My Blog
Below you'll find my continuing blog. Send your feedback, ideas, comments, or questions to steven@stcerri.com. Enjoy!
Find Your Mentor and Coach
Find Your Sam or Samantha
Posted by Steven Cerri on Thursday, September 28, 2006
Good morning!
In this blog I want to tell you about Sam. Sam Garcia. I don’t even know if Sam is still alive and so this might be a way for me to thank him and to acknowledge his existence in some small way.
I graduated from college in 1969 with a B.S. in aeronautical engineering. After starting out in the ground support equipment department of the Apollo manned space program at Rockwell International in Downey, California I was moved to the advanced space systems department in Seal Beach, California. I didn’t like ground support equipment work much but I really enjoyed the advanced systems work. I met some very good engineers (in both groups) who took this young kid under their wings and guided me along.
I was always a little more aggressive than my years or knowledge would probably support and soon I was picked to work on a new project that was part of the then, theoretical work leading to the development of what is now the space shuttle. The project I was placed on was called the Space Tug. The Space Tug was an on-orbit propulsion vehicle that was to go up in the shuttle cargo bay, with the satellite payload, and was to be used to place the payload into its final orbit.
My job was to perform flight performance analysis of the tug, which means that it was my job to calculate what sizes of payload the tug could place in various orbits. The program manager, the person in charge of all the analysis, design, and development of the Space Tug program was Sam Garcia.
Now when I first met Sam he didn’t strike me as anything other than an older guy who had knowledge and some power and responsibility at Rockwell. He was short and stocky, bald, with a deep, raspy voice, a quick smile, and an attitude that made you think that he would always find the funny or ironic component to any situation. And he had a slight “Spaniard’s” accent.
At first whenever I heard Sam talk to the program team, I noticed that he sounded like he was just talking to us. That’s all, just talking to us. I was the youngest guy in the group. At the time I was about 22 years old and the average age of the team, other than me, was probably 45 to 50 years old with Sam at about 50 years old. It wasn’t long before Sam and I became good friends. He once said that he saw a lot of himself in me when he was my age.
In any case, Sam began to talk to me about management and leadership, and it wasn’t the typical stuff about project management, schedules, and budgets. Our talk was about people. Who had what strengths; who had what weaknesses. How to make decisions about who to have do what and who to take to customer briefings. I got to go to all the customer briefings, something that was unheard of for someone my age and with my limited experience, but Sam trusted me and gave me opportunities.
One of the aspects of Sam’s life that he thought was important to who he was had to do with what he did after graduating from high school and before going to college. I don’t now recall much about what he said about his childhood or his father or mother or family, but I remember that Sam said that upon graduation from high school he boarded a merchant ship and traveled the world for two years. A young man of 18 years old, traveling the world. That experience gave him a different perspective than those of us who had gone from high school to college to work.
After this two-year period, Sam decided to go to college and got a degree in engineering. He now had a family, a daughter, and a good career at Rockwell. And he was teaching me how to deal with people.
After three years at Rockwell, and two of those years working with Sam, I decided it was time to go back to school to get a M.S. in geophysics. My reasoning was that if I didn’t branch out I would end up like so many 50 year-old engineers I saw around me; 50 years old and doing the same work that a young kid out of college was doing (i.e., the young kid was me.) I didn’t want that and so I thought the best approach was to branch out.
I asked Sam for his advice. My question was, “Do you think that my move to branch out into geophysics is a good move?” Sam’s response was indicative of how I think a good manager deals with direct reports, whether about personal matters like college or about work matters like presentations or analysis. His answer was also a reflection of a man who traveled the world at eighteen not knowing what he wanted to do with his life. His answer was, “I can’t answer that for you. This is something you have to decide. If you don’t do it or you do it because of something I say then you will never know if it was the right decision or not.”
There was another time I recall when Sam’s approach to me was very different. I had been performing an analysis on the Space Tug’s performance. I had developed a series of charts indicating how the tug would perform with different payload weights in different orbits.
