Category: Uncategorized

“You own it”

I had a recent conversation with a VP, and despite my protestations and disagreements, he said (rather matter-of-factly), “If it has X’s and O’s [sic], you own it”. I knew the conversation wasn’t a collaborative one, so correcting him by telling him it was “1’s and 0’s” wasn’t going to be productive, and probably be a detriment to a conversation where I was clearly being assigned something that I didn’t think IT should be assigned. 

Truth is, I still disagree – because I don’t think IT should “own” much of anything, to be honest. Actually, by his logic, if IT actually “owned” all things 1’s and 0’s that would pretty much constitute most of everything… don’t you think? In the digital age, not much is done by way of analog anymore… Does IT have the authority to be the gatekeeper for all things? 

I worked in an environment once where the manager (my boss at the time) took that stance, that IT was the gatekeeper to all digital assets… What it resulted in was a culture that viewed IT as an impediment to their ability to work. Furthermore, when something would go wrong, regardless of whether it was actually an “IT” issue or not, the organization would have carte blanche to blame IT, because such was the culture… “IT didn’t give me [X], so I can’t do [Y]”. You wouldn’t believe the level of ridiculousness when it came to the perception of IT in that environment. The thought process behind the level of IT interference was so bad, I remember during a company luncheon (I believe the In-N-Out truck was there to celebrate safety), the C.O.O. (who was… advanced… in his age) argued with the us, the IT team for 45 minutes because he insisted that my manager had developed some sort of software that told him that he had typed his password in incorrectly at login every time. He insisted that the second time he tried to login, he was permitted, but that first time always told him it was incorrect – he was convinced that the IT Manager was purposely creating a lag to slow down production.

Culture is a difficult thing to fix… long after that manager departed the company, lasting sentiment about how much IT affected how the organization did business hovered for a long time. It wasn’t until I was able to provide actual metrics regarding requests, response times, effectiveness, and data for rebuttal that perception began to shift, slightly.  Even still though, three years later when I departed the company, there was guilt by association. 

I don’t fault the IT manager, though. He built the environment from the ground up, and so speaking from experience, when you feel you “own” all the “1’s and 0’s” there’s a tendency to protect your customers (the users IT supports) from themselves. We used to joke that his favorite phrase when being asked for something was, “What is the business case?”

So how much should IT, “own” if anything at all? That’s a tricky question. IT’s influence is no doubt felt throughout the entire organization, from printers to scanners to computers, to software, development, automation… in the “digital” age – everything is done with something that uses “1’s and 0’s” to do its job. With that said, should IT own “everything?” 

I would always answer no. The answer I give is this: IT should not be relied upon to do day to day operational tasks. I’ll give an example – 

One of the locations I worked at, somehow, some way, became reliant upon IT to run MRP everyday. Without going into heavy manufacturing theory, MRP basically allows the business units, daily (at this place) to know what items they required to make their job loads, how many of said items, and when they were going to be needed, based on the schedule. The idea is that if everything is scheduled, you can operate at peak efficiency, because you have the exact amount of raw material available to you to manufacture your product, without any waste, and more is delivered to you for your next job… I digress.

The MRP module was a module within our ERP system, and somehow, many years before I had started there, it was given to a developer in my department to run. When she went out of town on vacation or was sick or anything else, it was very likely that MRP didn’t run, meaning that production would have no visibility as to what materials were needed that day, or when… and things would be ground to a halt.

IT should never be the lynchpin to which a process occurs everyday. Yes, it’s 1’s and 0’s, yes, it runs in a software environment, but the process should be OWNED by the department that uses it (in this case, Materials Mgmt). 

So what does IT own?

In this case, infrastructure, and the software and systems that these business processes run on are owned by IT… but the processes themselves should not be. In the case of my first example, where the VP was talking to me about what I “own”, this particular VP was trying to make the case that IT “Owned” and was responsible for the development of the website. I’m not a web developer, and know enough to be dangerous. I can manage the vendors, however… but that’s not what they want. The disconnect came when I said I lacked the credentials to make decisions based on the marketing aspects on the site, like content and functionality – but could advise as to the platform and technical requirements. 

