Live it - Lead IT

So, you want more money don’t you? I think we all do. As humans we can never have enough and this is an issue that I think is very relatable. Most of us have this issue at one point or another in our professional lives. In this episode I will discuss the ways in which to bring up this issue with your company and how to approach it if you want the best chance of success.

"The key to getting that raise you want is value."

The bottom line is this: when an employee comes and says “I need more money,” nobody cares. I’ve heard so many reasons for why my employees need more money! Some of the more ridiculous ones include economic inflation, getting a divorce, or even buying a Porsche! My response was always, “Yea, not my problem!” Asking for a pay raise just doesn’t work this way and it is a totally wrong approach. The key to getting that raise you want is value. Think about that. How much value do you, as an employee, bring to your organization? If you are paid a certain amount and you decide that it isn’t enough, downing tools is not the answer! In my eyes, if you decide to do 80% of the work just because you feel you aren’t getting paid what you deserve, you are a criminal! I would throw you out of my company. The smarter was is to deliver 110-120% so that your boss is happy with you and is more open to giving you a pay rise next time.

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"You are a good employee when your manager sees you as one!"

Now let’s speak about the average employee, how do you determine their value to the organization? My thesis is that you are a good employee when your manager sees you as one! Understand where your value comes from and how it is determined in your organization. Make sure that you can gauge how you’re doing, for example with an annual performance review. Your manager should know that you want more money. This should come across as information, not as bribe or blackmail! Additionally, I would not talk about money; instead focus on talking about responsibility. That sounds much better, and of course everyone knows what you really mean. Talk about your value to the company and how you want to become more important.

"Know your value in the organization!"

You must also understand the rules involving raises in your organization. Some companies only give raises at certain points of the year. Another issue may be that there is a union that organizes raises. Be aware of the rules and how they impact you. In summary, how do you get more money? The process is similar to how you should go about getting promoted. When an employee says that they want more responsibility, that sounds like he is ready for a higher position! A higher position goes together with a higher salary....

In one of our earlier episodes I touched on power and how there are three types of power. The three types off power are: role power, expertise power, and relationship power. I will explain how these types of power differentiate but I wanted to list them first in the beginning because I love structure!  

3 Types of Power* Role Power – I am the boss!* Expertise Power – The expert is always right!* Relationship Power – Positive relationships get things done! 

"People do things because their manager tells them to!"

Let’s begin with the first type, role power. Role power is when you are the manager. By definition what you say will be law for your employees. Role power relies heavily on hierarchical structure; all companies have this structure and once you join you are agreeing to abide by this. This is the type of power that you see people execute most often in the business world. People do things because their manager tells them to! Think about this example, if your boss tells you to do something you don’t want to, you don’t dare challenge them because what they say goes. Be careful with this type as everything you say as a manager comes from this type of power. The second type of power is expertise power. An example of expertise power is when there is a big project and a company hires a professional to consult. Everyone accepts the advice of the consultant because they are the expert in this particular field. Expertise power brings with it the ability to change a project directly or indirectly. Everyone trusts the expert right? This type of power is extremely powerful and has a lot of influence. However, expertise power can be limited especially because I have seen expertise power revolve around a 15 minute conversation.

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"Everyone trusts the expert!"

The third and final type of power is relationship power. I saved the most powerful type for last! A great example of relationship power goes like this: imagine a big room full of people and there’s a problem with a project. No one knows what to do. So a certain person that is always known for reasonable proposals has an idea. Everyone agrees and starts the process! This is relationship power because if another person would make this proposal, half the room would look at him like he was crazy! They would just think,

