The Premier Blog For Learning How To Attract. Motivate, And Retain Top IT Staff
At my core, I am an engineer. I recognize this, I accept this, I am proud of this. However, during my career many mentors have been kind enough to hold up that damning mirror of self-vision and have allowed me to see myself as I was: an engineer’s engineer. One key characteristic of this part … Read more
It’s great to have an IT team that is full of go-getters. However, as with everything in life, sometimes teammates can be too competitive. When we let the heat of battle overcome our better judgement, then we’ve got a real problem. When this happens, we stand a very good chance of starting to make very … Read more
So we’ve talked just a bit about the dangers of having players in your department / on your team who get so caught up in something that winning becomes everything to them. It’s almost as though you were attending an auction and it got down to the last two bidders on something and they both … Read more
So here’s an interesting issue that I’m sure that most CIO’s and IT managers would love to have: how best to mange over-the-top “A-Type” personalities? Hey, we all know folks like this (put that mirror down!) These are the people in our company / department / team for which winning can become more important then … Read more
About a year ago I had a chance to sit down with a member of an IT team that was working for me in order to have a heart-to-heart with him. We’ll call him Tim. Tim was a project manager on one of my teams and so far he had been a steady performer. I’d … Read more
Now that we’ve discovered that all humans, including those in in your IT department / on your IT team, respond to four basic drives, we are now faced with the really big question: how does an IT leader use this knowledge to motivate his/her staff? It turns out that there are actually a number of … Read more
We’ve talked about the fact that sometimes employee motivation can be a lot like performing brain surgery – you’ve got to be careful or you’ll end up doing a lot of damage. If an IT manager can realize that their staff (indeed all humans) have four fundamental emotional drivers that need to be met, then … Read more
A great deal has been written on how IT workers can deal with getting a new boss. For that matter, a lot has been written on what you need to do if you become the boss of a collection of IT workers. Shucks, I’ve even written a lot about how to find out what you’re … Read more
Dr. John Median is a developmental molecular biologist who recently sat down with the Harvard Business Review and had a talk about what we’ve recently found out about how the brain works and what this can tell us about being better IT leaders. The key question that IT leaders want to get an answer to … Read more
We spend a lot of time talking about how to be a great IT leader; however, the one thing that we’ve skipped over (until now) has been how to “manage upward”. This convoluted phrase was invented because it got to be too tiresome to keep saying “what can I do to make sure that my … Read more