Needless to say, I’m now in charge of the website content, form, and function. Yay me. (Can I put that on the resume?) 

I’m being slightly sarcastic about the entire thing, but the truth of the matter is, why do you want your IT guy deciding on what goes on the website? Just because it displays on a screen doesn’t mean the IT guy has dominion over it. You take your car to a mechanic, but you don’t ask them where you should drive on vacation… that’s on you. He’s just there to support your desire to do so.

It’s this scope creep that gets companies in trouble, that expands IT costs in a way that becomes uncontrollable. In a world of specialized jobs, why does the IT guy a generalist for all things that require electricity and network?  (As I write this, I’m developing a financial report that’s doing business analysis on price changes of our products, based on targeted gross profit margin…. So there’s that)

IT needs to supplement the business processes that the BUSINESS owns. The disappointing thing is that the buck is usually passed to IT when there isn’t a specialized talent there to handle the task.  It plugs in! Give it to IT!

At the end of the day, in order to bridge the gap between organizations and their IT, and the chasm of understanding between the two, it’s clear that IT will have to wear multiple hats, and I’m well aware of the risks, as they were, in doing so. But IT has to be upfront and relinquish control as well, be honest with the business about what they can, and cannot do… and what they should, and shouldn’t own. 

You can’t do everything. You can plan, plan contingencies, have a backup, a backup for your backup, documentation up the wall… but something is going to go wrong. 

This has been my experience over the last few weeks/months. As noted before, I was brought in to my current position about a year ago to “wear the cape” and be superman for the organization. I needed a job, so I relished the opportunity. “This is a target rich environment,” the CEO said to me on my final interview, where he kept me for nearly three hours giving me a tour of the enterprise. “Plenty to do here,” the CFO (who has since left the company) said. They were right, of course. But the truth of the matter is, is that they didn’t know what they didn’t know. 

Ultimately, that’s the fundamental difference between the business and IT. That’s what I’ve been trying to disseminate and define, through networking and this blog, to anyone who will listen. The organization doesn’t know what they don’t know, and they anticipate that IT (and in my case, the IT Director) will cover that gap. But we (in IT) are just like the people in the organization, just with a different core proficiency. There’s a blurring of the lines that occurs, because the IT organization’s function isn’t ever explicitly defined. Scope creep begins quite quickly, and as the organization begins to understand that every operation that occurs (especially in these times), depends on the backbone of an IT infrastructure (at least), IT begins to permeate every aspect of the organization. Operations, Finance, Reporting, Marketing, Administration, HR… IT has a hand in them all… 

Furthermore, organizations tend to see IT costs as a burden on the bottom line of the organization, and the expectation of the IT leadership is that we will find ways to save costs by consolidation, cutting, or otherwise. So how do we simultaneously get leaner and prepare for Murphy? How do we cut costs yet advance the company, technology-wise?

I wrote about this mainly in my last post – and this is nothing if not an expansion of that topic. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. This is especially true in IT. This is why we have jobs. This is why we are compensated. This is why Gartner reports consistent upwards growth of IT spending. 

(https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-10-07-gartner-says-global-it-spending-to-grow-06-in-2019)

However, I’d wager that much of this spending is reactionary, and not precautionary… at least that’s been my experience in the enterprises that I’ve been a part of in my career. Capital (IT) expenditures are (in my experience) a direct result of a system-wide failure that forces an enterprise to make an investment (or change), and not a direct result of planning for the future. I’d also wager that those companies that invest in their IT preemptively are better prepared for when (not if) Murphy strikes.

Case-in-point, I’ve been running an ERP upgrade (we’re 5 iterations behind the latest version, so this “upgrade” is more of a re-implementation) over the last 3 months. Despite the organization’s mandate that it be completed in 30 days, due to lack of resources we’ve pushed it to 90. I’ve created the project plans, testing schedule, coordinated with the resources doing the testing, and sat in on the pilot group’s work. From hardware failures, to unknown compatibility issues, to other fires to put out, an ERP implementation is not without its challenges. 

