A few days ago, I was talking to a person for whom I have the utmost respect. I particularly respect his ability to sit with a client and make a solid connection in a very short amount of time. If you have an angry client situation, this guy is the ultimate troubleshooter.
He told me about a situation where he was sitting with a client and talking about raising the rates that they were being charged. Anyone who has ever had to do that knows that it’s not fun for either side. He described how he showed them usage figures and told them about the increased costs based on the client’s growth. He made a rational, intelligent case for the increase.
The client didn’t get it.
In spite of my friend’s explanation and facts and figures and considerable powers of persuasion, they didn’t really understand. All they heard was, you’re going to have to pay more. They got to the end of the meeting and, being the perceptive person that he is, he knew they didn’t get it.
He told me that he stopped just before they were about to get up to leave, and he said “Guys, I just want to say something before we leave.” He proceeded to tell them in BASIC, REAL terms why he had to raise their rates and why he couldn’t continue to serve and maintain his high standards at the old rate. He was sincere, he was direct, and they got it.
For me, knowing how superb a communicator my friend is, this was a wake-up call. If this guy struggled in making his audience understand, how much harder do I need to work to get my point across? How much effort do I need to expend in connecting with the people I need to communicate with? How much more thought needs to go into reducing the noise and increasing the signal in my conversation?
</food for thought>
(In case you wonder, that’s the symbol for Real Numbers. And no, I’m not a math geek…)
This week’s entry comes courtesy of my esteemed colleague, Alex Robson. It’s a sweet little app that runs totally in your browser and seems to do just about everything that Microsoft Visio does.
Diagrams, flow-charts, floor plans, you name it and gliffy.com can handle it. It takes about 30 seconds to get started with this tool and it is surprisingly simple. The interface is clean and straightforward:
I was really surprised to see you can do things like copy/paste and grouping shapes. Obviously Visio can do far more, but if you just use the basics like I do, this is a great lightweight replacement. (Fear not, you can save your stuff as an SVG file which Visio can open.)
If you opt for the pay version, it’s just five bucks a month and it gives you some really cool collaboration features and increases your storage. Check it out!
I am a mess. I’ll freely admit it. Those who have worked with me know that I have to juggle many different eggs from vastly different worlds and at times, some of them fall. (It’s not so bad as I make a fantastic omelet.) As a result, I’m always looking for a better way to stay organized.
Evernote has been around for quite a while. The last time I looked at it was a few years ago, and didn’t really see how it would work for me. A friend of mine started using it and mentioned it so I went back to check it out. It seems that the magical elves at Evernote have been busy!
There are clients for the browser, Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android and Blackberry. You can even send notes to your account via Twitter! I’m packing the Droid around these days, so I downloaded that app and the Windows client. I’ve been using it for several weeks now and have been very impressed.
Here are screenshots of the windows client and web client:
The free account comes with 40 GB of space (premium is only $5/month for 500 MB and no ads), which seems to be plenty so far. I love being able to go to my phone when I’m out and about and have all of my notes and lists in one place. The tagging and search functions seem to work very nicely, but I don’t yet have a ton of data in there to give it a real test. The ink note story is not so great (I have used OneNote for a long time and am spoiled) but the ability to access data everywhere overshadows that weakness.
Once Sharepoint 2010 and OneNote 2010 and Windows Mobile 7 phones are out on the market, I intend to see if I can match the functionality of Evernote and still have all the things I like about OneNote. In the meantime, definitely take a look at Evernote.
What happens when one person who is used to being the smartest person in the room has to work with another person who is used to being the smartest person in the room? Or how about 3 or 4 of them? I’ve worked for a lot of companies that would give anything to have this type of situation, but what about the unforeseen side effects of such a thing? Sir Isaac Newton famously (and humbly) said “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” Would he have been as gracious if he had to go to staff meetings with those giants week after week? Would he have been as quick to self-deprecate if he had to constantly defend his ideas to those giants?
