My Annual Review

I am delighted by my annual review today: both a raise and a bonus! And I’m super proud of my score. I think this is more good news in the category of, Good things still happen despite this crappy economy.

Here are the major themes of my review:

Communication and Managing Execution are signature strengths. This isn’t news to me; I’ve studied my strengths, weaknesses & preferences enough to know what I’m good at and be able to articulate what I’m good at.  My boss happens to agree.  Also nice to hear is that I got a lot of positive feedback from my clients and even more importantly my team.  My boss thinks I’m getting to be quite good at managing people, and in particular coaching & helping them with career development. Good, because that’s why I like to manage people! Also heartening to hear is that I cut through the spin & confusion and get teams focusing on what’s most important and high-impact.

(By the way, being able to describe what you’re good at is important — often, it’s hard to tell others what our talents are because we’re all, Well duh this is nothing special; it’s just the way I am. Isn’t everyone wired like this? No,  everyone really isn’t wired like this, whatever your “this” is!)

My key opportunities right now are:

• Watch out for being too adaptable and picking up the buzzwords & jargon.  Influence w/o authority becomes a lot easier if I keep the technospeak out of it, use plain language, and get my partners to use plain language.  This is the business-world equivalent of my ridiculous ability to pick up regional dialects, y’all, and I’m over-using it.
• Set clear end-state expectations, delegate, and then let others execute in their way. Ah, the pains of moving from heavy on individual-contributor to heavy on doing-through-others.  I know I have trouble letting go of the methodology or process, especially when deadlines are tight or execs are phoning.  And if I don’t do this, how do a) my team members have an opportunity to grow? and b) I hold partners accountable to execute?  Teach others to fish, MFK, just order the fish and stop baiting, casting & reeling for them.

None of this information is a surprise to me, as I keep a pulse check on how I’m doing throughout the year – not just at review time.  I ask my peers, partners and even my team. And I ask my boss all the time.  He has even said, “I can’t physically give you enough feedback,” — Well, yes, fluid in-the-moment feedback is probably an opportunity that routinely shows up on his annual review.  So I go get my own.

But what’s really nice about this review is that my weaknesses are good ones to have, and seen in a positive light by my boss.  He and I both believe I can mitigate them.  They’re pretty sophisticated, and not game-changingly bad, like, Can’t deliver squat, or No one trusts or wants to work with her. These are things that if mitigated don’t keep me from slipping back, but rather propel me forward.

Quick Tips: Writing Reviews

I really do appreciate how my boss writes performance reviews.  He is to the point, possibly blunt, but I like that he doesn’t mess around with empty words or fluffy crap.  He is a wonderful editor of the reviews I write.

He just edited three for me: a top performer, a B-player and my bottom performer.  Here are the simplest, best tips I’ve learned over the years from him:

Top Performers: Celebrate. Three cheers for them, and make sure they know it.  Say thanks, in writing.  Tell them what they’re known for.  Tell them you want them to take their signature strengths to the next level, and tell them what that level looks like.  Celebrate all the wins. Yay for great results!

B-players: Lots of concrete examples. Ah, the tricky fate of the B-player.  They are walking along the fence and can fall off either side.  Give lots of concrete examples of specific behaviors that aren’t working — it’s been my experience that often times B-players can’t see what they’re doing wrong; they don’t “get” it.  Help them get it.  Spell it out, especially if they’re Gen Y. Or passive aggressive like we Minnesotans are.  Bonus tip: Raise the bar way up. Tell them it’s raised.  Tell them how high.  It’s also been my experience that B-players will meet your bar. Don’t give them a lame bar.

Problem performers: Pick a theme. Do NOT give a litany of all the stuff that bugs you and all the crap they’ve done wrong. You want to prompt new behavior, not demotivate and destroy. What is the one, two if you must, game changing behavior they can focus on?  Just like your stars: what are they known for? Make sure you’ve got solid examples. Make sure this is the game-changer that their clients, their staff, your leadership peers are all talking about.  Tell them this is their opportunity to take this golden ticket and rock it.  Rock it means neutralize, not turn into a talent. How many people are given the courtesy of a frank and honest assessment? Tell them to rock it.  Tell them it is their choice.

Oh and duh — are your performance reviews over for the year?  Well, start giving this feedback NOW, and keep doing it all year.

