Astromanager LLC

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Tag: Leadership

  • The pandemic and the unhealthy interrupt culture

    I was just relating to a colleague the other day how I find this whole pandemic working from home thing beneficial in certain ways. True, I have more meetings. tiring zoom meetings, than I ever had, but generally outside of my meetings, my time stays mine. People tend to hold things for our meetings, or they deal with things themselves that they might previously have come through my open office door with. There also seems to be a more general awareness that our non-work life is going to intersect with our work life, so there’s less expectation, generally, of immediate email response as well. I’m finding it easier to put my email aside for longer periods of time while I concentrate on a specific task or project without drawing people’s ire.

    Open door policies have good intentions and several benefits, but they also have some significant drawbacks. For one, they essentially say that your interruption is more important than my otherwise planned work. All the time – without exception. Yes, you can close your doors at times, or respond to an interruption with a statement that this isn’t a good time, but the general expectation at the office was anyone can go see anyone at any time and get a response right then and there. Not only does that devalue the work of the one interrupted, it can also be disservice to the interrupters who don’t derive the benefits from spending a bit more time on their problems and discovering the solutions themselves. Even in the pre-pandemic world, when someone you wanted help from wasn’t in the office when you needed, you usually went back to your own office, googled for a bit, sketched out some ideas, and generally found the solution you were looking for on your own. Would have it been easier or faster to get the answer from your absent colleague? Yes, perhaps, and in some cases that is indeed the right thing to do. But in other cases, it’s just not.

    From 3 Easy Steps to Establishing an Open Door Policy That Really Works with some good suggestions, but mostly missing the point about the value of the interrupted person’s time. https://www.insperity.com/blog/3-easy-steps-establishing-open-door-policy-really-works/

    I think the norms that have arisen around remote work have been good for abating the rise of an unhealthy interruption culture. People don’t interrupt unless they really feel they need to, tending normally to figure out the issue on their own or store it for the next scheduled zoom meeting. This, I think is the intent of the open office policy – I’m here to help when you really need it, but it’s that when you really need it that tended to get lost and people sought others’ help whenever it was convenient, not whenever it was really necessary. I want to hear from you and an open door helps make that possible. I also want you to spend some time with your problems and own your solutions and I have my own work I’d like to complete as well. Open doors don’t help very much with the latter two objectives.

    So now, even though I have fewer free hours in a day, I can generally use those hours more effectively than I could in the office. I have time to think; time to do the important, but not urgent; time to get into a state of flow and stay there for a while. None of these things are possible with the usual daily interruptions of an open door in the office.

    There are lessons here for the eventual return to office. I’m leaning more towards the concept of office hours rather than open door. I’ve considered that before, but this pandemic experience has really demonstrated the value of that approach. Stop looking for the quick answer that disrupts someone else. Work through the problem on your own, seek help when you really need it, and let others enjoy the same quality time for their work that you have for yours. Supplement this with scheduled time to talk to your colleagues and then really listen. Combined, I think these efforts could bring some of this work from home productivity back to the office.

    Working from home, of course, has its own set of distractions and interruptions that don’t apply to the office, but having more occasions for uninterrupted time, even for an hour, is a big enough benefit that Scot would like to find a way to continue this once back in the office.

  • Class Offerings

    Over the years, I’ve developed a number of short courses on a variety of topics concerning workplace efficiency, effective management, and leadership. Lately, I have expanded the content and realized there may be a larger audience for all of this than what I am currently reaching. So, I’m also thinking of new ways I can present the material and am considering whether I can make them into a set of self-serve videos that people could pick and choose from. The classes usually include a lot of interactive discussion and some exercises, so I’m trying to develop some way to translate all that into the different format. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.

    I also need a place to record a summary of the offerings, so for now at least, this is that place.

    The Productivity Series

    Your email inbox includes hundreds of emails that demand your attention or some action to close out.  You are continually barraged with new work requests that make it difficult to both keep track of everything on your plate and stay focused on the task at hand.   You find yourself constantly working to do the urgent tasks on your list and seldom find the time to work on those long-term important projects that don’t have specific deadlines.  You would love to delegate some of your work, but the process is usually painful enough that it seems easier to just do things yourself.  You sometimes wonder if it’s all worth it.  If any or all these situations sound familiar, and they are too much so for many of us, these four classes can help you regain control or refine your existing processes for more thoughtful productivity:

     1. Email.  Learn how to reduce the amount of time you spend processing your email and make your own emails more effective. 

     2. Task Management.  Learn how to organize your tasks so you don’t lose track of what you have to do or where you are on a given task.  Reduce the amount of time you spend switching tasks and prepare yourself to better respond to new task requests.

