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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Bad news doesn’t improve with age, or so I learned in a leadership training program I attended some years ago.

And it doesn’t, even though modern business leaders have learned another important lesson: If they hide bad news — or hide from it — for a few fiscal quarters they can bank a big enough bonus to retire, while the consequences become someone else’s problem. Yours, for example.

If you hide from bad news, though, it will simply get worse, so you need to find out what’s really going on in your organization in time to prevent minor glitches from becoming crises. That isn’t easy, because once your career has progressed beyond a direct supervisory role to middle management, every bit of information that reaches your desk has been filtered. That filtering takes two forms: Hiding bad news to stay out of trouble, and accentuating bad news to get someone else into trouble. Straight information is hard to come by. How can you maximize your chances of getting some?

First and most important, make sure of your facts. Just because someone reports a problem doesn’t mean there is a problem. Especially if the news is about someone else, make sure you ask the responsible party directly.

Next, don’t punish any bearer of bad tidings, even if the bearer is also the responsible party. If your first reaction to bad news is anger, you’re reinforcing exactly the wrong behavior. Your first reaction should be to ask the responsible party what’s being done to fix the problem. Figure out if you need to make a personnel adjustment after the problem has been dealt with, based on how it happened and how the responsible party dealt with it.

Nearly as important, surround yourself with people who aren’t impressed with you or your title. If the people who report to you try to curry favor as a career advancement strategy, they’ll tell you what they think you want to hear, not what they think you ought to hear.

Your direct reports also should understand the value of making their staff look good. When the time comes to present information, do they deliver it themselves, or do they bring along the staffers who know it best? If they present it themselves, by themselves, it’s a strong indicator that they want to control the information you receive and act on.

These pointers are a good start. Next week’s column will contain more straight information about getting straight information.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

As I mature (or maybe just age) I increasingly divide the world into things-that-are-my-problem and things-that-aren’t-my-problem. Earning enough to pay my share of the mortgage and groceries is my problem. Figuring out how other people should live their lives isn’t my problem.

Keeping close track of what isn’t my problem has proved to be a wonderful stress reducer. Sadly, while this has worked very well for me personally, it isn’t an attitude that scales very well. Whether the subject is foreign policy or running an IT organization, any number of not-my-problem subjects turn into my-problem subjects with distressing but predictable frequency.

Foreign policy I generally leave to others, at least until a round or two of some conversational lubricant increases my perspicuity and persuasiveness. How to run IT is another matter.

And when you run IT, trying to make anything that happens in the enterprise not-your-problem is suicidal. One way or another, it all ends up on your desk.

Boiled down to its essentials, traditional IT is composed of operations, which runs the applications already in place; and programming, which develops, installs, customizes, integrates and maintains business applications. IT operations is, of course, entirely about supporting the rest of the business. As for programming …

If there ever was such a thing as a programming project, there isn’t anymore. Projects are always about business change. And while business change requires information technology, it’s merely a necessary condition for success, not a sufficient one. If nobody thinks through how the business should operate differently, new technology just won’t accomplish very much.

Which leaves IT with two choices: Include how the business should operate differently among the things-that-are-my-problem, or become a disinterested supplier to the rest of the business, content to deliver software that on paper adheres to the specifications regardless of whether it actually does something important.

Just an opinion: You’re better off choosing the former, largely because if you don’t, business change won’t happen and you’ll get the blame no matter what really went wrong. And you should. “The software worked. It isn’t our fault if they didn’t use it,” is, after all, an awfully flaccid excuse.

Business change only happens if someone is responsible for making it happen. IT is where the entire company’s operations meet in one place.

So if IT doesn’t take responsibility for business change, who will?

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