What if you’re an employee, not the one writing the review? Well, make your boss be frank and honest.  Ask what you’re known for. Ask what your signature contribution is.  If they can’t answer, start asking your peers and clients and staff. Ask those people anyway.  Why are you waiting for your boss to give you feedback? Don’t give away all your power – go out and ask for it yourself.

Slightly Shocking Advice

G is a colleague who is one of the most amazing leaders of people I know.  He has been doing it for 14 years. I often look to his example & mentoring for advice. Yesterday at lunch he gave me some slightly shocking advice.

Background: At the F50C, annual and mid-year review time brings with it something I’ll call Leadership Assessment to help me avoid being dooced.  In the Leadership Assessment process, all managers of a department get together for a marathon session in which they discuss every employee: their strengths & weaknesses, potential for promotion, readiness for promotion.  They also set the employees’ review score and any compensation increases above & beyond what the score brings.

What’s nice about this is that important things like score and potential for promotion are not at risk to be in the hands of just one power-mad, jackass boss.  The group is a tempering, if not eliminating, influence on that kind of managerial abuse.  Of course what’s totally uncomfortable about this process is knowing that every manager on the team is sitting around talking about you, judging you, and sharing dirty laundry about you.

The slightly shocking advice:

Before every Leadership Assessment period, G asks his boss, What are you planning to say about me at Leadership Assessment? If that isn’t enough for the timid folks out there, G then tells his boss, After Leadership Assessment I’m going to come back to you and ask you what you actually said about me, and what everyone else said about me.

Wait, it gets better:

Then G goes in turn to each of his employees, and tells them: Here’s what I plan to say about you at Leadership Assessment, and then afterwards I’m going to come back and tell you what I actually said and also what everyone else said about you.

I find this advice amazing, mainly because it never would have occurred to ask this of my boss, or tell this to my employees without their asking first.  As much as I love and crave feedback, I am timid when it comes to asking for my leaders to lay my brand perception, potential and reputation all out on the table like that.  And I was super impressed when G told me he did this for his team.  He says consistently they love it.  I talked about managerial courage a little bit the other day: that’s nothing compared to this courage.

Are you bold enough to have your leadership really lay out for you all the external perceptions & reputation?

Are you bold enough to ask your manger to be frank about your potential for promotion?

Are you courageous enough to tell these things frankly but fairly to your employees?

Rypple Again

I swear this is it.  But I did try out Rypple on my team and 100% of them ended up replying! And they were very candid, which is awesome.   Not just candid, but focused, specific and actionable.  VERY awesome, totally usable.

(Rypple says if you ask 4+ people you have a stronger chance of candid response and full participation.  I think this is because the people you ask can see the count (not the who) of people you ask, and with 4+, folks are more comfortable that they’re truly anonymous.)

So, ta-da, here I share with you:

What my team said about me

Keep Doing

• Empower your direct reports, which makes them feel their commitment and work is valued and does add to the bottom line.
• Be very proactive & take follow-up action.
• Share knowledge, contacts & resources with your tea.
• Hold career development conversations.
• Recognize us, & hold us accountable.
• Give immediate feedback.

Start Doing

• Consistently ask for feedback and make those discussions open and comfortable.
• Ask, trust & limit over-advising when it sounds like things might be working out.
• Don’t react quickly to bad news. Let us talk through it together to arrive at next steps or a solution together.
• Provide information on how we each fit into your area and how your area fits into the team space. Provide leadership and direction on how we can add value to the broader business intelligence efforts at our company.

This is only slightly wordsmithed:  I reformatted it into keep doing/ stop doing form, and changed the “Don’t do X” statements into “Do Y” statements, because it’s always more effective declare what you ARE or WILL be instead of what you are NOT or SHOULDN’T BE.  I firmly believe you accomplish much more when you run towards something instead of running away from something.

I really like how candid everyone was. They called out a couple of blind spots which I didn’t know I had! Specifically:  jumping in to give too much advice too soon, and over-reacting to bad news.  Wow, I’m glad to hear i do the latter because I always hated it when I had managers who did that!  I can see it in myself now — I hear bad news and my bias for action goes into  fix it fix it fix it mode.  My team members will be better served by letting them — and holding them accountable to — fix the messes themselves.  This means holding back the advice, asking more questions like, “what do you think we should do?” and tempering my over-reactions.

I’ve sent this same summary to my team and my boss, so that all can see what people like about my management style and so that all can see what I want to hold myself accountable to address.

