Category Archives: IT Management

dotted lines

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In my current role, in addition to my manager, I have three clear dotted line reporting relationships. If you’re not familiar with the term, picture an organizational chart. Reporting relationships are depicted with lines, connecting employees to their manager. A dotted line relationship is an informal reporting relationship. Using my current role as an example, I report to the CFO and have dotted lines to the CEO, company owner and a VP. All of these folks play some part in reviewing and/or approving work my department does.

This is a little different from a matrix org structure in which there are two or more formal reporting relationships. For instance, a software developer reporting to both a project manager leading the software project they’re on as well as a functional manager.

Dotted line relationships are very common, especially in middle management roles. I’ve personally had these reporting relationships throughout my career. They are not without their challenges. This post is my attempt to articulate some of my learnings.

One potential challenge is conflicting expectations. You have to be careful with this one. Your first impulse might be to simply side with the person highest on the org chart. Always remember you have a duty to your formal manager. Keep them in the loop always. When there’s a conflict, go to them with it. As long as you are maintaining a good relationship with your manager, they will help. And they may just give you their blessing to do what the CEO, or whoever that higher status person is, says. They will appreciate you coming to them.

Also, and this is very important, be careful not to throw one dotted line under the bus when talking with another. It is easy to do this unintentionally – “ok, but Melissa said X”. As a human, you have a pre-frontal cortex providing you executive function. Use it!

Another challenge is inefficient or siloed communication. This one has a tie-in with conflicting expectations in that, if you’re typically meeting with each of your DLs one-on-one, you will likely end up in the middle of conflicts. Whereas if they’re all in the same room, they will naturally work out the conflicts with each other then and there. Try not to have separate status meetings with each of them. Do your best to corral them. Do not be afraid to point out the benefits of collaboration and alignment facilitated by meeting as a group.

In reality it may be difficult to achieve this. Some leaders prefer to have you one-on-one. It can also simply be a logistical hurdle to harmonize schedules of busy people. One tip I will give is, again, respect your formal reporting relationship. Include your manager on communications and invite them to meetings of strategic or financial significance, even if they may not be the primary audience. They must at least be given the option to stay informed.

Another communication tip – if you cannot get the whole band together for status meetings, mind the timing and order in which you meet with your DLs. For instance, you may want to schedule the regular status meeting with your formal manager earlier the same day you meet with the CEO. That way, they will both be working with the same current information. I learned this the hard way. After meeting with the owner of the company, I’ve had him go to the CEO and ask him about something we discussed. The CEO was not up to date on the topic and was caught off guard. Needless to say I learned my lesson. Keep all your DLs up to date. But make sure you do it in a way that no one will be blindsided by another.

And how do you know which DLs to go to for approval or consultation on any one specific matter? It is not always clear. And your formal manager may not always even know. This is something you’ll have to learn over time. It is part of the organizational tribal knowledge. While you are learning, err on the side of involving more DLs.

If this all sounds tricky, it can be. But in the scheme of things, it really doesn’t require a PhD. It’s a learnable skill. Just be thankful you have so many people taking interest in your work 🙂

Here’s a short anecdote illustrating the other side of the coin. I once worked for a SaaS company that was acquired. My manager’s role was eliminated. When my new boss from the acquiring company wouldn’t answer or return my calls, it wasn’t a good feeling (or a good omen). You WANT to be valued!

I’d love to hear about others’ experience with dotted line relationships. There are lots of situations I didn’t get into, like dotted lines to people outside the organization, reporting to a board of directors, etc. What are some of your tips for connecting your dotted lines?

It’s OK to hire people smarter than you

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Update (Aug 8, 2019):

I’ve been seeing a couple quotes make the rounds on LinkedIn that made me think about this post.  One is attributed to Steve Jobs:

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

And my personal favorite from Michael Dell:

Try never to be the smartest person in the room. And if you are, I suggest you invite smarter people … or find a different room.

As I start an unplanned, unexpected job search, I’ve naturally been reviewing my resume and LinkedIn profile. I’ve been reaching out to recruiters and coworkers from my past. And after telling LinkedIn that I’m actively looking for opportunities, I’ve had a few folks from my past reach out to me. Since my last day at work I’ve been trying to focus on my future, yet I find the activities one must engage in to promote oneself require reflection on one’s employment of yesteryear. Just wait until I start going on interviews….. I’ll really have to start reliving it all!

My employment history is more or less a steady progression up the proverbial career ladder. Albeit the last few years I’ve experienced some events that have forced me to step laterally onto increasingly rickety ladders. I got to thinking today about the notion of what a leader’s responsibility is and what part a leader’s self-confidence plays in hiring and interacting with one’s reports.

I took my first management position between seven and eight years ago. It was a very hands-on role to the extent that I actually had two roles – the IT engineering manager AND the lone systems engineer. So in a way it was the perfect transitionary role for me. I say “in a way” because as perfect as the role may have been, I was very green at the manager part and it was a steep learning curve.

I hired for several positions during my time with that organization and conducted many interviews. And I can distinctly remember feeling threatened by some of the candidates, either because they were more technically savvy than me or because they were smarter than me. If they were ambitious on top of that then I felt even more threatened. I convinced myself that the candidates with more IT experience than me were overqualified. Surely some of them may have not been right for the role on offer, but there were some I did not give a fair shake. And that is a mistake. It is within the realm of possibility that one of them may have gunned for my job, impressed my boss and eventually replaced me. It’s unlikely, but possible. But that doesn’t matter. When a company entrusts you to make a hiring decision, they are depending on you to select THE BEST CANDIDATE FOR THE JOB and to do whatever you can within reason to convince them to join the team. And what’s more, if you come across someone exceptional who is not right for that particular role, you should try and figure out some way to hire that person. Talk to HR and see what other roles are available, check the website for open roles, ask other managers, etc. Organizations can always use great people.

