will show up at the end of the comment.  I have modified the software so that your email address will not show up anywhere. “What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question.  More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/ Copyright©2008 STCerri International and Steven Cerri.  You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it.  If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you. 2009-02-11T00:00:00-08:00 http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/81_1_29_09/ http://stevencerri.com/index.php/site/81_1_29_09/#When:04:44:00Z Building Buy-In Is Easy “When you know what to do” Posted by Steven Cerri on Thursday, January 29, 2009 Hello everyone! The big question is... I often get asked these questions:  “Steven, how do you get buy-in from people?” or “In this difficult business environment, how do you get people to buy-in instead of worrying about other things that take them away from what they need to be accomplishing?” or “How do I get the team to give buy-in and have everyone pull in the same direction?” It doesn’t much matter how you phrase the question… it usually boils down to “How to I get everyone to agree to contribute their best efforts to what I want them to be doing?” The answer comes in 3 parts and Part 1 is... If you read my Ezine/Newsletter of last week, you know that the first part of the answer to getting buy-in is to understand that no one does anything they don’t want to do. So getting buy-in is not about getting people to buy-in because they feel that they have to do something they don’t want to do. You get buy-in by getting people to do something they want to do.  The goal is to get them to do what they want to do in such a way that it dovetails with what you want them to do as well. Part 2 of the answer is... If people are only going to do what they want to do, and if you want to align what they want to do with what you want them to do, it is important that you understand the motivation of your team members. You can generalize to some extent but each person is motivated by something a little different and you have to understand this. And this is not rocket science, but it does take some special attention to detail.  Here is and example of what I mean. An example... Several years ago I was working inside a printer company.  Most manufacturers have a number they watch.  The number is titled, “First Pass Yield”.  When a product, in this case a printer, comes off the assembly line it’s tested to see if it will work “right out of the box”.  The ratio of those that work to those that don’t is called the First Pass Yield. Those printers that don’t work must to be repaired by hand with labor and maybe parts added to the original cost.  If the first pass yield for a specific product falls to low, the product line will make no profit.  If it falls even lower, the product line will actually loose money. The particular printer company in this example had a certain printer line that had problems.  The first pass yield was around 75%.  This was definitely a loosing proposition.  The cost of reworking 25% of the printers before they could be shipped guaranteed that this printer line was not profitable. The CEO established a “Tiger Team” made up of a representative from each department.  These included manufacturing, manufacturing engineering, procurement, quality assurance, receiving, test, and sustaining engineering. This Tiger Team met every week and it had been doing so for 16 months.  During that time, First Pass Yield remained stuck at 75%. Finally the CEO asked me to join the Tiger Team and determine what if anything could be done. I joined the team, and while I had authority because the CEO sent me into the meeting I didn’t use it. At the first meeting I introduced myself and then I just listened as the meeting went on.  I may have asked a question or two, but essentially I was a “fly on the wall” just observing and listening. At the second meeting I told the team that I had some questions I’d like to ask, and I respectfully went around the table and asked each person what their responsibility was and what they thought the real issues were. As I went around the room I listened for what answers were being given.  Did they think it was someone else’s fault or responsibility?  Did they think it was a poor design?  Did they not have any idea?  Did they think that the answer was right around the corner?  Did they understand the fundamental problem(s), the fundamental forces involved with First Pass Yield? By the time I went around the table, I had a relatively clear idea of who was “moving toward a higher first pass yield” and who as “moving away from a lower first pass yield”.  I was also clear about who saw this as an opportunity and who saw this as a problem.  And I saw who was “passing the buck” to someone else and who was willing to jump in and figure out a solution. After I went around the table I then gave the meeting back to the quality assurance manager who had been leading the meetings and I went back into “observation” mode. First Pass Yield is all about statistics... Those of you in manufacturing know that First Pass Yield is all about the statistical reliability of individual components that make up the product.  Since I used to teach statistics at the college level, I understood the implications of what was happening to the printer line. By the third meeting is was clear to me that members of the team didn’t understand the issues around statistics and First Pass Yield.  Therefore, in third meeting I took the lead and I told the team that the challenge was essentially one of statistical reliability of the printer components.  I then gave them a mini-statistics course in 15 minutes. This printer had only 5 independent components.  Some coming from China.  Some manufactured in the U.S. and all five of them assembled at the company’s manufacturing facility.  All we had to do was increase the statistical reliability of each of those five components and we were home free. Here comes the buy-in... Now the challenge was to get buy-in from each of the Tiger Team members so they would focus on the component reliability that they were responsible for and stop pointing fingers and chasing ideas that didn’t matter. Most of the team members were hungry for some sign of success after 16 months of 75% First Pass Yield.  So when I gave direction, suggestions of what to do in order to adjust our test and reliability procedures, many of the team agreed. There were certain people however, who really understood the relationship between statistical reliability and First Pass Yield.  They got it intuitively.  To these people I gave more work and more responsibility.  I knew they could be trusted to understand the complexity of what we were doing and the inter-relationships between components.  And they wanted the freedom to use their judgment.  So I gave them more open-ended direction and suggestions. To others, who didn’t get the subtleties of what we were doing so well, I gave very clear direction.  They were not given such wide latitude to express their own judgment. And with regard to the one person who was not going to give me buy-in, I removed him from the Tiger Team.  It became clear this person was not going to move forward for the benefit of the team and the printer line and it was clear that his power and authority were more important to him than working as a team for the benefit of the product line.  Therefore, within a matter of four weeks from the time I joined the team, I removed him from the team. If you want to know how we did (we did very well) and you want to know what I did to get buy-in, you can get the rest of this story in my Ezine/Newsletter at:  Steven’s January 26, 2009 Newsletter Be well, Steven Cerri P.S. By the way.  If you’d like to leave a comment, and I’d sure be interested if you did, I’ve changed the comments software.  Only your comment and your name will show up at the end of the comment.  I have modified the software so that your email address will not show up anywhere. “What would it be like to be as successful with people as you are with your technology?” Steven trains, coaches, and facilitates engineers and technical managers to BE the answer to that question.  More information can be found at the:http://stevencerri.com/index.php/Home/index/ Copyright©2008 STCerri International and Steven Cerri.  You are free to pass this information on to others and to reproduce it.  If you reproduce it in whole or part please give attribution to Steven Cerri. Thank you. 2009-01-30T04:44:00-08:00