I hope that some of you are totally shocked that I shared the results back to my team & boss, at review time no less.  Good, if you are shocked you should be! We managers should absolutely be modeling how to know and own our strengths & weaknesses, and if we are going to hold our teams accountable to be more effective & use feedback, then we should in turn model it ourselves and avoid hypocrisy. Try it, try being honest & show your integrity!

If you manage people and think asking your team for feedback and then heaven help it, letting everyone know what that feedback was is too risky or immature or sets a dangerous precedent or whatever, then there is something wrong with you and you shouldn’t be managing people. Also you are a total coward.  I’m serious, go find a new job where you aren’t allowed to manage or review others.

The Importance Giving Upward Feedback

The new(er) manager stopped into my cube at the end of the day today and asked, I just had my self-review with our boss. Is he always this bad?

And I was all like, Huh?

Because I know he has his annoying traits and blind spots, goodness knows he does and goodness knows I’ve faced all of them.  But I also really like working with him, I know those traits are never meant to be personal attacks, and he is actually the best reviewer I’ve ever had at the F50C.  Really. I’ve learned a ton from him, largely by example and discussion, about how to write a good self review and how to give reviews effectively.

She went on to describe her review experience and I was somewhat shocked to hear it.  Which I told her, and I also told her the stuff I just told you above.

Here’s what was surprising:

1.  The behaviors exhibited were somewhat hostile and very overt, including an unwillingness to make eye contact. (Note: no yelling, swearing, or anything like that – mainly disengagement, not paying attention, reading ahead, and a very tense/hostile carriage of self).

1.5 Corollary: The behaviors exhibited were not a surprise to me, nor should they be for anyone who’s worked with him for more than six months, because they were “classic our boss” — completely part & parcel of his style, just taken to a really bad extreme.  This is not an excuse, just explanation for my surprise at her surprise.

2. There is apparently a pattern of these behaviors — when this new manager sat in on a mid year review he gave to a team member (she was too newly hired to give it herself), his style so upset the team member she had to do “repair work” (her words) afterward.

3.  She did not give him direct feedback at all about the mid year incident, at the time. Or ever.

4. She did not give him direct feedback today, or stop the review in the middle and ask, Should we reschedule – you seem disengaged, or Is something wrong? From your body language you seem upset.

So is the thing that pisses me off here, his behavior? Yes.  Duh.

Or is it her behavior? Yes. More so, I think.  Because:

• Giving feedback in the moment, about specific, observable behavior and its consequences, is the most effective way to ensure the person hears, understands, and is empowered to take action on the feedback. Because it’s relevant, can’t be misinterpreted, and can’t be easily dismissed. And she failed to do so both times.
• It’s one thing for us as his direct reports to have to manage up and deal with his style. It’s another thing not to shield the team below us from having to do that. Failing to run interference after the mid-year and to help our boss see the impact of his style/behavior on our team member is a huge disservice to both our boss and the entire team.
• I should note that the team member in question is one of our brightest and most resilient team members so the fact that our boss rattled her so much is a HUGE consequence.
• Failing to stop the self-review now and address the issue, or address it at the end means she lost an opportunity to teach our boss how to treat her.  And for people that have blind spots around people issues (our boss does and will be the first to admit it) you MUST protect yourself by not letting yourself be treated poorly. And you help very much the person with the blind spots by helping them see their blind spots. (This goes for anyone with any type of blind spot!)
• She was overly concerned with hurting his feelings. Hmmmm, was he concerned at all with hurting hers? No. Would she be concerned with hurting one of her team members’ feelings if she had to give this feedback to them? Yes. But would she find a way to do it effectively and not hurt feelings? Yes.

Here’s what I appreciate about the situation / am sympathetic about:

• She got a neutral 3rd party perspective -mine – to ensure she was reading the situations correctly before taking action.
• She committed to giving him the feedback tomorrow/soon (but it needs to be SOON) about both incidents
• It is hard to give your boss feedback. And our boss definitely can be intimidating. (I’ve coached him on this before.) But we all still need to do it – it helps our bosses, it helps us and it helps our team.
• I offered to let her blame it on me if that gives her a helpful buffer. MFK suggested I talk to you directly about this, or MFK suggested you’d want to know how your actions in these two reviews were read, and the consequences.

People, we are all adults! We MUST be able to speak frankly — firmly, fairly, politely, but frankly — with each other.  We teach people how to treat us. We help each other when we call out harmful behavior and support each other to change.  We have a right to give upward feedback.  We build ease in doing so by starting small and being consistent — then, when the big rocks happen, like today’s incident, it’s easier to be frank.