As I left work one day, half-way through the parking lot on the way to my car, in a flash, I had the realization that one of my equations could be wrong. I might have divided by a constant instead of multiplying by it.
I worried about it all night and the next morning ran into my office to verify the equation. Sure enough, it looked like I had made a mistake. I ran to Sam to tell him that the numbers on my chart were wrong. I told him I’d fix the numbers and get back to him. I felt proud that I had found the mistake this early in the program and that I could admit my mistake as well. He was supportive.
I spent the rest of that day pouring over the numbers only to determine that my original data were correct. No need to worry I thought. I’ll tell Sam I made a mistake about my mistake, my original numbers were correct.
When I told Sam of my error in thinking that there was an error, he looked at me like he could have handed me my head. With very little emotion in his voice or on his face as he spoke, which made his statement all the more stern, he only said these words, “Don’t ever do that again.” As I walked out of his office I knew I had screwed up.
One of the aspects I didn’t realize until years later about Sam’s management style was his ability to vary that style depending upon the circumstances. He could be calm and helpful; he could be playful and joking; he could be ruthless and demanding; and he could be a friend. As my own career advanced and as I began to develop my own way of moving through my technological business world I, unconsciously at first and then by choice, began to understand the usefulness of being able to adopt a wide variety of management styles. Sam was able to move smoothly through a wide variety of different situations with a wide variety of people. I ultimately saw that ability to be a key to management success.
Sam was my first coach and mentor. He talked to me about life and work and people, explaining to me what was important both at work and out, and how to know what was important and how to know what was not. What was important about Sam’s coaching was that he told me “what he was thinking”. He let me see into his mind, into his thought processes. That was so much more important to my learning than just “telling” me what to do. I got to see the “why” as well as the “what”.
I left Rockwell to go back to school and received a M.S. in geophysics. Several years later I ended up back at Rockwell at Seal Beach, and Sam wasn’t there. He had been transferred to another division of Rockwell, and I never saw him again. And yet what he taught me is still with me, so much so that I’m compelled to write a blog about his impact on my career and my life.
To all you technical professionals out there I urge you to find yourself a mentor, a coach. Someone who can teach you early (or late) in your careers what to focus on and what not to focus on, what is important and what isn’t. You don’t have to agree with your mentor or coach but they will help you by starting the process of asking the right questions and giving you their opinions from which you can begin. If their really good they won’t tell you, they’ll give you a view into their processes. Find your own Sam or Samantha. Seek out the wisdom in your technical profession. Look for the people who are not only successful but seem to have the respect of a wide variety of people in your organization. Not the people who just have their “like- minded” friends. But those people who receive the respect and support of a wide variety of personalities throughout the organization, throughout the community.
I don’t know where Sam is now, or even if he is on the planet. I’m sure there were others he gave guidance to throughout his career. For me, I still remember Sam as someone who had an important impact on my technical career and on my personal life. Thanks Sam.
Be well
Steven Cerri
So You Want To Be A Manager
How Does A Technical Person Get Promoted To Manager?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, September 25, 2006
Hello Everyone,
If you’re currently a technical professional and you’re thinking about going into management, it’s important that you be aware that your transition to management isn’t going to be an overnight process. You’re not going to go to bed one night as a technical professional and wake up the next morning as a technical manager. But you knew that, right? What you probably didn’t know is that it can be a very slow OR a relatively fast process. And it most certainly won’t be orderly because your boss or your company probably won’t prepare you well for the transition.
I’ve seen a lot of technical people get selected for management and so I’m going to tell you one of the likely scenarios you might experience.
First and foremost, most managers, and here I’m speaking of your manager; most managers don’t really understand management as a discipline. (I know, it sounds like a ridiculous statement, but all I can do is ask you to consider how competent you believe the managers are that you’ve met? Most of you will say, “not very”.) This is because most managers think that management is a no-brainer, or at the very least, it’s not a very rigorous discipline. Therefore, if you do your engineering work well, and you seem readily capable of talking to people, your manager will think that because you can do your technical work well you can manage other people doing the same or similar work.
