Live it - Lead IT

Today we will speak about how to bring in our positive attributes or habits from our old company and making sure we don’t pick up any bad habits in our new workplace. So bringing the positive and not absorbing the negative! This always starts with a decision from yourself. Honesty and then a decision. Before we decide which good habits to keep or which bad habits not to keep, you need to have clarity on your habits. Be honest with yourself! Unsuccessful people lie to themselves about losing weight, or going to the gym, or any number of other things. Don’t be one of those people! You’re only betraying yourself. I don’t believe in cutting or eliminating bad habits; I believe in replacing them. This works so the body can replace one habit with the other habit. 

"It is not right to behave like an asshole only because you have the corner office."

First, understand what your bad habits is and then replace it with something else. Transitioning to leadership and management, I am a big proponent of friendliness and being nice in the workplace. It is not right to behave like an asshole because you have the corner office. I recommend a simple exercise: every time you cross a door frame at work, stop, slow down and catch your breath. Roll your shoulders and reset your body and the brain follows! The second thing is managerial tools or techniques. You just simply introduce all of your management tools. Many employees complain that they don’t have a specific time to speak to their managers. If I believe, as the new boss, that this can be fixed by having weekly one on one meetings, then I will introduce it.

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"You need to know where the snipers are."

Regarding the team: find out who you will be working with. Find out who the nice people are, who the jerks are, and who wanted your job and didn’t get it! You need to know where the sniper sits, if there is a sniper.

"Do your job and evaluate and streamline the process."

Push through it in the first week and drink a ton of coffee with everyone. Learn to tolerate that things that go on that you don’t understand. Write them down and keep them to yourself for six months. Don’t re-organize the whole shop in the first week! So in essence: get to your job and evaluate the processes. Then when your evaluations are complete, you offer a proposal in order to streamline the process. Change is good, but learn to do it in a smart way!

Stay in lead!OLAF KAPINSKI 🙂

Today we are speaking about moving to a new company! Dealing with the stress of moving to a new company is a problem for many people. The stress can be caused by being evaluated by your superiors and your colleagues. We’ll start with the issue of dealing with stress, but a slight correction first! Let’s replace the word stress with excitement. The reason for this change is the following: our subconscious mind seems to follow our conscious mind. Calling everything challenging “stress” is bad because it puts a negative connotation to it. Instead let’s go for exciting!

"Instead of calling it stress, let's go for exciting!"

Back to the first point about dealing with the excitement of a new company. Good companies usually have good training programs or mentoring programs. Your mentor is usually outside of your chain of command, for instance you work in IT and they are in the marketing department. Companies make an effort to bring these new employees up to speed as soon as possible. Avoid retreating into your shell. By this I mean that you are there to manage! Do not be an IT manager who sits at the console all day. That is not your job. My biggest advice is make sure that you know what your roles are.

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"Do not be an IT manager who sits at the console all day."

As for pressure that the higher management or the organization brings onto you? Nobody can bring you under pressure unless you allow them to. If your new boss gives you a pile of work in your first week, most of which you may not understand, it may just be a test. New employees are put under the pressure to see how much they can handle. Your new company wants to see what skills you have, not just how well you can interview. This way they can adjust their expectations as well as adjust your role accordingly.

"Nobody follows an asshole!"

Make sure that you keep you keep a positive attitude because people only follow nice people. Nobody follows an asshole. One way to keep positive is to use an achievement journal. Every evening, write down 10 positive things so that you keep in this positive journal. Make sure that you talk to as many people as possible. A great place to start is with HR. Their job is to bring you into this company. At the end of this first week you should be suffering from caffeine poisoning. Why? Because drinking coffee equals people sitting together, speaking, and you adapting to your new environment!

Stay in lead!OLAF KAPINSKI 🙂

So last time we left off on external promotion. If your timetable is not reached in that time and you are not getting promoted, you should lead your own life and decide to move to a different company. It is the typical dilemma of no risk, no reward. You must head for adventure and just go! In fact, I’m not a big fan of internal promotions for a simple reason: when you get promoted internally, you stay in the same place and it does not show much adaptability.

"No risk, no reward. You must head for adventure and just go!"

Going somewhere else gives you a good chance to start over and change some of your bad habits. In psychology, environmental factors such influence how you behave. When you change your environment, you’re forced to reorient yourself and you can get rid of a lot of those bad habits. This is important, particularly as a manager since you should continually be learning and implementing various tools. Another good reason to go to a new company is the fresh blood that you will bring.  I’m a big fan of fresh blood! Unfortunately you can see in so many companies that the reason things are done is because, “They have always been done this way.” When you come in there as the new person, manager or not, seeing something from an outside perspective makes you question it.