Please challenge yourselves to to the honorable thing. But if you work for someone abusive, someone who has insane behaviors, someone who is extremely hostile to hearing feedback, you must leave.  Even in this economy, you must leave. The final power is the power of goodbye.

Rypple Review

As you know, I got viral-marketed and bit the bait. (Sorry everyone – now I’m reinforcing viral marketing tactics as valid, and now an army of Intern Nathaniels are going to march into our blogs with product advertisements thinly veiled as yes-man comments.)  Rypple is a service that lets you ask focused, specific questions and get fast feedback.

So now I’ve tried out Rypple.  I asked two questions of two groups:

• I asked my team what is the one thing I should do more of to support them and what should I stop doing
• I asked two partners & their boss how I can be more effective in my format & the info I provide to them when I ask for updates and corrections to expense center credits. (They manage the process and I can’t be successful without their help but they have a lot of trouble executing our correction requests accurately/at all.)

Here’s what I liked about Rypple:

• It enforces character limits on the question you ask, encouraging you to ask a short, focused question.  No long-winded, gasbag-of-vague questions.
• It saves your questions and your feedback in your account — If you’d asked me I’d have said I didn’t care about such a feature, but having stumbled into that part of the site, I think it’s handy and cool.
• It makes the feedback anonymous, so the people you ask can feel safe to be candid.
• It pre-fills but lets you customize the little intro note that goes with your question.
• It emails your feedback to you as it comes in. No need to monitor the site.
• Recent questions people have Ryppled scroll on the front page — they’re good questions and gave me good ideas.
• User interface is cool and Mac-like. I can’t stand poor user interfaces.

What I hated about Rypple:

• It took them about 18 hours to activate my account once I signed up. WTF? In this era? Activation should be instant!  HOWEVER, looks like this will be fixed once they exit private beta and launch wide — activation will be instantaneous.  The rationale for delayed activation in beta is due to a desire to monitor the sign-up list and reach out & personally connect with beta users. Well, they connected with me already when they viral marketed me, and there was no reaching out when I signed up, just delay.  Delayed activation may add some value to Rypple developers, but it adds no value to users — if Rypple wants to connect, activate immediately and then reach out. It makes so little sense that I’m inferring (right or wrong) that the activation delay in beta is  not about better connection to users but rather serves some security or development need — so just be honest and say so.
• Every time you hit the home page, an irritating message pops up saying they notice I don’t have IE 7 and that Rypple works best with IE 7. Rypple is targeting corporate folks, but people in large organizations almost always don’t have admin rights to upgrade software on their own. Most large corporations are not on the current version of Windows because upgrading can cause major disruption, and becasue upgrades are often done on wonky schedules related to contracts w/ Microsoft. Etc. So don’t bug us with this irritating message.
• Rypple offers helpful training on how to ask good feedback questions. But it’s video, so I completely ignored it.  In my cubicle farm at work, watching video with sound is really irritating to others. They need some text-friendly stuff for those of us in open workspaces.
• Rypple enforces that character limit, but that alone doesn’t prevent you from asking vague, unproductive, nonspecific questions.  It just prevents you from asking long unprodicutve questions. (But it’s a start!)
• Most of my askees haven’t yet responded.  Rypple is only good if people participate with your questions.  If they are busy, feel intimidated to answer, don’t want to be candid, or forget to answer. Rypple will not help you.

All in all though, I’ll keep giving Rypple a try. I also told three people whom I thought would be interested, and now I’m telling you. Hmmmm, who’s the viral marketer now? You can just call me Tool of The Man.

PS: intern Nathaniel just pointed to this article on getting good feedback. Love the POV!

How I Manage Up

Everyone’s boss is different — we all have our weird blind spots and paranoias and strange weaknesses and hyper-focused strengths.  So my tricks for managing up may not work for you, in fact they probably won’t.  But if my boss ever hires you, you can use these tactics on him.

1.  I debate with him. He likes debate.  He likes to argue the point and the merits.  Once I got some feedback that he & my former director liked me because at the time I was one of the only people pushing back.  That little reinforcement was all I needed to get super comfortable saying, “I completely disagree, and here’s why.”  The real tactic here is that I communicate with him using his preferred style.