So you document, you plan, you make backups, you convert, you pivot, and you report. You try to foresee every possible thing that could go wrong, and you plan for it.

Until you don’t.

I had spent weeks working with a pilot group in the new system, having them spend hours of their day testing and running transactions through the new ERP to verify that they were able to function and that everything functioned properly. Day after day another user would meet with me, and spend their time working on the system to make sure there would not be a problem come go live. For three months (almost) we did this practice, and I documented, planned, tested, and retested, all the while maintaining my regular duties in managing and providing direction for the IT organization.

In retrospect, however, there was a (pretty big) gap I didn’t count on. This is a learning opportunity – so pay attention.

I’ve come to realize that end-users are typically worker-bees. They aren’t paid enough to think critically of a system, and approach their tasks almost robotically in the sense of the work instructions. Where I was testing functionality with end users, I failed in the analysis. I took for granted that if an end user (and their supervisor) signs off that something is functioning, that it was, without analyzing that cross functionality between tasks worked properly. In a cleanroom environment, person A’s task might function properly, and person B’s task might function properly, but Person B doesn’t know how to analyze Person A’s work and see how it affects them. 

Ultimately, I trusted… and there was my biggest failure. This is why IT folks are cynics. 

After a myriad of delays, I finally got signoff from executive leadership and we were turning up the new system and going live. We went live on a Sunday, because our Australia office runs a day ahead of us, and everything seemed smooth. I celebrated, and was confident in a virtual ticker-tape parade in the office. 

In fairness – the Monday after go-live started that way…. I was hailed as a hero as everyone lauded the speed, consistency, and efficiency of the new system. They didn’t know what they didn’t know. I threw my hands up in celebration, and the VP of Ops was giving me a pat on the back for how great things had gone. 

Then Murphy showed up. In the form of our Planning Manager. She came to work around 8am (I had been there since 5:40am, to account for our operations in other parts of the country) and within an hour of work, she discovered a critical problem. 

Here’s the thing, and the thing I keep having to learn. Worker Bees don’t know WHY there is a problem, they just know they aren’t able to complete their task. They don’t know what they don’t know. 

To spare the technical details, a portion of an add-on that we utilize for our ERP was purchased in the last year by another vendor from the original developer, and they didn’t know that the piece of the add-on wasn’t compatible with the 2019 version of our ERP, and released it anyway. Since only our planning manager utilizes this portion of the add-on, we didn’t know it was a problem until she came in and began trying to release work orders. The ERP didn’t recognize any of the locations where the material was being held, and so while she could release work orders, the workers on the floor would have no way of knowing where what material was being held where. It was a mess.

A quick meeting with the VP of Ops (who had previously patted me on the back) and the consultant ended up with a decision to revert to our previous environment, essentially flushing 17 hours of operations down the drain (no way to recover anything done in the new system)…. And as Director of IT, I had the responsibility to let everyone, enterprise-wide, know that not only was the go-live a massive failure and that we had to go back, I had to let them know that everything that everyone had done in the last 17 hours, every product made, every transaction, invoice, sales order… everything… would have to be redone.

Persona Non Grata. 

Seconds after hearing of this catastrophic failure, my boss (the VP of Finance) called my personal cell… he wasn’t in the office yet and apparently someone had called him to tell him that “all hell was breaking loose”.

Snitches end up in ditches, I thought.

Needless to say, he was not happy, and I got an earful for the next couple days. 

Thing is, is that this function was tested… in a clean environment. The planning manager signed off on this function. Why, oh why, then, in production, did it fail? Because I tested everything individually, but not collectively. In checklist style, I had every department go through their functions and signed off, and then like a conveyor belt, brought the next department to test, never testing how work would go THROUGH the system.

