Out of those and more I’ve evolved a philosophy based on that. If we each have an approach that will work, but you are the one doing the work, I’m going to let you do it your way. It’s part pragmatic because you know how to do it the way you propose, and it’s part cynical, if it fails it’s something you were totally vested in. In practice it shows people you trust them.

Here’s a more recent example. Joe Webb asked if they could create a custom logo for SQLSaturday #51. I’m a huge advocate of good branding, and for SQLSaturday the logo is definitely part of it, so my first impulse was to say no – just stick with consistency and use the normal logo.  But I thought about it a bit more because I truly hate to say no. Why not try it once? Let them try it and see what we think. So what we wound up with is the official logo on the site, and the unofficial but approved logo that they used on their shirts. We haven’t reached a final decision on the future yet, does it make sense to open this up for all events? Does it make sense to make the rule that they can’t? Don’t know yet, and will be a good conversation at the Summit this year.

Try watching the decisions at work that really are a toss up and managers handle them. Try it yourself when you get a chance. It’s not always easy to let go, but it’s rarely failed me, and even when it did, I felt good knowing I let them own the process.

The upfront pain is good pain. If you haven’t been diligent about cleaning out your inbox, making sure you’ve set good goals that take into your time off, and groomed someone to cover for you – then you deserve it! There’s nothing better than the feeling you finally get late on that final Friday afternoon before you start vacation where all seems to be in order. Imagine feeling that way once a month, or every Friday, wouldn’t that be something? I think for most of us the lack of a read deadline to end the week with all in place means we never build the habit – and so vacation preparation feels like working an extra day or two just so that we can go.

The return to the office pain, that’s harder to live with, and harder to fix. Most of us return to find hundreds of messages in our inbox, all that have to be read. Turning on the ‘out of office’ flag is useful, but it doesn’t stop the flow of mail. Even if the person covering for you handled everything, much of it still necessary FYI that you have to read. It’s so awful to look at that many dread returning to work. It’s not that so much extra work has piled up, it seems like it has, and that causes stress.

I can offer three strategies to counter that:

• Delegate access to your inbox and have someone screen it for stuff that you don’t need to read or that has been handled. This is a more common model for executives, but it can help some.
• Come in 2 hours early your first day back to catch up on email. 2 hours, and from there you’re back on a normal schedule. Budget for it, do it early so that you’re not distracted by morning meetings and people stopping by to ask about the vacation.
• Instead of ‘out of office’, change it to ‘On Vacation’ and include a note that you will not receive email during that period, direct them to your fill in person, and ask that they contact you when you return on x date. On return to the office, select all, delete.

Beyond email, it’s easy to arrive at the office stress free and by 5 pm feel like you never went on vacation at all. Recognize that maintaining that stress free state of super relaxation isn’t possible, but also remember to put things in perspective. If you can’t do it the first day back from vacation, when will you be able to do it? One of my tricks is to block out time on that first day back, gives me time to re-acclimate. Make that Monday a slow day. Come in early to do email, leave an hour early to compensate.

The strange thing about all of this is that managers live it as much as anyone, but they could – if they chose to – do more to reduce the stress of that first day back. One way would be to not schedule you for any meetings, no Monday deliverables. Stop by your desk by mid afternoon to see how you’re managing and if overloaded already act as a calming influence. Think about it, we know that returning from vacation sucks and can actually increase stress, why wouldn’t it be a good idea to actively manage that transition just like you would a first day employee?

I’ve seen many people (including me) check email while out of the office on vacation to reduce the stress upon return. Bad idea. Unplug, the organization will survive, or will send someone to find you if it’s that important.

Can’t say I’ve mastered any of this yet, but planning for it instead of reacting to it is the first step towards healthier vacations.

For instance, say you’re building a house. You can wait quite a while to decide on the color, but you have to make and stick to a decision about the size and composition of the foundation early, I think for obvious reasons! Can you change it later? Sure, but it’s expensive, and in all but the most extreme cases not a viable option.

Or say you’re planning a family vacation. You probably have some time restrictions based on available vacation days, school calendar, and other life events. You probably also have to set a spending budget. Those decisions then shape what you do and for how long on your vacation. Here it’s a little more flexible, maybe you find out that your dream cruise is 1 day longer and $200 more than planned, you take a hard look if you can do it. But you don’t spend a lot of time looking at vacation packages that are twice as long or twice as expensive as your budget.

