Ten Things You Can Do To Build Morale

by: stacey - January 24th, 2012   Filed under: Leadership Add Comment

Morale is powerful.  Morale can get your team to go the extra mile.  To provide service that your customers rave about.  To recommend your company to top prospective employees.

It can also lead your employees to sneak out the back stairwell fifteen minutes early every day.  To provide customer service that leads customers to look elsewhere.  To steer their talented friends away from your company and instead solicit them for job leads to getaway  from you.

One key to morale is having the respect of your employees.  Here’s ten important things to build your employee’s respect for you:

 1.  Give Credit.  When your employees bring you ideas, always give them credit.  They believe their ideas are important.  They also believe that their ideas are tied to their career advancement.  If you take credit, then in their mind you are stealing from them and robbing their careers.  You’ll be branded untrustworthy in an instant.

 2.  Reward hard work.  This should be a corollary to item #1.  People feel what they do is valuable.  Prove to them that it is, and they’ll keep giving you more of it.

3.   Keep your promises.  If you don’t exhibit integrity, don’t expect your employees to do so.  This is especially true when it comes to pay, benefits and advancement.  Remember, we all come to work ultimately to gain something for ourselves.  Take that away and you take away their reason to keep coming.

 4.  Respect time off.  Days off from work are about our personal lives.  What we need in our personal lives are what keeps us coming back to work.  Don’t disrupt vacation days, weekends, and holidays unless you absolutely must.  If you have to, be frank and open about the business reason you have to do it, and be equally frank and open about exactly what you, and in turn the company, is going to do to ensure it doesn’t happen again (then see #3).

5.  Don’t push unreasonable deadlines.  Your employees know how long it takes to do their jobs.  That means that they know a deadline is unreasonable the minute it comes out of your mouth.  They know you’re asking them to work long hours from now until that deadline comes.  And they have from now until then to fume about it as well.

6.  Don’t Micromanage.  It’s vital to keep up with your project schedule and deadlines.  It’s not vital to know what percentage complete your team members are at on day two of a two month project.  It’s also not vital to know what they’re doing from minute to minute.  If you watch over their shoulders, they believe that you do not trust them.  That means they won’t trust you.  Take a deep breath and keep your eye on the goals.

7.  Stand back and let them work.  Either your employees know their jobs well, you did a lousy job providing them with the training they need, or you did a lousy job hiring.  Do you trust yourself or not?  If you’re watching them and interfering with how they do things constantly, then guess what the answer is.  Guess what else?  They don’t trust you either. 

8. No favorites.  Your team is your team.  It may have stars, but it doesn’t have favorites.  If coaches only played players they liked personally, can you imagine what professional sports would be like?  Treat your employees equally.

9.  Keep work about work.  This is a corollary to #8.  Keep your personal life out of the workplace at a reasonable level, and allow your employees to do the same.  Also, don’t ask your employees to run personal errands for you.  You wouldn’t pick up their dry cleaning, why should they get yours?

10.  Never discuss one employee with another.  People’s problems are personal.  That includes problems that they’re having with their jobs.  Don’t air their dirty laundry.

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Great Goal! Can You Reach It?

by: stacey - January 12th, 2012   Filed under: Leadership, Project Management Add Comment

I have posted in the past on how establishing good service levels for your website might be a good idea, but if you have no idea how to achieve the goals you are setting for yourself, you are wasting your time and paper. In fact, this goes for any business (or personal!) goal. Let’s look at what it takes to achieve a truly high level of service for a website:

1) a reliable web server
2) reliable power for the web server
3) reliable physical location for the web server
4) reliable network connection to the web server
5) failover capability in the event that the web server fails
6) reliable backups in case the server crashes
7) physical colocation of servers in the event that one server site is damaged in a disaster
8) multiple network connections in the event that a network connection fails
9) personnel who are experts on each individual component of your website (available 24/7)

and so on, and so on…

See what I mean? Unless you have the budget and manpower to support a 99.999% uptime, you are wasting paper if you set that as your SLA goal. In fact, if your business falls too far short of the goal or the goal sounds too unrealistic to your people, then I guarantee that eventually your staff will become pessimistic about it. The uptime will become an unhappy point with them, an inside joke in your company, and it will tarnish the reputation of anyone who was foolish enough to sign off on it.

This line of thinking applies to other goals in your company as well. It is important to think high and stretch your people. Challenges make your people stronger. They make your company better. If you are not stretching your people, you may risk your competitive edge. Setting too unrealistic goals, however, will simply set your people up for failure- and they will remember you for it. Being set up for failure is demotivating.

For that matter, setting too many ’stretch’ goals is just as bad if not worse than setting one unrealistic goal. Your people will get sick of every single win being a struggle to the finish. They will start to whisper things like “Who does he think we are?” and “Sure, just pile on more to the load, I’m stretched too far now anyway!”. Do you want to be thought of that way by the people you lead? Or, to be more specific, do you think your people will follow someone who they think these things of?

Never set goals that you or the people you manage do not have the resources- time, money or otherwise- to reach. Stretching is good for your business. Jumping off cliffs without a parachute is not. Others can see whether or not your goals are reachable given the resources available. Your people may see this as lack of respect for them (”He thinks we’re miracle workers!”), lack of ability to plan (”He doesn’t care how many hours we work!”), or a lack of knowledge (”Doesn’t he know that can’t be done with what we have?”). They will mistake it for incompetence, and your credibility with your people will take a huge hit that your ability to lead them may never recover from.

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Who Comes First?

by: stacey - January 3rd, 2012   Filed under: Leadership, Planning, Project Management Add Comment

A Project Manager’s job is to get their project done.  On time and within budget.  Period.

Right?

This is a trend I’ve seen in many places.  The project manager fights for their project to a fault.  They get the money and resources they need.  They win the battle of conflicting priorities for shared resources.  They take no prisoners and get things done.  While in the process of doing it, though, sometimes they rob other projects and processes of resources, and that ultimately hurts the company significantly.

As a project manager, you can never lose sight of the fact that you work for the company, not the project.  When there is a scheduling conflict, you have to ask questions and find out what the conflict is and what the importance of the other item is to the company.  There are ultimately times when you should stand down and let the other people through.

Your stakeholders can sometimes make this a delicate balancing act.  They will not always agree that the other project should be let through.  Not everyone thinks in terms of the Company as a whole.  You should take the time to explain yourself, though, and if you find yourself and what you believe is the correct thing to do in conflict with your stakeholders or, worse, project sponsor, take the time to escalate.  Don’t do it in a contrary manner; simply consult the right authority in the company and ask which choice takes priority.  Once you do that, report your findings and acquiesce to it.  Refer to the higher decision and seek help from leadership in explaining things if necessary.

Doing the right thing for the company is not always good for your project, but ultimately it is the right thing to do for your career. Demonstrating to leadership that you can think globally about the company will ultimately help your career.

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