Learning, It's as much an attitude as an activity.
In our last installment , I describe the three essential skills I felt were hallmarks of the best and most successful directors that I’ve worked with. Good directors, indeed good strategic leaders of all stripes, usually have at least one or more of these skills: strategic planning, visionary goals, and emotional intelligence.
The good news about these skills, and lots of other skills that can advance your career, is that you can learn them. Many people will spend a fortune on a classroom approach to learning these sorts of skills via an MBA. If you’re a penny pincher, you can get a leg up on these business and management-oriented skills by simply going to the web.
My favorite place to start for soft skills research with an IT-orientation is http://www.techrepublic.com/tech-manager/. It’s not a systematically planned course in strategy, but it is a good, free resource. You can learn about any number of important management skills from project management, to turning around dysfunctional teams, to managing budgets. There’s even a nice little topic dropdown listbox for a quick lookup for all topics related to strategic planning.
Another interesting trend that you can take advantage of is called OpenCourseWare (OCW). OCW is to higher education what open source software is to the IT industry. Are you considering the proposition of writing a business plan? Why not participate in MIT’s OCW class direct about writing business plans from the renowned Sloan School of Management? You can find all of the Sloan classes at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Management/index.htm. Many other top quality universities offer including John Hopkins University, Notre Dame, the University of California – Irvine, and many others. The OpenCourseWare Consortium has a directory of worldwide universities participating in the program at http://www.ocwconsortium.org/use/use-dynamic.html.
There also hordes of books on business strategy. I can’t even begin to describe all of the good books that you might or might not want to investigate. However, since business strategy is something for the McKinsey set, I want to warn you that books on this topic fill the whole spectrum from dry and pedantic to breezy and uninformative. I strongly recommend that you do your homework before buying a book of this kind. Read the Amazon reviews, and make sure that there are many reviews on hand. A book with fewer reviews has a less representative take on how well it meets the needs of the readership.
Guy Kawasaki, Art of the Start
A great book for absolute beginners in this area might be Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start. It’s about all the steps needed to get a successful start-up business moving, but he covers many of the necessary steps in detail without being boring or dry.
I’ve just gotten your foot in the door, but I’m sure our readership has a lot of great suggestions. Add a comment here about your favorite resource for strategy and business planning, setting vision, and emotional intelligence – as well as anything else you know of that might help raise the skills of our community. Thanks!
My employer, Quest Software, Inc. (QSFT26.15, +0.68, +2.65%) today added Apache Cassandra, an open-source NoSQL database, to its list of supported NoSQL platforms with the second beta release of Toad(R) for Cloud Databases. Toad now supports data access and management for Apache Cassandra, Amazon SimpleDB, Microsoft Azure Table Services, Apache HBase, and any Open Database Connectivity-enabled relational database.
If you haven’t paid attention to the new social media, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Just as email was a game-changer in the 1980s and the internet revolutionized society in the 1990s, social media is making a huge impact on the way people work and interact today. Personally, I was skeptical about social networking until some good friends persuaded me to give it a trial run. It seemed like a great way to dither away some valuable time, but I didn’t see the business value in the whole proposition until I tried it. [READ MORE]
Want a seat in the board room? Better bring your A game.
The skills that enable a person to be a top-tier database professional have very little to do with being a successful member of a board of directors. So what skills are needed for a person to be successful on a board of directors for any large organization? Here are a handful of skills, in no particular order, that I’ve seen demonstrated by very successful directors from days past:
Strategic thinking
Let’s face it – technology is detail-oriented work. No database professional can be truly effective at their job if they never get the parameters correct when calling a function, can’t remember the correct syntax for simple SQL query, or know their server only as a “DL something-er-other”. You have to know the details to be able to get your work done quickly. However, getting into the details at a board-level discussion is the exact opposite of how a director most effectively spends their time. Instead, board members need to figure out all of the elements of the big picture first. This time of assessmentis predicated upon have a strong understanding of the organization’s top few strategic goals, usually no more than 3-5 goals in any given year. Every new program needs to be evaluated against those strategic goals and, many times, what might seem like a great idea turns out to conflict with the organizational goals. After a new program or idea is vetted against PASS’ strategic goals and passes the test, it needs to be fully conceptualized – sort of like a programmer’s model of a program in pseudocode or a database in an ER diagram. Once that’s done, the various elements of the big picture are handed off to either specific board members or other high-level PASS volunteers for implementation.