     3. Prioritization.  Learn to make time for the important as well as the urgent. Understand basic human tendencies that sometimes inhibit us from making the best decisions on what task to spend our time on. Learn when and how to slow down and say no.

     4. Delegation.  Learn effective ways to offload tasks to others and still get results.

    Individual Components

    Email Management
    Finally, a meeting where you’re not only allowed, but instructed to read your emails. Leave this class in control of your email. We’ll discuss the zero inbox method of email management, including ways to send more effective emails, receive fewer emails, and derive better processes to organize the emails you receive.

    Task Management
    Once you’ve learned to manage your email, attend this session and learn to manage your tasks. How do you keep track of what needs doing? How do you make sure important tasks don’t slip through the cracks? How do you stop your mind from reminding you at all the wrong times about all the things you need to do? We’ll focus primarily on a simplified Getting things Done (GTD) type task management approach and discuss several practical ways to implement it.

    Getting the Right Things Done
    Go beyond task management and learn how to identify what the right things to be doing are and explore why we don’t always seem to do the right things, even when we know what they are. Mastering this content should help attendees remove low return tasks from their plates, focus on getting the most important tasks done, and partner better with their colleagues.

    Doing Less or There’s more to Life than Efficiency
    Focusing on productivity and efficiency are good things, but as with most things, too much of a good thing can still be too much. In Doing Less we talk about the value of slowing down, allowing time for context and creativity, and choosing a path simply because it is unknown. Together with Getting the Right Things Done, we address the other half of task management beyond organizing and controlling your tasks to prioritizing, doing, and sometimes purposefully not doing.

    Successful Delegation
    An important part of controlling your own task list is delegation. A critical and necessary part of delegation is tracking and ensuring your delegated tasks get done. Here, we discuss techniques to make proper requests of others, set deadlines, and follow up without coming across as a nag or an untrusting colleague.

    Effective Meetings
    You’ve mastered your inbox, taken control of your task list and become a master of delegation. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to attend, or perhaps even hold, a meeting to discuss your projects. This course offers a framework for meetings that helps ensure you walk away from each meeting with the results you need and with appropriate participation from the attendees. Would you rather watch a good move, or go to a meeting? If you chose a movie, come learn why and how you should attend a meeting instead.

    Leadership and Teamwork
    Can anyone be a leader? Do I need a title to be a leader? How do I learn my leadership style? Leadership is about character and skills and both can be learned. In this course we differentiate management from leadership, discuss the different ways one can lead, find a common thread running through most leadership models and the best leaders, and learn to lead by first understanding yourself, then others. We build a set of skills and a problem solving framework to help leaders and teams focus on the right problem solving steps while avoiding common pitfalls.

    Still occasionally suffering from an email inbox that doesn’t get emptied, tasks that don’t get done, meetings that aren’t efficient, and other signs that he has still not fully mastered this material, Scot enjoys presenting these courses and learns something new every time. As a result, his processes continually evolve and improve and hopefully others also gain control and purpose in their work life. It is all a work in progress and a journey he hopes to share with others for mutual benefit.

    In preparation for a new delivery system, Scot has started a new Astromanager youtube channel with as of yet, no content. If you want to check it out you can find it at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2lJ7RdBBowLLON762LQ6Qg. You can subscribe now for that first video notification and a valuable early subscriber number.

  • What exactly should managers manage?

    At Facebook, moving into management is not a promotion. It’s a lateral move, a parallel track. Managers are there to support people and to remove barriers to getting things done. Managers focus on building a great team, creating a vision for how that team will execute its goals, and helping the people on that team develop in their careers. They are put in those positions because of their strong people skills. They aren’t there to tell teams what to do. This viewpoint has become so effective that some managers at our company have even gone so far as to stop saying things like “my team,” instead opting for things like “the team I support.”

    I forget exactly where I found this, but here is one source:  https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/3-tricks-facebook-uses-to-shut-down-toxic-office-politics.html

    I really like this idea and it supports this general notion I have that concentrating power at the top with direction flowing down is the wrong way to run an organization.  At my organization, managers used to propose projects, evaluate which we could and should do, and then worked to form teams that carried them out.  We’ve grown a bit since then in that we accept project proposals from all staff, but we still let a small group of executive managers decide which we should do.  There’s a tacit understanding that executive management has to set the strategies, and therefore the tactical plans, for the organization.

    Our next growth step, I hope, is to allow staff themselves to select which projects we execute.  Managers, then, would have the job, as at Facebook, of creating environments where people can work effectively, and where staff understand the observatory’s strategies and operating constraints well enough to make the right decisions.  As Ricardo Semler explained in his book, Maverick, this means management has to make the organization’s finances, regulations, governance and other constraints accessible to the staff. Educate them in the nature of the business so they can use their experience on the lines to develop new solutions and projects that propel the organization forward.  (Ricardo even went so far as to hold accounting classes that taught employees how to read and understand the company’s income statements and balance sheets.)