2.  I give him direct, relatively blunt constructive feedback. He’s from Jersey, he likes direct communication.  We live in MN, there’s a lot of passive aggressive communication.  I try to be plain & straightforward.  I give direct feedback to him on his performance and style because 1) he’s not very self-reflective and doesn’t always monitor the interpersonal after-effects of his approach.  And 2) he once invited me to give feedback.  The first time I gave it, it felt like a big risk.  But there were no bad consequences to me; in fact he thanked me.  And that encouragement was all I needed to keep doing it.  The real tactic here is that I help identify pain points & friction points, and suggest possible solutions, before they cause trouble.

3.  I demand clear expectations and well-defined, specific desired outcomes. Actually, I need to get better at demanding these things, at the time, in the moment, when the confusion is happening.  He’s strategic, and he’s often thinking out loud at a mile-a-minute clip.  He usually locks onto his desired outcome like a pit bull locking it’s jaw, but often the outcome is not fully baked and it’s up to the rest of us to bake it.  A lot of the time I feel like I’m trying to mind read.  Or, I’ll have to digest our conversation for a while and then go back to say, “This is what I think we discussed, and now that I’ve mulled it over, here’s what I actually think I should do.”  This, more than anything, directly causes most of my stress, so my goal in 2009 is to stand up for myself right in the moment and get specifics and clarifications.  Just like the ROWE people say I should.  The real tactic here is that I [should] insist on specifically defining, and agreeing on, desired outcome and timing. Also I [should] ask for proof/data/objective facts when he makes an assertion that’s way out of left field.

4.  I take abstract, vague ideas and execute them. I take the crazy ideas and make them happen.  Like I said, he’s often stuck in his desired outcome without a clear path to getting there or an understanding of all the steps to take and issues to clear, and a lot of the time he’s lighting a panicky fire to get there.  He’ll be the first to admit, he isn’t organized, task oriented or a process master. (On the HBDI: no green.)  So he hires people like me, who are.  The real tactic here is that I complement his weaknesses with my strengths. Part of the success here is that he hired me to be this complement — however, I spent a lot of time early on figuring out what his strengths & weaknesses were so that I knew where I could add value.

5.  I make sure he recognizes the team. I show off their wins to him, insist he send thank-you’s or notes, nominate them for awards he gives.  Because it’s not a strength of his at all, and because it helps him not be scary.  The real tactic here is just a variant of both #2 and #4.

6.  I make him look good. Because: DUH. His priorities are my priorities. I’ll drop everything to get him a deck for a meeting with his boss or an important client.  I scan his calendar to figure out when big-deal meetings are happening and either offer or ask what he needs. I feed him wins & measureable successes from my team so he can in turn show them off to his boss and partners. I get shit done. I warn him when trouble or stupidity happens, if it’s likely to get back to him — no surprises. The real tactic here is that I make him look good. Dang, I wish my own team would take this one more seriously with me! LOL.

7.  I delegate up. I am not afraid to give a clear request or assignment back up to my own boss.  I particularly like to deploy him when I think some particular action on his part will make it easier for me or my team to cut through an obstacle and move forward.  Becuse our success is his success. Also sometimes I just think there’s something he should be doing, not me. The real tactic here is that I protect the boundaries of my own work, and ask for the resources (usually action from my boss) I need to be successful.

Blunt Feedback I Wish I’d Given

Some of this is blunt feedback I wish I’d been given, early in my career.  Some of it is blunt feedback I wish I — or someone — had given various colleagues & employees. Why is it so hard for people to be frank about this stuff?  Maybe it’s because I live in Minnesota, where the official state personality is passive aggressive, but sugar coating or ignoring this stuff doesn’t do anyone any favors.

1.  Stop obsessing about pay grade. Obsessing about pay grade is the wrong strategic move. The more you obsess about your pay grade, the more I think you have no common sense and the less I want to increase your pay grade.  Why? You care about pay grade because you want to make more and feel like you’re being promoted.

But to make more and get promoted, you should instead obsess about outperforming in your current role, getting new marketable experiences, and getting marketable title advancement. These are the things you talk about on your resume and in your interviews, not pay grade.

Plus, pay grades usually overlap by enormous amounts, so is not necessarily an indication your compensation,  just your upside. Jumping pay grades doesn’t guarantee more cash.  But outperforming and racking up marketable experience both increases your likelihood of getting a raise (more cash) and jumping pay grades (more upside).

