As our society continues to evolve in the knowledge worker era, we the IT people, are the vanguard.  We are the front lines of change.  We are the bearers of an awesome responsibility.  We are the builders and the keepers of the tools that give people the power to move mountains.  If we don’t recruit, retain, and develop the right technical talent, then those mountains might start to fall on people (or budgets).

And so we continue where we last left off…..

Do not make the mistake of believing that you compete for technical talent with the K-12 sector.. you compete with EVERY sector.
If you look out into the IT world for the K-12 education sector, you will notice one glaring problem that is so widespread it must be systemic… IT people in K-12 are not very good.  Before I get inundated with flame emails about the great IT people you know in K12, let me say…I realize this is a generalization and I know many IT people in K12 that are actually very good.  However, they are the exception, not the rule.  One of the major contributing factors to this unfortunate reality is the fact that management in K12 tend to apply the context of their own job market to other disciplines.  If I am a school leader, the number of potential positions at competing organizations is anchored to the number of schools at the other districts in my city.  If you think in terms of a metro job market, this is a very small number.  For an IT person, the job market includes every single company/organization within commute distance.  Everyone has IT and every IT function is growing.

When you believe that you only compete with the K12 sector, your good technical talent will leave and you will be left with those that could not transition to something better.

A high-end team is the cheaper option
When I say a higher-end team is cheaper, I am making a few assumptions:

• A high service level is non-negotiable
• You are actually getting high-end talent
• You are leveraging force multiplying technology

Technology is a labor intensive function and payroll is typically the largest single line item in your budget.  The tendency is to try maximizing value by reducing the cost of individual labor units (people) and increasing the number of bodies (particularly common in districts that prefer a tech person at each campus).  The problem is that you sacrifice quality and end up with a predominately reactive capability.

Imagine a team that has a high level of combined expertise, structured to focus talent on reactive and proactive functions, and equipped with a tool set that enables heavy use of automation and remote management (force multiplying technologies).  In this scenario you could easily centralize your staff and put your enterprise on a continuous improvement path.  This leads to dramatically lower total labor costs because you simply need fewer people.  If your school is growing every year (most are) you also have the benefit of dramatically reducing the slope of your growth-related cost curve.  As you continue to invest time in force multiplying tools/activities, your target labor ratios (Computers/IT Staff, FTEs/IT Staff, Students/IT Staff) will shrink.

Foster a sense of elitism in your team
Keeping your team motivated is even more crucial when you are trying to leverage small, highly effective teams.  Building a sense of elitism fits very well with this strategy.  Elite implies a “better than someone else” message.  It is important that the “someone else” in this case is external to your organization. The power of elitism in team motivation is not just that it drives a path to excellence, but that it drives sustaining that excellence.

Firing is far more important than hiring
Hiring is a crap shoot.  Even with the best processes and tools you are still rolling the dice.  The whole resume/interview/assessment dance is simply too easy to game and it takes months to see who you really hired.  The only way to compensate for this imperfect information quandary is to be rigorous in your termination process.  The moment you determine that an individual is not high quality and cannot be developed (“will not” develop is more likely), you owe it to the rest of your high-quality team to terminate them immediately.

How you fire people is also important.  There is no termination process that is secret and the rest of your team will have some sense of the “fairness” of the process.  Here are some of my rules for terminations:

• You must try to develop the low-performing team member.  If nothing else than to demonstrate fairness to the rest of your team, but there are other benefits as well.  You may discover in the development process that you have a potential high-performer in the wrong position.  If you keep them on the bus but move them to another seat they might start to shine.  In the past three years I have had two team members that were floundering on the Help Desk team and I moved them into different roles that seemed to match their interests.  Both of them quickly turned into high-performers and the value they have produced is immeasurable.
• When the decision to terminate is made, execute swiftly.  You owe it to the person you are going to terminate to do so quickly.  Every day that you wait is a stolen day of job searching.  Ignore people who say things like “Don’t fire on a Friday.  Let them have a happy weekend.”  What if they are happy that weekend because they are buying a new car or a house?
• Be generous with severance.  Two weeks of severance pay is the norm, but I don’t think it’s enough.  Two weeks doesn’t even cover a single household billing cycle and if they do not have a significant savings, then you have not given them any cushion at all.  I prefer to start with one full month of severance and increase it based on extenuating circumstances (i.e. bad job market, single household earner, medical issues, etc.).  It seems to take me at least a month to hire a new team member so the budget impact of a month or more of severance is minimal if not outright zero.
• Be gracious, present, and honest.  Not only should terminations be done face-to-face (I don’t think I really need to explain that one), but they should be done with grace and an honest conversation about why.  Do whatever you reasonably can to help them leave with dignity, even if they don’t deserve it.