I’ll give you an example. One of our past directors for PASS, whenever a new program was being discussed, would immediately begin to throw out detailed solutions to the program in question. “Oh! We could code that in ASP.NET and, now that I think of it, it’d be really cool to try the new .NET framework.” People would then start to argue about what’s the right technology to use. “No, we should use C#!” Sometimes, the discussion would devolve into an argument between different technological zealots who wanted things done “the best way” – that is, the way they like it. But wait a minute! The board hadn’t even come to consensus on what features the program would include, when it would be launched, who would be accountable for its success, how it would be funded, and who would do the grunt work to complete it.
So, to me, the first characteristic of a successful director is strategic, “big picture”, thinking.
Values drive the Mission. Mission drives the Strategy. Strategy seeks to accomplish Goals.
Vision
I’ve had the pleasure to work with many directors, both elected and appointed, over the years on the PASS board. There are a lot of reasons that motivate people to put their name into the hat for a seat on the board. Some are motivated by ambition. They want to see that cool entry of “director” on their resume and the new job opportunities it might open. Some are motivated by zeal for the community. PASS enabled them to learn a lot and they want to pay it forward to future generations of SQL Server professionals. Some are high-achievers who are a little bored by their day-to-day job and would like to liven it up with new challenges that are still pertinent to their career. Yet, no matter what motivates a candidate to seek a seat on the board, I’ve noticed that those who have a vision for change they’d like to accomplish in their time on the board are those who are most likely to make a difference.
Now when I saw “a vision for change”, I don’t mean an amorphous, pie-in-the-sky ideal. I mean, literally, that these successful candidates want to do one (or more) clearly defined projects for the benefit of the SQL Server community. They have in their mind a before- and after-picture of PASS. “This is what PASS looked like before I came to the board and, thanks to me, PASS looks different in this after-picture!” By comparison, directors who have no particular vision or who have a vision that is at cross-purposes with the organization, at best, muddle along in mediocrity or, at worst, flame out and walk away from the board with hard feelings.
Here are a couple examples. First, I’ve seen many fine technologists take a seat at the director’s table over the years whose attitude could best be described as “What the heck am I doing here?!? I sure hope someone tells me what to do.” If you’re not inspired, not burning with powerful desire for change, don’t particularly want to see a particular something happen within PASS then I really need to point out that this job might not be for you. A few such board members later caught fire, but most of the board members who came in without a vision for change, unsurprisingly, accomplish little. As the old saying goes, if you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t know when you get there. Second, we’ve had a couple board members who came to the board with a strong mission in mind targeted on altruism of some sort, like training underprivileged kids or organizing PASS members for volunteerism outside of PASS. These kinds of goals, while very worthy, need to be met outside of PASS through organizations that specialize in that kind of work. Let’s be honest, PASS has tiny budgets. And its directors have a very finite amount of time and energy for their volunteer activities. Any moneys or personal energies spent on things that don’t accomplish PASS’ strategic goals in fact decrease it’s ability to do so.
Where are we now? Where should we be tomorrow?
Emotional Intelligence
Many of us went into technology because we don’t LIKE to spend all day trying to read people’s subtle clues about what they want or how they are feeling. SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition works just as well for you if you use harsh tones with it as if you soothingly reassure it that you’re on its side. And you can’t debug a CLR routine any faster if you use affirming body language. Unfortunately, for the technophiles out there who’d rather send an email to the person in the cube next them instead of walking three steps to have an interpersonal discussion, board work is almost 100% person-to-person. The most effective directors have been those who can tell when someone is tuning them out, chose their words in a way that holds and retains interests of their audience, and can perceive the difference between when a person is truly supporting them and when a person is merely being polite.
Believe it or not, though, I’m not saying that effective directors are always the most suave or polished. That’s not the case at all. We’ve had some very gruff, even abrasive, directors over the years. But many of them were successful all the same because they understood how to communicate their most important messages effectively and, at the same time, read the subtle and nonverbal responses of their peers on the board for support.