The fault can lie with several people. The end user didn’t recognize the potential problem during testing. I didn’t catch the discrepancy in inventory after the work order completion. The vendor released a piece of software that was incompatible (and they didn’t know it)… but it doesn’t matter. While all those smaller issues will be addressed, the responsibility of a failed implementation (and 17 hours of lost production) lies on my shoulders. 

If you don’t fail, however, you don’t learn. 

To make a longer story even shorter, we pivoted. Shifted gears when Murphy took out one of them. I’m in the midst of deploying a stable release, setting aggressive testing, and a go live date of two weeks from now. All is not lost – much of the leg work done in the three months leading up to the (failed) go-live is still useful and will be used. 

My armor is blemished, but I’m still standing. My leash is shorter, eyes are closer on what I’m doing, but I’m still standing. I could be writing this from a Starbucks as I search for the next fork in my career path, and while that may still come, for now I’m still pushing forward, learning from my mistakes. 

Because if there’s anything I’ve learned to this point – just like the organization, IT also doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. My failure was in the assumption that others did know what they knew.

I won’t make that mistake again.

Was watching a (stupid, but entertaining) movie with my wife over the last couple nights. As we’ve gotten older and have had our children, we’ve gotten to the point where it’s near impossible to sit through an entire movie at night. So movies now span the length of two or three evenings, depending on how exhausted we are. 

So we’re watching this movie and it’s rolling along, stupid humor (it is a comedy/action/fun movie) and the climax of the movie approaches. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… the protagonists need to acquire evidence to find out just how the antagonists are carrying out their nefarious plans, or to discover where the bad stuff is, or to find out the twist as to who exactly is behind the problem, or…. Well… you know. Who do they turn to? The plucky tech guy. In this movie it was a “he”, but they generally are cut from the same mold. Not overly handsome or well built, socially awkward, many times overweight, and an absolute wimp that can’t handle the action part, but can “clickety-clack” on a keyboard clicking random keys and some random scrolling text later, the evil master plan is revealed. 

One of the lines that this “tech guy” said in this movie was, “I’ve never seen this type of interface before!” (Cause you know, if there’s a screen with a gui, somehow the tech guy is an expert in it) Also hacking, and things. Getting through a secure firewall is as easy as a bunch of keystrokes and some witty quip about security, camera pans to the more attractive but dumber lead, and voila! We’re IN! 

I can’t help but wonder how this portrayal of “tech” people came about. It’s hardly a new phenomenon, as movies in the 80’s had the same formula, if not necessarily the same sort of typecasting. I don’t have empirical data to back it up, but my observation of the typecasting of the tech person is a bit more recent. For all its posturing about achieving your dreams and not letting people stand in your way, Hollywood movies tend to put people in boxes. The chubby, socially awkward guy is the brilliant but-not-hot tech person. He can’t jump off the building, but man he can hack your firewalls. And start up your system. And spoof your cameras. And open your security doors, launch the missles, abort the launches, shut off the lights, turn on the lights… everything is a click and keystroke away!

Whether conscious or not, this type of typecasting has an implicit bias in the real world. There is this misconception about what it is a “tech guy” does. Some of it I believe has to do with what people’s perceptions from the movies are. The other part of it is that “tech people” have sort of embraced the “guy in the chair” look. Stereotypes, wrong or right, are based in some sort of reality. 

Regardless, from an ability perspective, if the role of the IT person isn’t clearly defined the organization tends to believe they can do either everything, or nothing at all. It’s usually one of those, and not in between. “Ugh, he couldn’t [insert task here], IT doesn’t do anything”… or the opposite. If it plugs into the wall, IT does it. (A while back I had a CEO send me to a golf course/meeting location to setup a sound system and projector. Add sound engineer to my resume thank you very much.)

Yesterday there was an article in the Wall Street Journal called, “America’s Got Talent, Just Not Enough in IT” (You can read it HERE)

Basically, the summary of the article is that companies are having a difficult time filling the tech roles that they have open… and to recruit for these roles companies are offering high incentives (the article referenced one instance where a candidate was offered a $250,000 signing bonus to fill a role….) SIDE NOTE: WHERE ARE THESE COMPANIES! I WILL GLADLY FILL THAT ROLE FOR THAT SIGNING BONUS – CALL ME… THE IT CONFESSIONS GUY.

