Personal | Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

Focus on Your Commitments – A New Way to Work

Jul 092011

Do you start the day opening your email and looking at the hundreds or thousands of messages in your Inbox? How does that make you feel? Overwhelmed, stressed and feeling like you are always behind on your commitments?

Do you have days where you know you worked very hard but somehow have nothing to show what you accomplished? How does that make you feel? Unproductive, overworked and stressed?

Do you feel that everyday you are at the beck and call of everyone else and do not have any control of what new crisis will hit you next? How does that make you feel? Dis-empowered, helpless and always wondering what the next crisis is?

These three symptoms typified my work life since I became a manager almost four years ago. I often said to my fellow managers:

“I am working really hard but it is not sustainable to do 10 and 12 hour days. I have to find a way to work smart so that my hard work really pays off!”

I attended a training course on using Outlook 2010 in May that has fundamentally changed how I approach my work. The course was offered by Priority Management Systems Inc and called Working Sm@rt with Microsoft Outlook. The course focused on using Outlook as a real productivity tool instead of using it just for email and calendaring. The instructor calls this “using Outlook with a business planning approach”.

The premise of the course is that in order to be productive, you need to focus on your commitments. To do this, you have to stop using your email Inbox as your To Do list. Face it, who puts things in your Inbox? You or other people.

As long as you start your day working in your Inbox, you will always be reactive in your efforts and working to someone else’s agenda.

To change this approach, the instructor helped us configure out Outlook client to open in our calendar and task list view. This is revolutionary for me. Previous to this, I used my Inbox, a paper based Day Timer journal, a Notepad document, a OneNote page and an Excel spreadsheet to try to keep To Do lists. None actually suited how I worked and I always found that I missed something or got distracted by conflicting priorities due to using multiple lists. Read more...

Thinking about Your Career Path

education, leadership, management No Responses »

Jun 152011

I have the privilege of leading a great group of IT professionals at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Part of my role is to help my team members think about and plan for their careers. I wrote about an approach using Personal Learning Plans that contributes to my thinking about this topic. I also added my thoughts to something Chris Lockhart (@chrisonea) wrote called The Right Stuff in a post called Building on the Right Stuff.

I had two sessions over the past weeks helping intermediate systems analysts think about where they should focus their efforts in their learning plans and about their future career paths. I introduced both people to our thinking about the types of people that are needed in every organization (in our case in IT organizations).

We started by talking about some of these continuum that influence careers:

Individual vs Team
Follower vs Leader
Technical vs Functional
Departmental vs Enterprise
Specialist vs Generalist

I firmly believe you need to know yourself before you can determine the paths you will take. I suggested to both team members to take the Myers-Briggs tests to get a clearer sense of themselves. Taking this approach also allows us to have a common vocabulary when talking about personality attributes. Take a look at my blog post Being a Teacher Works for Me. I suggest you take the test and see if it matches your perception of yourself. I will write another post that builds on the next step of our discussion by looking at what attributes we should work on.

Finding Time …

leadership, management, personal 2 Responses »

May 122011

I found two great articles in my Twitter feed this week that really struck home for me.

Over the past decade, I have prided myself on how busy I am multi-tasking and having a calendar booked solid. My hard work has paid off as I successfully progressed in my career, learned many new things and served my team and customers to the best of my ability.

But … with this self imposed hectic/chaotic pace, I have seen my commitment to fitness deteriorate, my personal and family life being compromised all for the sake of working harder (not necessarily smarter).

The first article I came across was retweeted by the American Management Association (@AMAnet):

#Leadership & White Space. (RT @mikemyatt) #Management | http://ow.ly/4Rn8i

Mike Myatt (@MikeMyatt) started the article Leadership and Whitespace with a great quote:

I don’t care how busy you are, but I do care about what you accomplish – the former doesn’t always lead to the latter.

After reading the article about creating “white space” in my calendar, I took some time to think about how I could go about doing this. It’s not easy when you have grown up in a management culture of “do more with less” and “deliver, deliver, deliver”. When I started the management role of my team of 22 analysts, I deliberately chose to take a “servant leadership” approach that focused on setting direction, empowering my team and then managing the inevitable roadblocks, politics and priority changes that come along the way. So do I have an answer today … no but I am committed to work on it.

The first reader comment on Mike’s post was from Tanveer Naseer (@TanveerNaseer) who wrote the second article I mentioned – Learning to Appreciate the White Spaces. Tanveer provided four reasons to create white spaces:

Provides opportunities for contemplation and review

Shifts our decision making from reflexive reactions to measured, deliberate responses

Allows you to address those unanticipated issues without penalizing other tasks

Even machines need maintenance/repair

These are great guides and really challenge me to rethink my approach to work. Thank you @MikeMyatt and @TanveerNaseer, you both have given me new insights on how to be a better leader and manager.

ps: For the social media naysayers, this is yet another powerful reason that I believe Twitter is an essential part of my professional and personal development!