Do I have a dog in this Fight? If I did, it'd be the Warner Brothers Barnyard Dog.

After my term of service on the PASS board of directors ended in December of 2009, I fully intended to stay far, far out of the way.  It’s an intention that I’ve largely been able to fulfill,excluding the odd conversation with an occasional board member or committee chair looking for a little impartial advice when weighing some consideration or other.

If you keep up with going’s on within PASS, then you’ll know that there’s been some hullabaloo lately.  Please reference paragraph 1 again at this point to understand that I don’t really know much about all this hullabaloo.  (I read one blog post by Stuart Ainsworth and decided to henceforth avoid all other mention of the situation). I mentioned that I’ve been trying to stay out of PASS’ way, correct?  But sometimes you just can’t dodge a bullet, even when you’re bustin’ out some Matrix-like moves and goin’ all Neo/Keanu Reeves on it.

To wit, I was happy to volunteer in hosting our first Music City SQL Saturday, which also happened to occur the day after the PASS board of directors wrapped up their quarterly meeting here in beautiful (and hot) Nashville, TN.  The two events were destined by the stars to overlap.  Which also meant I was going to be hearing about said hullabaloo (reference paragraph 2, above), despite my better efforts to get out of its (the hullabaloo’s) way.

(I’m being a bit disingenuous about being surprised that these events having some overlap.  I hosted a party at my house the Friday before our SQL Saturday for our event speakers and also invited all of the PASS directors and staff who were still in town as well.  So they were all coming together, like neutrons hurtling towards a chunk of uranium 236.  You DO KNOW what happens when neutrons are hurtled at uranium 236, right?).

Yeah, and then what?

Foghorn's idea of a dog fight

So despite trying to steer clear any PASS-related controversies, I’m compelled to speak up, albeit in as limited a fashion as I can manage.  Most of the people involved, from candidates to committee members, are friends.  I wrote endorsement letters for almost half of the candidates who made it to the Nomination Committee (NomCom) interview stage.  So I’m far from being a totally impartial judge of how individual persons were treated.  But, for what it’s worth, I’m trying to make my post less about personalities and more about the overall direction of the process.  In other words, I’m trying to be constructive, not destructive.

A lot of people have put out opinions about the PASS Election process and you can read more yourself here:

• PASS Election Discussion Forum
• PASS Candidate Discussion Forum

Since the call to vote is now open, I hope you’ll take some time to get informed about the overall process as well as the candidates standing for election.

So what’s your point?

Lots of people have complained about lots of things in this round of elections (so far), but what’s anyone going to do about it?  Well, my point in this and subsequent blog posts is to produce recommendations about the election process that will better it for PASS and the wider community.

I’ve asked several friends in the SQL Server community, as well as individuals unrelated to PASS or SQL Server but who have experience on corporate boards of directors, to join a group discussion focusing on the question:

Tit-for-Tat, eh Foghorn?

“Many in the community seem to think that the PASS election process is badly broken.  Do you think that PASS needs to implement fundamental and far-reaching changes to its election process, or does it only need some fine tuning?  Please explain your thoughts?”

So now that some of the personal aspects of the discussions have calmed down, the main point I want to make is that we can make this better.  But this will take a concerted and focused discussion to decide on the consensus.

Guest posters are waiting in the wings. Let the discussions begin!

To forward this discussions, I’ve asked guest posters to make open with their initial thoughts on their own blogs or here, for those who don’t have their own blogs.  Some have already posted their opening thoughts, which I will repost here.  Once the opening statements are all posted, we’ll begin to work through the various points and topics (refer to the PASS discussion forums  above) to see if we can drive consensus for concrete methods and steps for the nominations and election processes.

With that, you’re also invited to participate. If you have thoughts around process (not personalities), I invite you to participate either through posting comments here and on our future posts and, if you’re interested, to participate as a guest poster yourself.

• Join the wider discussion here.

I look forward to your thoughts and feedback!

-Kevin

Follow me on twitter at @kekline

 Many pundits are predicting that as the US emerges from its worst economic contraction since the Great Depression, business will bounce back with minimal new hires.  One of the primary ways that businesses grow their productivity without hiring more employees is to use information technology to automate processes that used to be done by real people.  But if the economy is still weak and the organization isn’t growing, that means life actually gets harder for those of us in IT because we’re being asked to deliver great returns to the company without allowing us to hire more people to get the job done.  In other situations, when the organization has been especially hard hit and must cut costs across the board, even critical IT teams have to let people go.  What’s a manager to do when misery like this abounds?