Here are some excerpts if it’s TL;DR: 

Gartner estimates that most large U.S. companies are competing to fill many of the same technology roles, including computer and information research scientists, systems managers, analysts, engineers and software architects. “Nearly a third of the most critical roles, like tech talent, are left unfilled after five months, costing millions in lost productivity on the table for each company every year,” Mr. Atkinson said.

And

Demand for these workers is growing as companies world-wide seek an edge over competitors by using technology such as cloud computing, data analytics and artificial intelligence. Global spending on these and other enterprise IT tools is expected to reach $3.79 trillion this year, up 1.1% from 2018, Gartner said.

In the first half of 2019, tech job postings in the U.S. rose 32% from a year earlier, according to federal employment data analyzed by IT trade group CompTIA. In the past three months, U.S. employers had about 918,000 unfilled IT jobs, CompTIA said.

Interesting, to say the least. I can’t help but wonder about this particular article. Are organizations having difficulty filling these roles because they aren’t really sure what the roles are that they are supposed to be filling? HR managers, not being well-versed in the IT world, are looking to check boxes on a requirements sheet. (“RDP? They say that they have RDP experience, check!”) But even those requirements, I have to call into question. How often does an organization know the areas of immense need and how to fill them? Who is coming up with the needs? “Oh we need a developer” What is that person developing? 

I made the comment a few weeks back that everything in IT went from generalist, to super specialized, back to the generalist space (due to cloud computing and converged systems)… and if it’s happening so fast that IT folk haven’t caught up, how do organizations know what it is they’re asking for? Furthermore, what I’ve found to be true is that once a person is hired, the expectations are drastically different than what was advertised. This is particularly damaging when organizations bring in talent for a specific project. How many organizations who make a commitment to invest in technology (IT) have the patience to see it through? In my relatively short career, I’ve seen organizations pull the trigger and change out people before the job is complete… effectively ruining chances that the project completes on time, on schedule, and on budget – and many times turning all the investment to that point into sunk costs. 

How do we level-set the expectations? You wouldn’t expect the corporate controller to generate a sales invoice, so why expect the IT guy to setup the sound system? Just because it plugs into the wall doesn’t necessarily mean it’s within the purview of the IT department. Or is it? Organizations need to level-set their expectations as well. I referred a friend of mine to an open position I knew of a while back, and after going through a couple rounds of interviews, he didn’t get the job. I knew the recruiter (she was a friend of mine) and asked why, and she said that the hiring manager felt that my friend (the one I referred) didn’t have the correct skillset for the position. In talking to my friend the candidate, he revealed to me that the hiring manager was adamant that he wanted someone who would do the job of (what my friend identified as) 5 different IT roles… and even though the compensation was decent, there was no way that he (or anyone else, in his estimation) would be successful in that. Months later, they pulled the position and last I heard never filled it.

So this never-ending cycle between make-believe and real life is blurred in the IT realm. It’s a chicken and egg scenario. What came first? An IT guy (or gal) who could seemingly do everything? Or some blockbuster flick that set the stereotype that IT folk generally sunk into?

Either way… that’s not how the force works.

Peter Gibbons: Let me ask you something. When you come in on Monday, and you’re not feelin’ real well, does anyone ever say to you, ‘Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays’?

Lawrence: No. No, man. S***, no, man. I believe you’d get your ass kicked sayin’ something like that, man.

It was around my first week on the job, I think. The CEO was at a conference, or show, or something out of the office, and he called the main line looking for me. He couldn’t get emails on his phone, or something to that effect. Come to find out he had left his phone on airplane mode from being on the plane ride, and when he turned off airplane mode, voilà… emails started flowing. I had saved the day without actually doing anything but answering the phone… then came the trap.