Bad attitudes are infectious, abate the wound
A team member with a subversive or otherwise bad attitude is the worst possible poison for a team.  One that if ignored will turn the normal stresses of an IT team into debilitating drama.  The solution here is fairly simple.  If the root cause cannot be addressed, then the team member must be terminated, regardless of competency or past performance.

The story continues…

1. My Talent Strategy Principles: The Original
2. My Talent Strategy Principles: Compensation
3. My Talent Strategy Principles: Talent is Everything (You are already here)

In my blog template travels I was forced to change the banner graphic several times and my frustration with Photoshop reached an all-time high.  In an attempt to find a photoshop-like tool made for grandparents to use (this is my litmus test for intuitive UI… maybe I should hire a bunch of grandparents to work with our BA’s), I re-discovered a very cool tool.  Microsoft Research Autocollage 2008.

Wicked Smart!
Microsoft Research Autocollage 2008 is a very simple application that takes a set of photo’s and generates a collage.  Sounds simple enough.  Yet there is quite a bit of intelligence in this simple little product.  When you select your photos, the software runs a facial and key object recognition algorithm and figures out what is “important” in each photo.  It will also analyse the over all color matt and organize the collage to maximize the flow of color through the final image.

Not Wicked Smart!
This tool is not free.  Really Microsoft?!  You give away tons of applications, tools, and whathoozits as part of your value-add strategy.  Why on earth is this not part of that offering?  There is a 30 day free trial and I encourage you to play around with it.  Though I will not be paying $20 for it…

No matter your role or industry, your primary responsibility as a manager is the motivation of your people.

Any discussion of motivation or the individual factors of motivation must start with the granddaddy of motivation theories, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  Maslow proposed a linear model where basic needs must be met before higher-order needs.  This model is typically represented as a pyramid.

The basic concept here is that before people can be intrinsically motivated, the more basic needs must be met.  For example, it is hard to imagine that someone could be motivated by a drive to be recognised as a valuable team member when they are struggling to put food on the table.  So the needs at each level of the model must be met before the next level can act as a motivator (see the Wikipedia page for a deeper explanation of Maslow’s model).

The problem with this model is that it doesn’t play out very well in the real world.  People are simply too complex to be represented in such a linear model.  I’m sure that most professionals can remember a time in their career when they were intrinsically motivated while struggling with lower-order needs.  Can anyone say Help Desk?

A much better model to explain factors of motivation is Herzberg’s Motivation-Hygiene  Theory (frequently called Two Factor Theory).  This model identifies two factors that combined determine an individual’s level of motivation.  Those two factors are:

• Motivators - give positive satisfaction, arising from intrinsic conditions of the job itself, such as recognition, achievement, or personal growth.
• Hygiene Factors -  do not give positive satisfaction, though dissatisfaction results from their absence. These are extrinsic to the work itself, and include aspects such as company policies, supervisory practices, or wages/salary

These two factors influence total job satisfaction.  However, each factor can only influence a single direction.  Motivators increase job satisfaction/motivation and Hygiene Factors can only decrease job satisfaction.  For example, a very low salary relative to the market for a particular position will negatively influence motivation and cause job dissatisfaction.  However, a very high salary will simply eliminate salary as an element of dissatisfaction.  It will not motivate.

