Browsed by
Tag: Management

Why Do Women Stay in Tech?

Why Do Women Stay in Tech?

“Tech is changing the world. It’s nice to be at the core of that [new technology]. Not watching it, making it happen.”

This quote is from one woman of over ten that I interviewed about their careers in tech. There has been much press about sexual harassment at tech companies. I wondered, “If this is always happening, why does any woman stay in tech?”

I interviewed women that have been in the field more than 5 years, 10, 15, even 30 years. I asked them about the challenges but also why they stay in the field. What are the rewards?

The women I talked with are managers, CEO’s, and individual contributors. The common theme among them is they are really good at what they do. Not that all of them realized that until we talked about their careers. After one interview, one woman said, “Wow, I didn’t realize just how much I’ve accomplished.”

In the coming weeks, I will write about these women, their challenges and the rewards of a career in tech.

Note: I will not use names of the women or company names (in certain cases) to protect their privacy. I will create pseudonyms for the women’s names.

Building a High Performing Team

Building a High Performing Team

Many of my Vice President’s and Practice Area Leads tell me, “Your team is a high performing team.” Then they ask, “What do you do to make it happen?” They comment, “Your team members are smiling all the time with happy faces,” or “Your Key Performance Metrics are all green with an excellent CPI (Customer Performance Index). 9 on the scale of 1 to 10 with continuous extension of the customer contracts.” “How do you make this happen?”

Having a busy schedule never gave me the chance to articulate my strategies in words, however now that I’ve been given an opportunity to write this blog post, I’ve thought of a few things which I was doing subconsciously.

One of the challenges in managing people is that some team members are not adaptable and acceptable to change and there are others who don’t want to accept any changes. I found that understanding personality styles helps me to better manage my team.

Understanding my team members’ personality styles along with brainer technique is key to understand how the person thinks and executes. Are they a left brainer or right brainer or a well-balanced person using their whole brain for thinking and execution? (See below for more details on brain types.) Having a sense of how the person uses their brain helps me to manage more effectively. Knowing a person’s personality style, I can identify the right fit for teams for different projects. For example, people who are right brain type of people are the perfect fit for innovative projects. Whole brain type of people are often the right fit for team lead positions and so on.

Another example about working with a right brainer. One of my team members came up to me with loads of enthusiasm around an idea for building a new framework for automation even though we had an existing framework to support. His idea was creative and made sense for what we wanted to achieve in the long term – and had a bigger ROI (Return On Investment) than our existing solution. I gave him the opportunity to work on his idea which turned out to be a very successful project.

Left brainers are great for systematic approaches to projects. Based on the nature of responses to questions and the kind of artifacts delivered by one of my team members, I was able to identify her as a left brainer. I found her to be an analytical person with a logical approach to solving issues. I assigned her to our knowledge share SharePoint updates project which she was able to complete with very minimal support. This became a very useful knowledge harvesting platform at an organisational level.

What do I mean by right and whole brain types of people? Personality assessments (see related article) help to identify people who are left, right or whole brains types of thinkers. Knowing the strengths of my team members helps me to motivate, encourage and provide opportunities for them.

What I’ve learned about Left, Right, and Whole Brain Types

It would be amazing to be surrounded with whole brainers all the time. A whole-brained approach connects the right and left brain. Interestingly, these days, some educational systems try to foster a more whole-brained scholastic approach with teaching techniques that connect with both sides of brain.

Left brain and right brain dominated people can be classified with regard to their thinking style.

Left brainers have a more systematic approach and tend to follow the rules. Analysis and logical thinking are their strengths. These folks are often good on projects involving algorithms. For example, software design using data structures and algorithms however complicated it is.

Right brainers are more creative and think intuitively. They are a very good fit for innovative projects. These types of people are new ideas generators. Often, they come up with the right answer but are not sure how they got it. These types of people often do lots of reverse engineering.