CEO: “Hey… your office phone doesn’t have a direct dial number”

Me: “No, we don’t have any direct dial numbers left, and they’re mostly reserved for the sales department”

CEO: “Oh, well we really should be able to get ahold of you directly, instead of calling reception”

Me: “Well – I have my extension forwarded to my cell, so if you call my extension, it’ll ring my cell…”

CEO: “Let me get your cell number so if I continue to have problems on this trip, I can give you a call or text…”

Me: “Oh… okay… it’s…… _____”

That was it. That did me in. Somehow, from that moment, it became open season on my cell phone. Fast forward to present time, and I’m getting texts from the Warehouse manager at 7pm because he can’t find his docking station. I’m getting texts on Sunday when I’m on a date with my wife because someone can’t figure out how to log into the Remote Desktop server. I get texts at lunch when they can’t find me at my desk, calls when I’m in the employee lunchroom, bathroom, or anywhere but visible to everyone.

Then came this last Monday – one of THOSE Mondays. Nothing worked. A couple members of the sales team had ignored the Microsoft warnings that their mailbox was almost full, and they let it fill up, so they weren’t receiving mail, which means they couldn’t get purchase orders. Our credit card processor went down, and computers in our remote warehouse had lost their trust in the domain and so therefore weren’t authenticating users at login. People couldn’t scan, printers wouldn’t print, programs were hung up, reports didn’t go out… basically, if it could be broken, it broke. And my cellphone did not stop ringing.

By the end of the day, I had mitigated most of the issues (the credit card processor wasn’t anything to do with me, our internal systems, or anything we could do…. But the business looked at IT to fix it anyway) and one of the executives walked over to my desk. 

EXEC: “I haven’t talked to you today”

OFFICE MANAGER (who is my cube neighbor): “He’s been very busy”

Me: “If it could break today, it broke”

EXEC: “Oh yeah, well… it looks like you had a case of the Mondays… but here’s what I need from you….”

I was living in a scene from “Office Space”

It made me think.. At what point in this career is IT too accessible? I realize that systems don’t go home at 5pm and back into the office in the morning, so there was always a degree of after-hours and non-traditional time to be put in for this vocation. It is something I’ve accepted, understood, and was fully aware of when I began this career. Furthermore, as my purview began to expand beyond local operations into national or global IT operations, I knew that I was never going to be really “off the clock” in a sense… that somehow I would always have a degree of knowing what was going on… but what is contact worthy, and what isn’t? When is it appropriate to “ghost” your company? IS it appropriate to ever “ghost” your company? If you see your CEO, or VP, or someone who is high up on the chain calling your cell (no matter the circumstances in which they got your cell phone)… can you decline the call? Do you feel obligated to answer?

I’ll be honest. I do. I have this almost pathological need to answer and prove myself. But, I’m not so sure it’s the right attitude to have…. Because to this point in my career, my perceived “always” availability has been a bit like the children’s book, “If you give a Mouse a Cookie”

“If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk”

If I answer the phone, text, or email at 8pm on Sunday, then the expectation is that if you reach out to me, anytime, anywhere, I’ll come through…. And it isn’t an altruistic notion. It’s an expectation.

I had this conversation with a superior recently (when being asked about my office hours). I said something to the effect of, “The system requires a lot of after-hours and weekend maintenance, and the operations in different time zones require support that I have to give/provide during off hours. So I’m more effective if I’m not sitting in the office 8 hours per day… ”

The response?
“We all work from home”

I felt like that gif where the guy is surprised and his eyebrows go up.

This one:

Either I’ve grossly understated what I do, or the business has no idea what IT’s role is, or both. 

Probably both. 

So where’s the balance? When am I “off” work? When is it okay to “ghost” my employer… if ever? I have a wife and three kids (all under 6)… and family life is the most important thing. Yet, somehow I feel like if I neglect the employment that provides for that family life, then I’ll be failing at family life… does that make sense? I don’t know how accurate that thought is, but it’s my paranoia. 

