Being a Leader and Not a Micromanager

Being a Leader – Assessing your Goals and Values

To be the kind of leader who innovates and takes the strategic view, you must constantly assess your career goals and your values in achieving those goals.  This is something you must do throughout your career.  As you aim for the higher technical levels, the task at hand is your primary focus as you strive to achieve becoming the best IT technician you can be.  This is often heavy on technical knowledge, so your focus is frequently on you and what training, experience, and career choices you need to be the best at what you do.  However, as you begin your journey into the IT management threshold, your focus must begin to shift away from yourself and onto those who look to you for leadership and guidance.  Your career goals need to move away from the technical and onto managerial and leadership with a laser focus on the strategic view.  Trust me; the technical vacuum you create when you shift to leadership will be quickly filled. 

Just because you are in a leadership position doesn’t mean you are a leader.  It starts with how you treat your staff and how you support them.  I have had some bad bosses in my career.  There were those who thought that because they were the manager that they could order us around like we were their pawns, yell at us in front of everyone, and make us work overtime or do scut work simply to show us who was in charge.  A true leader supports their staff, nurtures, and guides them, and stands up for them in the face of pressure. 

There will be times when front office will expect and pressure you to walk the party line, even when it goes against your own ethical or professional ideologies.  For me, the answer is always that my staff comes first, and I have wound up butting heads with some heavy hitters in the process, but I have learned over the years to carefully pick and choose my battles so that they both protect my staff and my career.  It doesn’t always work out in my favor, but I wouldn’t change who I am as a leader or a person just to get ahead.  I’ll jump off that soapbox now.  You will be up against this at one point in your career as you progress.  Only you can decide how you will act. 

Mentoring

There is one important piece of the puzzle that is tied directly to your leadership abilities and that is mentoring.  I doubt very seriously that I could have ever gotten to where I am now if it weren’t for the efforts of my mentors.  All of them guided me as I progressed and taught me management, leadership, organizational culture, process improvement, performance management, etc., and were with me every step of the way helping me craft the kind of evaluations that got me noticed.  If you are not mentoring those below you, then I must ask why not?  It is not just something that the promotion panels want to see to demonstrate your long-term leadership commitment, but because it is imperative that we train and prepare the next generation of IT leadership. 

Sure, there are leadership courses and even formally established mentoring programs that are there to cover the above bases, but I can tell you flat out that neither of them gave me the kind of benefit that informal mentoring gave me.  How do you do this?  It is incredibly simple.  Actively seek out those who are demonstrating that they have what it takes and get them under your wing.  Alternatively, some hard-charging folks will come to you for advice and mentoring, so give it to them!  Believe me; this will enhance your professional reputation in ways you can’t fathom.  I personally mentor dozens of people regularly and have happily given career advice, critiqued evaluations, or just lent an ear to dozens more.

There are many things you can impart to your mentees to make them better technicians, managers, leaders, and even better people.  Some of the things you can do to expand their horizons are to teach them the importance of:

• How to take calculated risks that result in outcomes that benefit the organization;
  • Knowing when to take risks is as important as taking them.  Learning how to weigh risk vs. benefit is an important skill that every leader must know.  For example, you don’t take a multi-million-dollar risk without senior leadership buy-in, but a lower cost risk that can pay larger dividends would be an easier pill for them to swallow.  There are even risks that cost nothing more than time and a little effort if you are willing to take the leap. 
    • That is the most important point of mentoring…getting your mentee(s) to start taking that leap, knowing that there is someone behind them to catch them if they fall and who will give them the latitude they need to be willing to do it again.
• Becoming better writers and orators; with a long-term focus on learning how to reach the “senior eyes” audience;
• The critical importance of strategic thinking;
• Understanding the business process.  Everything we do is not technical, no matter how much some want to think that it is;
• Becoming more skilled at Change Management.  How many projects, upgrades, updates, etc. have failed because customers did not want to embrace new technologies, applications, or processes?  Change Management shows you how to address this and get buy-in from all stakeholders involved;
• Getting out of your comfort zone by honestly assessing what is necessary for you to truly grow in your career to expand your leadership and managerial horizons.

Are You Truly Leading or Are You Just Managing?

There are two very distinct schools of thought on whether leadership can be learned.  One says leadership is something you are born with and the other says it can be taught as a skill.  I am a firm believer in the former.  Management, on the other hand, is a skillset that can be learned and needs to be honed at every phase of a person’s career. 

Take a room full of “managers” and watch as a call is shouted out for a volunteer.  Watch as the overwhelming majority of the room sits silently while one, maybe two, step up and answer the call.  It happens all the time.  Consider the various boards at your organization (Awards, Promotion,  and Evaluation Panels, etc.) and you will invariably notice that they seem to be comprised of the same small group of people.  Sure, there is that one person who is on only one board and was probably coerced into being on it, but the ones that are on multiple boards more than likely volunteered or were asked because someone thought they would add value to the group(s).  Those people, whether they even realize it, are the leaders within that organization.  At every post I have been assigned, I was on at least three boards, none of which I was on because I was forced (trust me, if I didn’t want on it, I would have said no), but asked because they knew I could contribute something to the greater mission.  95% of the staff will give you every excuse in the book (too busy with my real job, no skills in the function of the group, etc.), but the crux of it is that they just don’t want the responsibility or the challenge.  Look, you are either someone who will step up, take charge, and get results or you are not.  To me, that is the barometer for what makes a good leader.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think that the leadership training has some real value, but for training managers, not leaders.  Conflict management, diversity, problem-solving, negotiation, adaptability, etc. are all excellent skills to learn to be a good manager, they really are; however, being a great leader means taking charge and motivating your team to get the job done.  Leaders do this by being the best at what they do and through their actions by getting results.  They do this by motivating their people to do their best through leading by example and rewarding them for their accomplishments by ensuring their customers are satisfied, by thinking outside the box to provide innovative solutions, by building relationships through good networks, and by constantly questioning the status quo. 

Management, as a skill, is vitally important and you need to be good at it.  The fuzzy area for an IT manager is how much of it should be technical management and how much should be administrative management.  As you progress in your career, the scales need to be tipped to the administrative and you need to put your focus on being the best manager you can be.  Where the real leadership comes to light is when you start to look at yourself and decide if are you doing all the work or are you leading your team to get the job done.  I’ve started tours at more than one post where my mailbox began to fill up with every trouble ticket, technical request, and question from the customers on the minutiae of daily IT life.  If you are an IT manager and you feel the need to be involved with everything at the working level then you are not leading, you are micromanaging.  The last thing anyone needs is a micromanager running the store.  It makes your staff think that you don’t trust them to do their job, which can kill morale, and it overburdens you when doing your own job, because, as I said before, you should be tending the forest, not the individual trees.

Take a hard look at yourself and ask yourself if you are truly leading or are you micromanaging?  Trust me; the brass will see right through the micromanager as will everyone else.