    The next step would be to consider who owns and develops the organization’s strategies.  Is it executive management or the staff? Do executives make the strategy, then educate staff so they can figure out the best way to implement it, or do executives explain to organization’s environment so that staff can both develop and implement the appropriate strategy? What is the role of the visionary leader executive if not to develop clever strategies that when efficiently executed by employees lead to industry success?

    My answer to those questions involve removing the word “executive” from my last question. Why does the visionary leader have to be an executive? Furthermore, why does the visionary leader have to be a single person?  Don’t we get more opportunities to develop clever strategies if we reach out to all our staff and give them the ability and access to chart the organization’s future? Isn’t that the role of management – to maximize the value each employee adds to the organization? If a line employee has a compelling vision, there is no reason to stifle it just because the originator is not in executive management!

    That’s the organization I’d like to see. Management that creates environments in which employees can work effectively and that educates staff on the organization’s business so that good ideas, tactical or strategic, can come from anywhere within the organization, producing staff that all have the ability and knowledge to identify and carry our their best ideas.

     

  • Great leaders: Are personal crucibles a prerequisite?

    I’ve been reading the book Strengths Finder 2.0, by Tom Rath.  Like one of my favorite business books, First, Break all the Rules  by Curt Coffman and Markus Buckingham, Strengths Finders 2.0 relies on data gathered from extensive Gallup surveys to help the reader discover and understand their five (out of 34 possible) top strengths.  The author’s premise is that we gain more by concentrating on our strengths than we do trying to improve our weaknesses.

    In the end, I did not find my five identified strengths terribly enlightening. The premise that we should spend more time working on maximizing our strengths – both by strengthening them and by maximizing how often we use them – and less time improving our weaknesses, however, resonated with a couple other things I have been thinking about recently:

    1. Performance evaluations: I think we spend too much time pointing out weaknesses and developing improvement action plans when we do annual employee evaluations. I would like to see people figuring out what went really well, why, and how we can set things up to realize similar successes in the future. That is, performance evaluation discussions should dominantly be about doing more of what we do best and not about trying to be a little bit better at what we do poorly.  But then I get this nagging feeling that weaknesses are important to. Weaknesses make us blind to entire pathways of opportunity. Weakness make us fail to connect to people who think drastically different than we do.  If all we did was capitalize on our strengths, we would reach a certain level of success quickly, but to transcend to the next level, I think, requires an understanding and embracing of our weaknesses.
    2. Great leaders:  All the great leaders in  Bill George’s book, True North, went through at least one particularly difficult and personally challenging life-changing event on their path to becoming great leaders.  George’s belief is that it is through life’s experiences that we discover our true north, our purpose and our reason for leading.  Author Rajeev Peshawaria takes a similar approach in another book I enjoyed, Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders. While reading these books, I  began to ponder: do all leaders need what George calls a “crucible” to be successful? If you do not have a life-changing event of tragic proportions, does that mean you cannot be a great leader? What exactly is the role of the crucible? Is there something else going on besides finding a passion to lead for a particular purpose?

    I did not initially see how these two topics relate, although I have now come to think of the purpose of the crucible as the opening up and revealing a part of yourself that was previously unknown. George and Peshawaria’s main point is that crucibles give leaders a deep, personal drive that motivates themselves and others.  To this, I agree.  Yet, I think there is something more.   What crucibles also do is sort of complete the package. Crucibles make potential leaders more rounded and complete in part by exposing their weaknesses and vulnerabilities.  In revealing a sense of purpose, crucibles peel back the onion and uncover hidden parts of people’s psyches.  What used to be personal blindspots become irresistible areas of development and opportunity.   They often reveal a side of us we never knew we had – perhaps even a side we considered not only a weakness, but irrelevant.

    The best leaders know not only their strengths, but also their weaknesses. They organize their primary roles to take best advantage of their strengths while partnering with others in their areas of weakness.  They know that their weaknesses represent potential blindspots that, if ignored, hamper their ability to lead.  They also know to not only work with, but to value people that are strong where they themselves, are weak.

    George’s crucibles can help bring this clear sense of being incomplete, of seeing not only the value of our strengths, but the value of our weaknesses, as well.  This awareness helps us develop those weaknesses and to find others around us to support our weaknesses while fostering a strong drive to develop and accomplish something meaningful.

    Truly understanding ourselves is key to recognizing what our true strengths are. It helps us realize in what areas of work we are likely to excel. Truly understanding ourselves is also key to understanding our weaknesses and what aspects of our work we need to pay particular attention to and allow others to help us with.  It helps us find opportunities we would otherwise be blind to.  Understanding our strengths, supporting our weaknesses: this is beginning to sound like my paragraph on performance evaluations, yet it derived from studying a group of great leaders and their struggles.