The further you go on building the house or living your vacation, the fewer choices you have left, running out of time and money, but you can make lots of smaller decisions. What color to paint the rooms, carpet, where to eat dinner, what dinner show to attend.

I call that narrowing the funnel. At the beginning anything was possible, you could literally go in any direction. Two or three decisions later you’ll find that you’ve gone from infinity to much smaller tactical decisions because the course has been set. It may seem like an annoyance to hit constraints, but in reality it’s valuable – you commit to a goal and set some fences, and then you start executing. You can’t keep rethinking (well, I guess you can) your original decision points, you just adjust as you can and capture lessons for the next time.

That’s why for any big decision it’s worth understanding the limits that picking a choice imposes.

The first reason is that often they were promoted from within the team they manage, and doing stuff is their comfort zone, plus they are usually very very good at doing stuff – it’s a big reason they got promoted. This is one place where the next level manager can make a big difference, force them to step back – even if stuff fails in the short term – until they get a new comfort zone.

The second reason is that when you delegate, you’re handing off the task, not the accountability. If a ship runs aground, it’s the Captains fault, even if he had delegated to a highly trained and trusted deck officer. Delegating sounds good until someone lets you down, and you get to suffer the consequences. Have it happen a few times and even the best manager starts to hold tasks back, preferring to work longer than suffer the consequences of handing off to someone else.

That’s the path to the dark side. The fix, though painful too, is to teach employees (and contractors) to be accountable. For me, it means that if I hand off a task, large or small, the employee owns doing the task and for making sure I know if things are off track. That doesn’t mean telling me the day before the due date, it means telling me as soon as they see a problem. A good manager checks on stuff, but not every day – they don’t have time and you don’t want them asking every day either.

For me it starts with little tasks and little lessons, and first I find out who is trustworthy and who is not. It’s more than whether I’d let them hold my wallet, are they willing to tell the truth when the truth is going to be painful? Will they recognize that I need to know? Those become the intial set of go-to people, and then I start on the ones that aren’t quite there. A lot of it setting expectations – here is the task(s), here is the target date, and here is the expected level of communication. Then you wait to see if they do it. As soon as they miss a checkpoint, you intervene, quietly but forcefully. Have to  make it clear from the beginning that while it’s ok for things to go wrong, it’s never ok to not communicate when things go wrong.

Trust and delegation go together. Want room to work and not be micro-managed? Show the boss that you will communicate clearly and often, the rest just happens. Let a couple things slide, don’t expect a lot of freedom.

If you find your boss asking “where are we at on…” at anything besides a planned meeting, odds are you’re not where you need to be.

There are a lot of different approaches to leadership and different styles. How you do it matters of course, but if I could tell a beginning leader one thing it would be; do it the way that fits you.

Pretty Zen.

Still, when it comes to leaders and leading, I’ve found this to be useful advice to share:

• Leaders are the ones with the vision for tomorrow
• They take their vision and build consensus for doing it, often modifying the vision as part of that process
• They act as the face and the voice of their organization, at least internally (we don’t all get a Gecko for our commercials)

Good leaders do all three. Mandating a vision doesn’t work. Only following the group doesn’t work. And letting someone else tell the troops what the vision is doesn’t work either.

Leading is by it’s nature lonely. You get the blame when it goes wrong, often people are fighting your agenda for petty reasons (and sometimes good ones), and the credit goes to the people that do the work (if you’re a good leader).

Leading isn’t the same as managing. Lots of decent to good managers in the world, a whole lot fewer leaders. Leaders dare to dream. Doesn’t mean they don’t mistakes – they do, sometimes it’s the wrong dream. But organizations need direction,and direction usually stems directly from that vision of what might be.

Hope it helps!

The response rate wasn’t great, only 34 responses, but none of them valued technical competence as the most important attribute. That feels right, and it’s powerful statement to managers; be a manager, not the alpha geek. But it’s also not the whole story – surveys are hard! My guess is that some level of technical ability would be demanded, but is it? Another survey to do one day.

