milos topic

Do you see your current boss as a leader? Do you enjoy working for him/her? What would you do differently?

These are some of the questions we have all asked ourselves at some point while assessing our current professional environment and deciding what to do next. Most of us have also worked with or for people who had trouble leading a team in one way or another. Some of these folks weren’t even good managers (I’ll get to differences between managers and leaders some other time, but they are quite apparent).

I came across several people asking what makes someone a good leader and here are few things I have to share. Based on my experience these are important things (in no particular order) to consider when leading a team or even managing others.

1. Be approachable

Every single employee on your staff from the new employee who started last week to your right hand person, senior professional, have to be able to walk into your office, call or e-mail you if they have questions. An open door policy must be in effect at all times. Hiding in your office doesn’t help you or your team in any way, it alienates the two and creates a disconnect. Your employees need to feel comfortable to approach you regarding smaller concerns as well should they chose to do so.

2. Listen, then ask questions

When people are speaking with you, it is important to give them your undivided attention. Focus on their issue, treat it as the most important problem at that time and allow them to express what they are thinking and feeling about it. Once you hear what they have to say, ask questions on items that require further clarification and attention. Don’t assume anything, if you are not certain what the need is, ask until you get to the bottom of it.

3. Be fair and consistent

This is crucial in getting everyone to feel as an equal member of the team. Don’t allow someone to get away with stuff while penalizing someone else for the same action (or lack of). You can’t be too strict either, but it is important to be fair, consistent and set certain boundaries early on. Operations tend to run much smoother when everyone involved is clear of the expectations.

4. Acknowledge publicly, correct privately

You always expect and hope your team to perform well, but when someone goes above and beyond the call of duty make sure you acknowledge this stellar performance in front of the entire team. It’s up to you how you want to carry this out, an e-mail to the team or verbally at a meeting, either way it is important to be done in a timely fashion.
On the other hand, when a team member makes a mistake of some kind, speak with that person in private and try to understand the root cause of the issue. Do what you can to help them understand what went wrong and how to correct it. Humiliating them in front of their peers will only embarrass them and potentially push them into other mistakes. Furthermore, you don’t want your staff to be unhappy or ashamed at work.

5. Enable your team

If you have set expectations for their performance then you MUST be able to provide them with the tools necessary to achieve those goals. This is a very simple, but effective way to enable your team to perform up to specifications and be successful. This tools and incentives range from hardware, software, training to vacation and sick days. If your team’s success depends on availability of trade tools, it is your responsibility to find a way to provide them. In addition, enable people to make their work area comfortable and pleasant for them, if they want to hang some photos or posters (as long as they are not offensive to anyone) let them do so. I once knew a technician who liked to hand a photo of a particular mountain range in Asia as he said it relaxed him and helped him focus. I had no problem with that, as after all, while we do operate as a team, each of us is a very complex individual with distinct set of values, beliefs and skills. Here at work, people can listen to music as well, as long as it is not too loud (don’t want to upset the neighboring departments), disruptive or offensive. You need to have some fun as it is impossible to be in a business only mentality for 8 or 10 hours a day.

6. Empower your team

This is one of the areas were managers and leaders differ quite a lot. Managers tend to be control freaks without trust in their employees which is no way to run a team, department or an organization. If you have done your due diligence in selecting and training your team, you should be able to empower them by allowing them to make their own decisions. Staff also needs to be aware that every decision making ability comes with accountability for those decisions and actions. Obviously, certain decisions will still need to be made by only you, but as long as staff decisions are done along the previously agreed path and are working towards desired performance and success you should feel good about it. Enabling people to be in control of their destiny and make their own decisions is something they will all thank you for at some point. Furthermore, when making important strategic decisions, consult your team, you could be pleasantly surprised by their way of thinking and ideas you might have overlooked.

7. Fight for your team

As a leader of a department or a group it is your responsibility to fight for your team up the chain as well when working with other teams and vendors. Taking the fight on for additional resources, support, respect and organizational acknowledgment should be on your permanent to do list. It is one of those items you will never be able to check off.

8. Know your staff

I’m sure that most if not all of you have heard the saying, “Jack of all trades, master of none” which is not how you should staff your team. It is important to work with well rounded professionals, but it is even more important to know their strengths and use them in projects and operational responsibilities. You, as the leader need to be able to recognize what they are good at and enjoy doing and leverage those skills for the benefit of the entire team.