PS: title is more important than pay grade because title goes on the resume and sets compensation expectations.  For example, in my company, there are certain Analysts who are higher pay grades than some Managers.  But Manager flags as higher-compensated on a resume.

2. Fix your image. Sorry to remind you but humans are evolutionarily wired to make snap judgments based on appearance.  Image includes clothes, hair, makeup, ironing, tie, jewelry, fingernails, etc.  For goodness sake, use a q-tip! Want to advance? Dress like you mean it. Don’t dress like your kid, or yourself from ten years ago,  or the funky free spirit that you think you are.  Right now, you are over estimating how professional you look. If you tell me that “suits are uncomfortable,” or “suits don’t fit me,” than I believe believe you’re not thinking maturely or strategically about your career, because it’s plenty easy to find a suit that fits, and by the way you need to get comfortable with using a tailor.

This rant about suits comes from the suit culture I work in:  you need to carefully examine the culture of your own organization.  How do the leaders in your company present their image? How do the people you admire in the job you want (not the job you have) present their image? Follow their lead.

3. Your communication style is getting in your way. If you are not an excellent communicator, people aren’t recognizing your smarts & your contribution.  People are getting tired of fighting the communication battle with you, or being eternally confused by you. The more tired you make them, the less they will want to work with you, or for you, and to promote you.

4. You need to manage up more. If you don’t know what that is, you need to find out or get a mentor.  It is not the same as brown-nosing: it’s managing expectations, ensuring your actions are aligned with your manager’s goals, appropriately triageing issues, ensuring your manager knows your successes, making life easy for your manager and making your manager look good.  Everyone wants their manager to have their back, right?  Think of managing up as returning the favor.

5. Invest more time in your boss and your boss’ boss. You can have the greatest relationship in the world with the client or your team, but if you don’t ALSO invest in having a great relationship with your boss – and for that matter, your boss’ peers, your boss’ boss and anyone filling in for your boss  – than you are not going to have a great review or get looked at as promotable, or get great new assignments. Or be able to have a candid enough relationship with your boss such that you can say no, influence priorities, and call her on her bullshit.

6. Own your own weaknesses, start mitigating them and take off the blinders.  Why is are so many people so reluctant to own their weaknesses? Maybe because so many of us have been punished for weakness in the past. But what, do you think you are perfect? Only a perfect person would either have no weaknesses or not have to mitigate them.

7. Stop taking everyone’s advice indiscriminately. Instead ask: out of the menu of advice I’ve gotten, which is most applicable for this current situation or this current culture or this current personality?

This goes for my advice, right here, too.   I’m just a data point for you, and you can’t use every data point — I might be an outlier. I don’t have some magic solution or the key to it all.  If I had the key, I wouldn’t need to be writing this blog to figure out what I am doing.

I Received an Award!

I’m super excited to announce that 101 Smackdowns has given Open-Source Career the Superior Scribbler Award!  Thank you so much, Jacque and Clare:  I’m honored that you chose me.

The Superior Scribbler Award works like this:

• Every superior scribbler must name 5 other super scribblers.
• Link back to the author & blog that gave you the award.
• Display the award and link to this post, which explains the award.
• Visit that same post & add your name via Mr. Linky List, so the award creators can keep track of who the superest scribblers are.

Now I get to give some awards!

I’m going to take a cue from 101 Smackdowns and share with you over time the 5 bloggers I’m paying the award forward to.  I’ll update this post as I pass on the awards:

1.  Single Ma at Fabulous Financials. FF began as an open-wallet personal finance blog, but Single Ma has a whole range of great posts: strategy and insight into how she aggressively manages her career; tips, tactics & inspriation for buttoning up your finances and growing wealth; a big dose of no-bullshit; a snapshot into the joys and trials of raising a teenage diva-in-training;  updates on the saga of Single Ma and Mr Eye Candy.  Oh yeah, and shoes.

2. The Evil HR Lady. What could be better than getting HR lowdown straight from the evil source?  Evil HR Lady has tons of corporate HR experience and addresses the toughest, gnarliest, most interesting and most useful situations.  She writes of her own experiences and takes reader questions, and her writing style is really accessible and friendly, just top-notch.  This post specifically inspired me to give her the Superior Scribbler Award — I love her HR Extremist ideas about open-source salaries!

3. Anastasia from Blog@Work is a coach & entrepreneur & an international consultant & knows all about neurolinguistic programming (NLP). Yikes! And she is sharing it all with us!  Plus, she’s a great commenter and prodder here at Open-Source Career. And, she’s a Russian Brit, so she brings a unique point of view and a great writing style.

