Protect Your Employees' Time

As a leader, you are only as effective as your team is. Your team will only be as effective as they are allowed to be. One of the best things you can do for your team is to protect blocks of time when they can concentrate on non-trivial tasks.

Firefighting Duty

There are a lot of quick-hit tasks that come up in IT. Sometimes there are an overwhelming number of these short tasks, and sometimes it is easier for team members to hide behind the the sense of accomplishment and "scorekeeping" advantages of concentrating on these tasks. But if your team spends all its efforts on these firefighting tasks, your team is not effective. That means that you are not effective either.

One approach to dealing with this problem is to rotate firefighting duty among the team members. Each team member knows that someone else is watching the incoming tickets most of the time, making it easier to schedule blocks of time to be able to concentrate on non-trivial tasks.

Multi-tasking is a myth. The best you can actually pull off is rapid context-switching. But even that comes at a significant performance cost. The most efficient way to get through tasks is to work on them in chunks of time large enough to minimize context-switching's costs. By rotating firefighting duty, you give your team members permission to concentrate on bigger tasks.

Don't Micromanage

Robert L Sutton talks about the cost of well-meaning manager interference. There is a fine line to be walked between allowing your team member to feel unsupported and providing unneeded and disruptive advice.

You have to ask for status updates, but make sure you don't do that in the middle of a productive block of time. And when you get a status update, listen to what the team member says. Sometimes the team member needs a sounding board, sometimes he or she needs advice. The only way to discover which is to listen to what is being said.

The Human Shield

Every organization has its share of instability. Part of your job as a manager is to shield your team members from the chaos occurring in the organization. Set priorities that make sense within the overall direction of the organization, and make sure that the directions and priorities you set are left in place long enough for your team members to actually get something productive done. If you are constantlty re-directing your team based on the latest whim of someone in a staff meeting, your team will be stuck in interrupt mode, and it will never have time to carry a task to completion.

At the same time, you need to be responsive to the rest of the organization. If your priorities are not aligned with the overall direction, you are not contributing to the organization's momentum.

Where is the tipping point between consistency and stubbornness? The answer to that question comes from experience and self-examination. Sometimes you have to pull the plug on a project if you are seriously out of alignment with the organization's priorities. This should not be a common occurrence, or you have an even bigger problem. But you have to make sure that your team's energy is contributing to the organization's progress, and that can only be done by re-aligning from time to time.

Constructive Conflicts

Managers need to bring together team members in a way that good ideas have a chance to evolve and emerge. Frequently, this happens through constructive conflict. Good ideas can emerge when you have passionate, intelligent people disagreeing respectfully if definitely.

But conflicts can have a darker side. There are people who would rather play politics than address problems, and part of a manager's role is to protect your team members from destructive conflicts where possible. Backstabbing and finger-pointing should not be tolerated, and your team members should see you as someone who has their back. If they can concentrate on producing great ideas and solid results, your team will be working to its potential. That is good for your team, and that means it is good for you.