Hamstaa!

It's been exactly a year since I started blogging and so I thought it would be good to reflect on my experience so far.

When I set out, I wanted a means to communicate my experience as a manager to anyone considering the move. I've continued to keep the primary focus of my articles to management and leadership, however there has been the odd time when I could have blogged about other areas. This is something I think I'll do in the future.

I haven't received alot of feedback on my articles but that's not surprising considering how little readership I have and how many posts I've made. I did however receive some great feedback at a business event from Karl, the presenter of a session on the leadership course I undertook last year. He complimented me on my post Capability versus Competence and said he regularly points people at it when explaining the differences.

The one problem I do find is that I start an entry, get caught up in something else and don't get back to it for ages. In some cases, it is then too late to be relevant. 

The main thing I think I need to take away from all of this experience so far is that "the publish button isn't as scary as it looks" and I just need to publish those articles that end up in draft.

So my "new years" resolution is to publish more often.

As part of our interview process for new engineers at Ephox the final stage is the Coffee Interview.

The Coffee Interview involves everyone in the the team, except the manager, going out with the potential hire and having a coffee. While discussions can be technical, it's not a technical interview but rather a chance for everyone involved to get to know each other. At the end of the coffee I get consensus from the team as to whether we should hire the person or not.

What we are trying to do in this interview is determine if the team can work with the person, and the person can work with the team. It's a case of ensuring the hire is a good "fit".

By involving everyone the person will work with, we are essentially building an emotional contract between the team and the new hire. These people are the ones who can exert the most influence over the success of the new hire and as such, the Coffee Interview provides a way to invest them in the success of the person.

Over the last year I've been working on building better relationships with our local universities. I see this serving two purposes. Firstly, it provides an avenue for promoting Ephox and subsequently using this self-promotion as a means to attract high quality staff. Secondly, it is a way to give back to the industry and help attract more people into IT.

So as part of this outreach, I jumped at the opportunity to present as a guest lecturer at QUT recently. The subject, Core Project Management, has provision for guest lecturers so we took up the offer to present two lectures.

Damien presented last week on the topic of requirements gathering in a product company and yesterday I presented the differences in project management between a product company and a project (professional services) company.

It was the first time I'd given a lecture so it was a little daunting initially. Once I got started and found my groove, it all flowed together nicely. Unfortunately I had little feedback from the students on how useful they found what I presented. The lecturer however seemed happy with both the clarity and topic. Overall I'm happy with how it went and look forward to other opportunities to speak.

I was recently introduced to TED or Technology, Entertainment and Design. If you haven't heard of it, it's well worth checking out. Their by-line is "Inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers" and the site has videos of presentations from past conferences.

When I first became interested in hackers and computer security many years ago, the first book I read was "The Cuckoos Egg" by Clifford Stoll. Clifford is the astronomer who back in the late 80's while working at Berkeley noticed the intrusion and ultimately helped capture the hacker working for the KGB .

Clifford appeared at the 2006 TED conference and the video "18 minutes with an agile mind" is now available.

Watching it, Clifford exudes a huge amount of energy and passion for his topics and this energy is infectious. So if you have a few minutes, check it out.

I was reading an article, "Cultivate Commitment" by Julia Stirling, in The Weekend Australian recently that resonated with my belief that management and leadership is about people. The focus of the article was on employee commitment and the part management plays on the level of commitment.

Keeping employees engaged is one of the biggest challenges for managers. Happy people are productive people, and research suggests relationships are the biggest single determinant of productivity within a group.

There are three levels of employee commitment identified in the article; Engaged, Not Engaged and Actively Disengaged. The level we should be striving to cultivate as managers is the Engaged employee. Engaged employees work with passion, feel a profound connection to their company, drive innovation and move the organisation forward.

What was disappointing to read was the percentage of people that are Actively Disengaged versus Engaged. Only around 10% of employees are Engaged with over 50% at the Actively Disengaged level.

Michael Mere, an educational consultant with Swinburne Industry Solutions says

"The poor levels of employee engagement show how much 20th-century management theory and practices are failing today. Emphasis on obedience, diligence and even thinking are no longer delivering competitive advantage. In the 21st century, what you need to be competitive is a workforce that is using its initiative, is committed to the organisation and is passionate about what it does."

As a manager, we have the most influence over the level of commitment our employees have. What is interesting is that relationships are a major part of this influence. There are two major reasons identified by Mere for why people become disengaged. These are:

dysfunctional relationships (particularly with their immediate supervisor/manager and within their work group), and failure, real of perceived, of the organisation to fulfil an obligation or expectation

Over the years, I've occasionally found myself in situations where promises where made that were never kept and as such I found myself becoming "Not Engaged". I left very soon after.

Because of these experiences, something I've strived very hard to do since I moved into management is to meet the promises I make with my team. I've also worked at cultivating a good working relationship with everyone I work with.

So why do managers have problems with building relationships within their teams? Mere says that the

Lack of emotional maturity in supervisors and leaders is a major contributor to disengagement

Interestingly, this emotional intelligence is not a contributing factor in the promotion of people to a management role, despite how important it is in building and maintaining an Engaged team.