another coffee, please

Today I went to a panel session.  I’ve never been to a panel session before and didn’t know what to expect.  It was run by Cisco, and FITT, and the Australian Computer Society, though, so you can expect it was pretty slick.  Plus there was a promise of “networking” – a word that scares me because it involves selling yourself to complete strangers (in a professional way!).  But I am prone to bouts of proactive career building so I registered within the first 24 hours, before I could talk myself out of it, and before the registrations closed because so many people signed up.

The panel session was called “Discover your unique strengths – Striving for self mastery”.  I can never work out what these titles really mean and I’ve decided before that I should just ignore the title of these events because sometimes it goes way off topic.  Having said that though, the words “strength” and “self-mastery” caught my eye.

The people on the panel were worth doing some quick iphone research on the way to the panel (me, organised? ha!) and they all sounded pretty interesting.  I’m just going to copy their names from the event page since they probably have CVs that go for miles:

Les Williamson – Vice President, Cisco ANZ
Sara Adams – Operational Director, Commercial, Cisco ANZ

Clive Leach – Executive Coach

Dr. Suzy Green – Coaching and Positive Psychologist
Yu Dan Shi – Director of Marketing, Cisco ANZ

So two women with Director in the title, and a Dr.  Talk about motivating – that’s where I want to be one day.  So it was with great interest that I listened to Yu Dan talking about how it was difficult to fudge a self-review at Cisco because they measure you on strengths, not weaknesses.  Two things struck me – one, she understood that fudging self-reviews usually was inevitable (she’s human!) and two, that strengths based measurements of your ability are really, really good for women.

It made me stop and think for a moment about what my strengths are, and I realised I couldn’t completely answer that question.  I know I have strengths but I have no idea what other people perceive them to be.  And normally when I’m thinking about perception I worry about looking too young, or being a female, or not wearing the right clothes, and that stops me from bringing out my positives.  So that’s one thing I decided I would work on: identify my strengths, and then promote them to others.

The other two speakers – the men! – were equally interesting.  Clive Leach talked about “flourishing”, a state that only about 20% of workers experience.  I understand this feeling because I know I’ve been there: a state where you want to wake up and go to work and you feel great.  A healthy life is where you flourish both at home and at work, of course.  Too much over-flourishing at work and you’ll affect your home life.  Les Williamson, who is Yu Dan and Saras’ boss, talked about how he works to try to combine corporate and social or human networks, to bring out the best in people so that they are, well, flourishing.  At least, that was part of what he talked about  - aside from that, he was a very funny guy, very down to earth, and not at all who you would expect to be the VP of a massive multinational like Cisco.

On the way back to work (yes, unfortunately it was only 12-3pm) I wrote down a couple of things to follow up.  Actually, I wrote down a lot of nonsense too (something about people on trains having jazzy ringtones) but I figure that’s all part of the brain dumping that helps me clarify my real thoughts:

1. Websites, tests, assessments of strengths

• http://www.authentichappiness.org/ , where you can do a VIA strengths finder test,
• Realise 2, a similar strengths finder tool that uses more business language,
• and the next book I’m going to purchase, Gallup’s StrengthsFinder 2.0

2. Word of the day: “Authentic”.

• How to be authentic when you deal with people at work (and at home!)
• Giving authentic feedback.  Asking for feedback.  I thought it might be valuable to start asking people what my strengths are.  And my weaknesses.  That all kind of scares me a little.  Gotta sleep on it.

3. You don’t have to be an expert in the field to be a Manager in it

• Something Sara Adams said, that resonated pretty strongly

4. Email a few of the people I met, to try to keep in touch and do that “networking” thing.  I really suck at talking to people in person and I promise I will try  better next time.  I did give out a few business cards, which is kudos to me for (a) remembering to bring them and (b) actually giving them to people.

I got back to work feeling energised, until I found someone’s email that made me feel little again.  Sigh.  I dealt with that one by stomping around the room creating negative energy.. woops.  Gotta make a note not to do that next time.  Fortunately the issue (storage) I am talking to the Ops Manager about later today, but that’s another story for another time.