I’ve experienced three recessions during my career and I’ve learned a few lessons about team leadership when layoffs and job losses are making daily headlines.  Here are a handful of pointers that can help keep your team on task and keep the morale strong:

Be as informative as you can as often as you can. It’s simple, but true – honesty pays.  Talk to your team frequently and in-person.  If it’s a distributed team, get on the phone or a video conference to make communication as expedient as possible and to avoid misunderstandings that so frequently come up with email.  Tell your team about the good stuff happening in the company and how executive management is steering the boat down the rapids.  Emphasize what’s positive in the company’s future and how the company’s future prosperity is dependent on the teams’ ability to stay focused and get their jobs done effectively.  Use the difficult times as an opportunity to praise their hard work and perseverance.  And if things look really grim (as in, layoffs will soon be hitting your team), give individual advice to team members to find ways to “weather the coming storm”.  Failing to share information frequently will result in a lot of gossip which, in turn, leaves everyone on pins and needles.

Focus on core competencies. If you’re on a development team, make sure all of the projects you are leading have strong ROI.  Handoff or de-prioritize those projects with a vague value proposition.  Make sure your best people are working on the projects that are most strategic to the company.  That way, you’ve protected them from possible layoffs if the company has to cut projects across all teams.  If you lead an infrastructure team that doesn’t work from a well-documented project plan or have strong project milestones, spend a little extra time tracking staff activities and tying back team activities to the processes that keep the company up and running.  If possible, point out areas where consolidation can save the company additional dollars.

Demonstrate fairness and consistency. Nothing demoralizes a team as much as seeing the rank-and-file suffer while managers and their favorites continue to ride high.  If furloughs are announced, relay the news to your team by telling that you’ll be taking every Friday off during the furlough period.  If the team has to work extra hours, don’t go on vacation.  If you have to make some ugly decisions, such as cutting projects or releasing some consultants, publish your objects for the decision so that the team can see that the decision was made objectively and based on clear priorities rather than a hidden or highly subjective agenda.  In addition, it’s important to stay consistent in your interpersonal behavior.  Sometimes tough times can raise our blood pressure considerably.  But it’s very important to control your temper and keep your frustrations in check.  But also don’t act artificially happy or devil-may-care if you’re a normally even-keeled person.  Your inconsistent behavior will strongly demoralize the team and leave them guessing about what you’re not telling them.

Huddle up more often than you did in good times.  Teams that pull evenly together during lean times build a strong sense of camaraderie.  If the company has cut the training budget, schedule a combination team potluck and lunch-n-learn conducted by someone on the team or together while attending a webcast, like one of the 24 Hours of PASS sessions.  Schedule some free training from a group like the ToastMasters to add to everyone’s soft skills.  Take the opportunity during a lunch-n-learn to remind the team how important they are and that, even though the company has cut back on training, getting training for them is still important to you. If the company has pinched pennies by cutting the free coffee, ask each person in the team to cover it for one month.  Start off a week by bringing in donuts for your weekly team meetings and then ask for volunteers for the coming weeks. Meet for beers on a Friday after work or get together for coffee before coming in once during the week.

When possible, allow consensus-driven decision making. If your team is able to brainstorm over a really tough issue, they are often better able to stomach the outcome than if the decision rolled down from Mount Olympus.  If executive management demands a lot more work from the team without adding staff, telecommuting might provide a way for the team to do more work without more dissatisfaction. If you have to cut costs, open the discussion up to the team to find ways to save dollars, for example:

• Examining the use of all third party products for any that the team no longer uses and, thus, can save on the maintenance and license fees. In one case, one of my former teams was licensed for everyone to have a full CASE tool on their desktop, even though only two people on the team could effectively normalize a database.  Cutting back to two licenses saved the company over $40,000.
• Conversely, sometimes a new tool can make your team much more productive and cost effective, particularly those that automate time consuming tasks for the team.
• Many times, consolidating a variety of disparate small providers into a single larger provider can save lots of dollars by allowing greater negotiating leverage and by cutting costs associated with staff time from purchasing, accounts payable, etc.
• Allowing everyone to pitch in on a temporary pay cut rather than cutting a team member.
• Looking for jobs currently done by expensive consultants that can be taken in house.
• Based on the mission of the team, brainstorm ways to save the company money through better technology or improved efficiencies.  Perhaps upgrading to the latest release of SQL Server now, while the upgrade costs are covered by the maintenance fees, will provide new features that breathe life into older hardware or provide less expensive but essential capabilities such as achieving the project’s high availability requirements using a less expensive approach like database mirroring instead of Windows Clustering.