Here’s a worst-practice example. Immediately after getting a seat on the board many years ago, a former director spoke up in topic after topic at board meetings and calls throughout the year. By the second board meeting of the year, other board members would roll their eyes when he’d jump in. It didn’t matter to him that he was off topic – he had the floor, by gosh. It seemed that, more and more, this director was primarily speaking up in search of “pats on the back” and “you’re so smart!” sorts of positive strokes, not to actually advance the conversation. Everyone came to feel like he was wasting their time. When this director presented a proposal for a major new initiative to the board which he was sponsoring (which took several hours, by the way, about three times the length of a normal proposal), he basked in the spotlight at the podium like a rock star. Unfortunately, he failed to present a cohesive proposal and, on top of that, hadn’t vetted his ideas before hand with a single other member of the board. I sometimes wondered if he worked alone because he didn’t want anyone to share in the glory of his great ideas. His proposal, and his wider tenure on the board, fell flat because every exchange with him felt like his time on the board was all about him, instead of all about the organization.
Summary
There are lots of minor skills that help a candidate become an exceptional director. Knowing how to create and read a budget helps a lot. Having project estimating and project management skills certainly yields good fruit. Running a good meeting and helping to drive for consensus are great skills to bring to the board room. Being diplomatic and learning how to build political capital can help a director implement ideas that they favor. But, all things considered, successful directors do these three things:
Think strategically rather than in terms of low-level details
Have a vision for one or more changes that they want to enact during their time on the board.
Know how to communicate interpersonally and gain the support of their colleagues on the board.
The good news about these three key skills is that, while not natural to most SQL Server professionals, they can be learned. Where to start? In my next column, I’ll point out some on-line resources which can help you learn these key skills of strategic leadership.
Since the release of SQL Server 2005, companies have been investing heavily in SQL Server for their business-critical applications. DBAs are now challenged with supporting ever-growing datasets and making efficient use of allocated disk space in both production and enterprise storage environments. Yet DBAs seldom have a clear picture of their data storage and therefore cannot determine whether they are getting a worthwhile return on their storage investment or if an out-of-disk situation is looming.
In this presentation, Kevin will address these challenges and explore methodologies to help you efficiently use allocated disk space for enterprise storage and production environments.
Microsoft SQL Server’s relational engine has offered new instrumentation that improves by light years with each new release. The introduction of Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) in SQL Server 2005 provided a much-needed equivalent to Oracle’s long-standing and capable V$ and X$ system views. SQL Server 2008 has provided another dramatic improvement to its instrumentation with Extended Events (also known as XEvents) that promises to offer even greater opportunities to tune, trace and troubleshoot the inner workings of a SQL Server application. All of this stands in stark contrast with the anemic instrumentation offered in SQL Server Analysis Services, Microsoft’s wonderful multi-dimensional data repository that is a free feature-set within the SQL Server product. [READ MORE]
This presentation is a bit old, but largely still applicable. It will help you understand Microsoft tuning techniques. It will teach tips and tricks for making queries perform better, and how to use tools to tune SQL.
At a rather muted Microsoft TechEd in Los Angeles in May, the crowds were diminished and the educational content was slimmed down. In the past, SQL Server sessions were so abundant that you’d have trouble choosing which of several you might want to attend. This year, the state of the economy was reflected in many ways, including the one, or, in just a few cases, two sessions per time slot allotted SQL Server professionals. Despite the low ebb, the Microsoft SQL Server team made an exciting announcement about the upcoming availability of the SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP (Community Technology Preview). [READ MORE]
In the past few columns, we’ve talked about how to conduct an interview and, dreadfully, how to dismiss a member of your team. I this post I would like to discuss the whole process from the candidate’s point of view. For the job candidate, an interview is your opportunity to showcase your talents and the strengths that you bring to an organization. It’s also your opportunity to demonstrate the unique talents you, as a potential team member, offer. Never forget that interviews are a form of competition, so each and every advantageous characteristic you can demonstrate to your potential employer is one more point on your scorecard.