The four quadrant model of behavioural types that is often used to understand how people think has these four types: Driver, Analytical, Amiable and Expressive. Here is a map of left and right brainers to this model:

  • Drivers are right brainers who know what they want and how to get there with high energy.
  • Analyticals are left brainers who are highly detailed people with a methodical approach.
  • Amiables are left brainers who try to get along with all personality types blending to all types of situations.
  • Expressives combine right brainers excellent communication skills and great speaking ability but are not very concerned about facts.

 

Picture: http://www.runrunlive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Personality-types.jpg

Knowing what kinds of thinkers my team members are allows me to provide them with opportunities that challenge and motivate them. It is my secret weapon in building high performance teams.

About Rashi Gaur

Rashi’s leadership and mentorship experience along with people management and high customer satisfaction has resulted in successful project deliveries globally for organizations including Honeywell, IBM, Boeing, General Motors, Shell and ABB Inc.

Rashi has 15 plus years of experience in IT projects and hardcore test management in various domains including automobiles, aerospace, oil & gas in industrial sectors at various management levels.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rashi-gaur-pmp-b6b3b844/

Company Values: Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Company Values: Actions Speak Louder Than Words

If you’ve ever worked at a small startup or have been part of a management team, you’ve probably worked on defining the company values and goals. Many employees are often cynical about the company values. They think it’s a futile exercise because it often seems that once the values are identified and listed on a company webpage, they are promptly forgotten.

Some values frequently selected include:

  • Integrity
  • Respect
  • Diversity

These are all good words. But how are those words implemented in the organization? Or are there implicit values that are actually implemented?

For example, many companies say they value diversity and integrity. However, actions always speak louder than words. If diversity is valued but the management team is composed entirely of white males, that makes me go “hmmmm.” Do they really value diversity? Or, say the company gets called out for not treating employees fairly. Is integrity really a value?

Why do disconnects occur between the values written down and the values demonstrated by the leaders and employees in a company? It’s simple: it’s the leadership team. The leaders allow certain behaviors to exist and flourish in an organization even if these behaviors directly contradict the stated values.

Employees take cues from the leadership team. If at an all-hands meeting, a leader jokes about “bro” culture, she or he is sending a signal that the “bro” culture is ok. Sure, it’s a joke. But why make such a joke? If a leader only considers hiring white males, how much does that leader value diversity? The managers in the company will take notice and follow that lead.

At one company for which I worked, one of my employees was having issues with someone in another group. The person’s behavior toward my employee was threatening. When I went to my peer to discuss the situation with him, he brushed off my concern by saying that was just the way this person was. Regardless, the behavior was inappropriate. I asked my employee to keep a record of what this person said to him. He did.

I took this evidence to our Human Resources department and they followed up on it. Found out this inappropriate behavior was happening with other employees as well and that it had been going on for awhile. People were afraid of the guy and avoided him. Hostile working environment anyone? The person was fired.

The reason this had gone on as long as it had was because the leader of the organization, by ignoring the inappropriate behavior, was supporting it. It didn’t matter one of the company values was respect. He was encouraging disrespectful behavior. His reasons for not addressing the issues were: “That’s just the way he is” and “but he’s a valuable member of the team.” These are never justifications for not reprimanding or even firing someone for inappropriate behavior.

Defining values for a company or organization is important. But what’s even more important is having the leaders of a company understand they are the ones defining values every day through their words and actions. Living the values is more important than just listing the values on a company webpage.

Don’t Ask if You Really Don’t Want to Know

Don’t Ask if You Really Don’t Want to Know

“I really want feedback on my performance. I especially like to hear where I can improve,” a new direct report told me eagerly. Steve looked sincere. He acted sincere. So I thought he was sincere. I then proceeded to tell him that he needed to be more careful about the type of information he was sharing with people as it was causing people to think that features were changing in the product. His opinion was affecting the progress of the project as people didn’t want to work on features if they were going to change. Steve then became really upset with me asking who said that about him and stating loudly that people shouldn’t be so sensitive. He ranted. He raved. I was taken aback and surprised.

