Information Technology is a Team Sport too!
Posted: April 21, 2011 Filed under: Leadership, Teams | Tags: CEO, CIO, Coherence, IT, leader, Role, Role-Based Assessment, team Leave a comment »This morning I was on the panel for the opening session of the Society for Information Management’s CIO Forum & Executive IT Summit, near Philadelphia. There was a whole lot of IT talent in one big room – but more importantly, I’ll bet there were a lot of leadership team members in the crowd who aren’t appreciated nearly as much as they should be.
It may seem odd, but even at the ‘C-level’, some executives are ‘insiders’ and some are not. During the past decade or two, many IT leaders (along with HR leaders) have found themselves left out of key decisions, even when they clearly could have provided relevant—even essential—business insights. Finding that this is still true gave me a ‘flashback’ to the time when getting ‘seat at the table’ was something I really craved. Happily for me, I get to pick where I sit these days, and my special chair (petite, like me) is usually at the head. But it isn’t about ‘the table’ any more. It’s about the team.
I like IT, and I value IT people a lot. Years ago, before we developed the interlocking behavioral simulators that generate our product (TGI Role-Based Assessment reports), it would take us about 11 hours to produce a single report. Today, the reports are ready almost instantly, and they are delivered automatically to boot! The fact is, we wouldn’t even have a marketable product today were it not for the truly gifted developer who created the simulators from my very crude design. That project alone took 8½ years.
Then there are the IT teams that created business blogging, eBusiness technology, and lately, provided a self-service environment for social networking. Thanks to these anonymous tech heroes, TGI has recruited over 130 agents worldwide, and we recently logged our 75th customer—some of which are IT companies and departments. And all of that activity has happened in less than 18 months, on a shoestring budget!
Equally important, IT has sped up the process of differentiating ‘RBA’ from other forms of assessment. Every day, more and more executives and business owners are learning that the ability to measure how people team together is a big value-add when hiring, selecting teams, promoting, and coaching or managing people.
The opportunity to utilize offshore IT has worked well for us, too. Our technology partner in India has done a great job of developing the online business system that handles both internal and customer transactions. So in a way, we have two CIOs, one domestic and one outsourced. And their most important job is to team together because if one side isn’t talking to the other, there’s going to be business trouble.
In business, all sides need to be ‘connecting’ with each other, so in order to be a successful IT leader—or any kind of leader—you need to be a good team player. This is not just my opinion…it comes from years of in-depth research on executive behavior. The one thing you need throughout the executive suite is a measure that we call Coherence. People who are Coherent have a positive orientation to working with others to achieve common goals. In other words, they are top quality team players.
The second thing that makes a good IT leader is a good fit between the person’s mode or style of contributing to their team, and the actual job responsibilities that they are expected to fulfill. One of the things we learned during 25-years of R&D is that different people have very different levels of attraction to serving the needs of their organization or team. This attraction is measurable, and we call it Role, with a capital R to distinguish it from the more common use.
The demands on an IT leader can range all over the map. Consider how utterly different the CIO job is in a fast-growing firm that is implementing a cutting-edge eBusiness solution, as compared to the CIO’s responsibilities in an old-line firm that is primarily focused on maintaining reliable mainframe-style systems.
The job title may be the same, but the Role (the capital-R Role) best suited to the job will be completely different. Not just because of the technology, but because the nature of ‘teaming’ is so different in those two environments.
On an executive team, the CEO is the leader – but ‘leader’ has a lot of different meanings. If you have one who truly believes that leadership is a team sport, and they lead by inspiration, with implicit trust in their teammates, then there will be plenty of seats at the table, to be filled by people who have something to offer that moves the company’s vision into reality—regardless of whether or not their title starts with a ‘C’.
If all of the people on the team are Coherent (another thing that RBA measures), some really great team synergy will happen. But Coherence isn’t everything. When you have high Coherence, and correct Role-fit throughout the teams in an organization, you are on your way to creating what we call a Coherent Human Infrastructure.
We have a fabulous team, and yet things don’t always work perfectly. That’s where I take the blame. In the language of Role-Based Assessment, my dual Roles are Founder and Vision Mover. Both of those Roles work at a very high level of abstraction. I’ve learned that I need to really think through and communicate what I want to happen, and then trust my IT team to make it work. Where I haven’t, that’s where we falter. Fortunately, the team has learned to remind me to come out of the clouds whenever they need me down on the ground.
