All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Organizational Effectiveness|Last Updated:

I just read another CIO top-10 priorities list. As is often the case, it struck me as being right on the money.

So long, that is, as the money it’s right on is in Martian dollars.

No, I’m not going to give you the link. Today’s offender isn’t a standout. Do some Googling to find your own missing-the-point list.

I say this because right now, as of this writing, CIOs have three and only three priorities (updated from The CIO’s missing priority | CIO ):

(1) Preventing ransomware attacks; (2) figuring out how to lead and manage IT’s workforce given today’s staffing challenges; and (3) helping the business executive leadership team focus on how IT can and should be used to create competitive advantage, or, failing that, to mitigate competitive disadvantage … without increasing the risk of a ransomware attack.

We’ve already covered ransomware attack prevention to the extent my sources and I are able – see “Ransomware: Don’t just accept the risk” (KJR,10/18/2021).

Helping your execs stay focused on competitive advantage? You’ll find ideas for that here: “The CIO’s missing priority” (CIO.com, 4/7/2022) and I don’t have much to add on that subject either at the moment.

That leaves staffing. This used to be about finding, recruiting, hiring, and promoting the best talent you could find. It’s no longer that straightforward. The logic dictating how CIOs need to plan has become more convoluted as well. IT hiring managers have these ingredients to deal with (at least):

Employer/employee relationship: Do you want employees to feel like they’re part of something, or will a transactional perspective, where each employee’s role is to move work from their inbox to their outbox, suffice?

Inter-employee relationships: While this decision might seem to be joined at the hip to how you define the employer/employee relationship, it isn’t: Even if you decide the employer/employee relationship will be transactional, that doesn’t mean employees will interact with each other solely on a transactional basis.

In fact, employees might find it impossible to limit their relationships to a transactional perspective. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to manage the organization you’re responsible for by parsing responsibilities to such an atomic level that employee can work independently. Like it or not, situations will arise in which employees will find themselves relying on each other to get their work done.

Siting: Remote vs Onsite vs Hybrid workforce: Back in the good old days of COVID-driven improvisation on this subject, the workforce siting decision was independent of the employer/employee and employee/employee relationship models.

To the extent their responsibilities allowed it, employees worked remotely. But as COVID declined and the situation evolved, the siting decision became a consequence: The desired relationship models became the driving logic underpinning the siting model. According to this view, if the goal is non-transactional relationships, you need an on-site workforce, or at least a hybrid one.

Power sharing: Employers are accustomed to having more power over employees than employees have had over them – even more so for job-seekers. That imbalance has, over the past few years, eroded. Management (that is, you) is no longer in a position to decide what is optimal for the business and inform employees of how it’s going to work.

You’re going to have to negotiate your staffing preferences with employees who’s view of “optimal” is predicated on their very different perspectives.

All of which leaves you with the current, messy situation, where employees mostly want to work remotely because it’s more convenient, while employers mostly want employees on site at least part of the time so as to encourage the formation and maintenance of trust-based relationships, both between employees and their managers and employees with each other.

What’s making your situation even trickier is that it isn’t even clear who you’re supposed to negotiate with. You certainly can’t negotiate siting and relationship models with employees one at a time. But in the absence of unions, no defined entity has the authority to speak for all employees.

Which leaves it up to you to help employees choose credible representatives to figure it out with you.

Bob’s last word: Because employees will have to depend on each other no matter how everything else comes out, everyone will have to figure out how to use collaboration tools to maximum advantage no matter how siting and the employer/employee relationship comes out.

Making that real has been an IT priority for the past several years already. In this respect, count on the future being just like the recent past only more so.

Bob’s sales pitch: Aw, c’mon. You know what I do for a living and what I can do for you.

Now on CIO.com: “Bad metrics are worse than no metrics.” It’s about being smart without embracing SMART.

Comments

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

We used to call it “retiring in place” (RIP). Now, those who like to claim ownership of old ideas by attaching new names to them are calling it “Quiet Quitting.”

Back when I was in management and needed to recruit an employee for an open position, a prerequisite was drafting a position description – an eloquent soliloquy that listed the responsibilities the new employee would be responsible for and the skills they’d need to fulfill those responsibilities.

The final responsibility was always, “Other duties as assigned on a time-available basis.” The skills needed for it: flexibility, adaptability, and the ability to innovate.

HR generally asked me to remove this responsibility. I generally explained that it was the only responsibility that mattered.

HR and I didn’t always get along.

But neither HR, job applicants, or I once considered that including it would end up placing an unfair burden to a new hire. Quite the opposite – it was understood to be the most efficient and accurate way management had to understand what other roles employees could succeed in, which in turn translated to providing opportunities for promotions and the increased compensation that accompanied them.

Sometimes it even worked that way. But in all too many companies it devolved into a transparent stratagem for employers to get fifty hours of work for forty hours-worth of pay, with the promised benefit to employees somehow never turning up.

Understand, I’ve been writing about this and related subjects for 18 years, questioning whether “work ethic” has anything to do with ethics (it doesn’t – see “Work Ethic,” 9/13/2004 and “More Work Ethics,” 9/20/2004). All that’s happened since then is that employees have (1) caught on; and (2) acquired enough bargaining power with their employers, at least temporarily, that they can do something about it.

And so they are. Some are embracing the “gig economy.” Many are leaving jobs (and managers) they hate for pastures they hope are greener. Overlaying this are those who don’t leave but do work remotely as much as possible, in part to minimize contact with the managers they dislike, along with those who RIP or QQ.

As a manager in this new world of employer/employee relationships, your options are limited. Your protestations that employees who … QuietStay? … will find their efforts rewarded in the long term might be credible on an interpersonal level, depending on your reputation within the confines of the business that was.

But unless the whole business has earned credibility, any promises you make are bounded by your personal presence and won’t survive you should you move vertically, laterally, or beyond.

So as a manager, assess the aggregate mood of the employees in your organization and adjust accordingly, recognizing that like it or not, your relationship with employees is and will increasingly be more transactional than you’d prefer.

Bob’s last word: If you’re an employee considering the RIP/QQ alternative, think very hard about a downside that’s rarely mentioned. As I said in one of articles linked above, “If someone wants to work hard for an employer who doesn’t value the hard work and rewards other qualities, there are good reasons to do so, as several readers pointed out. For many people it’s a matter of self-respect. Even more important than that, slacking off is an easy and bad habit to get into, and hard to break once you have.”

Bob’s sales pitch: Want to give your group an entertaining and iconoclastic view of How Things Work? Sorry – Bill Nye isn’t available and if he was, you couldn’t afford him.

On the other hand, I am, and you probably can. So if you’d like a keynoter who can deliver the Keep-the-Joint-Running perspective on life, the universe, and everything, or at least on how IT and the rest of the business can and should fit together, let’s talk.

Now in CIO.com: “What CIOs get wrong about optimization.” They ignore the principle that in order to optimize the whole you must sub-optimize the parts.

Comments