9. Remember, you are PART of the team

You happen to be in a leadership position for one or more of the following reasons:

- you own the business
- you have been there the longest
- you are the most knowledgeable and experienced person on the team
- you got “lucky”

Whatever the reason is you always need to remember that you are a part of the team, never above it or superior to anyone you work with. Treat people the way you want to be treated with respect, dignity and professionalism. People need to want to work with you and get their tasks accomplished, not to do so out of fear or retribution. Furthermore, the moment you use your title (VP, CIO, President, CEO…) as a reason to justify why someone needs to complete the work you have assigned to them, you have lost the respect of that person forever.

10. Keep up with your team and industry

In my case, it is important to stay current with the latest IT news, events and technologies. The importance in doing this lies not only in your own personal development and advancement, but in addition in retaining the respect of your employees. Generally (in IT field in particular), if employees think that their boss is clueless in their particular industry and area of expertise they lose respect for their authority and decision making ability. Bottom line is, be knowledgeable about the business you are in. You expect your employees to do so and the same rules should apply to you as well.

11. Put the puzzle together

All of these things considered, leading a team is not an exact science. There’s a lot of planning and organizing involved, but there are also times that require quick thinking and improvising in order to best respond to newly created situations. Keep working at it and tweak along the way to find your own style that best suites your personality and character.

Those are the main principles I follow when working with my team and they are constantly changing, growing and being improved. While there are not exact science and there’s no blueprint to success, following these general principles will go a long way in creating, maintaining and leading a successful team of individuals.

If you have any of your own tips to add, please share.

A friend of mine came over a week ago with an old PowerBook G4 and asked if I could get the OS up to date (he brought the OS 10.5 disk) and make it run faster. Well, considering it’s a 2004 machine with
1 GHz PowerPC processor I figured it would be able to run the latest Apple operating system (fresh install, NOT an upgrade) with a bit more memory muscle. It had 512 MB of RAM which would allow OS 10.5.x to run, but would most likely make that experience slow and painful.

In order to mitigate this, I ordered two 1 GB RAM SODIMMs from Crucial. In addition, you can use their “Crucial System Scanner” tool to determine what kind of RAM you need. Memory came in today, but I had trouble opening the memory slot door as I couldn’t find the necessary #0 Phillips screwdriver. Considering that I can always use a new good set of precision screwdrivers I took a drive to Micro Center in Paterson, NJ and bought myself a complete toolkit.

With everything I needed in place I began the RAM upgrade. By the way, here are major steps needed during laptop memory upgrade:

1. Turn the computer off
2. Unplug the power adapter/cable
3. Ground yourself
4. Take the battery out

Once I did all of that, I’ve removed the 4 tiny screws from the bottom of the laptop and took the old memory out (in this case, two 256 MB DIMMs). Then I placed new DIMMs in; screwed the door back on; placed the battery back in place and pressed the power button.

Memory upgrade is complete, all that is left is to confirm it.

Once your system boots up, you can check if the machine recognizes the new RAM by clicking on the Apple logo and then selecting “About This Mac” option.

As you can see it recognizes the newly installed 2 GB of RAM.
That’s all, not much to it. Happy computing!

Today was certainly one of those days which would live up to an ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”. From around 1:20 pm until 5:30 pm we (MSU campus) were separated from the rest of the world. Well, it wasn’t quite that dramatic, but it sure sounds intriguing, right? During those 4+ hours we were without Internet connection which has made some operational tasks a bit challenging, but overall we ended up doing all right. Furthermore, being without Internet (for the most part) has made it very clear how dependent we are on it and how important it is in getting certain tasks and initiatives accomplished. Cloud computing can be a blessing and a curse when network fails. But let’s save the talk on the importance of Internet and its benefits/drawbacks for a later date.

As we lost connection to websites located off-campus our networking department began to work diligently on assessing the problem. Considering that we still had full access to all online services located in our data centers we suspected that the issue was an Internet Service Provider (ISP) related problem (in our case, Verizon).

Just to be certain and follow best practices we have inspected our own networking gear, monitoring tools and found them all to be completely functional. Upon this realization, we have escalated the call to our ISP who at first suspected a NJEDge core router as the culprit, but has later informed us that our service interruption was a part of a major Verizon SES (Switched Ethernet Services) outage for all New Jersey business clients. While this is definitely a large problem state wide at least it made us feel a bit better knowing that it’s not just us who are experiencing network difficulties.

Here’s one of the e-mails sent out from our systems and networking group updating users of the status of this issue:

Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2008 3:43 PM
Subject: Update: Internet connectivity

To Our Campus Community-

As a follow up to my previous email, our Internet Service Provider
(Verizon) has indicated that the connectivity problems we are experiencing are the result of a wider, regional outage within Verizon’s New Jersey commercial service area.