Communicate upward as well as downward. Don’t forget that you’re likely to be the team’s main point of contact with upper management.  If you’re not well informed, then they definitely won’t be.  Take extra time to ensure you know the strategy and direction of upper management and how it impacts your team.  As technologists, for many of us, our first impulse is to huddle behind the monitor and type faster.  But you will frequently need to get out of your comfort zone and hunt down the latest information by directly interacting with your boss.  In addition, whenever you interact with your boss, be sure to tout the accomplishments of the team in a diplomatic and tactful way.  If you’re not relaying the successes of your team, who will?

I’m sure you’ve seen some effective techniques for leading a team during difficult times.  What were your favorite approaches?  And everyone always want to hear about disasters and worst practices.  So be sure to share those with me too!

-Kevin

Heather Eichman interviews Kevin Kline, the former President of PASS and systems specialist for the SQL Server Business Unit at Quest Software.

Posted February 08, 2008.

This series of posts is dedicated to enhancing your soft skills.  For many technologists, the day-to-day grind of work tends to keep us focused on the SQL Server part of work and causes us to overlook the Professional.  While we, as technologists, spend the majority of our time honing hard, technology skills, but it’s important to remember that we are first and foremost employed to add value to the business processes of the organizations we work for.  In this series I will cover a wide variety of topics, including soft skills like management, teamwork, communications, time management, and negotiations, as well as semi-soft skills like budgeting, project planning, project estimation, and so forth.  And let’s face it, people who are good at the soft skills while also having strong technical skills often see better career growth and more opportunities than those of us who are purely technical.

To begin, I provide some homespun wisdom about effectiveness and efficiency in our jobs. These words are, of course, loaded with meaning and have produced multitudes of academic papers and big-name, New York Time best selling books.  Everyone wants to be more effective and more efficient in their job.  While I might bring up some of the more imaginative ideas and innovative concepts at other times in the series, I want to be direct with you today.  Just as the simplest concept for financial well-being (“Spend less money than you earn!”) is sometimes the hardest to implement, so too the simplest concept for effectiveness and efficiency can be hard to make a workplace rule.

The first and most elementary rule of efficiency is to spend the majority of your time working on projects that are your forte.  Management studies have shown that people aren’t just 50% or 80% more productive when working on what they’re best at, they’re actually 300%+ productive compared to activities where their skill is merely “satisfactory”.   Here’s an example, if you’re really good at crunching code, do not spend lots of time attending and running meetings.  Delegate that to another member of your time or find someone on your team who does enjoy that sort of thing.  If you’re exceptionally good at performance tuning or designing databases into relational integrity works of art, do not spend all of your time writing requirements.  You’re simply ruining your sweet spot for productivity.

Of course, many of us are on the prowl for a promotion or better job, which often require us to spend more time working on activities that are outside of our forte.  I’ll address how to get back to your strong points when your job asks more of you in a future post.

Now, there’s a similar easy and elementary rule for achieving high degrees of effectiveness.  The primary point to remember in being effective in your job is to focus your activities, at any given time, to only two or three things on which your performance will be judged.  This might sounds simple and easy, but I’m constantly surprised how many people find it almost impossible to say “No” when more work comes their way (and this also applies to their personal life at the PTA, with the kids’ activities, with the church or volunteer organization, and so forth). 

It’s very simple.  If you cannot focus on successfully closing out a small set of activities, you’ll fail once you reach the point of being overwhelmed.  Think of a juggler who seems quite competent juggling three balls.  But when they try to juggle five balls, they’re lucky that they can keep one of them from falling to the ground.  Plus, anyone watching is thinking “That person can’t juggle at all!” because they never saw the juggler successfully keeping three balls in the air.  So, learn how much you can handle and then, when asked to do more, respond with “I’d love to take on this new project, but what of my existing projects has to be put on hold?”  Taking on too many projects has the additional very detrimental effect of upsetting your work/life balance too, because most of us try to complete more projects by spending less time recuperating or with the family.

As with efficiency, we’ll come back in the future to specific techniques you can use to stay on task and limit the number of active projects you’re responsible for, even when management is asking you to take on more than you should.

In the meanwhile, think of other soft skill questions you might have and I’ll address them in future posts.

“The idea is to provide the recipient access to all of the tools needed to improve his/her skills, an opportunity to gain practical experience, the potential to earn a recommendation and/or referral –and to positively contribute to society as a form of ‘give-back’. No free lunch, just sweat equity –the kind that makes us all feel good for the effort.”

If you or someone you know is interested, the specifics are here.

Watch a full interview with Kevin Kline, president of PASS and technical strategy manager, SQL Server, Quest Software as he discusses the evolution of SQL Server.

Posted September 17, 2007.