In this episode of Live it, Lead IT! I am going to be talking you through the Disney Strategy, a straightforward, effective tool based on three distinct stages to help you realise your dreams.“The Disney strategy says: Start with the dreamer phase. So dream, dream, dream!” Do you want an average life, or do you want to live your dream life? While it takes courage to reach for the stars, as soon as you start imagining what your ideal life looks like, you can work toward its realization. To achieve that life, you have to start with visualization – you cannot realise what you can’t imagine.So how do you go about dreaming up an image of your ideal life? My best advice to you is to head out into nature, void of any gadgets or other distractions, and let your imagination run wild. Often, when thinking about life goals, people believe that they are undeserving, or that their desires are unrealistic. Put all of these concerns to one side and imagine what you would love to be doing for the next five or ten years. Try to avoid overcompensation, where you only picture having those things that you don’t have now. For instance, time to spend on a beach in an exotic location. Ask yourself if it will really fulfil all your desires.Once you have a clear picture in your head, create a vision board. Preferably using a large sheet of paper, collect images, whether you print them off the internet or cut them out of magazines, to create a visual representation of your dream. Keep it somewhere visible where you can see it often.“The realization phase opens the world of opportunities!”Now that you have created a clear image of your dream life, you will need to start planning how to get from where you are to where you want to be. Treat this as a project plan and break down the steps you need to take you to realise your ideal life into smaller chunks. Don’t overcomplicate it and be sure to write it down.“What will I have when I live in that dream life? Think of the Consequences!”The third and final part of the strategy is to consider the consequences of realising your dream. You will need to ask yourself several questions to assess what the outcomes are of you living your ideal life. These include, ‘What will I have when I live my dream life’, these will include all the positives of you achieving your dream, which might include recognition in your industry or a larger wage; ‘What will I no longer have when I live that dream life’, which might include for example a boss that you need to answer to on the positive side; and ‘What might I miss when I achieve my dream life’, which for example might include less time with friends or loved ones. This latter question asks us to focus on the positive things we have in our current life.“Use Disney’s strategy to make a huge step in your life.”The beauty of the Disney strategy is the simplicity of the three phases. Be sure to spend most of your time focusing on the dream phase and try to expand your horizons as much as possible to ensure you are not limiting your ability to dream. Try reading books or studying others to explore new options. Dedicate a quarter of your time to the realisation phase as this is where you will see how you can move closer to your dream. Finally, spend the rest of your time on the consequences, as the final stage. Use the Disney Strategy to take a massive step in your life in the right direction, and, if you can please share the results with me.Happy dreaming till next time.Stay in lead!Olaf Kapinski

“Can we do this Agile, please?” “No, we can’t!”

Still, so many IT-coworkers are (t)asked to do this project agile, rather than “classic”. I believe, this is the wrong approach: Use the right tool for the problem.

Today’s Episode will define the criteria which leads to use waterfall or agile methods executing a project:

* Complicated tasks shall be done using waterfall

* Complex projects best are approached the agile way

To give a very short differentiation here: Landing on the moon was complicated. A child’s birthday is complex.

 

This Year’s LeadershipStars Program will have a focus point on those methods. Mail me, if you are interested!

Stay in lead

OLAF KAPINSKI

 

 

I work with People responsible for IT and even in 2020 I hear statements like “Olaf, I shall digitalize, can you help?”

“Perhaps in your countless episodes, there is already this hidden theme somewhere: What do you think are the first “tools/methods” that a manager should learn, use and above all improve? “

That was the question on Xing, the German competitor of LinkedIn. I was surprised that I couldn’t come up with an episode right away, nor did I find anything exactly fitting in the archive. Over 280 episodes and still no such summary? Let’s go!

The first and most important management tools

I have formed four segments and now recommend something for each one.

Management Philosophy

The profession of a manager is rarely defined and certainly not uniformly described. This starts with the names of the hierarchy levels and does not end with the different understanding of goals.

Often it is a mixture of laziness and ignorance, which then says sentences like “Staff Meetings are done by HR for us.”

Prof. Dr. Fredmund Malik has laid the foundations here with “Leading Living Performing” and created a uniform and universally applicable management definition. I can only advise every manager to have read the book and do it again and again.

Management tools

Anyone who takes on personnel responsibility changes careers. Away from the specialist to the manager. The new job is no longer about the specialist tasks, but about getting other people to do the right things for you. The new job is about people, no longer about the profession. If you don’t want or can’t do this, please leave the task to someone else! We already have enough bad managers.

Communications

To interact with other people, communication is necessary. Communication is a craft that needs to be learned. Good leaders have even mastered it.

There is a whole range of models for communication. Many theories, much structured knowledge. Managers want to make it their hobby, so to speak.

I teach some models in the LeadershipStars Program that I find very helpful. In the coming program, this area will be expanded again heavily.

Some recommendations:

* Communication Styles

* Schulz von Thun’s “Four Page Model”

* Much of the neurolinguistic programming is directly usable

You are interested in interpersonal communication. Selling, arguing, convincing, all just communication.