    Which  brings us back to Strengths Finder 2.0. Yes, in terms of performance output per energy spent,  maximizing our strengths is generally going to be more rewarding  than improving our weaknesses.  But that is not the whole story. It is the knowledge of our weaknesses, our real ownership of them, that allows an additional level of growth that takes us from being good leaders to potentially great leaders.  Crucibles not only directly confront us with our weaknesses, they often expose a part of ourselves that we didn’t know we had.  Sometimes this part of ourselves ends up being a weakness that perhaps is not quite as weak as we thought.  We begin to appreciate the value of our weaknesses. That is, we are forced to re-classify what we may have previously cast off as not very important or useful, as something not only useful, but valuable.  The very act of discovery both increases our own abilities in our areas of weakness and helps us to appreciate and value others whose strengths are our weaknesses.  People that we might otherwise have not valued, we begin to see as key contributors to our mission. We begin to value, rather than shun, people who think differently from us.  I believe these results are what transform George’s (and our own) generally good leaders into great leaders.

    So, do you need a crucible to be a great leader? Perhaps not, but you do need to understand who you are, why you are, what you do well, and what values those different from you bring.  A crucible is just a convenient, if sometimes painful, way to get that.

    Fifteen years ago, Scot took a personality test and was most shocked not by his resulting personality type, but at one particular type that he clearly was not.  He was amazed there really were people – both functional and successful – that were really this type. Today, he finds  exploring that part of his own personality and working with others of that type, very rewarding and a key to working his way to being at least a good leader.

  • So, I finished my MBA. Was it worth it?

    Yes!

    22 months and countless hours later, I finished my MBA program from the Shidler College of Business at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. It was probably more work than I expected, but I also got more out of it than I expected. I could have put in less effort and still completed the degree, but as with anything in life, you tend to get what you put into it and putting in more effort than the minimum needed, I think, was highly worthwhile. What I expected from this program was to learn how business is done, how managers manage, and how leaders lead out in the “real world” in ways that I could apply to the business of astronomy.

    The program certainly did all this, but there was a lot more. I learned many practical things about personal finance including stocks, bonds, negotiation tactics and strategies that were only obvious after I discovered them, and a bunch of other stuff I figured I should learn about some day, but never did.  I even now own a genuine financial calculator, although it is RPN, so I’m not a total sellout :).  Perhaps, even more importantly, I learned about myself – I learned more about who I am, why I am the way I am, and what I want to do with my leadership and management initiatives.

    For one of my last classes, I ended up defining the purpose of my leadership as being:

    …to combine the data-based, scientific method of problem solving with
    the human elements of trust, respect, and opportunity for all in order to form truly healthy teams and organizations.

    I may still need some work on this purpose, but I think it’s a pretty good place to start. I want to help create, vibrant, healthy organizations in astronomy, specifically working to set up environments that allow people to perform at their best, whether they be scientific, technical, administrative, or other support staff. Similarly, I enjoyed bringing scientific rigor to my co-MBA students who worked in all kinds of non-profit and for-profit industries and were not well-versed in the scientific method. There is a lot of potential fulfilment in this line of work as well. Bringing the best organizational aspects of the rest of the world to astronomy, and the best analytic approach of astronomy to the rest of the  world. This purpose helps me understand the two worlds I try to live in: the scientific and the professional management/leadership worlds.

    Shidler DLEMBA Class of 2014

    And finally, I spent 22 months collaboratively and intensely working with 29 of the best managers and leaders in Hawaii. These people, my co-students, come from all backgrounds and fields, but shared this one crazy thing in common: a desire to learn more about how to run, manage and lead better organizations so strong that they agreed to give up their evenings and weekends to sit in front of their computers and join forces with each other to complete this program. While I may have been able to complete this program without them, it would not have been nearly as much fun or rewarding. I learned from each of their stories and each of their industries, as much or more as I learned from the faculty. They are all on my personal Board of Directors.

    astronomerBOD

    Another sign of Scot’s dual interest in astronomy and effective management and leadership is portrayed through Myers Briggs type assessments which, depending on when he takes the test, result in either INTJ (code-named “Scientist”) or ENTJ (code-named “Manger/Leader”).  This whole astronomy management thing is starting to make sense.

Big Science Boards Books Budgets Business Change Management Classes Communications Community Competition Conflict Crucibles Emotions Employee Development fire-fighting Fun Gemini GTD Hiring Impostors International Introduction Leadership Management Management Corollary Matrix Mauna Kea Federation Mistakes Politics Productivity Project Management Scientist Dilemma SDSS Social Media Videos Whole Earth Telescope