5 Soft Skills for Leadership

A recent article in CIO magazine outlined five soft skills that every leader should develop:

• Financial management
• Critical thinking and analytical skills
• Marketing and communication
• Innovation and collaboration
• Leadership

Financial Management

For most techies, there are very few things more boring than a financial statement. But money is power, and people who understand it are more effective.

Develop the skills needed to understand what your organization's financial goals are, and how priorities are selected to support those goals. Some of this will be from learning how to read and understand reports, but the most important piece is to take an interest in your organization's financial life.

Critical Thinking

Learn how to identify the quality of data and how to see whether the data support the conclusions that are being drawn. This means that you have to approach what you are told with a critical eye, and devote the energy to think about whether the information matches reality, and whether the conclusions are correct.

Why are things done the way they are? How could they be better? What information can you collect to support (or debunk) those conclusions? All of these are aspects of critical thinking that you need to practice.

Marketing

What techie doesn't make fun of marketers? Scott Adams' comics are replete with gags about marketers that have more than a little truth to them. But they have something to teach us.

Effective managers learn how to communicate and sell their ideas. If you can't bring other people along with you, your results will be limited, no matter how good your ideas are.

Innovation and Collaboration

We like technology. So why is it that IT professionals are so bad at applying it to our own organizations? Develop tools and practices that will promote collaboration and multiply the effects of everyone's efforts.

Leadership

Becoming the person that other people want to follow is the essence of leadership. Think about the people you want to follow, and identify the characteristics they have that appeal to you. Be fair to your employees and teammates, and be generous when there is credit to go around. When things go wrong, take the positive tack and look at what was done to fix it and what is being done to prevent the same problem from coming back.

Give Your Employees the Gift of Flexibility

As a manager, you have a tremendous amount of influence over the lives of your employees. On your own, you have the ability to make your team members feel like valued, respected professionals. Or you can make your employees' lives a living hell.

One of the best tools at your disposal is flexibility in setting peoples' work schedules. Let people come in at a slightly different time so they can drop their kid at school or avoid a particularly nasty recurring traffic snarl. A little human compassion can go a long way to making a team member's work experience much less stressful.

I'm not talking about coddling your team. Especially in IT, you will be asking your team members to work odd and inconvenient hours. During deployments or major troubleshooting exercises, you will be asking them to cancel personal plans and stay for long hours to get the work done. That is the nature of IT. People who don't like that need to be looking into a different career path.

What I'm talking about is treating people like respected professionals. Set clear expectations and hold your team members accountable. That is what it means to treat people like professionals. But treat them like respected professionals by giving them the flexibility to accomplish the organization's work in a time and manner that will work for everyone involved.

If you can do that, you will reduce their stress and increase their focus. The organization's work will be done more efficiently and reliably. And isn't that in everyone's best interest?

Using Contractors Intelligently

From executive management's point of view, contractors solve a number of problems:

• You can bring in expertise that your current staff doesn't have already.
• If the project is falling behind, you can bring in extra hands to try to speed up the work.
• You can cut them loose at the end of the project with no impact to your permanent staff's morale.
• You don't have to pay their benefits (not directly, anyway).

The world is not as simple as contracting vendors would have you believe.

• If your staff doesn't have the expertise to understand the implementation, how will you go about maintaining and upgrading it?
• Adding more hands to a project increases the complexity in communicating requirements and managing resources. The experienced (ie, most productive) members of the staff will need to spend time and energy bringing the temporary workers up to speed enough to be able to contribute. Frequently, the overhead of additional hands actually outweighs the benefit.
• If your staff is told they have to support something they don't understand, that is probably not so great for morale.
• Do you really pay your contractors less than the fully-loaded cost of any employee? How about if you include the ramp-up and ramp-down time costs of the contractors into your calculation?

The key here is to use your contractors effectively.

• Don't use them to be the "expert" on a technology. Use them to train your staff on the technology and to work alongside your staff in designing the solution. The role of an "expert" contractor should be as a teacher and a mentor, not as an implementor.
• For contractors who are an "extra set of hands," make sure to assign them the routine, well-understood work. The training time for these tasks will be lower, since they are probably well-documented. You will be able to have more junior team members instruct the contractors on their duties, leaving the more experienced staff to push the project forward during the training interval.

There is an appropriate use for temporary workers. Using them as long-term staff replacements is not a good solution, since it is almost certainly more expensive than using internal staff. Use temporary workers either as mentors or in appropriate lower-level roles. Treat them decently, let them become part of the team. But set clear expectations, and be open and honest about where the project begins and ends. And when the project is over, let the contractors go. If that leaves you short-handed, that means you need an additional long-term employee.

Tactical vs Strategic Spending

Alix Partners released a study discussing the importance of focusing on strategic vs tactical IT expenses.

When there are cost reduction pressures, it is sometimes easier to cut a strategic project than to go after expenses in operational, day-to-day IT. Unfortunately, that is exactly the wrong mind-set to take into budgeting.

Ongoing expenses need to be managed aggressively. Look for old assumptions and unused capacity. Clean up and reduce where possible. Negotiate tough deals with your suppliers. Look for projects that will reduce your ongoing operational expenditures.

For most of us, our employers view IT as an expense, not as an investment. Part of that is our fault. By focusing on eliminating strategic expenses rather than controlling operational expenses, we have limited our ability to make our organizations more competitive and efficient. As IT leaders, we have the power to turn things around by changing how we prioritize IT expenses.

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.

Enthusiasm and Job Interviews

I recently replied to a posting by a job seeker who was concerned that she was competing with a younger candidate for a position that might be viewed as a reduction in rank from her previous experience as a VP. She wanted to know how best to portray her experience without playing into what she felt the interviewer saw as her greatest drawback.

My feeling is that enthusiasm can cover a lot of initial prejudices. You need to excite the interviewer about the prospect of working in the same organization as you, and you need to display enthusiasm about the new position. Come into the interview brimming with ideas about how you can make the environment better, and show the interviewer how excited you are at the thought of carrying them out.

Some people may be put off by this sort of exuberance, but they would probably not be fun to work with anyway. You deserve better than them.

Here is what I replied:

I think the key here is that the interviewer wants to get a sense that the challenges of the new job represent a fresh and exciting perspective for you. Bring up your previous successes and describe ways that you have been able to apply your experiences to create something new.

Describe the parts of the new job that you find particularly intriguing and exciting. If you can communicate a feeling of enthusiasm, it will tend to overcome any concerns by the new employer that you are looking to use their position as a parking lot while you keep looking for a new VP gig.