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Let’s move to some a personal advantage you can get by moving to a new company. You will boost your CV!  Especially in Germany, a CV is an extremely important aspect of your professional career. When I receive a CV that shows no movement, either horizontally or vertically, it makes me question whether you can move at all! Having a good track record of change in your CV makes sense. Now obviously moving to a new company is a gamble, as you are playing a role in the interview and the company is playing a role as well! If you impress them, if you say and do the right things, then they hire you.

"Leaders live from their network!"

But once you make the move you have no network. Leaders live from their network. A leader is good because they can move organizations. Although it is a challenge, I like people who show me that they know what they want, and that they’re going for it! Bigger risk, but potentially a bigger reward. Go into the new company and introduce all the management tools and techniques that you wanted to implement in your old job but never got around do. Reinvent yourself! If you take this little bit of risk and you just push yourself, from my point of view you are making your life exciting.

Stay in lead!OLAF KAPINSKI 🙂

So how do you go about getting promoted? There’s a difference between being promoted internally within your organization and wanting to move to a different company and being promoted externally. We will initially be discussing the first option, or internal promotion as most people are more focused on that. It’s difficult to jump from one company to a different one. When people ask me about being promoted my best recommendation is: wait until they promote you!

"Wait until they promote you!"

Most companies want to promote internally because when you hire someone from outside of your organization you don’t know anything about them. The result is that you have somebody who doesn’t know the organization. The really successful people that I know try to promote within the organization. When I say wait until you get promoted I don’t this as a passive type of waiting. It’s not complicated to get promoted if you are smart about it. First of all you have to know who is responsible for your promotion. Who is responsible for promotion in your company? The obvious answer that most people say is the organization. But it’s not “the organization” that promotes its people. The word organization is a vague word we use to avoid taking responsibility. Usually a person decided who gets promoted, but it’s not always your boss! I haven’t seen an organization in my 20 years in management where the boss is the only decision maker when it comes to promotion.

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The second thing is to make sure that the people responsible for your promotion know who you are (in a positive way!) Understand what these people are looking for when they want to promote someone. This means learn what capabilities, ideas, thoughts, and knowledge they value.

"Do the job of your boss!"

The next step is relatively simple. Do the job of your boss! This is what I usually recommend: if you want to get promoted, you need to talk to your boss first. Your boss will either be supportive and give you feedback in what you need to do, or they may fall out of their chair laughing. Your boss needs to be your supporter. You cannot be promoted, even in big companies, around your boss. The best way to get the support of your boss is to ask them what you can help them in. Do not upstage them, instead assist them. That help, that assistance, goes a long way, especially when it’s time to decide who they will promote.

"How long do you wait?"

How long do you wait? The appropriate amount of time varies for different people. A reasonable amount of time including training and demonstration of capabilities is about a year.

Today’s topic is about continuing education and bettering yourself. Are you the best version off who you can be? We challenged our readers to send us an email if they believe that they are the best version of themselves. We received a response from one of our listeners. Harris is young manager who runs a team of about 10 people is making about 100,000 euros a year. So why does he need to improve? Although this thought process is understandable, let’s look at it from the perspective of someone with 20 years of experience in IT management.

"How do you get promoted? You show your superiors that you're capable of being more responsible and ready for more."

Congratulations are in order as you’ve been doing well in your leadership position for about three years now, as you mentioned. So why should you change or improve? Promotion is a massive reason why improvement is vital. How do you get promoted? You show your superiors that you’re capable of being more responsible and ready for more. What comes with promotion? Higher position and of course a higher salary! My assumption is you’re not working only 40 hours. I would guess you’re doing about 50 or 60 hours a week. Experienced leaders don’t switch their brains off at 1700! You take your thoughts with you. This is usually not the case in non-leadership positions. The more responsibility you have, the more you put into it. However, if you improve yourself and become better at your job, the less time you will need to put into it. My recommendation for the best way to get promoted: try to get unemployed! Trying to get unemployed means setting up your organization in a way that they completely exist without you. The result? You will find yourself getting promoted time after time as you can deliver things that your boss and your colleagues’ thought were not possible. This will not happen if you don’t have the right skills, capabilities, or mindset.

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Another reason to improve would be a possible transition to another career one day. Even if you’re satisfied now, that doesn’t mean you will be satisfied tomorrow. We read everywhere that children in school today will be having jobs in 20 years that we have not even heard of! Things are changing at a rate that nobody, 50 years ago, or even 20 years could have predicted.

"Even if you're satisfied now, that doesn't mean you will be satisfied tomorrow."

It’s not a question if they will change, but when they will change. Many jobs are becoming obsolete due to advancements in technology. There is one discipline,

“What if you just explain your thoughts to your employee?”