Was it my delivery? Or did he really not want to know of any areas of improvement?

I try to be very careful how I discuss areas of improvements with employees. It can be a constructive conversation but also has the potential to blow up in your face. To make it a constructive conversation, I use something recent to demonstrate where I think someone can improve. I put it in writing, if needed.

For example, say I have an employee that is having difficulty with communicating with those that don’t agree with him. Let’s call him Bob. It is a constant issue, not a one-time occurrence. In a meeting with a group of Bob’s peers, I watched while he became frustrated with trying to explain his viewpoint to someone. He ended the conversation with, “I just don’t know what more to say to you,” sighed, threw his hands up in the air and sullenly looked down at the table. The person on the receiving end visibly bristled and said, “Well then, I guess we are done here,” and left the room.

I took that situation and asked him, “Was that the outcome you wanted?” Of course it wasn’t and he said so. Then I asked, “How could it have ended differently?” This opened up a conversation between the two of us to explore how he could have handled things better. I made sure to say that this is an area of improvement for him and asked him to suggest how we monitor it to see how he improved.

But sometimes, even with using specific situations as examples such as the ones with Bob, it doesn’t matter because the person really doesn’t want to get the feedback. They really, really don’t. Like Steve. I did try to work with him and provide him with specific situations in which his behavior affected people but he always became upset and wanted to confront the person or persons, as he knew they were wrong. I realized that he really didn’t want to hear anything but positive feedback.

If you don’t want feedback, don’t ask for it. Everyone likes positive feedback, and I’m happy to give them that but I believe in balanced feedback. None of us are perfect. We are all works in process. I always benefit when my manager reminds me I am impatient and she points it out to me after a meeting. I know I lose support from people with my impatience. I work on it, but every now then, it seeps through. Reminding me helps me to remember this is something that didn’t magically go away. It takes constant mindfulness on my part to avoid expressing impatience.

If you really want constructive feedback, ask for it. But if you really just want to hear how great you are, don’t ask.

Communicating Mission, Goals, Strategy

Communicating Mission, Goals, Strategy

I was managing a five-person startup. We had put our mission, company values, goals, and strategy in place about 6 months ago. We had spent several days together in a small, windowless conference room nailing down these things. No distractions. Just focused on making sure the mission, values, goals, and strategy were all well defined.

Since there were just five of us, I figured that communicating those things again wasn’t necessary. Then about 6 months later, we were talking about current projects and future projects when suddenly, Kevin said in a frustrated tone, “I don’t know where we are going. How can we determine what projects to do next if we don’t know where we are going?”

I was stunned. We had all agreed on our mission. It hadn’t changed. That mission certainly defined our end game, what we wanted to achieve over time and we had defined goals to get us to that end game.

I suggested we take a break. When we got back into the room, I said I wanted to review our mission, values, goals, and strategies just to make sure nothing had changed. We went through them and didn’t even tweak one. I then asked what new projects we should consider and we had a productive conversation.

It hadn’t occurred to me that I would need to repeat our mission, values, and goals periodically. We were only five people – how could we not all be on the same page? But I found it doesn’t matter if you are managing five, fifty or five hundred people. As a manager, I have to constantly review these things with my organization. Communication takes effort and I have to invest my time in it constantly.

I need to remind myself that as a manager these things are important for me to know and track. But employees are focusing on other aspects of the company and projects and it’s not their job to keep these things up front and visible.

So now I always review the mission and goals with my teams and tie it to what they are working on right now. Most people like knowing they are contributing to the company mission and goals. You can also review progress toward goals. I’d rather have people say they are bored with hearing the mission statement and goals than them saying they don’t know where the business is going or what we are trying to accomplish.

Constantly communicating the mission, value, goals, and strategies helps keep people focused and on target. And helps them to see how they are contributing.