Have you ever found yourself wanting to make a major shift – in skills, in roles, in relationships? One of my good friends, Jimmy May (Blog | Twitter), accomplished a set of major career and lifestyle revisions including relocating to Redmond, taking on a huge new level of job responsibility as part of the Microsoft SQL Customer Advisory Team, and achieving the noted accreditation of Microsoft Certified Master.
Jimmy and I were chatting about undertaking major life changes like these and, as is often the case, his thoughts were too good not to share. Be sure to explore these excellent career development resources. So here were some great pointers from Jimmy:
Let me know what other resources you enjoy for professional and career development!
And if you’re really interested in developing your IT leadership and management skills, I encourage you to attend my Leadership Skills for IT Professionals seminar. I’m presenting this full-day seminar in Dallas at the SQLRally on May 8, and in Louisville at SQL Saturday 122 on June 19. Hope to see you there!
This might be most most overcommitted four-week period of time ever in my life. I’m tired just thinking about it! Not only am I traveling internationally and speaking over the next few weeks, I’m also helping on two book projects, learning some new applications from Quest Software, and helping on a small Transact-SQL refactoring project.
Swag on hand? I’ve got a special printing of 500 video training DVDs for this trip:
SQL Server Training on DMVs
Performance Monitor and Wait Events
Plus, I’ll have a few posters, stickers, and other goodies. Come see me!
SQL Saturday 105; Dublin, Ireland; March 24
My maternal grandmother was first generation Irish-American and, somehow, going to Ireland feels a lot like going home to grandmom’s house. And all my Irish friends make it feel like I’m going home to see the extended family – cousins and ‘once-removed’ family types. And on top of that, we get to talk about SQL Server at SQL Saturday #105! I’ll be doing a session called “Top 10 Things Every Developer Should Know”. I’ll also be hanging out at the Quest Software booth much of the day and, just for fun, I plan on doing a completely unscripted lightning talk.
SQL Server User Group; Maidenhead, UK; March 27
From Dublin, I head over to the lovely town of Maidenhead, UK. I’ll be spending a couple days in the Quest Software office there in Maidenhead, whose SQL Server User Group is lead by fellow Questie Richard Douglas (blog | twitter). I’ll be presenting after Business Intelligence impresario Jen Stirrup (blog | twitter). Space is limited, but there are still some seats left.
This is the official launch event for SQL Server 2012! This is your chance to get the best and biggest dose of SQL Server 2012 training for quite some time. The free training day event is sold out. However, some of the training day seminars have open seats, including my seminar Leadership Skills for the Database Professional. This seminar distills the years of formal training and hard-won experience I’ve accumulated throughout my career starting as a developer leading a small team, through the founding and early startup years of PASS, into my later years leading a large, multi-national development organization. You’ll learn all the skills that are crucial for you to make the leap (and it’s a big one) from full-time technologist to a leader and manager of people.
And we’ll be hosting our popular SQL trivia quize and IT Horror Stories sessions as well. So be sure to plan on grabbing your lunch and heading into our fun lunch-time sessions!
I hope to see you at one of these upcoming events! Cheers,
The Expert’s Conference (TEC) is a multi-day event featuring five co-located Microsoft educational conferences at the San Diego Marriott Marquis & Marina April 29-May 2. It’s pretty – see!
The event includes advanced 400-level training on Microsoft Directory & Identity (including Active Directory), Exchange Server, SharePoint, Virtualization (Microsoft Hyper-V) & Workspace Management, and PowerShell Deep Dives. There are lots of great activities for Quest and Microsoft customers and partners. In addition, there’s a Quest Software Day, with User Groups sessions; Focus Groups to steer product direction; and Executive Briefings.
In the registration section, be sure to mention my name when it asks “How did you hear about TEC?” If I get enough people to sign on, they’ll let me off of the chain and give me fresh bread and water instead of the old moldy stuff they usually slide under the cell door.
Click on the pretty picture below to get more info!
I’m being a little bit incendiary with that title. Many IT pros grow into very good managers. But it almost never comes naturally. It takes hard work and many hard won lessons before most of us ever achieve a degree of skill and comfort with managing other people. Thinking about moving into management? Help is here!
