Effective
Engineering
e-Newsletter
– 3/05/2009
This is your monthly e-Newsletter from
Effective Engineering Consulting Services
(www.effectiveeng.com).
If you would like to receive Effective Engineering e-newsletters as they are
published, please send an email to
e-newsletter@effectiveeng.com, and we
will add you to our distribution list. Comments and suggestions are welcome
and encouraged!
eN-090305:
Hire Adults, Expect Results!
By Tom
Dennis – President, Effective Engineering [tdennis@effectiveeng.com]
You’re a manager who
has just been given control of an important new project, and you want to do
absolutely everything you can to make it a sterling success with features
and functions that will guarantee strong market success (generating great
revenues), outstanding quality, on (or ahead of) time delivery, and within
budget. You’ve been given some range of freedom in building your new team;
some to be chosen from among existing employees, and the authority to hire
some new employees specifically for your project. Most of the available
existing employees have been around for a while, and have a mix of
capabilities and motivations. You know most of these folks, to varying
degrees, and can learn more about them from peers and others. Your new hire
budget (as with your overall budget) is, of course, fixed, but you have a
choice of how you want to spend that money. You can bring in a good number
of inexperienced (and less expensive) people, or fewer (and more expensive)
experienced people, or a mix of both. What should guide you in building
your new team, and how should you go about it? In the words of my good
friend Lee Beaumont**, “Hire adults,
expect results!”
First let me clarify what I mean by experience and by adult.
Experience
in this instance should be viewed as directly applicable and applied
knowledge about one or more aspects of the project that are essential to its
success. Experience in this definition has little to do with age. There
are people straight out of school who may have specialized experience that
may be absolutely critical to success, and there may be people who have been
around for a long time, but whose experiences, while significant and
valuable elsewhere, may not be at all applicable in this project. If you
want to succeed, you will need experts with the right kinds of experience.
Being an adult has far more to do with behavior than with
chronological age. It has to do with levels of personal responsibility,
integrity, and trust. Adults are people who can be trusted to honor their
commitments and deliver honest and reliable results in the times they said
they would (see also
eN-050804 – Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say, and Do What You Say You’ll
Do!). With adults, you don’t spend your time babysitting and
resolving stupid conflicts, picking up dropped balls, listening to “can’t
do” excuses and other childish behavior. With adults, you get a level of
initiative, creativity, and leadership that can emerge and transform the
team and project to a new level; breakthrough products can result. With
adults, new people in the organization have excellent role models to learn
from, and a healthy mentorship relationship can develop that brings benefits
to the mentor, apprentice, team, and project. With adults, you have people
you trust to talk to and collaborate with in problem solving. With adults,
problems can be foreseen, anticipated, and avoided much earlier and at much
less cost. With adults, people rise to the occasion, and delivering on
commitments becomes expected and fun. In my career I have known people
straight out of school who exhibited outstanding adult behavior, and
well-seasoned, even experienced people who still behave like children. Some
children (of any age) can be trained, and some cannot! Being an adult does
not mean you shouldn’t have fun in your work. Adults can still have fun at
work, but not at the expense of others or the project. In fact, having fun
should really be a prerequisite, since it is one of the key elements that
motivate responsible adults to look forward to going to work every day.
My daughter once worked for a ‘dot com’ company shortly before the
bubble burst. The concept this company had was actually a fairly good one
with reasonable prospects for success. They brought in an experienced team
with a solid background. However, the management team made childish
decisions that proved fatal to the company. On many occasions, when she
described what was going on in the company, I commented to her that the
company needed some adult supervision in management. Their decision making
processes appeared to me to often be random and capricious. The company
limped along for a while, making questionable, and often wrong, decisions
along the way, but the crowning glory of immaturity came when the management
team decided to spend their scarce and precious funds on expensive office
furniture rather than investing those funds in building the business. When
I heard this, I told her the end was near, and sure enough, a few months
later they shut the doors, due to lack of funds, on what could have been a
successful operation in adult hands.
On the other hand, I once worked at a company that started out as a true
garage operation and grew to about a $1.4B business. The founders there,
despite their many child-like quirks and idiosyncrasies (some things they
did were fun for everyone, and others were just bizarre), had their heads
screwed on straight when it came to delivering what their customers wanted
and in keeping costs down so that the business could grow. All furniture
was bare-bones and bought used at fire-sale prices. All the meeting rooms
had no chairs and stand-up tables, with an emphasis on getting in, getting
done what needed to be done quickly, and getting out. While there were many
other things wrong or questionable at this company, they ran it as a focused
lean, mean, fighting machine and for a long time it grew and prospered.