I think that the rapid pace of change – economic, technological, demographic, and so on – is finally causing people to realize that all of business is a team sport.
The more IT leaders recognize that their function is essential to the human infrastructure of the entire organization, and not just the IT infrastructure, the better they will ‘connect’ with their mission, and with their colleagues. You can’t outsource that!
As long as I know I’m working with IT people who are good team players, and who have expertise and vision, they will be ‘insiders’ in getting us where we want to go.
Dear IT leaders, and future leaders: Your star is rising again. All you need to do is to play IT as a team sport!
I May Not Have All the Answers, But I Have Some Good Questions
Posted: April 6, 2011 Filed under: Behavior, Leadership | Tags: change, change management, questions, Role-Based Assessment Leave a comment »Maybe it’s my line of work, but people are always expecting me to have the answers. (If they got a Role-Based Assessment report from my company, it will contain a lot of answers. But from me? – sorry, I didn’t replace my crystal ball when it broke, and since we started using Keurig coffee pods at the office, there aren’t enough tea leaves around here for a decent reading.)
So instead of feeling useless, answer-wise, I thought I’d give you a look at some of my favorite questions.
Warning: The Surgeon General has determined that you may safely ask these questions of yourself. However, asking them of other people, without an explicit request for help, can be dangerous to your health. (And that warning goes double if you happen to be married to the respondent!)
“What does that mean?”
It’s always a good idea to start by defining your terms and concepts. Language is rich, but if you don’t establish a common frame of reference, you will get noise and distortion in the communication channels. When that happens, it is easy to end up thinking that you understand, even when you are missing the point, totally. This guarantees that many, if not most, of the answers anyone comes up with during the course of the discussion will not be helpful ones.
“How do you know?”
We have browsers. We have Google. We have expert communities. With all the stuff that the giant collective ‘they’ opines about on practically any topic, it’s amazing how much trouble we still get ourselves into. That’s because we are sometimes entirely too dependent on what ‘they’ know. (If you don’t believe me, visit and snoop around Snopes.com.) A lot of the stuff we ‘know’ because ‘they’ said it, just isn’t so. Sometimes asking the ‘How’ question snaps us back into reality.
“So what?”
People often want advice on how to change things that they have no power to change – or even to connect with. I don’t want to offend any change management professionals here. Changing big organizational processes is a tough challenge. But sometimes change doesn’t warrant all the hue and cry that goes up when people first hear about it. So when someone is complaining, and there’s really not much substance to it, you can hit them with ‘So what?’ It’s especially effective when used sparingly – and sincerely. You’ll sound practical – and sympathetic – at the same time, and you won’t actually have to get too deeply involved with sound and fury that signifies nothing.
“Why?”
I love this question the most because kids ask it all the time. And it has the simplest answer (ask any tired parent): “Because.” The key with this question, for adults as much as for any kid, is that sometimes you need to keep asking it until you get an answer that satisfies you. And on the flip side – you can just keep giving this answer until the person expecting a different, better one, goes off to search elsewhere.
Lastly, a favorite question, and of a much higher order: Hamlet’s “To be or not to be?”
Only one good answer. ‘Be.’
Be-cause when you are be-ing, good questions (and good answers) sorta come naturally.
True Confession: Social Networking Made Me a Nicer Person, and It Could Bring Us World Peace
Posted: April 4, 2011 Filed under: Behavior, Leadership, Social Networking, Teams | Tags: Barry Libert, Focus, iBooks, intellectual, libertarian, LinkedIn, networking, Quora, revolution, social, true confession, Twitter 1 Comment »I used to be an ordinary intellectual. You probably know the type. NY Times crossword in ink. Knock out latest opus, magnum or minimalist, in a flash. Prefer to dream up ideas rather than actually work them.
Then I went ‘social’. And in the course of connecting – via LinkedIn, Twitter, Quora, Focus, and some other places I can’t even remember, with a large number of people who I would never have the time to call or write a letter to on a regular basis – I became a nicer person. I mean, I still do all my regular stuff. But now I’m more likely to think beforehand about its impact on other people.
This is why I am so enamored of an amazing little book that was my ‘first-time’ purchase from iBooks. The title is “The Revolution Will Be Tweeted“, and it was written by Barry Libert, founder of Mzinga and a pioneer in social media/mobility technology.
It’s a very intellectual read, but it’s not at all stuffy. It is the very nice kind of intellectual work that changes the world because it comes from caring. In a nutshell, Barry is saying that the road to peace is social. Not to be confused with socialist, which, imho, is not very social at all. (I say that as an unreformed, unrelenting, pit-bull libertarian.)