I’ve been spending the past several years turning the lessons I’ve learned as a manager into a set of courses for IT professionals who want to make the leap in to management. I’ll be presenting some of these lessons as full-day seminars. I hope you can join me! Details below:
Some of them I learned (fortunately) through reading, training, and extensive coursework before I ever experienced them in person. Some of the lessons, I learned through a kindly mentor who helped me see problems coming just over the horizon. And some of the lessons I’ve simply learned the hard way. Maybe your career path is headed in the same direction as mine…
An Oft-repeated Career Path…
Here’s how mine went, and it’s a rather common refrain among IT pros. It goes like this – you’re outstanding at your IT job. You excel. You have a lot of credibility. Every few years, you get a promotion. But eventual, your boss (or your boss’ boss) tells you that you’ve topped out as a technologist. They simply can’t give you any more raises. And there are no higher level technology jobs you can get promoted to. You couldn’t even get a better job at another company. Ah, but there’s more to the corporate ladder than just IT. There are all of those juicy management positions that =DO= offer potential for more raises. So you say to yourself “Why don’t I just jump over to the management track? I excel as an IT guru. I can do that management stuff easily. In fact, I’ll be better than any of my bosses ever were!”
…Leads To Oft-repeated Mistakes
But if you’re like many IT pros, it starts to sink in that all of those skills which made you ‘the awesome’ as an technologist are =NOT= transferrable to the management work you’ve now got on your plate. Successful IT people, by their very nature, often succeed because they enjoy “the machine” more than personal interactions – and that’s what good management is all about.
Here are some common behaviors I’ve seen from IT people once they get into management that can cause lots of problems.
Answering a simple question via email, Twitter, or IM when the person asking the question is in the cube a couple strides away.
Spinning up a long back-n-forth email thread when a phone call could settle the issue in 10-20 minutes.
Spending many hours on research to justify a recommendation for an important decision, sharing the research with other stakeholders (via email, usually), and then being surprised that no one supports the recommendation.
Failing to convince the boss into spending money on important ideas, like training or tools, or increasing headcount.
Even after extensive interviewing, hiring someone whose a poor fit for the team.
Thinking “We’re way behind on our projects, so I’ll just spend today hip deep in the technology helping the team get back on track.”
Puzzling over why team members are demotivated and unproductive, or that they are motivated and productive but to their own purposes.
Can you name a few more? Add a comment!
But Why?
Problems like these are simple issues of human nature. We all, naturally, try to do things according to our preferences and experiences. But their two very consistent built-in preferences of IT pros that these mistakes keep happening again and again are:
Choosing the computer interface over the human interface: We got into IT because we like computers. We thought of them as at least a little bit cool. As we spent a bigger percentage of our day clacking on keyboards, clacking on the keyboard became our preferred way to interact with other people. In fact, as IT people, the computer is our work. But when we become managers, the computer is, at best, only a tool for our work of managing people and, at worst, an outright impediment and obstacle to our work. Many problems in leading teams have their origins in choosing a computer-based method of communication when another form of interperson communication would be quicker, yield better results, and improve team interaction.
Smart is as smart does: A very common element of human nature is for people who are successful and smart to believe that success and smart applies to pretty much everything they do. In my own family, I recall family reunions where one of the more successful cousins, who was in the insurance business, enjoyed giving everyone else advice about personal finance, stock and investing, politics, religion, parenting, animal husbandry, and who-knows-what else. He basically believed that because he’d done well in other areas of his life that he was right about everything he had an opinion about. Ah, but pride comes before the fall, does it not? And of course, he was tripped up several times by his own limitations. We see this same sort of pattern repeated when the IT Pro begins to manage a team in the same way s/he managed her IT resources. The only problem is that machines deterministic. They yield consistent results when provided consistent inputs. People, well, we could say that people are non-deterministic, but it might be more accurate to say that people are plain ol’ chaotic.
Of course, I’ve just touched the tip of the iceberg with these two points. I’ll be talking a lot more about this in future posts and fixes for these common issues.
Comments? Thoughts? Experiences?
I’d love to hear your own experiences either as the IT pro seeking or working in a management role, or as an employee watching another IT person learn the management ropes. Add a comment here or drop me an email.