Whenever I’ve hired a non-ideal candidate, it has been either because I felt threatened by great candidates or because I was giving up on finding the right candidate. Every single time without exception it has made my life more difficult, hurt our department and by extension hurt the organization. This is a big mistake for a manager to make and demonstrates poor judgment. It’s truly a learning opportunity.

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Fast forward a few years in my professional development and I moved on to work with some very talented engineers – some more technically savvy, some flat out more intelligent than me. And you know what? It worked out great. It worked well because they were happy in their roles as trusted subject matter experts who were passionate about their work and who I would rely on daily. And it worked great because I became comfortable in my role. I realized these two things as I matured as a leader:
A) As the amount of time I spent on hands-on technical tasks decreased, my technical skills became less sharp and I HAD TO depend on others.
B) There are other indispensable skills that I bring to the table. There is no need to feel threatened or to be insecure.

Point B is where the self-confidence comes in and it’s really a game-changer in the career of a technical person transitioning to a leadership role. Your job is not to out-perform the people on your team. Your job is to get the most out of them. Your job is to remove obstacles from their path. Your job is to deal with the C-level egos and pressure from the board of directors and insulate your stars from all of that. It’s your job to understand the business strategy and competitive landscape and to help create the vision and to give your team direction. It’s your job to motivate and develop the team and help them to understand how what they’re doing is positively impacting the organization. It’s your job to mind the finances and foster collaboration. It’s their job to be brilliant and do all the magic that makes everything happen.

working around IT

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I recently had the opportunity to visit one of our “branch” office locations.  I put branch in quotes because it is these locations where the actual revenue-generating operations take place.  I work in the corporate office where the organization’s shared services operate.  We play the supporting roles for the branches.

But I digress.  This was the first opportunity for me in my current role to visit one of our branches.  For the most part it was what I expected.  But in one respect it was enlightening to me.  People were finding workarounds to overcome deficiencies in IT support and infrastructure.

First I encountered a gentleman who was using a laptop which I did not recognize.  I could tell right away it wasn’t one of the standard issue HP notebooks we provision.  Much to my dismay it was in fact the man’s personal laptop.  When I asked him about the situation he pointed me at his company desktop computer.  It was virus-ridden and unusable.  He had opened a Help Desk ticket months ago.  So I looked up the ticket.  It was closed because this gentleman failed to respond to email inquiries from the Support technician.  Why?  He had no reasonable way to access his email.  So he brought in his personal laptop, gave out his personal email address for correspondence, and was able to basically function at his job.  He did not need access to internal corporate data so he could get by with access to the public wifi.  I felt for this man.  And what made me feel worse was how delightful he was with me.  It turns out he was a computer programmer many moons ago in the early days of the software business.  We chatted about many things from the rise of the microprocessor to the information revolution of today to a possible future where no data is private and the possible implications on business and government.  Needless to say I apologized about the computer and re-opened the ticket.

Another example to IT workaround was a home router someone had purchased and connected to the network in order to get more network ports.  There is a reason why these devices are strictly forbidden.  Not only because we don’t know about themThe home router I found, but they have a built-in DHCP server.  And of course the patch cable from the wall was connected to the Internet port.  So the two computers and printer connected to the switch ports were firewalled off from the rest of the network.  When I asked about it no one could give me a good answer.  If they had made a request from IT we would have had new lines run or sent them a small switch.  I assume the people in this department were so disillusioned with IT, they didn’t want to waste time waiting on us.  People want to do the right thing.  They want to follow the rules.  But if you need to wait a week for a response and several weeks for a resolution, you won’t involve IT unless you HAVE to.

The third and final example was a workaround for an infrastructure problem.  We’ve been battling issues lately with printing through Citrix XenApp.  We have many different models of HP printers in the offices.  For use in XenApp we usually just use the tried and true LaserJet III driver.  Recently we started using a new software application in XenApp.  People have had all sorts of printing problems using the non-native LaserJet III driver.  When printing reports the text will go off the end of the page or will be scaled incorrectly, etc.  We started installing the proper drivers for the actual models of printers.  And things blew up.  Print spooler crashes, printers failing to map into XenApp sessions, utter chaos.  We have come up with partial workarounds and things are getting better.  But in the meantime the poor people out in our offices have needed to come up with all sorts of creative ways to print reports.  From emailing to themselves, to printing locally to who knows what.  There are probably people copying and pasting data into spreadsheets!

So there you have it.  People need to get their work done.  They literally cannot afford to always wait for IT.  What can we as an IT department do to fix this dysfunctional situation?

1)      First we can add some staff.  I won’t go into detail, but we got ourselves into a situation where we simply did not have enough staff to support the numbers of employees, devices and applications we offer.  I’m happy to report we very recently have brought on a couple new people.

2)      Now that we have (presumably) enough staff, we must focus on customer service.  Even with better service levels it will take time to change people’s perceptions of IT, to undo the damage we’ve done.

3)      Show our faces in the branch offices more often.  This demonstrates that we care and humanizes IT.  We’re no longer an unknown number of nameless faceless geeks who don’t give a damn about real people.

What else should we be doing to improve our customer service and our image presented to the organization?