Thus is the issue with “invisible IT”… where I know that I do much behind the scenes to keep things running, it isn’t inherently felt by the company. So the (incorrect) assumption is that I’m not doing anything… hence my desire to answer when someone calls, starting the cycle all over again.  I need to do a better job of explaining to the business what it is I’m doing… but I don’t want them to have this expectation that I will ALWAYS be on…

I’ll tell you this, however… yesterday I had to leave the office early for a personal matter. About an hour and a half later my phone rang, twice. First the office manager, then a VP. For the first time seemingly EVER in my career… I slid the button on my phone to “decline”

The office manager followed up with a text about a vendor trying to contact, and I didn’t get anything from the VP. So far, today, I haven’t been told anything… so I wonder, is it okay to decline the call? I sit here with baited breath. 

Further bulletins as events warrant… If you see me walking on the street with a banker’s box, pick me up.

There isn’t much in the professional world that is more anxiety-producing than getting a new boss. This can be when you switch jobs, or someone is promoted above you, or a reporting relationship change, or a myriad of other situations where your direct (or indirect) supervisor changes. I’ve been on both sides of that equation, and it makes my stomach turn thinking about it. I’ve also watched it happen around me, and rarely, if ever, does it go smoothly.

I believe there is this pressure to make changes as the incoming boss. Not specifically because changes need to be made, but changes are the barometer for which an organization can measure your performance as the incoming boss, right? Because if things were going smoothly and running without issue, why bring in a new boss?

This is especially true in the IT world. Because there is… ambiguity…  about what we (as IT folk) do, very often the (incorrect) assumption is that we’re not doing anything. You’ve heard the metaphors… IT is like the plumber.. You don’t think about them until the toilet is clogged. I like to have privacy screens on my monitors, not because I am doing anything nefarious, but because with my level of access as the IT Director, I’m very often dealing with things that are confidential in nature, or have access to data that not everyone has access to. Yet, there are fewer things that produce more buzz than the dude who’s screen you can’t see. “What’s he hiding?” “He’s watching Netflix” “I saw him streaming video” – all of which have been said to me from bosses who have fielded complaints. Point is, because they don’t know what I’m doing, they assume I’m not doing anything…. 

I digress. 

What I’ve found in my career is that it is just as anxiety inducing to BE the new boss, as it is to GET a new boss. It’s made me think about what kind of boss I want to be. Here are a few I’ve encountered along my way: 

“Great boss, horrible manager” This boss was extremely flexible to me, giving me full autonomy to get done what I thought needed to be done. When executives questioned my actions or methods or proposals, this boss backed me unequivocally. Did I need to leave early? Check. No problem. “Can I work from home today?” Check. No problem. “We need to buy this <insert IT initiative here> because it improves such and such.” Check. They agreed and took it to the executives. This boss put full trust in his team and let them use their skill set. 

Admittedly, personally, I felt that I did my best work under this style of leadership. However, there’s a sharp decline to this style, one that I didn’t think about. I mean, who doesn’t want a boss that leaves you alone and lets you do whatever you want to do? The main issues present themselves when management begins to notice that the boss isn’t really doing anything, but that his (or her) reports are actually running the show. When asked a question, this boss would always respond with, “let me check with (insert me here) and I’ll get back to you”. Soon, management questions what it is that the boss is actually doing, and eventually the cost benefit of having that boss there becomes more than what management feels the boss is bringing to the table. The boss is let go, and another is brought in to “reign in” the department. The “great boss, horrible manager” never really managed. No direction on projects, no discipline in meeting goals, no performance indicators (I don’t think I ever got a performance review under this type of boss), and ultimately, no accountability. This boss either takes the fall for a department, or blames the shortcoming on members of the department (I’ve been there, too). Ironically, if this type of boss is able to effectively dodge a bullet for a shortcoming, it usually doesn’t last for long, as the pattern repeats itself even with the next person up. The boss’ inability to manage comes back to bite them, and people are burned along the way.