It seems like managers, so often, either go way overboard or go into hybernation and do way to little. This month, I had the pleasure and horror to hear two stories of managers run amuck with power. The first is from a friend and IT professional I’ll call Tony. Tony said this:
I worked for a firm as an IT manager when it was going through a relocation project. We migrated from a shoddy IT infrastructure in a shoddy, unsecured server area (which had water pipes running around the back of the servers to the coffee machine with rodents visibly running around) to a shiny new office with a shiny new server room with a big door. This new server room door had not only a normal key lock but also a swipe card reader.
Unfortunately, the Director of Administration (really the Office Admin) wanted to allow access for all to the server room, so people could help themselves to toner cartridges when their printers ran out, without bothering to tell us so we could order more. (I’m skipping over the obvious horror of them having access to the servers and network)… And we were told that using the keys to lock the room would be a disciplinary offence. We tried to point out obvious security issues and were shouted down.
The important assets of the company were subject to constant pilferage and, come to think of it, ended up resulting in an eventual Employment Tribunal. All of my “I told you so’s” came back to haunt them as details of their it in full in court, as the justices had read all of these details read in court and factored them into their ruling.
In a separate case, another acquaintance named Barry proceeded to tell me:
Our firm brought in a new Director of IT. This individual wasn’t satisfied with overseeing a mere IT division. Soon after coming on board, she set about systematically isolating and debilitating other managers in other functions, like the finance and accounting department. If one of these managers didn’t align themselves with her, they sound found that office life was getting harder. Service was taking longer. New installs, updates, and repairs were excruciatingly slow. Meanwhile, those who played her game got all the support that they needed. Most chalked it up to the simple ebb-and-flow of the business, not to premeditated planning. But as time went on, it become more evident that she was employing a divide-and-conquer tactic to win higher level strategic battles in the executive suite. In short order, she’d taken control of both IT and the money functions. Turnover started to go up quickly and before another couple months had past, most of the old guard was gone. Even these event seemed to be pre-planned, because the next thing we knew police officers were boxing up her office and taking her away. The six-figure salary and frequent bonuses weren’t enough, so she’d evidently moved into to outright fraud or embezzelment. We’re not sure which it was, but it landed her a multi-year sentence in jail!
Wow! Once again, I’m reminded of the value of checks and balances, in the second case, and the high value of listening to your team, in the first case.
I hate to admit it, but I’m a hoarder. Yes, like those insane people on the A&E TV show. Only my hoarding is all virtual. For example, take the image above. That’s just a tiny part of my Google Reader home page. That’s a tiny part of my Google Reader home page AFTER reading most of the day on a recent Sunday. I still had thousands of entries to go after hours of reading. On top of that, I subscribe to some technical e-newsletters. I’m a member of quite a few LinkedIn discussion groups, each of which produce daily and weekly newsletters. (I only subscribe to the weekly versions). Then there’s Twitter too. In all, there are THOUSANDS of interesting floating through the ether which I’d been trying to collect and, occassionally, read. Bah humbug!
The Downside of an Information Hoard
You might think that, as an IT professional, hoarding information is good for you. After all, the more you know, the more effective you are at your job, right? Uh – no. I’ve discovered a few downsides to keeping all of this information around. First, I lose time on administrivia, uh, I mean administration. I can’t think of a time when a search on Google has not produced the information that I’m interested in. So by spending time keeping up with my blog feeds, adding new blog feeds, deleting old ones, and so on, I lose time administrating something that really doesn’t need to be administrated.
Second, there’s the time it takes to read all of these entries – many long hours to read thousands of entries per month. I’ve actually figured out a little trick to make this go a lot faster. What’s that trick? Well, previously, I used to start reading my entries and then clicking “Next Entry” each time. Even when I skipped a lot of entries, just slogging through them all was a big time drain. Now, I simply select large swathes of entries that I’m not interested in and click “Mark as Read” without ever opening them. Works great! I’ve also gotten a lot more aggressive about dropping bloggers and RSS feeds that offer low value. A lot of bloggers have popped up who only recount things which are available in Books On-Line. Why spend any time on that at all? I’m looking for strong insight, experiences, and analysis – not simple technology facts. (A follow on thought to this tip is that “Bloggers Should Write Meaningful Article Titles!”)