I liked how easy it was to deploy the poll, and l liked that I could easily see the results by job title, age, gender, and company size. I didn’t see an easy way to share the results (thus the screenshots), and I wished for richer options when building it (for example, have them order the attributes to see the total ranking), but that’s probably beyond the scope of it’s intent.

I’ll go big and share what I think now, from an uninformed perspective. My first thought was…isn’t that what you should be doing during an annual review? Finding out if an employee is happy, what they want to do for the next year, if they are bored, restless, mad, etc? My second thought was that done wrong, it could easily seem like management looking for the weak links. Thinking about leaving? Good, we can make that happen!

I think most managers and employees look at annual reviews primary as the time for salary adjustments, and it’s common to talk about nothing else except that. Adding a happiness block to the review form might help (and not dumb to do that). Still, I think the focus of the review is rarely holistic.

Where I think it gets interesting is if someone else did the stay interview. Maybe the next level manager? Don’t think it would work if it was a peer manager (politics), and not sure if someone from HR would work – they could ask the questions, but would they get the subtleties? More important, if they talk to anyone except their direct manager and express any kind of unhappiness, won’t they worry about that going back to their manager? That is the point after all, but that could get awkward in a lot of ways.

Or would it be more interesting to send out a annual survey? Are you paid fairly? Have you considered leaving for a bigger challenge, more money, less stress?

I feel like I’m in a loop. If you have trust between manager and employee then I’m not sure you need this. If you don’t have trust, I’m not sure it works!

So, I think I see value in the effort, but the application of it, just not sure.

The starting point for this is that many good employees feel under appreciated, under paid, and are often passed over for interesting assignments and promotions. Why? Their boss just doesn’t know what they have done for the company.

How can that be you ask?

Most managers are busy, and they have an expectation that when a task is assigned it will get done. They may see you working late or through lunch (and appreciate it), but even with a small team it’s easy to lose track of who is working hard and effectively versus those that just work hard, and then again those that just spend a lot of hours at the office.

Now you may think that isn’t fair. Perhaps not, but it is the reality. That leaves you with a fork in the road:

• Work hard and do things that need to be done without being asked, and hope someone notices
• Do the above, but make sure you track it and share it with your manager at some point.

Assuming that you are taking the latter option, how do you do it? I’ve seen three main strategies:

• Log your accomplishments, times you came in on a weekend, extra hours, great ideas, etc, and share them at review time (note that sounds a lot like a private blog!). Sound technique, the only downside is that you only get to alter perception once a year.
• Do somewhat the same, but in less formal fashion – perhaps dropping in to see the boss once a week to ‘check-in’ and casually mention any extra effort. This often goes along the lines of ‘I had a heckuva time getting up Saturday morning for stuff with the kids after leaving here at 2 am’. Or you can be more direct, as fits you.
• Letting everyone know that you did something extra – lunch with colleagues, team meetings, chance encounters with others

You can combine those as you want, and many use all three. You might see those as pushy, or even devious, but it all comes down to how you deliver it AND how it’s perceived. This often depends on the person you’re working for – do they get and appreciate the value of you sharing your accomplishments, or do they see it as sucking up or worse?

As a manager, I like to hear about times when an employee has done something well, because I don’t always know and I want to make sure to keep the rankings of who delivers up to date in my head. At the same time, as soon as it starts to feel like they over emphasizing every line of code they did, I start to apply a filter, which comes close to zeroing out the value. The same if I see it as taking credit for work or ideas that weren’t really theirs (and that does happen – especially if the ‘other guy’ isn’t speaking up).

As a manager, I want the insight, within these rules:

• Never exaggerate
• If all I hear is good stuff, then you’ve moved into self serving. Share some missteps too.
• Never take credit for work done by others
• Plus points for making sure I know about good work done by someone else on the team
• Don’t try to manipulate me, but do learn what I value and what I don’t

Maybe you start to see that how you deliver is as important as what you deliver, and for those that are just giving up on the idea that the boss is all knowing, the first attempts are usually painful and awkward. Remember that it’s to be expected. Just keep working on it until you find a method that works (and remember to adjust when you get a new boss).