That’s right. Most technical professionals who do a very good job at their technical work are “assumed” to be competent to manage a team of people doing the same or similar work. You manager is thinking something like this: “Well John (or Betty) is a really good engineer. He really seems to know his stuff when it comes to the technology. And he seems to be a nice enough person. He seems to communicate well enough with other people. Most people like him. He doesn’t seem to raise his voice or get into verbal disputes. He can probably manage one or two people doing similar work to what he has been doing. I’ll just give him a simple management task with a few people to manage and see how he works out.”
That’s it. That’s how you get selected for management. There is usually no more preparation than that. As you will probably notice from this scenario, you’ve been selected for a relatively small project. That’s reasonable. You’re not going to be selected to be a full-time manager without significant experience. However, the key here is that you will often be selected for your first management position without being given sufficient training. You’ll be seen as a good technical person. You’ll be seen as someone without significant inter-social faults. You’ll be asked (usually) if you want to be a manager and most of the time the response is “sure”. And that will be it.
Now once in a while a good technical person is selected to manage a small project and they are given some training in preparation for this new responsibility. The training will often come in the form of one or more of the following classes: corporate human resources/personnel policies; project management; budgeting and scheduling; good listening skills. While these classes regarding the “doing” of management at your company are useful, they are not what you need as a new manager. Primarily what you need as a new manager is a way to understand how to make the transition from individual contributor, the “doer” part to the motivator, the “doer doing less and motivating others to do”.
As an individual contributor you got your rewards from the doing. As a manager, you will get part or all of your rewards from what others are doing. This is the shift you want to make. This is what you want to learn about. This is what will make or break your transition.
I want to point out one more major dilemma in this early stage transition, and that is you will have “one foot” in the management world and “one foot” in the individual contributor world. That is, you won’t be a full-time manager and you won’t be a full-time individual contributor either. This is a very difficult situation to be in but unfortunately, we all have to go through it. There seems to be no other way to get from technical professional to manager. At some point in the early days of our transition process, we all have to be part-time manager and part- time technical professional. You will have to “change hats” frequently from manager to individual contributor and back and forth and this will definitely get confusing and it will be a challenge… I can guarantee it. But frankly, there isn’t any other way. You won’t have sufficient experience to be a full-time manager so you’ll have to make it a part-time gig. And about half of you will not succeed.
You won’t succeed because you never wanted management in the first place. If you had wanted management you certainly wouldn’t have studied all those years to be a technical professional. So let’s be clear. Being a technical professional is generally not a “people oriented” profession. Technology deals with ideas, laws of physics, machines, equations, and only peripherally, with people.
Now all of a sudden, because you do your technical work so well, you are going to be asked to focus on “people”.
I take the position, that from the technical professionals’ point of view, management is a new career. One that you didn’t ask for and one you didn’t prepare for. And yet, here it is. It’s going to require preparation and practice. And it’s going to require more than just knowledge of how to use Microsoft Project, or how to set up budgets and schedules. It’s going to require an understanding of how to deal with and communicate with and manage people. It’s going to require a personal understanding of your own motivational forces and an understanding of the motivational forces of others. This is why the transition to management is such a challenge for many technical professionals.
It’s a new career. It can be done. It can be done smoothly, elegantly, and successfully. It must be done with a conscious process of choice and an understanding that, for most technical professionals it’s a second career.
Be well
Steven Cerri
Founder of "The Fully Integrated Technical Professional©"
"Training and coaching technical professionals to be as good with people and management as they are with their PCs"
Can People Really Change? (Part 2)
The Answer To The Million Dollar Question.
Posted by Steven Cerri on Thursday, September 21, 2006
Good morning!
I’m now going to answer the question I posed in the previous blog---“Can People Really Change?” In the previous blog I pondered exactly what that question meant. And I’ll now answer it in two ways. First I’m going to say that if the question is really asking if people can change their personalities, if they can change “who” they are, then my answer is “I don’t know and it really doesn’t matter”.