So today the title of the episode is “Don’t tell them what to do.” “Them,” are your employees or direct subordinates. Let’s start with what I usually see. There is an employee who is doing something such as a presentation or important task. The manager has explained what needs to be done. The employee then delivers the presentation. Unfortunately, the manager becomes frustrated because he receives a page that explains the process he required. However, the format is not what the manager wanted.  The letters could be too small, or the template could be different than the usual company-approved design. The manager then explains to the employee specifically what needs to be done. The end result is that the manager assumes that they should have just done the presentation instead of delegating it!

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“Don’t tell them what to do, tell them why!”

Most managers are very good at teaching employees about WHAT they need to be done. The secret is to tell the employs WHY something must be done. To continue the example of a presentation: tell the employee WHY the presentation must be designed a certain way. For instance, tell them the target audience, the amount of time available and what message you are trying to convey. This way, the employee comes up with a proposal for the presentation as well as any questions that he may have. Now the employee is growing and learning! The more room for creativity you leave, the more you are able to see your employees thrive. Challenge them and see them overcome and adapt. Your aim should be to hire professionals that are better in their fields than you are. Tell them what to achieve: what are the goals or visions of the assignment or project. This method of WHY and not WHAT tends to yield more results in the long-term and ensures that your team runs smoothly. Help your employees to create better and better results!

Stay in lead!OLAF KAPINSKI 🙂

Transcript

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening! Hello and all, come back to the Live It, Lead It podcast. It’s me again, Olaf Kapinski from the green field.I walked the dog again and his name is Albert, as a little reference to Mr. Einstein. I still see that there is a little intelligence gap between Mr. Einstein and this furry person.Whatever. If you have a dog, I think I will just put a picture of him in the show notes, which you can find on LiveItleadit.com so that you know what I’m talking about. So don’t tell them what to do is the title of the episode.

As you may have seen it in the headline we will be discussing the science of excuses. The scientific term would is cognitive dissonance. The official definition of cognitive dissonance is: the emotional tension that arises when a person becomes aware of simultaneously holding two conflicting beliefs or when an individual detects the existence of a lack of consistency between attitudes and behaviors.That was the scientific, long definition. So it’s when you’re doing something that, internally you do not agree with. A good example is purchasing a new car that is not fuel efficient, but at the same time, believing yourself to be a very environmentally conscious person. Cognitive dissonance causes us to have emotional discomfort and confusion. There are three ways to resolve cognitive dissonance. The first way is to change your behaviour; the second is to change or justify your view; the third way is to add a new thought.

"Cognitive dissonance causes us to have emotional discomfort and confusion."

Human beings are designed around feeling comfortable and positive, so when you feel that internal confusion or angst, you want to resolve it in the quickest way possible.This is usually how every good excuse is made. The beast of the excuse is that it happens in your own brains. Usually you see this with New Year Resolutions. It’s unrealistic to decide to run a marathon in June when you just started training in January! People start to make excuses and that’s why you get to next year not having achieved what you set out to achieve. So how do we get around it? You have to stay true to your ideals and your goals. Hold yourself accountable to what you want to do! One way to do is by writing your goals down.  When you put something on paper and you can visualize it, it’s concrete. We do the same in the Leadership Stars program during our 6 O’Club, which is a call the first Monday of the month.

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"You only have one life, and you can either be driven by excuses or you can become successful."

You only have one life, and you can either be driven by excuses or you can become successful.  A good thing is to find a social crutch, such as someone that’s as passionate about something as you are. Someone like a friend or a coach that holds you accountable, as an external motivation. You need someone to push you out of your own comfort zone!  You need to prioritize whatever your goal is and work at it as hard as if there was someone behind you watching. A great quote is: “When the small things matter as much as that last goal, that’s when you will achieve success.” Never settle for good enough. Good enough is almost an oxymoron, because good is a positive, enough is a negative. If something is good enough. It is, by definition, not enough.

Today I would like to share a thought on where IT departments should stand in the system of organizations.My first position was as a consultant and then six months later I took over the lead of the IT department. That was the time when the computerization of the business really started. This was the big point when each of these people who sit in the offices could really make productive, use of computers. Now it is 2020 and when I deal with companies, I very rarely get positive feedback about their IT people. The majority of employees believe that their internal IT department is not good.This affects me personally as I was an IT manager and team leader. And I know why! Whenever people need their IT department, they always complain that they’re so busy. Others are busy too! So IT is usually slow performing or delivering stuff that others don’t understand. If you are becoming upset then good!  If not, then maybe this is not the right podcast for you. Give it a try and stick with it.  What I see today is that IT departments, have completely separated away from what they call “the business,” or the operative units of the company. I believe this delayed 15 or 20 years of development, and I also believe that this is the way to hell, meaning outsourcing.

“IT departments have separated away from the business."