It’s amazing to me how much difference being good at this can make. Many years ago I worked for a company with many offices, most staffed about the same and doing about the same work for their area. There was a manager at a nearby office that was seen as being very, very good, but I had seen him and my own manager work, and in my view my boss was as good, if not better. Why was he perceived as so much better, when in fact the tasks were either done or not done? It came down to two things:

• He was co-located with the next level manager, giving him plenty of ‘hallway opportunities’ to share that he had just completed a task a couple days ahead of schedule, etc, etc
• He made it a point to make sure people knew when he did anything ahead of schedule

Said differently, he was the only one talking, so the assumption was that no one else was going anything exciting or trying to excel. That was far from the case, but most of those others dismissed it as ‘politics’ – and that was my own view as well. Looking back now I see that he was just playing the game better than the rest (which is mildly negative, but it is a competition), and that the people he worked for weren’t very good managers or they would have done more to compensate.

Some managers will work hard at seeing accomplishments (good ones), and many think (different ones) that if you don’t get it and do your own marketing that you truly don’t get it, and that in itself moves you down the list of good to great employees.

Changing focus some, as a reader/consumer of content I tend to look at it exactly the same way as I would as a manager. If every post and tweet is a ‘look what I did’, I will probably filter you out. On the other hand, if you take time to post about stuff that is just interesting and not about you, I read that and appreciate your effort (and by implication, your knowledge and skill that let you write it) and then I’ll also read with interest/patience about things you do that you want to share.

For example, yesterday I posted some notes from the South Florida Code Camp. Part of that was to share that I did a couple presentations – demonstrating competence and participation. But instead of just writing that, I tried to share more thoughts about the trip. Arguably that just means more about me, but for me blogging is first person. I could write it as more of a report, but I think that is less interesting to most people, and definitely less fun to write. Think about that for a minute – was it useful, did you find it interesting to hear about the trip, or did it just smack of shameless self promotion?

I prefer a low key approach, others tend to more aggressive (blatant?), and it’s interesting to me that people often accept a style of marketing from some people that they wouldn’t from others, in effect adjusting for the personality of the one doing the messaging. I can’t say that one is right and the other is wrong, but can say that the more conservative strategy is to err on the side of caution. Hard to undo the damage if you cross that line (which you can’t see).

Have you found a way to effectively market yourself at work?   Or seen a technique that really worked well? Or a technique that just seemed over the top?

The Intro

Joe SQL has been in the hospital for some performance tuning. A couple days into his stay he is moved to a different room on a different floor. Upon arrival at the new room he notes that the door has a sticker across it (ala a crime scene) indicating the room has been cleaned for the next patient – kinda cool! Upon entering the room is  noticeably warm and the air conditioner doesn’t seem to be working, so his significant other (Mrs. SQL) asks the assigned nurse to see if can be fixed, as Joe is used to server room temperatures.. Mrs. SQL leaves to backup the databases.

Phase Two

Several hours later Mrs. SQL returns and the room is still warm, no news from the nurse. Calls and asks again for someone to fix it, or to see if another room is available. Hard to tell if the nurse is interested.

Almost There

An hour passes and no action and no update, so on the way out the Mrs SQL visits the executive office of the hospital and is told that the problem will be corrected quickly. Within 10 minutes:

• Very senior nurse visits Joe to let him know that they are working on another room ready and on getting the AC in his current room fixed. Seems motivated to get it fixed, mildly irritated about the call from the big office downstairs
• Building maintenance dude arrives, spends 5 minutes investigating and announces it is fixed, turns out the cold water supply to it had been turned off
• Senior nurse returns to say an alternate room is available. Joe can move now, or wait half an hour to see if the current room cools down enough. Joes figures one cube is as good as the next, elects to delay the move and hope the AC works.

The Conclusion

Senior nurse returns in about 45 minutes and the room is cool enough, seems mildly happy to have it resolved and to get back to business.

Most us look at this and call it bad customer service. Sure! But that’s the view from the customer. What do we see as a manager? If we looked at it from the perspective of each of the people on the hospital staff, who did well and who did not? As managers we often look at these in terms of blame – whose fault was it? I’m not advocating that approach, but it’s important to identify the failure point and reason to see if it’s possible to prevent a repeat of the problem, or of bad handling of a problem.

I know you don’t have all the details, it’s often that way in real life. But there’s enough there to see what you think about the role of a manager and how you think it should be executed. Tell me who did well and who didn’t, and why. Who’s the villain here?