I've read a bunch of books that promise to teach management skills. Too often, the advice given is superficial or simplistic, like, "Sit down with the two upset employees to help them resolve their differences." Uh yeah, right. When do we get to the part where I bang their heads together? Alternatively, you can read management books composed of sound bites that emphasize attitude or theory, with case studies that have Happy Ever After endings. These books are usually best employed for squashing large spiders. I've never found them helpful for anything else.

Which is why it was a breath of fresh air to attend a conference where people talked about pragmatic problem solving issues, offered no pretense that good answers always exist (much less are easy), and was fun. Fun?! Imagine that. The Amplifying Your Effectiveness conference is the brainchild of Jerry Weinberg, whose name may be familiar to you as the author of Secrets of Consulting, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, or The Psychology of Computer Programming.

I spent only a day at the conference -- I wish I had time for more -- and attended two sessions. One, appropriately enough for my telecommuting lifestyle, used simulation and discussion to explore the challenges of working on a distributed team. The other, led by Esther Derby and Johanna Rothman, based on their book Management Behind Closed Doors,  discussed how to conduct effective one-on-one meetings to learn about project status, develop capability, and uncover obstacles.

All that sounds just like the dull business books I mentioned, but they didn't work that way. Everything at the AYE conference is a workshop; nobody stands at a podium to issue advice from On High. I started the day wearing my mantle of journalistic dispassion and distance, and it lasted all of ten minutes. (Okay, so I'm not good at wearing a mantle; it always falls off.) These workshops really engaged me; I forgot to take notes.

I soon found myself in an exercise where the Home Office had tasks to outsource to a team overseas as well as sort-of-local team members who spent 70% of their time on another project. Never mind that the tasks were jigsaw puzzles, and that the part-timers were working on origami. I worked as a full-time telecommuter for at least a decade, but our "Home Office" team made every mistake in the book. When we went over the results, people re-realized the importance of having team meetings; of creating a common understanding of the goals and the role of each person; and the need to either build trust between remote team members or have really clear work definitions.

That last bit isn't fluff. One real-world issue that came up in discussion was the uncomfortable situation when you have a team of developers working here, and a team of developers in, say, India -- and it's obvious to everybody that the local team's jobs are being sent overseas. How much trust can possibly exist, pointed out the presenter, Esther Derby, when the home office team doesn't want the folks in India to succeed? How well do you think those teams will work together? Obviously, in such a case the real problem isn't  compensating for distance, but dealing with the feelings of the people at home. It only seems like the distance is the problem.

Oh. That's right. You want some of the lessons learned? Here's a few.

* Have a "synch up" meeting on a regular basis. Nothing really got accomplished until we found a way to get all the teams together.

* We needed a better project start. Everyone in the

You do not have flash or javascript support.

Average (1 vote)

Reply
Digg this
Slashdot
Reddit
LinkedIn