But there are three tools that I consider fundamental and say that every manager must know, be able and use them:

One on One

Regular discussions with the employees.

Feedback

The only way to get permanently better employees

Meetings

They are still the biggest item on the calendar for many people and just as often there are complaints about poor meetings.

Specialist tools

In addition, each profession has its own specialist knowledge and methods. How your field is to be organized is probably already exhaustively described in several papers. For my IT department, ITIL is always being used.

However, all managers want to be professionals in project management. Here is the standard PRINCE2.

Again and again I can only recommend that you build your own area of responsibility along established standards. Understanding these and adapting them to your own needs is the fastest way to success.

The third specialist tool is to align the organization with the goals to be achieved.

I have already published a lot about this.

Stay in the lead

Your OLAF KAPINSKI

"Do tech gadgets make us more or less productive?!"

Today we will discuss whether digital tools make us more or less productive at the workplace. This is a very interesting topic, because it is a bit heretical. All of these tech gadgets that are very nice and very fancy and very expensive can maybe reduce our productivity in the workplace.

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"The more devices you have, the less focus you have on what you want!"

Think about your average office environment: you have the person working there, they have their laptop or phone and the purpose of these devices is to connect us and to allow us to do our work. Unfortunately these are designed to get our attention. The more devices you have, the less focus you have on what you want. If you have a notification blinking up on your laptop every two seconds about an email or about a calendar meeting that’s for tomorrow, or next week, you cannot focus on the important tasks. In order to be a modern individual in the Western world, you have to be able to switch your attention quickly. It’s something that we adapted to as we are no longer working on farms and doing the same tasks over and over again. We need to be able to think quickly and adapt. However it’s this very act of adaptation that’s allowed you to become quick and to handle all of these digital tools that has made you less productive at certain other tasks.

"Your brain gets used to patterns!"

Why has this become so widespread? Your brain gets used to patterns. If the majority of time you’re required to have a very short attention span so you can jump for one after another or one topic to another, it’s going to be very difficult for you to sit down and switch your mind back into that long, slow, continual process of doing a very long task. It’s hard to switch between these different types of attention spans that you need. What’s the solution? The solution is having a little bit of order in your life We spoke a lot about is good. Have a designated time to check your digital tools so you’re not a slave to the device. It gives you that discipline. As leaders we need to reduce the amount of tools that people need to play with. If you’re responsible for a team of people, you need to understand that this can affect your concentration. As a manager you should be setting the example. If you have designated a time to do something, then stick to it and do only that specific activity!

Stay in lead!OLAF KAPINSKI 🙂

Today’s topic should be an important lesson for any manager. Your employees are neither robots nor slaves. You hired your employee for their brain. As a manager you usually have ideas of what you want to achieve, but if I need to deep dive into how to achieve this then you can do this yourself!

"Your employees are neither robots nor slaves!"

When you tell your employees exactly what you want step by step, there is no space for their creativity; you also block all of their good ideas. Many managers out there complain about that. They’re still stuck in the daily business, and they are quite big when it comes to control. So control has lots of negative things. I do understand why we need to control from time to time. But control doesn’t feel good on your side! I hate to be controlled. Control is also a lot of effort. Instead, if we as managers assess the delivery of our employees and give constructive feedback consistently, after a while trust develops on both sides. I think it’s a very innovative style of leadership. If you think back 50, 60, or 70 years, you didn’t really need creativity as a worker. I have spoken many times about how the world is changing. Lots of consumer and offering markets have opened up! That means we have higher competition. The emphasis is on speed and innovation.

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"Control the important stuff, not the easy stuff!"

Now let’s go back to delegation and into control and trust. If I rely on my own brain, then I can only produce the stuff out of my own genius brain while ignoring all of the other brains in the company. I believe this is not the right approach for the majority of industries which are left in Europe. Control the important stuff, not the easy stuff. Lots of people just control the easy numbers. And the easy numbers are just not really related to the real outcome. If I give you this task out of the blue and the next morning I say, “Can you tell me this? Can you tell me what happened?” I would just ruin trust this way.

"You control everything that is business critical!"