I’m sure you’ve know people like this. Maybe you are one of them. Over the course of their lives, they have always emerged as the people that others turn to when they need things done. They tend to be accustomed to having the best, fastest answer to any given problem. I think the conditioning that happens to this sort of individual happens so subtly that they don’t even realize it’s happening.
So what’s the big deal? My esteemed colleague (I told you I would give you credit, Steve) and I have been talking about this for some time. Here are a few thoughts on the danger this presents to teams.
- Tunnel Vision – Every human being has an ego that tells them that their ideas are better than someone else’s. Your ego in this has been fortified by your entire life’s experience in which your ideas were always the ones that were picked. This can really negatively impact a group of people who are trying to solve a problem.
- Assumptions – You’re smart. You know your teammates are smart. Therefore, they must know the same things you do, right? I think this leads to NOT exploring ideas and NOT talking through how you came to your conclusions. Assuming in a team full of smart people can be lethal.
- Communication Gap – I suppose that communications is really at the heart of any team’s problems. Any time you have more than one person working towards the same goal, communication becomes the glue that holds it all together. I think smart people don’t sit and think, “I’m not going to communicate with that other person.” I think more often it’s a combination of “We have daily/weekly/monthly status meetings to get us on the same page” along with some “I’m doing the WORK, I can stop and talk about it every five minutes” with just a dash of “I figured it out, so should everyone else.”
I am fortunate to work with as many HIGHLY talented people as I do. Every last one of them has some area(s) of absolute genius. In spite of that (I suppose I’m arguing here because of that), we’ve fallen prey to some of these problems, mainly because we were unaware of this subtle cause. But as GI Joe cartoons taught me when I was young, knowing is half the battle.
I am a chubby computer geek. No, seriously, I love food (which has lead to my marshmallowy midsection) and I love technology and sci-fi and reading and host of other things which lead to my junior high ostracism and labeling as a geek. Being a chubby computer geek does not (in my case anyway) lead to a great deal of team sport. Or any sport. Or really anything that involves breaking out in a sweat.
(This guy was Brad Pitt compared to how I was.)
I realize now that may have been a liability for me, even along the uber-nerd path that I have followed in life. I wonder if I had participated in any kind of team anything, would it have taken me as long to have this realization. It’s embarrassingly obvious when you think about it, but it took me years to really get it. The realization is this: Not only is it IMPOSSIBLE to do everything yourself, it is no FUN either.
A good team of technology people is an absolute joy to work in. A good team is orders of magnitude more productive than an average team (as is a good developer, according to Steve McConnell). For productivity, for morale, for ROI on those salary dollars (you know they ain’t cheap), every business should be striving to make their technology teams the best they can be.
So how is that done? A few thoughts:
- Communication – If you don’t have communication, you don’t have a team. It’s that simple. How can more than one human being work towards, or even agree on, a single goal without communicating. Once again, I feel like Captain Obvious saying things like this, but it seems that communication is one of the hardest things for teams to get right. I’m saying words and they are saying words, but we never seem to get in sync. Not getting this right will kill a team in a hurry.
- Trust – This one is a little trickier. Volumes have been written on the topic, but what can I actively tell you to do to build trust? Be trustworthy? It’s a true answer, but it’s fuzzy. How about, don’t undermine trust? Maybe that’s a better angle on it. When you want to say something you think is witty at the expense of someone on your team or their work, just don’t. It’s harder to build bridges than to build walls, but it’s essential that everyone commit to it.
- Value – You could use a word here like “results”. Or “outcomes”, or even “shipping”. What I mean is the thing that your team has to get done. The reason why the business is giving the team money. Whether it’s delivering a web site to a client, a working Exchange implementation to the company, or that new feature your accounting department has been waiting for, the team MUST be focused on the results of the labor at LEAST as much as on the labor itself. Value for the end-user should never be far from any team member’s mind.
</go team>
