Free IT Manager's Handbook: Getting Your New Job Done by Bill Holtsnider, Brian D. Jaffe Page B

enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.
    Teddy Roosevelt
    Chapter table of contents
2.1 Keeping Employees Focused
2.2 Employee Training
2.3 Employee Performance
2.4 Generational Issues at Work
2.5 Further References
    Even with the advanced functionality available in today’s hardware and software, the human factor is still the biggest influence on how effectively technology is used in your environment. The members of your IT team are the ones who will select, implement, configure, monitor, and manage the technology in your corporation. The technologies in place are only as good as the people using them—that applies to both the end-users and the IT team.
    The technology products in your environment behave in a fairly predictable manner, but people oftentimes don’t. Managing a staff is an art, not a science.
    The importance of managing a team can’t be emphasized enough:
•Become a great manager and you’ve found a career path and skill that will serve you well for the rest of your life—both in and out of the workplace.
•Fail to manage well and you may find that your potential growth with the organization is limited at best.
•Become good at it, and it becomes your most valuable skill, and your staff and department become a critical component and vital asset of the organization.
•Without good staff management skills, you’ll see your department’s goals and objectives become an uphill battle, and you and your team’s value to the organization will be questioned.
    2.1 Keeping Employees Focused
    IT Managers must set clear priorities, explain the company and department mission, and communicate often with their team. Throughout this book, specific techniques are detailed to provide you with methods to accomplish these goals.
    Establish Priorities
    One of the most important, but often unnoticed, functions of a manager is to set priorities; these can include actions such as allocating staffing and funding to various projects, provisioning of technical resources (such as hardware), setting of deadlines, and so on. Employees who spend months working on a project often wonder what exactly it is that their manager does. In truth, the manager is doing one of the most important parts of his job by deciding which projects get worked on, when they need to start and finish, and what resources are assigned to them. A manager’s real worth is in his ability to set goals and objectives, set priorities, make decisions, and manage and motivate the team to achieve them.
    Setting goals and priorities means managing your staff and your team so that their work reflects, as close as possible, your own priorities. Those priorities should, in turn, reflect those of the organization. (See the section “Company Mission, Vision, and Values” on page 34 in this chapter about the company’s mission, as well as in Chapter 1 , The Role of an IT Manager , the section “Developing an IT Strategy” on page 10 .) A manager’s merit is found in his staff’s work. Of course, your decisions and priorities may be totally off-base or they may be 100 percent on target. But if you fail to manage your staff well, the quality of your priorities will not matter: Your goals and objectives will never be achieved anyway.
    Communicate with Your Team
    First and foremost, communicate your vision for the department to your staff. They should understand both where you want the department to go and the plans you have for getting there. Both are important. You don’t want to be the manager who makes the trains run on time, but doesn’t know what to put in the freight cars. Similarly, you don’t want to be the manager who talks on and on about the wonders of train travel but never gets the tracks put down.
    The communication of your goals and priorities to your team is vital. The way you communicate with them will vary with a project’s scope. A two-year project to implement an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application will require