In my mind, acing an interviewing is about preparation. Like an actor in a play, you’ll do best when you avoid common mistakes and show some passion and eloquence. In the preparation category, always remember to:
Dress for the part. In this day and age of business casual, it’s still important to dress like the CEO for the interview. Only dress in business casual if the CEO is publicly and often seen in business casual themselves. Good grooming is also very important. And avoid chewing gum, smoking, or keeping your blue tooth plugged into your ear. Nothing says “I’ve got something better to do” than keeping your Bluetooth headset on or keeping your cell phone handy. Don’t play into the common stereotype that IT people are slobs or can only dress like a 14-year old boy.
Know the company. It’s simply inexcusable for a candidate to know little or nothing about a publicly traded company when they come in for an interview. With a small company, ask friends or relatives about it. Heck, even call the receptionist for a chat. But do not come in cold and do not ask questions about the company whose answers are prominently displayed on their website. I knew of one job candidate who was asked to demo the company’s software as part of his interview. Imagine if he’d never spent much time getting to know the company?
Know your history. For heaven’s sake, do not lie or misrepresent yourself on your resume! You’ll get a barrage of interview questions about your past. Even so, it is still important to review your resume. At every point in your career, be prepared to highlight why you were great at what you did in that job. You’re competing against other candidates and a little self-promotion is likely to be all the separates you from the rest of the pack. Also, be prepared for the broad and often challenging questions I told you about in the PWWO column about Behavioral Interviewing. Always be able to answer the question “Why should we hire you?” Still, it’s important not to bring too much ego to the table. Don’t give answers like “Because I’m the BEST, baby!” Instead, focus on the value and talents you brought with answers like “I perform really well under stress and deadlines. And, combined with my technical and communication skills, have been an anchor on the other teams I’ve served on.” Be prepared to give examples.
Be curious. Prepare a number of questions about what it will be like to work for this company and on this team. What’s a typical work week like? What’s the pace of work like here? What are the boss and co-workers like? Is the job given a lot of autonomy or is it strongly team-oriented? Remember that this is also your opportunity to interview them, to see whether you’d really enjoy working there.
Be courteous and communicative. Be early for the interview and, during the interview, bring as much enthusiasm to process as you can muster. Use positive body language to show your interest. Turn your body towards the person you’re speaking too, no slouching, and make eye contact. Nod to convey that you understand the question and, when you don’t understand the question, paraphrase it back the interviewer to make sure you’re on the same page as them. These, among other displays, convey a sense of energy and vitality. Always thank the interviewers and follow-up with a thank-you email. If you really want the job, immediately follow up with a card. You’ll be amazed how much that personal touch can add, especially since so few people actually go to that step. However, in our digital age, you have to act fast. They’ve probably interviewed a couple other candidates within the same week, if not the same day, so don’t dally. Finally, avoid slang since it makes you seem pedestrian. Also remember that accents can make you seem provincial (I’m from Alabama after all), so try your best to enunciate clearly and sound like a newscaster.
Remember Technology’s Proper Place. As IT professionals, we often get enamored with the technology. It’s absolutely appropriate to show your excitement over some cool new gadget or technological feature. (“I love extended events in SQL Server 2008!”) But remember that technology is only half our job. The truly exceptional IT professionals are those that can communicate effectively, can manage interpersonal relationships well, and understand the business. Look for opportunities to demonstrate your good experiences using these soft skills in your interview and you’ll truly separate yourself from the herd of other candidates seeking the same job.
Conquer stage fright. It’s natural to get nervous. And there are a few steps you can take to keep your nervousness in check. First, practice with a friend, relative, or business pal. Rehearse the interview in your mind. A little Zen goes a long way towards serenity in these situations. Also, if you really are nervous, when an interviewer shakes your hand and asks “How are you?” simply admit that you’re nervous. You’ll be surprised how much getting that off your chest can help relieve the stress. And if the interviewer(s) has any sensitivity, they’ll also reassure you. “Ah, don’t worry. We’re just regular folks here” is a common refrain.
The good news is that interviewing skills are not something that some are born with and others aren’t. It is a learned set of skills and, with a little practice, you can truly shine. Are those with the gift of gab in better position? Yes. I think that those who communicate easily have a small advantage. However, even the shy and reserved can demonstrate that they’re the right person for the job by avoiding the big mistakes and approaching the interview with foresight and practice.
Other thoughts and ideas about how to do well in an interview?