When we take the army as an example, you cannot say that the logistics unit is the only part of the army. I will share a very good story with you. I had an interview in my German podcast, and someone made this statement: “No innovation, this is not IT. Marketing does the innovation.” Only increasing the network from speed one to speed two is not innovation!Nobody can survive without IT! Even a blacksmith who makes horseshoes will not be found if they are not online. Every company needs a solid foundation, which is IT based. Each IT department is, if not the heart of each company, then at least the spine and the brain of the company. The purpose is to understand the business, to understand business processes, to deliver a platform which the company can rely on and grow from.

“Every company needs a solid foundation which is IT-based.”

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For instance, see that GDPR is a positive, not a negative. GDPR was the biggest present for smart IT companies in the last 10 years. It was an opportunity to open all the boxes in various departments: understand them, analyse them, document them and become brain and spine of your company. Use these opportunities to allow the company to thrive in the future and to optimize and to get better in the future.

What is stopping you from becoming the innovative engine of your company?It’s in your hands! 

Today’s topic is about wanting to change your boss. How do you go about doing this? The short version is that it’s not possible. This is the shortcut version of this.Let’s look at it from a different perspective. If you are responsible for a team, and one of your employees wants to change you, what’s your reaction?Change doesn’t work when it is against the hierarchy. I have never had a boss in my career of nearly 20 years within IT, who was able and willing to take feedback from the subordinates! There are some who pretended, but when it came to the point. It didn’t work.

“Change doesn’t work against the hierarchy.”

I’m not saying that managers are not listening to feedback, but chances are very small. Instead let’s talk about what you want to change in your boss. For example, what if your boss gives you work that you cannot handle or are difficult?  If these things are difficult, then train until they’re not difficult anymore. Sometimes when we say we want to change our bosses it is often personality changes! For instance, they do not say good morning when they enter the office. It is imperative to differentiate between people’s personality, such as being friendly or polite and their work performance. You’re not at work for fun and entertainment. You’re there to deliver! You are hired to do as task as well as possible. My experience says we all perform much better if the workplace is fun, but this is not why we’re there.

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Now if you have a reasonable boss and he throws stuff on your desk, and it’s too much, don’t say no; instead give her a choice. Be creative. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Now let’s focus on personality: the impossible one.There’s one person on the planet that can change you. It’s yourself! Nobody can change you if you don’t want it. You can pretend that you changed, but you’re just acting. And the more you must act, the more energy it costs and at a certain point in time, people. Serious change from the inside can only be initiated by the person who wants to change now.

“Many managers associate the tools they use with their own personalities.”

If you cannot change the people that you do have some manner of control over, how would you change someone that you have no control over? Let’s avoid focusing on behaviours rather than on output. Lots of managers don’t know that leadership is an arts. They don’t know that this can be learned! Therefore the tools that they use are not seen as tools, but as their own personality traits; any critique is seen as a personal insult. So don’t try to change your manager!

So today we are talking about something that we touched on in a few of our earlier podcasts. The difference between leadership and management. The difference between being a leader and being a manager. So it’s let’s discuss management first, because leadership is very rare! I have compared management and leadership in the German podcast, I called them Ernie and Bert from Sesame Street!

"Management is making sure that the organization does everything tomorrow exactly the same way as today. Only a little bit better"

Management and leadership connected differently. Here is my definition of management; Management is making sure that the organization does tomorrow exactly the same as they do it today. Managers do the things that they did yesterday. Even if they improve and make things a little bit better, it is only optimized about 5%. Managers make sure everything performs, but they don’t go crazy with this. Management is focused on trying to avoid mistakes. Repetition is the keyword for management.  Now we will have the definition of leadership.Steve Jobs is a prime example of leadership bordering on craziness. They go hand in hand! Imagine a big room with engineering gurus are there, all very upright and analytical. Steve Jobs comes in with his black sweater and challenges them to invent a new computer the size of small stack of A4 paper! Remember computers back in those days were these big noisy machines and changing the graphics card was a rush in itself. Steve Jobs further challenges the engineers to design the computer with a touchscreen and wants to see the first prototype in eight weeks! This is leadership. So leadership looks in my definition into the future. Leadership is disruption. Leadership is mistakes. Leadership is trying new things! Leadership shakes the foundations of what we have, this is the way the organization survives. Management looks into the past. Leadership looks to the future. So we have several people who are good in the one and good in the other. Management is easy because management gives stability. So this is the biggest enemy of success in the future? This is a success of the past.

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"Leadership is disruption. Leadership is making mistakes. Leadership is trying new things!"

This is the reason why, especially in Europe, you can mostly see management. We were so successful since the Second World War. This is where management took over. This is where leadership is missing. When we do the same things that we’ve done yesterday, it’s safe. You need to have both. Leadership sounds good, but you can destroy a company with innovation. Once the innovation is there,