All Posts in Career Management

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

I’ve held nearly every job you can hold in IS, and in twenty years I’ve never worn a pager.

Some of this was dumb luck. When I worked as a programmer, for example, none of the applications I supported ran as overnight batch jobs, so that eliminated one source of pager-itis.

For the most part, though, I carefully planned my freedom from being on-call. When I managed networks and telecommunications, for example, I remained pager-free, even though we ran a 24×7 mission-critical operation. How?

Every time the subject came up I asked the same question: “What would I do about it?”

The team always had analysts on-call if something went wrong. They wore pagers. I slept until the next morning.

“What if they need you for something?” one of my colleagues once asked.

“Like what?” I asked in return. “They know what needs to be done, they’ll make the right decisions, and if anyone questions their authority they can explain that they had no choice — they couldn’t reach me because I don’t wear a pager.”

If I’d worn a pager I’d have had to justify it, and that would have meant insisting on being beeped every time something went wrong. And that, in turn, would have drained the authority right out of my team.

Even worse, I would have lost a lot of perfectly good sleep.

A lot of first-time supervisors treat their newfound authority to make decisions the way a child treats a new Pez dispenser. It isn’t the decisions (candy) that matters. It’s the process of delivering them that’s fun. (As evidence: At a recent “Nerd-fest” thrown by my friends Faith and Lynn, Fitz demonstrated his new motorized Pez dispenser. This is a killer gadget, kids. Ask Mom and Dad to get you one!)

These supervisors either learn the key lesson of career advancement or they’re perceived to be front-line supervisors the rest of their lives, even if they reach middle management. That’s the oldest lesson of succession planning: Always be important, but never be essential.

A regular theme of this column is the distinction between managing well, managing effectively, and succeeding in your career. Managing well refers to how you manage staff. To manage well, you have to delegate well, giving decisions to the people who report to you. Otherwise they can’t grow.

Managing effectively means making sure your department gets its job done well. That means you’re responsible for people and processes, not making decisions. The fewer decisions you make yourself, the more effective you are as a manager.

And then there’s the minor matter of your career. To be promoted, you need to pass the following tests: (1) You should at least resemble being qualified for the position you want; (2) You must have created the appearance of having been effective in your last job; and (3) You must be easy to replace.

This is neither original nor profound, but it is hard to accept. That’s because being hard to replace is a key survival strategy for many employees. And it’s a good one if your goal is job security. If that’s your goal, in fact, you should avoid sharing information, skills, or anything else that helps someone else do your job in your absence.

If, on the other hand, your goal is advancement then you have to treat succession planning as a personal mission. Delegating decisions makes you upwardly mobile. Your department can function effectively without you, and probably includes several qualified replacements, too.

Here’s the irony: Some managers get the silly idea that managing well and effectively is what got them promoted.

Comments

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

“Dilbert” has been verbed.

We’re starting to hear executives say, “Let’s not Dilbert this,” when debating some question of corporate policy or direction.

Progress is where you find it, I guess.

When Scott Adams invented Dilbert he worked at Pacific Bell. Pacific Bell, like most regulated monopolies, has little incentive to improve efficiency. When a utility makes a rate case to a public utilities commission (PUC), it demonstrates the cost of providing a service. Once the cost has been demonstrated, the price is almost a given. Since PUCs understand margins, they tend to allow pricing that delivers an acceptable margin percentage.

Which means regulated monopolies have an incentive to increase costs, since whatever the margin, higher costs will lead to more profits rather than less.

Regulated monopolies don’t generally find themselves squeezed for funds. You might think this would lead to higher salaries, or more pleasant working conditions, or the ability to “do things right” instead of having to make hard choices.

You’d be wrong.

Over-funded organizations act more like ecosystems than organisms. You’ve heard the phrase “it’s a jungle out there”? A jungle is an ecosystem.

An ecosystem is a stable organization composed of independent organisms, each focused on its own purposes. These individual organisms see to it that free resources find a use (that is, there are no unfilled niches). And as an ecosystem become more stable over time, species diversity increases and the flow of nutrients and energy within it becomes increasingly complex.

A business that acts as an ecosystem is unhealthy, and the symptoms are easy to spot. The company as a whole has no focus. Competitive urges are focused internally — department heads vie with each other for projects or funding. Departmental funding comes from sources within the ecosystem, and internal consumers define the value of most corporate processes — that is, internal economics, often built around a system of charge-backs, drive most activity.

Meanwhile, employees say, “I’m your customer” and “You’re my customer” to each other and mean it.

In companies like this, influence and power come from getting along — from political dexterity. Many employees will, in fact, find it literally impossible to connect their work to the creation of customer value.

And of course, the cost of sales is viewed as an overhead expense … hence the popular financial statistic “SG&A” — Sales, General, and Administrative expense. Sales and Marketing are largely disconnected from the purpose of the business, which is generating shareholder value, not increasing marketshare.

Compare all of this to the most successful business in the world, Microsoft. What complaints do you hear about Microsoft? Most boil down to it engaging in predatory business practices.

A predator is an organism. It has its own purposes, which it achieves through organized, focused activity. It understands that if it doesn’t succeed in achieving its goals, it won’t eat.

Microsoft creates lots of shareholder value but I’d bet you’d have a hard time finding a Microsoft employee who worries about it. Microsoft exists to dominate markets — to be a successful predator, taking food away from its competitors.

If you work in a company that acts as an ecosystem you have some hard choices to make. Don’t even try to change the company. You’ll just alienate the rest of the executive team. Only the CEO has any chance at all to change a company like this, and even for a CEO the road to recovery is a hard one.

You can, however, keep your own house in order. Cultivate executives who deal with external customers. Constantly ask how proposed projects will lead to increased competitiveness or customer value. Focus IS on the company’s purpose as best you can.

Or, you can leave to work for a predator.

Comments