So, you want to build a team of adults with applicable experience to embrace
the project and help ensure it will be a great success. While adults in the
team are mandatory throughout, and experience is critical, you don’t
necessarily want a team filled exclusively with experts. You also need
members on the team who will complement the capabilities of the experienced
experts. You need people who can carry out the tasks and experiments
critical to proving and practically implementing the concepts that the
experts develop. Pick the mix of experts and implementers carefully. You
also want to avoid clashing egos and turf battles, so it is critical that
members of your team can get along with each other and cooperate and
collaborate well. Another key element is to give your team the freedom and
opportunity to spread their wings and make this project far more than the
sum of its parts. Trust this team (with reasonable controls) to show that
they can make pigs fly! (See
eN-081002 -- Pigasus – When Pigs Fly!)
Now it’s time to actually build your team. First, look over the available
existing employees and choose carefully. Based on the specific areas of
expertise and experience you need, who among these people best fit the
project needs? Think of it like casting a movie, finding the best person
for each role, not just the stars. If you need people who you know would be
perfect for the team, but who are not in the available pool, see what you
can do to bring them on board. Perhaps you can barter with a peer and agree
to trade someone they have for someone you have (this works particularly
well when the trade is good for all involved). Perhaps you can get a person
you’d like in a reasonable timeframe. Perhaps you’ll need to escalate this
to your boss or higher. You don’t want to damage someone else’s project,
but often you need who you need and someone at a higher level needs to
evaluate the tradeoffs and priorities (see also
eN-090205 – When Everything Is High Priority, Nothing Is High Priority!).
Bartering, trading, cajoling, escalating, threatening, and other possible
actions should all be considered, although carefully. Using this process,
or something like it, go through the list of available people, and others
who you’d like to be available, and start building your team from within.
Next, think about what you really need from new hires. Do you want experts,
or are there enough of them in house? Are there experts available outside
and how do you find them, how can you get them, in what timeframe, and what
will they cost? Do you need worker bees who are fresh and highly motivated
to get in and help the experienced people accomplish their goals, and gain
experience while doing so? Are these people better found inside or
outside?
What are other ways you can increase your effectiveness and efficiency?
Think outside the box. Would it be better to consider some outside help in
the form of consultants or contract development resources with specific
expertise that would enable them to very quickly provide a critical element
of your project that it would take considerable time to develop internally?
Are there elements of the project where pieces could be effectively
outsourced (locally, domestically, or internationally)? In looking at such
choices you need to think carefully about how you would manage such
outside-the-box choices; the management challenges are generally far greater
than you may initially think. Still, your goal is to get the job done in
the most effective fashion within an available budget. Your primary
limitation is your budget, not how you choose to spend it. Get creative to
think outside the box about ways to get the most bang for your budget buck.
However you organize it, populating the team with adults is one of the most
critical elements, but it may not be the most critical. In the end,
you are likely the most critical (yet often nearly invisible) element
in the success of your project. You need to lead by example. Don’t ask
others to do things that you would not do yourself (assuming you had the
skills and expertise of the members of your team). Nothing should be above
you and nothing should be beneath you. When you demand extra efforts and
time of your team, put in the extra efforts and time yourself. When
difficulties arise, be the leader who moves the obstacles out of the way so
your team can do their jobs more effectively (see also
eN-030313 – Move the Rocks and People Travel Faster). Shield
the team from unnecessary distractions and impediments (see also
eN-070607 – Shield Your Troops!). Get your team the tools to
enable them to be most productive (see also
eN-030410 – Use the Right Tools to Do the Job Right). Don’t set
your team up with unrealistic expectations or sunny day scenarios (see also
eN-060608 – Unrealistic Expectations, and
eN-070503 – Sunny Day Scenarios). Communicate, communicate,
communicate! (see also
eN-070104 – “What We’ve Got Here Is A Failure To Communicate!”)
Most important, establish an environment where the team feels trusted and
earns the trust of you and others (see also
eN-080207 – Trust Me, I’m Not Like The Others!). Trust is
earned and not owed, but you have to show trust to gain trust. Show the
team you trust them and that they can trust you.
When done right, getting a critical project launched properly can result in
a project delivered with spectacular results. This means the right people,
the right product, the right plan, and the right execution. Key to that
success is the team that pulls it off. When done right, the experience can
be nothing short of exhilarating! It can make every day an exciting one you
wake up early to and look forward to. The members of the team are critical,
and to maximize your opportunities for success, you need to hire
adults and expect results!
----
** [Note: This topic, the expression ‘Hire
Adults, Expect Results’, and his usual clarifying comments come from my good
friend Lee Beaumont (see prior e-Newsletters
eN-071004- The Schedule Estimate Extortion Game,
eN-081113 – Start Spreading The News!, and
eN-090108 – Can You Pass The Red Face Test?). Lee has and continues
to be an outstanding source of thought provoking concepts, ideas, and
insights. Please also check out Lee’s excellent website
www.emotionalcompetency.com, and particularly his pages
www.emotionalcompetency.com/responsibility.htm and
http://www.emotionalcompetency.com/trust.htm.]
Copyright © 2009
Effective Engineering Consulting Services, All Rights Reserved