I like to think of these factors as being on a balance scale.
If we increase salary and remove it as a hygiene factor, it will increase satisfaction.  However, if we keep increasing salary we don’t get any additional benefit because we can only remove it as a factor.  We cannot turn it into a positive influence.

To keep your team members motivated you will need to maximize the motivators and minimize the hygiene factors.  This can be very challenging because everyone has different thresholds for each factor.  The only way to deal with this challenge is to ensure that you have strong lines of communication open with your team.

Pay enough that salary is no longer part of the conversation
Pay is a very strong hygiene factor.  Perhaps even the strongest.  You could do absolutely everything correct as far as other hygiene factors and motivators and if the perceived pay disparity is strong enough, you will have a severely unmotivated team member, perhaps even disgruntled.  This factor is also the most likely to cause an important team member to seek employment elsewhere (a very costly issue if you consider the team productivity loss, cost of recruiting new talent, and institutional memory loss).

I have always believed that the key to eliminating pay as a demotivator is to simply pay enough that pay is forever removed from the conversation.  This is clearly an easier said than done item, but it is not as difficult as you might think.  The key here is two-fold:

• Senior Management Buy-in – You must get your senior management to buy-in to the concept, even if you already have the authority to set salary ranges.  Your higher-level technology people will likely make more than many of the senior level academic people and you need buy-in to combat the resentment that will result.
• Data – You must accept that you are a biased source when it comes to salary recommendations for your people.  Not only are they your people, but you are also a technologist (at least in the eyes of your fellow management).  Coming to the table with an external, unbiased source is crucial.  There are low-cost/free options out there, such as salary.com, but they introduce a significant self-selection bias and as a result, are not the most credible sources (though they are far better than nothing).  You can also purchase salary data for school districts in your state and try to match up the responsibility and skill levels (not as easy to do as you might think in the K-12 world, where we have tons of silly titles, i.e. deputy chancellor of blah blah, director of sharing, etc.).  The best option is to have a professional firm do a comprehensive salary analysis for you.  This can cost as little as a few thousand dollars and is worth every penny.

Paying enough that pay is no longer part of the conversation does not end with paying enough.  You have to talk about compensation as well.  At this point you have to be wondering about this glaring contradiction.  The goal is to remove pay as a background conversation with your team member.  If you just pay enough that the background conversation goes away and do nothing else, it will eventually come back (I call this Happiness Entropy).  During your performance reviews, which I recommend doing every six months, you should walk the team member through the same data you used to determine their salary range.  Just like you had to convince Senior Management of the appropriate salary ranges, you need to convince the team member also.  This semi-annual conversation is also the perfect time to bring all the other non-pay benefits together and communicate a total value package for the team member.  Don’t forget to highlight those benefits unique to the K-12 world, such as Teacher Retirement System, Health Insurance, extensive vacation, access to education credit unions, or teacher discounts in the community (I get discounts at nearly any book store for being a school district employee).

Avoid large pay disparities
You must always assume that people will find out what their fellow team members are paid.  This is particularly true in a public school district where that information is not only published, but is also freely available as an Open Records Act (Texas state version of FOIA) request.  This is also true in a private organization (even where company policy defines disclosing your own salary as a termination offense).  The simple fact is that people talk to each other and few people enjoy keeping secrets.  So assume that this information will become known by your team members and ensure that each position on your team is paid within an acceptable range for the duties that they perform.  This issue typically is most acute with internal promotions, not external hires.  The natural tendency is to promote someone and give them a percent of salary raise.  With this methodology you end up with the greatest disparity for your highest-potential team members… those that have been promoted several times.  The key is to define salary ranges for each position and remove percent increases as a factor in promotions.