Third, and more importantly, information hoarding takes a big emotional toll on me. Maybe it’s a factor of just how my brain works and is completely inapplicable to you. But in my case, I always carry a subtle nagging feeling when I have unread entries in my various accounts. Even when I know that these entries are optional and that it’s not necessary for me to read any of these things, I still feel like I should read them. Basically, it makes me feel like I should be working all the dang time and that makes me feel anxious. Anxiety makes me less productive and more prone to burn-out. And anxiety bleeds through my work hours into my home life. It makes it hard to enjoy a movie with the kids or some gardening in the yard. All because there’s that feeling that I haven’t gotten the hoard processed yet.
The Solution to the Information Hoard
I mentioned a couple specific techniques for thinning out the hoard in paragraph two. To summarize, first, subscribe to only those bloggers, feeds, and newsletters which add actual understanding to your life. Second, open and read only those entries that matter and skip the rest. Those are techniques for dealing with lots of entries to read. But my last problem, the anxiety issue, was a little bit harder to solve.
Like a lot of internal ways of handling life’s problem, the answer is simple but not easy. Similar life problems with simple but difficult solutions might include feelings of guilt (the solution is confession) or anger (the solution is forgiveness, either of yourself or for the other party). So what’s the solution to anxiety? Here’s my thought process – the answer to my information hoard is about values. What do I mean? I value these various things because they make me better at my job. Losing things of value causes me some anxiety. My anxiety has its roots in the feeling that I’m letting things of values (these various blog entries) slip through my hands. Why would you ignore things of value, or even worse, get rid of them?!? On the other hand, if you asked me what I really and truly valued most in this world, I’d answer with “my family and loved ones”. But again, do I actually demonstrate this priority with my time? Not nearly enough. Therefore, the answer is to properly appraise the value of my time. When I think about it rationally, I think that this sort of reading is worth about 30 minutes per day, maybe a full 60 minutes when there’s something really important to learn or someone really significant to listen to.
That’s it. After 30 minutes, I can walk away from any sort of reading guilt-free. So what’s my new solution to the information hoard and the anxieties that it’s been producing? A quick check on the writers and topics I care about the most and then “MARK ALL AS READ”. Yes, there will be more to read tomorrow. But now I no longer carry an ever increasing load saying to myself “Someday I’ll get to that”. I feel better already.
Feedback Requested
What’s your strategy to dealing with your information hoard? Are you still keeping everything you ever produced or read digitally? Does my approach sound reasonable and workable to you? Or am I off base?
A bit of background: Those aren’t grand daughters of the Clampetts in the picture at right. Those are my three daughters and three stepdaughters, all of whom I want to inherit the world – as little or as much as they want to take hold of. (I already talked a bit about this in a post on my personal, family blog. Be warned, it’s all boring family photos and such). Enabling them to have all of the choices and opportunities that are open to my son is a big motivating factor in my life. So many years ago, when several PASS volunteers wanted to start doing more to build a community of support for women in technology, I was an ardent supporter. And as president of PASS, I was able to do a tiny bit to help move WIT forward. Now, as I travel around speaking at various other conferences and events, I always try to sit in on the Women in Technology (WIT) sessions when I can.
A while back at a SQL Saturday in Indianapolis, I was enjoying the WIT panel discussion listening to the panelists discuss their upbringing and how they became a success in the field of technology. Their stories were, in some ways, similar. They were smart. They weren’t scared of math. They had an important mentor who supported them and encouraged them that they could accomplish any goal. They endured struggles such as financial hardship that, while difficult to overcome, also refined their desire to become successful in their careers. Some of the women who had to deal with men of the previous generation even had to overcome blatant chauvinism.
But then another similarity among the panelists, just a hunch really, struck me. I had to ask, to confirm my idea. “How many of you were a bit of loner or at least weren’t heavily influenced by your friends’ opinions before your professional career? Because with my own daughters, it’s their friends who they want to please. And they’d punt right away if their friends teased them about being good at math, or choosing a technical career, or anything else I can think of for that matter.”
It was pretty much unanimous. All of the panelists were loners or had a very small social circle during their formative years. Now perhaps I’m speaking from an inaccurate assumption, but most of my daughters are tight with their friends. And friends mean a lot to them, perhaps more than any other aspect of their social lives (like their family). So if their friends tell them that being interested in technology will “geekify” them, then they’d drop it like a hot potato.
So I wanted to put this question out to my female friends in the IT world. Were you in a big circle of friends during your developing years? What importance did you place on their opinions? Did they give you any flack for going in to IT or doing well in technology related classes?
