@bbcomCIO

Have you ever wondered why some projects or groups struggle so much to get things done?  Have you ever been sitting in a meeting wondering why you’re talking about trivial things when there are much larger problems at hand.  If your like almost everyone in today’s high paced world, more than likely you can relate.  generally this is nothing more than a communications breakdown.  Everyone communicates differently and no matter how you might think you’re communicating to them, the reality is you may be missing the target 100%.

Recently I was involved in a similar situation where small things were being escalated in a project and trivial issues were being presented as major risks to the project.  This directly involved me as a roadblock.  The reality was (in the end) it was nothing more than a communication style.  I have a particular way I work within my teams and my organization and the way I do that lends itself to talking about problems before ever presenting the solutions.  This is good unless your working with someone who looks at a problem and instead of presenting the problem to be solved they just throw out their solution.  Tech people tend to want to walk thru the process of understanding the problem before a solution is thrust upon them and I’m really no different.  I usually say “Don’t give me your solution, present your problem and lets work on a solution”.  It’s really splitting hair because another way to look at this might be “Don’t talk about problems, lets present solutions”  neither is wrong they are just differences in communications style.

I like an approach where I’m presented a problem, maybe for my organization, my personal character, etc and then I commit to resolving the problem and getting a solution in place.  Others I’ve worked with over the years like to look at a problem, put a solution in place and present that solution as a step forward.  Both have their values, one tends to gather more information first and get more buy in and the other focuses on moving forward faster and may not be as open for debate.

I’m a big fan of buy-in as I think without it you may drag baggage with you to your destination.  The culture in my team is much the same, and most likely because that is the way I operate as the leader of my teams.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not perfect and I don’t always seek buy-in on every item I have to deal with.  To me (IMO) the  ”here’s your solution” approach can tend to make people feel like it’s a Top Down model and they can become resistent.

How do you communicate?  Do you like to hear the problem first and then commit to putting a solution in place that take multiple things into perspective or do you tend to just look at the end point and present your solutions to getting there?  How does it work for you?

It really boils down to the fact that you have to be flexible and know your audience and the people who work with you on a daily basis or it will cause you heartache and really put stress on your organization.

Do you think your a great CIO, VP, Director…..Manager?  If someone were to survey your teams and your direct reports would you score an A+ or an F ?  This was a question that I wanted to tackle head one.  How could I get an anonymous feedback loop (360 degree feedback) from my direct reports and the teams that work inside the IT department.  It’s simply not enough to feel like your doing a good job, you need to know your strengths and weaknesses.  It’s far better to get real feedback (as honest as you can get it) to guide you and allow you to keep doing what is good for your organization and focus on squashing the weaknesses you may have.

In our review cycles we have our employees go thru a 360 degree review process and I’m no different.  I set out to create a survey that could be 100% anonymous so people in my organization could speak freely.  We have a pretty good track record with that because I like that type of feedback.  The idea was simple.

1. Create a survey with limited but specific questions to get a measurement of how the teams in my organziation felt I was leading / or not.
2. Make sure it’s anonymous and that there is no way to track down who said what.  No names, no IP addresses, no emails, etc.
3. Present the survey in it’s raw format to the team, summarize all the feedback and present a plan for addressing weaknesses I have.
4. Keep this model going over the long haul.

The first part was pretty simple.  Google Docs to the rescue.  I won’t elaborate on it here but it’s trival to build a survey like I wanted in google docs and publish it as a nice, easy to fill out form.  - If you want help just let contact me.

I sent out a few reminder emails to get everyone to fill it out which was great, everyone responded.  Also I had one free form question where I requested at least (1) thing that I could do better.

I then gathered the information, put it into a presentation with RAW data and I setup a meeting and presented it just as I received it.  You might be thinking I’m nuts at this point.  How could I just get up and say here is what you all felt about X and how I’m doing on this or that and that I have weaknesses in “some” areas.

General questions were things such as.  Do I lead with Integrity  (Scale of 1-5), How well do I understand the people in my organization (1-5), Am I helping move our organization forward (Helping/Hurting), How well do I communicate Vision and Context (1-5).

Scales of 1-5 were something like 1 = Not at All and 5= All the Time.