Nice is not the opposite of intellectual. Intellect is something that happens inside your head. Nice happens between people – in that magic space that is neither and is both. You can be intellectual and nice.
Try it. It’s worth the effort.
Like this:
Time and the Tides
Posted: February 27, 2011 Filed under: Behavior | Tags: flow, Natalie Sweeney, time, time management, unstuck Leave a comment »Natalie Sweeney is one of those people who does more in the standard day than most. (I get accused of that too, and believe me, it’s often an accusation, not a compliment, as if I have some magic time machine in my middle desk drawer.)
People call it ‘time management’, as if time doesn’t have any qualities that one might consider before trying to push it around or demanding it move in the direction that satisfies your momentary desire.
Natalie specializes in getting people ‘unstuck’. I like that idea better than trying to turn the tides.
So here is my take on why people get stuck.
One, they spend too much time focused on the far off future without ever connecting with people who can do the things that get you ready for that future.
Two, they get mired in the past, holding on to dates and moments, and often reconstructing that time to align it with a desired outcome instead of what is.
Three, they look at the present, not as it is unfolding, but as they are assuming it will be.
All are problems of perception, behavior, and measurement.
Time is like light. You can measure it like you measure waves and particles. But if you consider only the waves, you will find it hard to accomplish much that anyone will ever notice. And if you consider only the particles, you will forever miss the flow.
Leading Nowhere?
Posted: February 20, 2011 Filed under: Behavior, Leadership, Teams | Tags: budget, Chief People Officer, Dilbert, HR, leader, reality, Scott Adams, team Leave a comment »Did you see today’s Dilbert? I highly recommend getting the app or just looking here. It’s where cartoonist Scott Adams holds up a mirror to leaders and challenges us to look at reality.
This morning, the point-haired boss (PHB) tells his R&D team that he has an upcoming meeting with the CFO and will be competing with other departments for budget dollars. PHB complains that the other departments will have an edge because they are all staffed with professional liars. Dilbert, the hapless, but honest and hardworking engineer, has a hard time buying into that. The dialog goes back and forth, as one by one, PHB names a department – marketing, sales, PR, finance, legal – and Dilbert is driven to agree that they are staffed with professional liars. In the last panel, PHB gives Dilbert a chance to try naming one himself. Before he can finish getting ‘human resources’ out of his mouth, he concedes defeat.
If you want to play leadership as a team sport, you can’t afford to have anyone on the team who isn’t a good team player. That means you need to start with whomever you entrust to get you good team players. Often, the HR function isn’t seen as critical to the success of the company, and often, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – or worse. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Remember, it’s your team, and as such, you are the ‘chief people officer’ of it. Think in terms of the human infrastructure you need to achieve your vision, and make sure that anyone you entrust with bringing on your team members s also a great team player.
Then you can lead in the direction you want to go!
Talent or Teams?
Posted: February 4, 2011 Filed under: Leadership, Teams | Tags: Bud Adams, coherent, NFL, RBA, resume, talent, team, Tennessee Titans, Tom Thomson, Vince Young Leave a comment »Tom Thomson, an executive search consultant in Franklin, Tennessee, sent me this great story about talent and teams.
“In 2007, the Tennessee Titans needed to draft a quarterback. The owner, Bud Adams, picked Vince Young. Young is a great athlete and had all the physical attributes you could want in a quarterback. Before drafting a player, NFL teams do the same things we do in business. They look at a player’s ‘resume’, interview them, and do reference checks. They assess the player’s physical and mental attributes at the combine. Young was tall, fast, and strong armed. He had a strong resume (2nd in the Heisman and a National Championship). The Titans decided to invest millions and draft (hire) the Texas QB.
“Three years later we find this was a bad decision. The Titans were correct in their assessment of Young’s physical attributes. What they didn’t know was that Young was not a coherent team player. He put himself ahead of the team. Young did not prepare like he should. He partied in Texas instead of working out with his team during the off season. When things got tough, Young attacked his coach and walked out on the team.”
And then Tom stopped talking about the problem and started talking about the solution:
“An RBA report* would have alerted the Titans to what they were getting with this player.”
I’ll say it again. It’s teaming, not talent, that wins the game.
*RBA stands for TGI Role-Based Assessment. Reports are available in two forms: Management-directed, for making management decisions, and Self-directed, to give to the person who takes the assessment to help with their self-development.
