Do Something Nice for your team
IT managers do not have to be the bad guy; do a random act of kindness for your client and employees when you can.
When your employees spouse has their birthday off, let your employee share the day with them. Often a person gets their own
birthday off and then spends the day at home alone doing chores while patiently waiting for the family to come home and celebrate. You can
give your person time to be with their SO.
Buy a box of candy and leave it on your desk with a sign “Take One” and never eat one yourself – too many overweight people in the
world already. I used to have a dart board in my outer office and let people play when I was out (heck, they played when I was there!) and
this makes you more available to people and if they play when you are there you can keep up with the private lives – people chat when they
play. Project updates, timelines that discussed offline, hopes and aspirations – they talk about it all.
Invent an award and have the most senior management available award it. I worked with the IT Recognition folks in one company, and
although the thing changed names a dozen times we kept it going. Anyone in the company could nominate a person got the award the nominator
was given a nice shirt with the program logo on one shoulder and a word like nominator on the other. A small award should be given monthly,
an additional award on the quarter and a yearly award. These are also helpful to review people because one person nominated monthly by one
end user is just a friend helping a friend. One person nominated on a regular basis for different project or deliverables may be your
future star.
Start a reading program and give your managers the same book on management – whatever the newest trend is – and write a short note
to each person thanking them for their work. Same idea for your entire organization, select a topic that relates directly to them and
buy/sign a book. I did this when I was a young manager (for my boss) and when we went to a regularly scheduled meeting – 30 minutes to an
hour was set aside to see what people thought. I facilitated to meeting and got some interesting feedback because some people came up with
an idea from the book and others knew exactly where the idea came from and we were able to develop a set of best practices from those
books. Once my boss chose the book and no one read it because his taste was not that of the man in the data center – keep control of the
subject matter.
There is always something that you can do to make sure people in your organization are a bit happier than they are today and a
happier person will deliver more; and more willingly take on the extra tasks that will come along. I never had a person complain about
working for me because they always knew I was fair and gave them the advantage when I could.
Think about it. Put something in place.
Richard McLaughlin
2 October 2007
Fontainebleau
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