The Verizon service manager has informed us that the company is performing diagnostic tests on the equipment but did not provide an estimate on when Internet connectivity would be restored.

Verizon seems to be generally reliable and stable, but when they fail, they fail in a big way (similar to Apple products). To all Mac heads out there who just rolled their eyes: I’m sorry, I simply couldn’t resist.

It took them a while to get back online, which is a bit surprising assuming the level or redundancy a company of their size must have, but then again at this time we don’t know the exact event that caused the outage.

Now you know how we spent most of our work day. How was your day, was your business affected by this outage in any way?

I normally try not to rant online too much as it is really pointless and generally counterproductive. We have all experienced poor customer service, long waits and rude representatives, but at times certain behavior exceeds all stupidity. This is one of those times.

Today, at 12:30 PM I have tried to log into an Aetna account and wasn’t able to so. The login fields are visible and available on their homepage, but once the info is inputted, I would be transferred to the above displayed page. Now, 12:30 pm GMT-5 (or EST if you prefer) is right in the middle of a work day here on east coast; it is also 9:30 AM GMT-8 (or PST) on west coast (meaning people are already at work) and even if you were somewhere in Europe, London for example it would be 5:30 PM GMT(0) which also means that people would need to have access to their system during that time.

Dealing with servers, databases and web front ends myself I can appreciate that at times things happen and go wrong without notice, but the way this situation is handled is what makes it bad and a bit surprising for a company of that size. Even now, an hour later, there is no update on their site informing clients that the system is inaccessible; the login fields are still visible (even though they don’t let you login) and their tech support sucks! I called them as instructed by their page and was given an attitude and nonsense answers.

Here’s a brief exchange I had with one of their techs/customer disservice reps:

Me: I can’t login to my account on your website and was instructed to call you.
Tech: Yes, the system is updating itself.

Me: Updating itself, as in on its own, just decided to do so in the middle of a business day?
Tech: Yes. It’s strange, it normally doesn’t do this, but I guess it decided to pick a different time today.

Me: So your system is not experiencing any technical difficulties, it simply decided to update itself?
Tech: Yeah, I know it’s weird, but nothing we can do about it, it just started updating itself.

At this point, I’m clear that I’m dealing with a moron, but have decided to ask another question or two. Btw, she was dead serious while providing those answers.

Me: Do you know how long it will take for it to update itself?
Tech: It normally takes anywhere from an hour to two, but not sure. Try logging in in a couple of hours and if it doesn’t work I guess it’s not done yet.

Me: Thanks! You might want to post a note on you site informing visitors of this change.
Tech: Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. Is there anything else I can assist you with today?

Me: No, thanks! You have done enough already.
Tech: I’m glad I was able to help you. Have a great day.

Furthermore, besides the technical “expertise” I’m starting to wonder what kind of system are medical records and personal information stored on if they can’t provide something as simple as a failover or any kind of redundancy for their customer information system.

I still have to call them back, but I refuse to do so just yet, I need some more “down time” first.

Over the past several weeks I have experienced intermittent audio issues playing Flash content in Firefox 3. I’m running 32-bit Vista Enterprise SP1 and have tried all the usual “suspects”…reinstalled Firefox; updated/reinstalled the Shockwave Flash plugin; checked permissions on some of my site/script blocking add-ons, but the loss of audio remained intermittent. Then I did an online search for this issue and some people recommended going to Tools –> Add-ons –> Plugins and disabling, then enabling the plugin itself. This seemed to work momentarily, but days later (especially after updating the plugin to the latest version) problems came back. As you can imagine, this was getting annoying.

At that point, I decided to look at the OS side of sound control (don’t ask why I didn’t do this first) and found that for some crazy reason Firefox was muted in the Vista volume mixer. I turned the volume up and it’s been working ever since. I can’t believe that the problem was caused by something so simple which I should have looked at initially.

I’ve received a new Dell Latitude D630 and wanted to set it up from scratch…format, OS install, drivers, apps…all one step at a time. Well, after the OS was installed (Vista Enterprise), the machine started blue screening (BSOD) and would go into a reboot. Initially, I wasn’t able to see the BSOD error as the machine was set to restart after a failure. After correcting that, I was able to see an error message which wasn’t really that helpful other than it pointed towards a hard drive. Just to be certain, I ran all hardware tests as you can see below and they have all passed.

That told me that the hardware was fine, but that something must be misconfigured and I was right. Under BIOS Setup I have made the following two modifications (based on the HW of the laptop):

1. Under “Onboard Device” section I turned off “Flash Cache Module” which enabled me to

2. change “SATA Operation” from AHCI to ATA.

It now works like a charm!