I’m interested in developing this blog as I learn, but I know something I have to do is commit to it.  I’m sitting here today on a Monday night, logged into my work email, reflecting on my career so far (all three years of it) and my career to come.  What I’m interested in, what I’m looking forward to, what I want to be in a year or five years or ten.  It’s something I think about regularly especially when work starts to get stressful or frustrating.

“It’s my choice.. it’s my life.” — Rachel Berry (on Glee)

I can see so many career choices, so many paths that are available to me.  I have a university degree in Computer Science, I’m interested in everything, I’m quick at picking up new things.  I love to communicate and share knowledge.  These all seem like useful traits/attributes or certificates to have.  I want to be the best I can be but I have no idea which of my strengths I should play on or which of my weaknesses I need to develop.

I was thinking about my career goal the other day, and I can sum it up something like this: “I want to go to work every day giving more than I gave yesterday, learning more than I knew yesterday, being more than I was yesterday”.

This is an industry that attempts to redefine “service”.  If your server is up and running, then you can’t complain about “service”.  If you can contact a service desk out of hours and get an automated email reply, then you are getting “service”.  As long as your service provider is providing something you can’t or don’t want to do yourself.. this is considered “service”.  It’s a concept that, I admit, I am rather bitter about.  I had a dream when I was younger of working in retail (one day when I am an old lady I will serve you at Myer).  I love the thrill of making customers happy, going above and beyond their expectations; in IT, however, it seems as though the base level of service is good enough, and don’t do more unless the customer is paying through the eyeballs for it.  Ugh!

It gives me hope that there are technical people, developers, IT professionals – whatever you want to call them – out there who agree with me.  Who see customer service as more than restarting services when they’re told a website is inaccessible; they will, of their own accord, conduct analysis of the problem, suggest upgrades, fixes, modifications that will improve the end product.  I love workplace environments where you don’t mind working overtime because you know that the customer satisfaction is worth it – either for the warm and fuzzies or for the extra income that will come in or maybe just knowing that they’re going to tell their own customers about you.

A company that really struck me as understanding “customer service” is Runic, developers of a game called Torchlight.  A single user posted on their forums asking if a feature was available, and with no further ado the developers added it.  The customer didn’t have to raise a request via a customer service channel, then wait for it to be acknowledged as an issue (probably only after a percentage of their user base raised the same issue), and then wait for a fix or change to be pushed out with other system upgrades.  It may have only been a minor change, but it was done without fuss, and without cumbersome processes.

I think that’s what makes “service” so difficult.  It may be that Runic is small enough that its developers can make changes to code without having to go through a huge change control process, but then again: why should any IT company have to go through such processes? Why make the customer suffer for what may be a simple change? I dislike workplace policies that require every little change to go through iterations of reviews until either the goalposts move or grow or just fall over and everybody forgets why it’s happening in the first place.

I would rather fix, install, or make the customer’s life easier than to have to wait for their server to fall over while I’m waiting for internal approval of change requests.  Customer service creates satisfaction.  Satisfaction speaks for itself: it’s advertising to everybody what kind of service they’ll get if they come to you.  And that is good for business.  Service levels should imply satisfaction with the end results, not just a way of protecting yourself if an issue is found.  It’s good to know there are companies like Runic who are really putting service back into IT.

I spent a chunk of time tonight updating my virtual profile. This is actually a lot more daunting than it sounds. The sites I have the most obvious virtual presence on (i.e. I use my full, real name) are LinkedIn and Facebook. I don’t have much of a presence on the former, but eerily it shows up as the second hit when I Google my name. And though I generally don’t mind when people search for me on Facebook, it does concern me that there are people out there who are able to use this information to their advantage, and to my disadvantage.

When I started my current job, I asked my co-worker why they’d picked me. Was it my eagerness to learn? Fitting into the team?

“Well,” he said, “we googled you.”

Uhoh. What did you find?

“That you’ve been involved in a couple of computing societies at uni (tick!), that you did pretty well in the HSC (tick!) – oh, and you met your boyfriend through World of Warcraft.”