A manager’s job is not to “change” someone. If that’s the manager’s life mission they should have been a therapist.
Second, a better question to ask is, “Do People Change Their Behavior?” And the answer is absolutely “YES”.
As a manager, your job is to get a specific behavior from people, behaviors that support the goals of the organization, not to change their personality.
People are constantly changing their behaviors to get what they want and a manager’s job is to find a way to get people to behave in such a way that is productive for the team, the company, the project, and the individual.
In fact, that’s exactly why I got the reputation of being a manager who could build high performance teams with people no other managers wanted to work with. I was able to focus on getting the behavior that I wanted. And it’s why my coaching programs produce such powerful results (I know that’s blatant self-promotion, but it’s a fact.)
The best way to think of it is this way. Imagine that each human being is an iceberg floating in the sea of life. (Sounds poetic doesn’t it?) From our birth through our early years our iceberg has the potential to float pretty high in the water. A good deal of our potential way of being, our potential personality and the behaviors produced are visible for all the world to see. We play, we express ourselves, we laugh, we cry according to some internal and innate sense of who we are and who we can be and who we are becoming! Our behavior is flexible and varied.
Then life occurs and “stuff” gets added on top of our iceberg and more and more of our iceberg gets pushed under the surface of life, invisible to most people. We “grow up”, we go to college, we become technical professionals and our iceberg gets well defined as a “technical professional’s” iceberg. Now life just keeps happening and maybe all of a sudden the waters change. Maybe they get warmer; maybe they get colder; maybe they get rougher; maybe they get calmer. Whatever new situation arises, it’s a new situation and the question becomes, “What happens to our iceberg?”
Well, we generally attempt to ride in the “new” waters the same way we rode in our “old” waters. And often that doesn’t work. So a manager, coach, mentor comes along and starts to interact with us. All of a sudden things are different. The person (in this case, the “we”) begins to behave differently. As I said, in my career, my experience is that I can take people who have not been willing to change their behavior and when they find themselves traveling in the waters I manage, they’re different. What’s unique? Is it me, is it the other person, or have both of us led to this difference?
I’ve now come to understand what happens not so much as a change process at the core of an individual but as a “potential” for changed behavior and the appearance of that changed behavior in the world. You see, many people are hiding most of their potential under the waters’ surface, out of view of the world. If you know how to change the surface “weight” on their iceberg, (i.e., the environment, the communication, their relationship to their world) you can actually get people to “expose” a capability they have always had but that hasn’t been visible, yet. The capability has always been there and because of fear, or lack of need, or lack of knowledge, it stayed hidden. The really exquisite manager, or mentor, or coach, can bring this capability to the surface and help the person expose it and all of a sudden it looks like the person has changed when in reality they’ve had the capability all along and all that is different is that the person is behaving differently. Have they “changed” at the core? Maybe; maybe not.
But as a manager, I’m not interested if they’ve changed at their core, I’m most interested in their ability to change their behavior.
Now some people don’t have certain capabilities. No amount of coaching, managing, or mentoring will bring a behavior to the surface if it’s not under the surface to begin with. For those people, training and desire are then necessary. For example, let’s say my manager decided that the company needed a brain surgeon and I should be it. I’m not a brain surgeon and I haven’t been trained as a brain surgeon. It’s not a reasonable potential for me, yet. No amount of coaching, mentoring, or managing is going to make me a brain surgeon by uncovering that hidden capability. In order for me to be a brain surgeon I have to want it, badly, and I have to be trained in it. Once trained, I can have that behavior as a potential.
Likewise, if a manager wants an employee to behave differently and the necessary capabilities are not there, such as communication skills, or management skills, or and interpersonal skills, no amount of prodding is going to make it happen. The direct report will have to want to make those changes and will have to acquire the knowledge and training necessary to have those capabilities.
On the other hand, if your manager wants you to make a presentation to a thousand people, and you already have comfort speaking in front of a few people, but you just haven’t spoken to a thousand people before, then getting you to step up on stage to speak to a thousand people is merely a capability that has been hidden from view. And in the right circumstances, that behavior will show up.