“What were you doing between 11:17 and 11:34am?” Also known as the extreme micromanager. I started with the boss type that I did the best under, but now I give you the one I performed the worst under. Every movement is scrutinized under a fine-tooth comb. I had a boss who asked for daily reports of my activities, with to-the-minute accounts of my time. This was for a MSP (or Managed Service Provider). I understood that time spent on client activities was billable to the company we were providing service to, but this went above and beyond. GPS tracking on my work phone to track travel time between clients, reporting of bathroom breaks, utilizing CCTV systems we supported to verify I was where I needed to be, doing what I was supposed to be doing, when I was supposed to be doing it. Checking connection logs to verify that the IP addresses matched where I was supposed to be connecting from. 

This type of management was demoralizing, suffocating, and just all around awful to be around. A polar opposite of the first type I mentioned, this type of boss over managed, and was not a great boss. 

“I want it all, and I want it now” Queen is stuck in my head. This is the boss who I feel I’ve run into the most in my career in IT. The boss who is somewhere in between the other’s I’ve mentioned, in some ways. Usually this is when IT reports to someone who is not in IT, and so they don’t have a clear understanding of the requirements set forth. The IT Director (me) makes a proposal, and it’s like a merger negotiation, we go back and forth for weeks. When this boss finally accepts and signs off on the proposal, the expectation is that said project will be done, now. “I want it done by…” Or, “When are you going to be done with that thing we signed off on last week”

There are more, but I won’t go too much into them.

The boss that knows enough to be dangerous. Usually has had some exposure to what you’re doing, and knows enough to get into trouble, but not well versed enough to know how to exactly do something.

The new general manager. Like when a sports team gets a new GM, usually they fire the coach, the staff, the players, and bring in everyone new.

Book smart, but practically not so smart. The academic. Knows what needs to be done by the book, has no idea how to actually do it. Lacks practice.

Notable things said to me by former bosses: 

“I was making nine figures before I came here” (why did you come here?)

Boss: “I need you to give me something like this.” 

(Shows me document)

Me: “Can I get a copy of that so I can recreate it for you”

Boss: “No, it’s from my old company and it has to be heavily redacted” 

Me: “So you want me to give you something like what you can’t show me”

Boss: “You’re being difficult”

Before my current assignment, I read Michael Watkins’ book, “The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting up to Speed Faster and Smarter”. While I wish I could tell you that I’ve been able to put into practice everything the book has said, it’s been my experience that things like that aren’t super cut and dry. That being said, there are good nuggets in there, and if nothing else it helps me focus on things I need to work on. Here’s one of the nuggets:

Fundamental Propositions (From the first 90 days – taken from HERE)

1. Transition failures happen when new leaders either misunderstand the essential demands of the situation or lack the skill and flexibility to adapt to them. 

2. There are systematic methods that leaders can employ to both lessen the likelihood of failure, and ensure that they reach the breakeven point faster. 

3. The overriding goal in a transition is to build momentum by creating virtuous cycles that build credibility, and avoid getting caught in the vicious cycles that damage credibility As a vicious cycle takes hold, the organization’s immune system gets activated and the new leader is attacked by clumps of ‘killer cells’, encapsulated, and finally expelled; it’s not nice, and it can get messy. 

4. Transitions are a crucible for leadership development and should be managed accordingly. They are an indispensable development experience for every company’s high-potential leaders. 

5. Adoption of a standard framework for accelerating transitions can yield big returns for organizations.

Regardless of whatever book you read, one thing remains clear. A new boss is anxiety-inducing for both the boss and the employee. However, you (and I) are 100% responsible for your relationship with your boss. Sometimes those relationships don’t work out, and that’s okay. I’ve had to learn what type of boss I want to be, and I’m still learning. Sometimes those lessons are hard, but with each opportunity to either get, or have a new boss, there’s a new opportunity for education and growth. Knowing it affects both the boss and employee, acknowledging this, and working within that framework during the transition will ease the transition. And if not, you’ll be working for a new boss, soon enough.