Oh. THAT article. Where I proclaimed my skepticism of online dating sites and my distrust of the undead. Though I’m not terribly embarrassed by the article now – it’s a good talking point, you know? – when it was brought up by people I hardly knew I wanted to sink into the ground. The funny thing is that this article was written a year and a half ago and yet it’s still around on the internet. It’s been archived for all cyberspace eternity! And one day I will probably go for a job interview in which the interviewer will say, off the cuff, “so, Phoebe, are you still one of those World of Warcraft nerds?”

Interviews I regret aside, however, I’m interested in how my virtual presence can identify me even before someone’s met me. It can affect everything, from how smart (they think) I am, to how well I dress, to my personality traits. People can decide whether they like me before even setting eyes on me in the flesh. If this is bad enough with friends of friends (and potential partners!) I can only imagine what a potential employer would think of my Facebook photos.

So I’ve turned them all to private, so that only “my friends” who I am directly connected to can see them. (I have doubts about the integrity of this system though as I used to be able to copy and paste direct picture links to people who weren’t part of my Facebook “friends”). I’ve also limited the amount of information that complete strangers see. Is it relevant that I’m in a “complicated” relationship? Maybe. Does it imply that I’m not committed, or that I have personal problems? (No, he just lives twelve thousand kilometres away.)

I think it’s important to separate Facebook groups and widgets into those which are definitely just for fun (like a Scrabble type game) and those which are a bit more grey. I’m not a fan of the applications which aim to give you a net worth, or identify you via adjectives. I’m not a fan of groups which polarise, either, since I often don’t agree with the sentiment. Some groups I do believe in (see: No Australian Internet Censorship) but I think for the most part I reject invitations to groups I’m not a solid supporter of.

On to LinkedIn, the social network aimed at a slightly more serious audience, and I realised that my profile there also needed a bit of tidying up. Spelling inconsistencies irk me by nature, but I’d also not capitalised my first and last name (maybe at the time I didn’t quite know what I was signing up for). I’ve corrected this, and redefined my current job title. However, when it came to updating my profile, I was a little stumped…

Like writing a resume, LinkedIn is more about selling yourself than any of the other social networks I’ve been a part of. MySpace is (mostly) about expressing yourself, whether it’s through music or having an objectively aesthetically pleasing profile. Facebook is about connecting to old friends and acquaintances, and adding the random guy you bumped into last night who happens to already be within your network because he’s friends with your sister’s boyfriend’s best friend. It’s got a very casual factor to it that suits its demographic, which, remember, was originally college students (and alumni)!

LinkedIn is a step away from that. It’s the network where you won’t be afraid to talk about how good you are without coming across as arrogant. It’s where you want to link your Seek and CareerOne jobhunts so that you don’t ever need to fire up Microsoft Word again in order to try to make your resume look good. Not just does it list all of your qualifications, it also displays your referees and, should they move to a new job, will keep their contact details current. To this effect, I think it’s one of the best career tools online. However… this is the daunting part.

Where’s the line between selling yourself and going overboard when it comes to social websites? What kind of presence is “better”: a good career profile or a good social profile? Which are recruiters more interested in? One displays your skill set (according to you) and the other displays your personality, your attitude, and your lifestyle. Is it “okay” to describe yourself one way on Facebook and a different way on LinkedIn – your intended audience is different, after all – or will that person end up reading both and conclude that you are a hypocrite?

Add in my weblog (should anybody find it) and you have a third perspective of the same person. Hopefully my ideals remain relatively similar across the spectrum, although I foresee that as I advance in my career, and my personal life, there will be times when I can’t align the Internet and something will go terribly wrong, probably during the most important job interview of my life (or my wedding). Then again, I am a pessimist.

Curious? Google yourself.

(This is a rant post, and all my rant posts are probably going to be lengthy and probably whingey too.  I don’t expect you to read them, and on the same note I don’t expect you to feel sorry for me.  I rant because this is my blog and I can write whatever I damn well want to.)

It’s nothing new to be sick of work, or the place you work, or the people you work with.  To be honest, I like my job.  I like the people I work with.  I like the atmosphere of this company and the work that I do, as long as it keeps me busy.  I loved this job when I started because every day I came to work I learnt something new.  I did something technical, I was involved at the system level, and there were things I didn’t fully understand.