So I’ve come to believe that I don’t know the answer to the question “Do people change?” What I have concluded is that people have a vast potential that is unexplored, unexposed, and not used in the way they can behave. A vast potential of how they can become given the opportunity. And there are two requirements for a behavior to show up. Number one they have to want it. A desire to have the new capability and the new behaviors is a necessary but not sufficient requirement. The second required component is the exquisite mentor, coach, or manager who can create an environment where some of that vast potential of the person can indeed be exposed. It’s what Peter Drucker meant when he said a manager’s job is to emphasize people’s strengths and make their weaknesses irrelevant.
There you have it. Like the iceberg, there is much more under these words that goes into their application. This is the process that I use in my coaching program. At some point in your career, as a technical professional you’ll be asked to behave not so much as an engineer, scientist, or technologist, but as team leader, a manager, a facilitator, or marketing communicator (or maybe you’ve already been asked). All or some of these requested behaviors might be potential behaviors that have been hidden but have not yet become available to you. How do you make the shift? How do you behave differently and keep yourself intact. This is where coaching, and judgment come into play.
Be well
Steven Cerri
Can People Really Change?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, September 18, 2006
Recently I was in a coaching session with a high level technical manager at a high- technology company. This manager has been struggling with a difficult direct report. In the course of our session the manager asked me point blank: “Can people really change. I’m beginning to get to the point where I think we really can’t change people.”
Now that’s the $1 million question, isn’t it? As managers, can we change people? Should we change people? Do we have the ability or even the right to contemplate the phrase; “Can I change this person?
Have you changed? Have people close to you changed? When you think about whether you have changed are you looking at a time frame of months, or years, or decades? When you ask the question: “Have I changed?” what’s your answer? Do you respond, “Well I’m the same person but I’m different too.” “Different in what ways?” “The same in what ways?” If you focus on what’s the same, does it mean you haven’t changed? If you focus on what’s different, does it mean you have changed?
Can we change people only if they want to change? Do we change at the “surface” but not at our “core”? What is the core anyway? If I’m a technical person am I a “technical person” for the rest of my life? Do people need a life-altering situation in order to change?
Frankly I don’t know the answers to these questions. These are age-old questions, aren’t they? I like to think that people change and yet for every example I can give you of how someone has made a miraculous change I can give you another example of someone who has resisted change. Is there a “truth” in there somewhere or is it just my perspective? I believe that anyone who tells you they know the answers to these questions is full of hot air.
Having said all that you might ask, “Well, as a technical manager, what’s the use of trying to help people to be successful? People come to work as who they are and that’s that. They either do their job or they don’t. It’s not my job as their manager to change them.”
Now that last paragraph is one I really don’t agree with. I do think there are certain boundaries and generalities that we can make about the possibility of human change. I’ve seen people make radical shifts or changes in behavior in my years as a manager. Is a shift in behavior a change in them or just a change in behavior? Remember, as a manager, you ultimately manage a person’s behavior; you don’t manage changes in a person’s personality. What you want as a manager is a specific behavior from an individual, not their soul. Let me explain; let’s take this a step at a time:
First, we probably all know people who fall into the category in which they are not going to change, no matter what. They are set in their ways and they’ll gladly say so to anyone who will listen. They like themselves just the way they are, and it’s clear, just in conversation that they are not interested in changing one bit. These are not the people I’m talking about here. We can exclude them from this conversation.
Second, we also probably know people who don’t seem to have a sense of themselves. They adopt whatever demeanor, behavior, and personality are best suited to the situation. They are also not the people I am talking about here. We can exclude them from this conversation as well.
The third group comprises the people I am talking about and they are those people who have some sense of themselves in a way that is stable and identifiable to the outside world. Their way of moving through the world, their way of being, for them, has worked well enough in life. Perhaps things have moving along just fine and now they are coming up against some “personal life force or situation” that requires them to change in order to deal with it. They can either change and deal with the situation successfully or they can revert to old behaviors and get hammered by the situation. The bottom line is that we probably have enough experience in our own life and in our observations of others to know that about 50% of the time people change and 50% of the time they get hammered.
