Alex pulled just the right quote from this article from The Insider blog:

“You can’t hire someone who can make sandwiches and teach them to be happy,” says Jay, “So we hire happy people and teach them to make sandwiches”

This may seem like an oversimplification, but it’s true! I’ve always felt when hiring that you are much better interviewing the person first, then worry about their skills. I’ve seen folks with more experience than I come in to a job and have a negative impact on those around them and I’ve seen folks with practically no experience come in and do wonderfully.

The full interview with Pret’s Head of Communication Jay Chapman has some fantastic content and is well worth the read. sandwich

Companies today want their employees to cooperate more, to work well in teams, to share knowledge and to work to achieve success together. That is why it makes absolutely no sense to send them on trainings that are mainly competitive in nature. Even when these events let people work together in smaller teams, competing against other teams, the focus still ends up being on competition, not cooperation.

There’s a simple reason why these events are almost always competitive: Competition = instant passion. Setting up a competition activates a primal urge in many people to win at all costs, making them very focused and active – which looks great to the organizers.

But there’s a huge downside to this – which means that not only are many team building events a huge waste of time, they can be actively harmful to teams.

Alex goes on to point out the top 5 problems with competitive team building events. For a less competitive approach to team building I encourage you to consider the following:

First, try to take the pressure out of it for all the reasons Alex mentions in his article.

Second, try to keep it loosely structured. For example, a trip to a baseball game is great because it gives everyone a common experience but also leaves plenty of time to chat and get to know each other.

Third, involve everyone! You’re not going to get everyone all the time but it’s important to do things that everyone is able to do. It’s fine to encourage people to go slightly out of their comfort zone, but don’t plan an event that you know certain people won’t go to.

Fourth, have at least some of your team building/social events during work hours. Lunches can be a great opportunity for this. The important thing is to involve the people who may not make it to after work events.

You can’t force people to have fun, but you can certainly give them the opportunity. Honestly the best team building experiences I can remember have been practical jokes – always in the best of humor of course. It may seem unlikely, but you’d be surprised how many people want to help when you say you’re going to fill the CEO’s office with balloons!

team building, office, work, leadership

As Rob notes in an update it’s not quite as black-and-white as he paints it but the article offers a terse analysis of two communication styles that made me actively think about what and why I communicate.

communication

Many of the developers I know have been programming since they were in junior high. Whether it was building text-based games on an Apple IIe or creating a high school football roster app in Visual Basic, it’s something they did for the challenge, for the love of learning new things and, oh yes, for the chicks. Ladies love a man who can speak BASIC to his Apple.

College graduates face a sad reality when they leave the protective womb of a university and have to get their first real job. Many of my friends found jobs paying around $25k out of school, and were amazed that the starting engineering and computer science salaries were nearly double that. But the majority of the engineers in my class didn’t become engineers for the money; we did it because it touched on a deep inner yearning to tinker and impress their friends. And did I mention the chicks?

Money is a motivating factor for most of us, but assuming comparable pay, what is it that makes some companies attract and retain developers while others churn through them like toilet paper?

Now, don’t get me wrong, you need to compensate your people appropriately as well, but ask your developers if they have any side projects and you’ll probably find that the best ones have some exciting side projects going on that they’re doing to learn something new, give back to the community or just to help someone out. This is the list of how you can tap into that energy at the office and get the most out of your developers.

via digg

management, project management, programming, information technology

Alexander has compiled a list of 10 seeeeeriously cool workplaces including Pixar, Google, Redbull and many more.

It’s astounding how little attention most employers pay to the environment their employees work in. A good environment will do wonders for morale, retention, creativity, collaboration and countless other facets of your business.

My workspace is still emerging but the great part is I now work from home so I have full control.

office, cubicle, work environment

He stresses that hard work and keeping an eye out for new opportunities are key, and they are. From my experience I would add one more thing to that:

Make a point to fully understand everything you do. Sure, you may know what the oracle listener does and how to start and stop it, but if you don’t understand it you won’t be able to troubleshoot it. You may know when to apply a bitmapped index, but do you know why?

This depth of knowledge is what has set me apart from other IT professionals I’ve worked with. It speeds development and troubleshooting and time after time has made me the go-to guy when people have questions.

How do you get to this technological point of enlightenment? Start at the bottom. I took several computer science classes as an undergraduate. They weren’t at a top university, hell I didn’t even get good grades in most of them, but I was there every day listening to understand. Even just an introductory computer science course, if you’ve never had one, can fill in some background on how searches, queues, logic, hardware and software all work.

After college I worked as a Solaris administrator. That gave me a strong foundation in UNIX and since I displayed a good understanding of UNIX, less than a year after becomming a sys-admin I was slated to become a DBA as one of the companies other DBAs left.

So, now that I’ve rambled on for a bit, what was my point? If you take the time to understand every step, not just slap together a solution, you will generate solutions which are more robust. When you make mistakes you will be in a much better position to learn from them.

My only other peice of advice is resist the urge to cut corners. Do everything you do as well as you possibly can. If you need help, get it. If the project takes longer than expected, fine. Everything you put out there reflects on you as a professional. I like to say “I’d rather not do a job than do a job poorly.”

professional development, oracle, dba, information technology

The article echoes many of my personal sentiments that your administrators and developers need to be encouraged to work smarter, not harder, even to the point of having “free time.”

… You want an environment where sysadmins kick back and read IT magazines occasionally, because their run-of-the-mill administrative tasks (adding users, managing disk space, etc.) are all scripted and/or automated. They can then focus their energies on the unexpected and unavoidable issues that crop up from time-to-time.

Beyond handling the unexpected, through having this “free time” administrators will have the ability to identify areas in need of improvement. If your administrators are running around fixing stuff all the time your team has a problem! Not only will morale, and therefore retention suffer but your administrators will have no time for evaluating new opportunities.

The best teams celebrate those who sit back and let their computers do their work for them. You want to have a project team that considers repetitive development activities to be tasteless. Sometimes necessary, but generally frowned upon.

Check out the full article and think a bit about what your team could be doing if they weren’t fighting fires all the time.

Of course this is exactly why I am writing a book on Oracle Shell Scripting due out next year.

project management, it management, information technology, database administration, system administration

So how’d [write a whole book in twenty days]? Well the answer is obvious isn’t it? Clear goals, hard work, perseverance, sticking to it, eliminating distractions and writing no matter what, right?

Wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. I tried that. Didn’t work. So I tried the exact opposite and that worked.

Like most of Alexander’s posts, this list is both highly applicable and refreshingly unconventional. Some of these things I find I’ve already been doing and others I’ll have to remember to try.

While my publisher would probably take issue with #9 (No deadlines or goals) I’m sure these tips will find their way into how I blog and work on my books.

writing, blogging

For a C-level executive, the idea here is pretty simple: If you want to leverage the wisdom of the crowd, if you want to tap into the creative genius of your entire organization, if you want to leverage the full capabilities of emergent intelligence, you have to trust your people and you have to get out of their way. As a C-level executive, your only job is to create an environment that fosters innovation and success.

Check out the full article at Innovation Creators

management, micromanagement, project management

Alexander cites many ways the wrong customer can have a negative impact on your organization resulting in employee dissatisfaction and even poor customer service. There are some lessons here that some will be uncomfortable with, but it’s a great look at the big picture.

Oh, and thanks to Donald Burleson for sending this on to me!

management, project management, cat herding, customer service