I’m not going to say that ‘now, I know everything’ – far from it! I’m just worried that the way the company is heading is dithering on politics, on contracts, and on potential sales.  Things aren’t being seen through from start to finish with customers, there is a shortage (I won’t say “complete lack”, although sometimes it feels like it) of communication from the management through to ops, and, well, I know I’m not the only person here looking for a new job.

What would I like to see to make my workday more bearable? Hmm.  It’s an interesting question, because on one hand I could be totally selfish and say “Well an extra 30k would be nice” or I could be unrealistic and say “I’d like to have the whole organisation communicate like a well oiled gear”.  Or I can be realistic and say that the following things will slow down my search for greener pastures:

* Good communication.  We are a small-to-medium sized company (somewhere in the vicinity of 30 employees) with skills ranging from the technologically illiterate to those with 30 years+ of technical, practical knowledge.  The variety is refreshing and for a company of our size, good for us: with people around who are less technically literate, we in operations have to think about how we word things.  An example occurred today when one of the BDMs required clarification as to whether “dual hba card” meant two cards, two sets of HBAs, or one card with two ports.

On that note, though, communication has to go both ways.  I like to know what the company’s goals are from a board’s perspective, or from the sales perspective.  I want to hear about where we’re struggling such that I don’t pass on the wrong information to customers.  Since everybody in the company (pretty much) has interaction with the customers, it’s imperative we’re all on the same level.  I don’t feel like this is occurring; in fact, I feel as though the management is purposely telling us something different to what’s occurring over there.  And when we pass on this information to customers it causes all sorts of confusion, which leads to negative publicity for the company.

My solution? Even something as impersonal and tacky as a company newsletter for internal distribution is better than what we have now.  There are, on occasion, emails sent around briefly telling us what we already know about expanding and attaining new customers, but there really should be a central source of gossip rather than via the Exchange grapevine.  If not, then keep everybody updated with the latest happenings of the business and the outcomes of important internal meetings.  There are team leader discussions, but where’s the consolidated team email?

* Better relationships with customers.  Every company has the big fish, the small fish, and the three eyed fish as customers.  It’s a given that some will be easier to deal with than others.  I think it’s important that in a small company, where one of our biggest assets is being easily accessible, that we talk to the customers.  Unfortunately it recently seems as though operations staff is being told to “stay away” – don’t talk to the customer unless you have to; get everything in writing before you commit; push it back to the account manager.  I know that as we grow it’s wise to let the customers know that they won’t always be dealing with the same technical staff; on the other hand, we are small enough that alienating the customer makes them wonder why they’re with us when they can get the same kind of cold treatment from a larger and more established company.

My solution? Ensure that the customer is introduced to the technical staff.  Even a brief greeting and a chat is enough to build a technically founded relationship with a customer who operations staff don’t usually get to see face to face.  (Most of our incident handling is done over the phone/email).  Having the opportunity to meet your customers, and for them to meet us, removes that impersonal layer and promotes open channels of communication.

* Friendlier working environment.  I hate my desk at the moment.  This is seven eighths my fault.  I don’t keep it tidy, and I have a very strange sense of humour (such as the seven legged lamb picture that I pinned to my wall).  We, like most office workers, spend eight hours or more of our day living in a bland cell.  It seriously kills the imagination and I’m won’t be surprised if one day someone comes around and asks me for a TPS report and a stapler.  Why I think that this environment is bad: it suffocates me.  I know there aren’t going to be many other offices out there which are better, but I know that they do exist.  As a techie I can get more out of a mentally stimulating environment than one with four walls and a door.  Whether it’s technical equipment to play with (sorry, “work on”), a chillout area which gives us some place to relax, or improving the general environment and atmosphere, I would really like to see more care given to the operations habitat.

Solution: get a fuusball table.  We’ve tried the magnetic dart board (bad idea) and whiteboards (which actually get used for work).  I would like to see more pictures up and around the walls to make them less bare.  Force people to use their cells – I mean, cubicles – as a place that is both comfortable and aesthetically pleasing.  It will make the whole office look better, and improve your mental health when you’re at work.  Feasible? Probably not.  But I can dream.