How to Clean Up a *@#%ing Mess

It’s only day two back and it’s already apparent that several things fell apart while I was gone.  This is not to say I’m such a superstar that my absence is the direct cause of the chaos (although it has been made abundantly clear to me that I was sorely missed).  It’s more the nature of project work and IT project work specifically:  crap happens, things go wrong, and perverse incentives exist that cause people to hide bad news until it’s too late.  Yeah, OK and some of it is because I was gone.

The task before me is to quickly get back up to speed at a deep level of detail so I can get back to working my mojo and getting things moving forward again. I need to diagnose just what the heck is going on and then I need to ensure we are moving, moving MOVING FORWARD people!

Here are my favorite techniques:

1.  Play dumb. I’ve been away for four months so I’ve missed a lot of the history, nuance and back story.  I get to ask all the dumb, naive questions I can think of, and play that magical role called “new person” even though I’m technically not new.  Having to answer the dumb, obvious questions can help people cut through the spin, justifications and finger-pointing.  Plus, I really need all those dumb details! Did I mention it is such a relief to let my inner dumb come out of the closet?

2. Ask for post-mortems. What happened? Why did it happen? What specific cascade of events occurred?  Tell me about it in plain English. Where are the exact points where things broke down? Are we likely to repeat these mistakes? How can we ensure this doesn’t happen again?

3. Set the standard for no finger-pointing. Goodness knows, the team has done enough of that already.  Business blames IT, IT blames the business, project managers blame the clients, fingers pointed all around.  Say aloud, to everyone, over and over again:  “I’m not interested in pointing fingers.  I just want to understand what happened.  What’s important is what we do now on our way forward.”

4. Bias for action. Corollary to #3.  Once I understand exactly what happened and what the current state is, I want to know what we will do about the current state.  I do not want the team, partners or clients moaning and bemoaning.  I want some specific next actions.  I do not want an overblown, over-engineered, re-engineered gantt chart.  I do not want a month of planning or a 60 day rebaseline. I want some specific, concrete, do-able next actions.  I want some small, achievable wins (to help morale and momentum).  I want them time-bound and deadlined, and I want them executed.

5. Open the communication floodgates. When *@#%ing messes are developing, communication clamps down.  People don’t want to share bad news so they keep it to themselves.  People are pointing fingers, so they talk behind each other’s backs to sympathetic ears.  Decisions aren’t being made and time pressure is mounting, so communication stops.  Time to open back up the communication floodgates and send clear, simple messages to all the stakeholders.  No overwrought, convoluted status reporting, just simple clear current state and way forward statements, and consistent messages.  Use multiple communication channels — one-on-one statuses with leaders, broadcast emails to the virtual team, broadcast emails to the stakeholders, in-person steering committee meetings, etc.  Give consistent statements and clear facts, avoid finger pointing, clearly outline accountability (who will do what now, and by when).  But tailor the style of message to the audience.

6.  Re-introduce discipline. Once the way forward, and specific time-bound next actions are identified and publically announced, ensure that the plan is being worked.  Pull the core group together for regular status updates.  Communicate those updates.  Work the plan, mitigate the risks.  If the facilitator or manager of the project execution is largely to blame (no public finger pointing!) for things falling apart, replace them. (But no public finger-pointing! This step is for leaders to handle behind the scene).  Do a deeper dive into timing/action; set milestones. But don’t plan to plan.  Motivate the team. Light a good fire. Get them moving forward again.

7. Re-introduce feedback. Keep a pulse on client happiness. Schedule regular in-person or email check-ins. How are things going? How do they feel about the way forward? Keep a pulse on the project team.  Are they executing? Are they burnt out? Do they buy into to the end goal? Answer concerns as promptly as possible. Insist on people talking directly to each other (not complaining to third parties), but if they have bad blood or poor communication styles, help them out.  Use every interaction to ask, “What can I start, stop or continue doing to help you? Do you have feedback for me or my team?”  Hold the partners and virtual team members accountable — provide specific, actionable, behavior/consequence based feedback as soon as possible, but not in public.

8.  Celebrate wins. Bomb the team and clients with positive feedback when warranted. Publically celebrate (announce, aknowledge, point out, you know what I mean) small wins, big wins and interim milestones achieved. Catch people doing things right.  Catch them some more. Catch them some more.  Reward what you want more of.