From this third situation what are we to conclude? Are we to conclude that people don’t change, that people do change, or that some people can change and some don’t? As I said earlier in this blog, to this question I must say that I don’t really know the answer. But I do have a different way to think about this that makes a great deal of sense to me and explains the observable facts better than the black and white answers, “yes” or “no”.
I’ll elaborate in Thursday’s blog. See you then.
Be well
Steven Cerri
Are you using all your skills at work?
Posted by Steven Cerri on Thursday, September 14, 2006
I want to introduce you to what is probably a new concept for you. The name of the concept is, “The Fully Integrated Technical Professional©”. I’ll explain what that means in this blog.
You go to college to learn your trade. You learn how to be an “individual contributor”, a technical professional who can solve specific technical problems. That’s all well and good.
Then you work at a company for a number of years and slowly or perhaps not so slowly you are given greater responsibility, especially responsibility for the management of projects and the management of a small team. You are expected to contribute positively to the team and maybe even display a little leadership in meetings. You are expected to be able to compromise and find the most effective solution in collaboration with your colleagues, those down the hall and those halfway around the world. You are expected to communicate and communicate well with a wide variety of people.
And from this situation there are two possible paths your career can take. You either do all this well and you succeed and therefore move along a path to management, or you don’t succeed, you crash, and you get relegated to doing “technical work” only. Now don’t get me wrong, you may choose to be the manager or you may choose to remain completely focused on the technical work. The operative word here is “choose”. If you choose the path you want, fine. But many technical professionals, who get relegated to the technical world after attempting the management path, don’t get to choose. They find they haven’t measured up and they are disappointed, frustrated, and bitter. In fact, it’s mostly for this reason that many companies have developed the “dual-track” for those technical professionals who want to stay technical and those who want to become managers. The dual track allows technical people to “stay technical” throughout their careers, and while some choose this path, some end up there because they didn’t know how to make the successful transition to management.
Here is my position; let’s throw this whole concept of two paths and failing on any one of them out the window. Let’s make what we do with our careers a choice… a conscious choice, made because we understand what we want to do and what we are best suited to do.
That means that when you graduate from college and enter the work force as a technical professional you have one of two major paths to take; either you remain primarily technical or you move into technical management. However, whatever path you take you will contribute ALL of your capabilities. Regardless of whether you stay technical or you become a manager you will develop your skills at communicating with anyone in any situation. You will develop your ability to manage and lead be it in a meeting or with a company wide project. You will learn how to think systemically. You will learn how to vary your communication style so that you can motivate people whether in a small meeting down the hall or when talking to an auditorium full of your employees.
This then is what it is to be a Fully Integrated Technical Professional. It is to be a fully developed contributor to your organization either as a technologist or as a technical manager. It’s to continue your personal development process after college. It’s to be able to live your professional career from a position of choice not from of position of limitation. The Fully Integrated Technical Professional is a technical professional first. It’s someone who understands to varying degrees technology, its implications, and its capabilities. And it is someone who can also communicate, interact, understand, and motivate people and situations so that things can get done, not just by one person but by many. Remember, the days of living in the corner lab and working alone to accomplish what needs to be done are mostly gone. Look around. Nothing of significance gets done anymore without the contributions of many people. To me, the Fully Integrated Technical Professional is the only way to be a technical person in the 21st century. Like I often say, the Fully Integrated Technical Professional is a technical professional who is more than technical.
Be well
Steven Cerri
My Introductory Blog
Posted by Steven Cerri on Monday, September 11, 2006
You’re probably wondering… who am I and why do I have this blog? The answers to those two questions are very important to me as they are to you.
To the first: I’m an engineer, a scientist, and a business person and entrepreneur. I have degrees in each area: a BS in aeronautical engineering; an MS in geophysics; and an MBA. I've done international training, I'm an author, and I'm an adjunct professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Technology Management Program Department. I have over 30 years of experience in aerospace engineering, software development, and printer manufacturing companies, in both the technology and the management areas. And that experience has been in commercial, government, and in department-of-defense business arenas. So I’ve gotten a taste of how all three of these environments function.
I began my career as an engineer and ultimately became a general manager. I’ve made the transition from technical professional to technical manager and beyond (product manager, general manager, and corporate trainer). By most standards I’ve been very successful and yet, I got very little help along the way. By that I mean I got very little help that would have made my transition to management easier. Primarily this was because there was no one who really, and I mean really, understood what a technical person goes through when they become a manager. Technical people either make the transition to management or they don’t and if they succeed their success is attributed to some “innate” ability.
Oh, for sure, there were the psychologists who could teach me what they thought I should know about people and management. But they were psychologists; what did they know about what was going on in my head, the head of an engineer? And there were the engineers and technical managers who would teach me about project management, schedules, and budgets. But those were the easy functions. No one was there to teach me what I really needed to know to make management “comfortable” for me. There was no one there who was willing to discuss the “transition” from technical professional to technical manager. And while I was lucky enough to be successful, I made the trip pretty much on my own, so to speak.
In fact, I was extremely successful in building teams. I was able to turn projects and organizations around, even in situations where others had failed. Somehow I had learned how to motivate and move people to achieve results that others could not. And I began to help those who worked for me make the transition from technical professional to technical manager. I began to groom program and project managers to take on their own major projects. Some even started their own companies.
To the second question: From these results, I more and more began hearing myself say; “I want to teach technical professionals how to do this because I really think I understand what they need to know that no one is telling them. Most of my approaches to building teams and managing people and projects went against the accepted practices, and yet the results were fantastic. So I had to ask myself what was going on here and why was I successful building technical teams and grooming managers while others weren’t as successful?
I decided about 15 years ago to embark on a consulting, training, and coaching career. I decided that it was important to me to get what I considered to be my message out to technical people. And so while I’ve continued to work inside corporations on and off since I started my consulting, training, and coaching company, my main interest has been in training technical professionals to have successful long-term careers, either as technical professionals or as technical mangers and helping them make a smooth transition if they decide to become technical managers.
The message of this blog then, is really my message. It’s based on my experience, and on my ideas about what works and what doesn’t work in technology management. It’s about the personal development of the technical professional required to become a truly long-term success as a technologist or a manager in their organization.
You won’t find a compilation of other people’s ideas here. You won’t find any straddling of the fence either. You won’t find me giving you several ideas about a management topic and then telling you that it’s up to you to decide what to do. If that is what you want, there are plenty of good blogs that you can visit that will provide that kind of information. That’s not this site and it’s not me. I definitely have an opinion developed over a long career. I have strategies that work in a wide variety of technology management situations. They have worked for me and they have worked for the people I’ve trained, coached, and taught. This is not about theory, it is about practical technical management.
On this site, my message will consist of my ideas, my experience, and my suggestions. Try them out. If they work, please come back. If they don’t work then please feel free to let me know. I encourage you to ask me questions; pose specific situations you might be facing; get specific. This can and should be a powerful learning process. And that’s what we do as technical professionals, we learn and we apply what we learn. You’ve learned about the physical laws of the universe. It’s time you learn about the “laws” or maybe "theorems" of technical management.
You’ll find that my message consists of three parts and three parts only. Part one is that I help technical people be better and more effective as technical people in their technical organizations. Part two is that I help technical managers be better technical managers. And part three is that I help technical professionals make a smooth and effective transition to technical management. All three of these components comprise a program I call “The Fully Integrated Technical Professional” (more on this in future blogs.)
I’ll update this blog twice a week; on Mondays and Thursdays. Enjoy and much success.
Steven Cerri
Founder of "The Fully Integrated Technical Professional©"
"Training and coaching technical professionals to be as good with people and management as they are with their PCs"
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