I talked to my team and stated what I can do and where I’ll focus to be a better leader for them.  One feedback item that came back: Your technology bias can tend to drive decisions in a less than objective manner.   I have to admit I sometimes do that….not always, but maybe more often that I should or it wouldn’t have been on my feedback request.  My response – Ask more questions, leave the topic on the floor longer and have more  discussion before throwing out a direction or saying no to something.

So now the big question to you as a reader.  Are you willing to open yourself up to this type of review from your teams and direct reports?  Are you willing to expose your weaknesses to everyone while you stand in front of them?  To me it was an easy decision and one that I take to heart, how can you be an effective leader if you don’t know this type of information.

I’d say you could do this at work, at home, and with your friends.  Don’t we kind of already do that in many areas of our life?

Good luck with doing a 360 and I’d love to hear back from anyone who does it and how it works for you.

Reaching out to the minds you work with and getting input and how something as small as a 1.5 hour lunch can change everything.

Last month I had my administrative assistant setup appointments for me to have lunch with all my employees.  I have a large number of them so I wanted to take two at a time to lunch, each one being in a different team.  I felt this would allow some cross pollination at the lunches and bring an interesting dynamic.  Yesterday was the first lunch and it was an amazing 1.5 hours.  I was able to gain insight from the day to day activities, ask questions, and allow them to be very honest and frank with me as they wanted: no holes bared.

What I gained out of the lunch was a much larger insight into some areas in my organization that need attention.  Areas that the teams support and perform in, in spite of challenges that tend to slow them down.  I asked a lot of questions, questions like; what can we do to speed up things for our teams, what can I do to help empower you and your teams better.  What I got back was some very direct answers that will help me with my roadmap for the department in 2010.  It will also benefit our customers by making our development cycles much faster moving forward.

I also gained insight into their desires to help grow the company, help other people in the teams external to them and overall make the department and the company a success for delivering value to our customers.  This was exciting for me to hear and watch as the conversation continued.

I’m now able to look at my next 90 days in a new way with the input provided from the lunch.

Question: Are you having lunch with your teams?  Are you getting you game on for the next 90 days with input from the teams?  I can tell you my new plan will for sure include that as a model to feed my plans going forward.

Going to Boise from San Diego seems to be either thru Utah, Denver, LA or SFO. We took the SFO route with united to get home the soonest. While I was at the SFO airport killing some time between flights I decided to catch up on my twitter feed and see what was the rumbling going on out there in the world. Turns out it was good info (as normal) and that there was some great talk, url’s and general info on the new iPhone 3S. I also found out some great world info, creative sites, etc. 20 minutes later I felt up to date and ready to eat some lunch and head to the plane. On the leg from SFO to Boise I looked toward the front of the plane as I was grinding through an audio book [twitter power] and I saw an older fellow I’d guess about 65+ reading a newspaper. One of the headlines on the page he had exposed to the back of the bus was titled “New iPhone details coming soon”. I kind of had to chuckle because before that ink had even dried I’m sure there were tweets going on all about what the article was only then eluding to. I had already seen photos, read comments and articles and this poor man was just getting his appetite for tomorrows ink. This got my head wound up with several thoughts that I’m going to post here. I don’t think they are anything profound but I hope to get a comment or two about them.

1. How can paper companies survive what seems to be one after another going bankrupt? How can they bring in the social aspects (book: Tactical Transparency – A very good read).
2. What age group reads the paper? How many are currently in transition and just need help making the switch? I’d think it won’t be long.

After thinking about that for a few minutes I faded back to my hotel room for the last week. Every day when leaving the motel room I’d have the WSJ sitting in front of the door as if to say “you should read me”. I would pick it up and toss it in the trash and proceed to get real time relevant news, stocks etc on my iPhone. I would have done much of that on my laptop but the hotel did not offer free wifi! Hey Hyatt, I have an idea for you, are you ready to listen? How about you give me the option when I check in to get WSJ or free wifi? How about you give me the option to have my Sheets changed every 2-3 days and knock off 10 bucks from my 20$ parking fee that we know didn’t cost you anything.

Ok I’m ranting. I like the Hyatt, they are always friendly but always seem to stick it to me with parking and that part drives me nuts but that’s not the topic of this post perhaps another day. I guess I’d have to admit I’ve never read the paper and I’ve always found my news and information online where I can read comments and find out other peoples views (much more fun). Let me know what you think about papers survival and if your a paper reader educate me as to why you are still doing it that way I’d love to know.