It seems like the days of overt chauvinism are behind us here in the US. But I wonder if we need to start earlier with our daughters among their own peer groups to support them for a future in technology.
I had a very interesting conversation recently with a good friend of mine. She’s at the top of her game as a first class enterprise DBA in a major medical institution. She was interested in my career advice because she’d recently received an unsolicited invitation for a higher paying job in the business intelligence (BI) field. While I won’t talk much more about the specifics of that conversation, it’s not a unique conversation. In fact, I gave an interview to SearchSQLServer.com a while back about how DBA career paths are more and more leading into an even better paying career in business intelligence. Check out the interview HERE.
SSWUG.ORG’s virtual webcasts will prepare the “Accidental DBA” for patterns and practices they will experience in their role as a database administrator. I will provide easy-to-understand insights and realistic examples for professionals who have not had any formal DBA training. By the end of our four-part series, you should have the information needed to get up to speed on database planning, administration and performance tuning basics.
Session Descriptions
In the first session, you will see what is needed to fulfill the role of a (Database Administrator) DBA by learning more about what is typically expected of administrators and where the bulk of the work is done. Regardless if you are a draftee or volunteer to the position, the information applies to anybody wanting to better understand and fully own their title.
Over the course of the second session, you will find out why it is important to grasp some of the tips and tricks that DBAs have practiced for many years. I will emphasize about the need for documentation, testing, automation, sharing experiences and continuing your education.
During the third session, you will understand the reasons why the DBA is the sheriff in town! That’s why it’s important to know what you’re dealing with in your departments and inside your databases. I will explain how to inventory, determine what is not your responsibility, talk to your stakeholders, learn the business cycles and tackle important tasks.
The fourth and final session will emphasize the four essential skills needed to survive and excel in your database administration position – Communication, Troubleshooting, Benchmarking and Automation. I will explain how to leverage these abilities toward increased job security and professional successes.
I’ve always appreciated how Andy Warren (blog| twitter) operates in the most transparent manner, especially as it relates to his role as a director for the Professional Association for SQL Server. For example, Andy’s latest blog post about prepping for the SQLRally, to kick off in less than 30 days, is insightful and gives you a good idea of the sort of work a strong director for PASS needs to put in. I also enjoy how Andy more or less thinks out loud and offers you the chance to provide your input. In that latest blog post, he was mulling different after hours entertainment options, giving you a chance to pipe up with your opinion if you had one.
Learn from My Mistakes
Times running out for the early registration discount. Save $50 by registering before the end of the week! And while you’re at it, register for my full day, pre-conference seminar on learning leadership and management skills especially tailored for the IT professional. Here’s a quick run-down of the topics we’ll cover in my pre-con:
Earning the respect of your team
A deep understand of effectively motivating technology professionals
Specific skills to lead database professionals competently that broadly fall into the categories of:
Coaching team members to effectively meet goals and deadlines
Facilitating change and navigating organizational disruptions
Promoting communication within the team and with management
Keeping teams and projects on task and within scope
Dealing with difficult team members
Practicing good team time management techniques
Read all about the goals of the session here. If you’re coming to my session, I’d love to hear your thoughts ahead of time about challenges you’re facing!
Personal Experience, Personnel Experience
Also, just a word about my bona fides. I’ve had a lot of leadership and management training over the years, but like many professionals I consider my on-the-job experiences to be the most valuable.
On the education side of the equation, I received a bachelor’s degree in the school of management back in the 1980′s. I’ve also gone through the Center for Creative Leadership‘s leadership training curriculum, the Blessing and White Management Training curriculum, and SmithBucklin’s not-for-profit governance and organizational strategy training curriculum. On the experience side of the equation, I led small dev and admin teams of 3-7 people starting way back in the early 1990′s. In the late 1990′s, I started taking a more strategic direction with my skills as the manager of information architecture at the firm where I worked as well as taking a role as one of the founding directors of PASS. In the early 2000′s, I joined Quest Software as our initial SQL Server product architect and spent several years leading the team to a over 50 individuals in a half dozen teams in as many disparate locations around the world.
A Few Words About Community from SQLBits8
The more I go, the more reasons I find to go back to the SQLBits conferences held around the UK. The starting image isn’t very flattering, but here’s a fun little interview put together by Andrew Fryer of Microsoft:
