Drive!

After “What drives motivation?“, check “Drive” from Dan Pink!

Never underestimate what is inside you!

People Management 101 : Motivation & Communication

The following presentation explains some basics about “People Management”. Like what gets people motivated (pleasure & the avoidance pain), how to get them accounted, management by walking around, …

The 8 steps to succesful Change Management

The father of Change Managemnet (John Kotter) outlined 8 steps to succesful Change Management in his book “The Iceberg is melting“. Let’s go through them:

• Set The Stage
  Create a Sense of Urgency : Help others see the need for change and the importance of acting immediately. Remind people that they are on a burning oil rig; they’ll die, if the don’t jump off…
  Pull Together the Guiding Team : Make sure there is a powerful group guiding the change; one with leadership skills, bias for action, credibility, communications ability, authority, analytical skills. Just like project teams; one needs to have a great team to drive the change.
• Decide What To Do
  Develop the Change Vision and Strategy : Clarify how the future will be different from the past, and how you can make that future a reality.
• Make It Happen
  Communicate for Understanding and Buy-in : Make sure as many others as possible understand and accept the vision and the strategy. Start communicating from the start; remember that there is always communication, be sure that you are the one providing the correct information!
  Empower Others to Act : Remove as many barriers as possible so that those who want to make the vision a reality can do so.
  Produce Short-Term Wins : Create some visible, unambiguous successes as soon as possible. Go for the quick wins to boost moral.
  Don’t Let Up : Press harder and faster after the first successes. Be relentless with instituting change after change until the vision becomes a reality. Be persistent in driving the change.
• Make It Stick
  Create a New Culture : Hold on to the new ways of behaving, and make sure they succeed, until they become a part of the very culture of the group. Think neurological levels here…. where culture is at the top of the pyramid.

The difference between Consultancy and Bodyshopping

During my career I had multiple discussions about the line between bodyshopping & consultancy. Yet “Work The Line” has a really nice post on this.

Some excerpts…

Does the firm have genuine practice areas based on shared intellectual property? A consultancy should have mechanisms for capturing, sharing, and reusing intellectual property in areas of specialized expertise. These mechanisms can be embodied in people (practice leaders), processes (defined practices for knowledge-sharing), and tools (collaborative software, reusable collateral, etc.).

So is there an infrastructure to back up your knowledge workers? As a consultancy firm your key asset is the knowledge of your people, so are the able to share this asset?

Does the firm limit its consultants’ billable time for strategic purposes? A body shop bills as much of its consultants’ time as possible, all the time. In contrast, a consultancy continually invests time in improving its collective knowledge and performance.

Key indicators here are training & the % of people “on the bench”. If people are allocated fulltime towards a customer; how can they be acquire their knowledge? One might say that this is because they are trained on the job, but those are not always the grounds where one can gain much experience in new/expert fields. When spending all your time “on the road” is not allowing the time for reading, communicating and reflection which is essential to maintain quality.

Does the firm measure success in terms of profitability per engagement? This question is closely related to the last two. If a firm’s goal is simply to bill as much as possible, and its preference is to bill for time and materials, it will have no interest in the profitability of individual engagements, and will simply “run the clock” as long as it can. Conversely, if a firm uses its knowledge to deliver high-value fixed-price engagements, it will try to perform engagements as quickly and efficiently as possible, in order to maximize their profitability.

The profit made on project with a fixed price is based upon your knowledge. The more you know, the more efficient you can provide the solution. Where is your motivation when you charge by the hour? Then it’s just a hidden form of interim work (to me).

Does the firm leverage new skills to build higher-level relationships? Over time, a firm builds skills engagement by engagement. It comes in to offer skill A, and picks up skill B in the process. If the firm simply adds these new skills to its list of “things we do,” it is behaving like a body shop. If the firm analyzes, consolidates and leverages these skills into higher-level client relationships, it is behaving like a consultancy.

Do you have many different profile which are being “rented” towards clients, or do you have a specific area where your knowledge dominates? This come close to the question whether or not the firm can distinct one self (as a brand) by encapsulating a specific value proposition.

Conclusion

A body shop bills as much of its consultants’ time as possible, all the time. In contrast, a consultancy continually invests time in improving its collective knowledge and performance.

HR Retention with Generation Y

The following excerpt from “The War for Talent” is something where old-skool HR management struggles.

Gen Y Generation Y—people born after 1980—whose outlook has been shaped by, among other things, the Internet, information overload, and overzealous parents. HR professionals say that these workers demand more flexibility, meaningful jobs, professional freedom, higher rewards, and a better work–life balance than older employees do. People in this group see their professional careers as a series of two- to three-year chapters and will readily switch jobs, so companies face the risk of high attrition if their expectations aren’t met. As one HR director explained, “The millennial generation doesn’t want to work 100 hours a week. These kids want a different deal; they have seen their parents work all their life for the same company and then get fired. They are not interested in killing themselves for work.”

So the gen Y doesn’t always get portrayed positively. Yet HR has to face the fact that these people are our new knowledge workers. The generation Y wants the TRUE win-win situation in relation to their work situation. They provide knowledge to the company, and in return the company will have to provide a decent platform for this generation to grow. The financial side alone just doesn’t cut it with them, they want to be part of “Enterprise 2.0“!

Gen Y, the Knowledge Worker 2.0!

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The man with the plan; the communication plan!

There is always communication!
When it comes down to change, it’s all about communication. Yet how often does one practice this in a decent manner? The first step is to realize that there is -always- communication! Let us say that we’re managing a restructure… Would you tend to hold communication off until you know everything? If so, did you think that people won’t talk amongst themselves? The ‘gossip’ is also communication, and it’s even communication that you cannot control! It happens because people do not like uncertainty and they will fill in the blanks with their own stories. Even though you want people to be creative, I don’t think this is the best situation to let them fantasize.

Getting talent to nest

Turnover Crisis?
Just before the long weekend, a fellow IT enthusiast pointed my attention towards the following article: Solving the IT Turnover Crisis

Let’s bring forth an excerpt from the intro:

… You’ve probably noticed that the most talented software developers tend to not stick around at one place for too long. The least talented folks, on the other hand, entrench themselves deep within the organization, often building beachheads of bad code that no sane developer would dare go near, all the while ensuring their own job security and screwing up just enough times not to get fired.

This must be something a lot of people have experienced. The “top performers”, as the talented are often called, are generally the first to leave the leave the nest when trouble arises (f.e. yet another restructuring).