Use bonuses to differentiate performance
This is a K-12 industry exclusive principle and I do not recommend heavy use of annual bonuses in the private sector.  The reason is that they are simply not very effective in reducing the compensation hygiene factor.  Every dollar I spend in a bonus is not anywhere near as effective as the same dollar simply added to salary.  There are several reasons for this:

• Bonuses incur a severe tax penalty - because a bonus is outside of the predicted salary (and thus disconnected from the tax tables used to calculate withholding), most payroll departments withhold at least 30%and I have worked places that withheld as much as 50% just to be safe (tax code identifies a minimum withholding for bonuses).  So right out of the gate you are losing a significant chunk of the perceived value.
• Bonuses are not predictable - A bird in the hand is worth two in bush.  Salary is perceived as a sure thing, while bonuses, no matter how regular, are not.
• Bonuses are often not considered income – Frequently, financial institutions will not consider bonuses in debt/income ratios.  This can have a significant effect on large ticket loan qualification (i.e. cars, houses, etc.).
• Bonuses have a low frequency – Typically, a bonus is given once a year or twice a year at the most.  An increase in salary appears on every paycheck.  You do the math.

We have established that annual bonuses are not very effective.  So why would I even list this as a principle?  In the public sector it is not uncommon for salaries to be exceedingly difficult to change.  In school districts even the lowest salary range may need board approval and there are numerous cases where salary ranges are too narrow to accomodate acceptable performance/experience ranges within a single position (or sometimes even a range of positions).  In these cases, an annual bonus might be more attainable.  Put simply… something is better than nothing.  You have to consider your politics.

Leverage the power of spot bonuses
At this point you might be blowing a gasket… “What?! Didn’t he just explain that bonuses are evil?!”.  Yes, yes.  Let me explain.  Annual bonuses are not very effective at reducing hygiene factors, at least as compared to salary.  However, spot bonuses can be very effective as a motivator.  The money is just a vehicle.  The real purpose is supporting a sense of recognition and achievement.  Very small amounts of money, given as a reward for a significant accomplishment, can be very effective at motivating a team member (and to a lessor extent, the entire team).  Here are some of the rules I follow concerning spot bonuses:

The amount should be small – I would not do more than a couple hundred dollars.  In fact, I prefer $100.  Why?  Well first of all it is not a large sum of money and I have a budget to manage.  But the primary reason is that they are more likely to do something special with the money and will associate your organisation with that special event.  This could be a date night with their significant other, a frivolous purchase of pleasure (think Xbox game, music, etc.), etc.  The point is that it is small enough to be spent on a single event/item and the organization benefits from that association.

• The awarding of the spot bonus should be as public as possible – You want everyone on the team to know.  There will be a small motivating effect on the rest of the team.
• The spot bonus should be for a singular ”above and beyond” event – Don’t dilute the motivator effect by awarding spot bonuses for accomplishments that are expected of everyone.  If you do, you run the risk of turning this into a hygiene factor.  it is also important that it is a singular, definable event, not an ambiguous “you’ve doing a great job”.  Remember, you are using this technique to motivate the entire team, not just an individual.  They need to know exactly what was done.
• Structure the spot bonus to account for tax withholding – If you want to give a $100 bonus then make the actual amount enough to cover the tax withholding, $200 if your organization withholds 50%.  This avoids the discontinuity between the bonus you communicate and what shows up on the check.
• Present the spot bonus in a physical check – This gives a physical artifact for presentation and makes it a more concrete experience for the bonus recipient as well as the rest of the team.

Ignoring these principles WILL be costly
In my past three years, the only regrettable attrition I have experienced on my team has been solely the result of dissatisfaction concerning compensation.  Those departures not only seriously hurt my team, but they also had very direct cost implications.  Beyond the simple cost of replacing talent, we incurred delay and overrun costs on projects for whom those individuals were key resources.

The story continues…

1. My Talent Strategy Principles: The Original
2. My Talent Strategy Principles: Compensation (You are already here)

The idea is that over the course of their career, the high-performing executive develops a set of principles that guides their strategy and enables them to make very fast decisions.

Notice I do not use the term “successful”… we all know successful executives that are dolts and gained their position via the Peter Principle… I am talking about you US airline industry

These principles are typically formed early in a career and come from lessons learned, formal education experiences, and influential people (parents, first great boss, mentors, etc.). Once this foundation exists, decisions can be quickly tested against this set of principles. The slightly-nerdy part of me would call this a set of business rules for decision-making. The very-nerdy part of me would call this a series of conditional test algorithms comprising a heuristics model for decision-making. Let’s take the “business rules” path and avoid making my brain hurt.

