| May 2006 |
| By Wes Simonds |
Yesterday you were rock-star technical talent. Today, having proved your knowledge and your skills, you've ascended to the next rung of the professional ladder: management.
Your first new job duty will be to manage your own professional transition. How do you do it?
That question is harder to answer than it might seem. IT management is a complex balancing act between the IT part and the management part; leaning too far in either direction can land you in trouble.
If you've spent years painstakingly acquiring technical skills, how much time should you spend maintaining them? How essential will they be? Will they command respect from your staff, or keep your staff from seeing you as a true manager at all?
Mark Lavery, IT Infrastructure Manager at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., has been dealing with these issues for nearly a decade. Originally hired as technical talent specializing in Token Ring networks, Lavery has since moved into management at NGS, one of the world's largest and most diverse nonprofit organizations, but retains vivid memories of the early days.
"I was very motivated. I wanted to avoid the mistakes that previous managers of mine had made," he said. "[Because I had serious technical skills], I [had] a lot of credibility with my new team."
Lavery sees nontechnical managers as intrinsically problematic -- and not just because they can come off as uninformed. "Sometimes they delegate to the wrong people. That creates serious problems... The rest of the group does a collective eye roll. Deep down, they figure one of them will have to [deal with the problem]."
Thus, tip #1: Stay as technically current as you can, especially at first. IT professionals often evaluate themselves and managers on the basis of objective technical knowledge. If you are perceived as technically competent, it will ease your transition period into management as well as improve the process of delegating work to appropriate staff members.
Eric Anderson, IT Administrator, tells a similar tale, albeit from the other end of the organizational continuum. His employer, staffed by a total of less than 50 people, provides consultation for the federal government and he has only recently acquired direct reports.
"I [find it's best] to spend about 10-20% of my time in a given week on personnel management," he said. "This includes assigning calls and apportioning time to projects... the rest of [my] time is taken up with actually [implementing] projects."
Anderson sees himself as migrating gradually to more management duties over time. Still, that migration will have to happen in parallel to the evolving needs of his employer.
"I expect to do less hands-on work as the IT staff grows along with the rest of the organization," he said, " I plan to [let go of my technical duties] in this order: telephony, workstation support, server maintenance, and finally, network maintenance and security."
Tip #2: Dynamically change your ratio of management to technical duties depending on the emerging needs of your particular employer. Smaller organizations will probably require more technical currency from managers than larger organizations.
How do you best stay current, though? Again, different organizational needs will dictate different tactics.
Lavery, for instance, relies on direct interaction with his staff more than any other information source.
"Honestly, I just listen to the techs," he said. "If Morton, for example, tells me that Apple's new patch doesn't work with HP printers, that's a seriously useful bit of information, both with techs and with higher management. It allows me to attend management meetings and... speak with pretty good authority."
Anderson applies a more balanced approach, preserving as a manager the information-gathering tactics he developed as a tech.
"I try to grab hot-off-the-presses books about the core technologies that we use,” he said. “I [also] peruse a lot of websites, particularly discussion forums, in order to stay on top of problems with new operating systems and applications."
Tip #3: There is no fixed, best way to stay on top of emerging technology issues for all IT managers, so design a custom process of keeping yourself informed that is optimized for your particular job.
In the end, though, the measure of your success will stem from how quickly and how well your staff rises to meet technical challenges -- and how easily your relationship with them is maintained.
"I think the ultimate lesson is not to be Louie DePalma from Taxi," said Lavery. "You can't manage technical people by yelling at them from your cage. After time -- in most cases, years -- you can step back and watch the process run. In the beginning of your tenure, you need to show them that you understand why they can't be replaced by trained monkeys."
Wes Simonds is a veteran freelance journalist and marketing copywriter specializing in the tech sector.
Comments on this article? Share your feedback on our discussion forum, Dice Discussions.
*Please note, you must be a registered job seeker in order to submit your question to Dice Discussions.
|
|
|