This is this is not a fire and forget process. This is a permanent process of you handing over responsibility and decisions to your employees step by step by step. I call this management. You must understand which of your employees you can handle a little bit more responsibility. You control everything that is business critical. Don’t waste your time with controlling rubbish. Usually the real success is not really in the numbers so make sure that you control the right things and let go of the right things!

"The definition of leadership is to execute change!"

Today we will be discussing change!  Every organization wants to change in a positive way. Whenever we do a topic like this, it’s always best to define what a word is because a lot of people have different conceptions. The definition of change: the verb is to make or become different and the noun is the act or the instance of making or becoming different.

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"People create rumours if you leave this information gap open!"

Let’s create one example which we discuss in depth. We have a business in 2020 that is now trying to rush into digitalization and online strategy. Let’s take a grocery store with maybe 100 stores or something. The change has to do with building up and online store and some delivery services. How does that make the standard employee feel? When there’s a change in a company, many times there’s a possibility of downsizing which means you lose your job! We discussed before that people slip back into fear when they do not know. And so you start feeling this this hectic and stressful thing. The morale of the team of your team is going to suffer and so the product that you put out will suffer. People feel this irrational response when you have an authority, which would be the management, that is not communicating properly.People create rumours if you leave this information gap open. To avoid this, when you start a big change than communicate, communicate, communicate! Share all the information that you have in a way that people can digest. I made a point in an earlier episode about how reacting is like being on autopilot. As a reactive individual, you do not need to make a decision because the decision is made for you! On the other hand, as a proactive individual, you have to assess and use your brain. Always make a decision. It could be the wrong decision, but make a decision. Don’t wait until a decision is made for you because by then it’s too late! Whether that be a business decision or a decision on a project that you’re delaying until the path becomes clear. Sometimes the path does not become clear and you have to choose. Nobody likes a reactive individual, but everyone wants to be one because it’s very easy!

"3 Positive ways of fostering a team environment!"

The definition of leadership is to execute change. So everybody who wants to become a leader must make decisions. Once you get into a leadership position, you don’t automatically become better at making decisions. It takes a lot of practice and a lot of skill to be able to transform into making a decision for a group of people. If you have a hard time making a decision for yourself, imagine what it’s like making a decision for a group of people!

Why do people, even intelligent, well-balanced throw themselves into fear and panic? This is similar to the phenomenon of managers being busy in an office and running around telling everyone how stressed and busy they are. It is a reactive lifestyle, but humans are naturally a reactive species. Reacting is safe, and much easier than being proactive. Not making decisions proactively saves you from having to predict what might happen; instead, you wait for something to happen and then adjust accordingly. 

"Relating to the COVID-19 outbreak, we simply do not know!"

Now, Coronavirus or COVID-19: the core of the problem is that we do not know, and as humans we fear what we do not know. Fear of the unknown has kept us alive for thousands of years. Relating to the COVID-19 outbreak, we simply do not know. Due to the prevalence of mis-reporting by authoritarian regimes (China, the origin of the outbreak is notorious for censuring domestic and international news outlets), or the fact that up to 80% of the population are asymptomatic, or the underestimation by developed countries such as the US and members of the EU has left a void.Conspiracy theories fill the void and can be explained by what in psychology is called teleologic bias, or the desire to believe that everything happens for some greater purpose. No one, regardless of level of education, is immune to these feelings. So reading and spreading doubtful information is going to happen when the authorities have no idea what they are talking about. You could say that this COVID-19 outbreak panic is a way for people to cope with something they know nothing about. 

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"We can take for granted that our more basic needs will be met!"

There is a psychologist named Abraham Maslow who coined the term “Hierarchy of Needs.” In the West and other developed countries, we can take for granted that our more basic needs will be met. Few of us have to really worry about food, clothing, or shelter, and even next-level worries, such as physical safety and security. Now suddenly some of these basics are under threat. Suddenly panic and hopelessness is part of every day life for many other countries.The act of hoarding buying up supplies when this all began is a method of coping psychologically. People feel safer when they took steps, even though hoarding all those supplies will not prevent you from catching a virus. Under crisis situations, people typically tend to rally around one another (this boosts our chances of survival). However, you can disrupt that if you deprive people of the opportunity to act in a coordinated way. If there are no trusted sources of information, such as when the authorities continually change their stories, then you get much less coordinated information.