With ever-increasing frequency, I get “how did you do that?” questions from my industry peers (and every now and then a Superintendent or CEO). Whether the question relates to performance management systems, ERP, high-service levels, or simply cost picture, my answer is almost always “I built a good team”. That answer usually prompts a series of requests for org charts and job descriptions. While these artifacts are standard fare in our roles and as long as we have HR departments we will need them, I don’t feel that they are particularly important (though I do believe that the process of creating them has its value). The question I think should be asked is…

How do you build a good team and how do you keep it all together?

Whenever I try to answer this question I start to rattle off single-sentence advice tidbits and quickly sound like a business school version of Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen.  I have come to realize that I have my own set of principles, developed over the course of my career, and that I do not typically think of them in concrete terms.  As an exercise to help me both identify these principles and articulate them more effectively, I decided to give them substance by writing them down.

• Pay enough that salary is no longer part of the conversation
• Avoid large pay disparities
• Use bonuses to differentiate performance
• Leverage the power of spot bonuses
• Do not make the mistake of believing that you compete for technical talent with the K-12 sector.. you compete with EVERY sector.
• A high-end team is the cheaper option
• Foster a sense of elitism in your team
• Firing is far more important than hiring
• Bad attitudes are infectious, abate the wound
• Balance your team with external hires and internally developed talent
• Build a promotion path for the entry level positions
• Titles matter
• Training is sustenance, not luxury
• Support regrettable attrition

Many of you will disagree with at least some of these principles and you might even think some of them are crazy (Support Regrettable Attrition usually elicts an “Oh.. he’s soft in the brain” response).  I encourage you to call me out on anything you believe is wrong.  I am a work in progress and as such, so are these principles.

In future posts I will take each individual principle and give a deeper explanation… stay tuned.

The story continues…

1. My Talent Strategy Principles: The Original (You are already here)
2. My Talent Strategy Principles: Compensation

Alas…this is not a poetry blog and so I needed something that has an education ring.

As any member of my team fortunate enough to survive one of my whiteboarding sessions will tell you, I am not an artist. Since I am also not a quitter, I did what any other IT guy would do in this situation… I decided to make a collage. I had visions of several pics of students looking happy with cool blurring and paintbrush effects in the background tying it all together.  Opening Photoshop, I proceeded to spend the next several hours in teethgrinding frustration as I tried to figure out how to do these very simple tasks. Really Adobe?! How is it possible to be this bad at UI design? Was Torquemada on the design team?

In the end, I was able to produce what you now see on the banner.  I am not proud, but I am content. At least you don’t have to worry about reading
my poetry.

Hello world,  i’m not sure who you are or even if you are interested in hearing from me… but here I am anyways.

 So what is this blog going to be about?  What’s the point?
Thanks for asking!  I wasn’t sure how to segway into that topic and your timing was perfect.  Over the past several years I have begun to receive steady requests for my opinion, experience, and thoughts on many topics relating to Information Systems management in the K-12 education sector.  I have always tried to make time for these requests and answer them in the spirit of cooperation and community-building from which they come.  Last year (early Q2 2010), our head of software development kicked off a project to upgrade our robust and extensively customized SharePoint implementation to SharePoint 2010 and discovered that there was little information in the ether on this challenging process.  As he and his team worked through this project in our test/dev environment, he used a WordPress blog to chronicle the steps and stumbles.  His blog immediately began receiving a large number of visitors and recognizing the potential outreach benefits for our organization, I encouraged him to continue posting his discoveries and use the forum to build relationships within the K-12 tech community.  With this blog I intend to shamelessly mimic his sucess and chronicle my discoveries within the realm of K-12 technology strategy and management.

I encourage you to comment on any posts you read here as well as offer critism (it doesn’t even have to be “constructive”).  My skin is thick and I promise to accept your comments in the spirit of debate.

May we travel together along this road to the truth…

-Richard Charlesworth