Hiring SME IT Leaders: Results Or Skills?

As small to medium business Owners or Managers, at some point you realize that the time has come to look for some leadership to take control of your IT  team.

Like most businesses, in your early stages of growth you probably hired your IT staff based on particular skill sets that you needed. Perhaps those skills were with certain Point of Sale systems, database software or email servers, etc.

While skills and experience are critically important when supporting and fixing your existing technology and software tools, that requirement for a particular skill level begins to change as you begin looking for higher levels of IT leadership. Those exact skill sets can become less relevant than business results.

That is not to say that there can be zero technology skills!

As SME managers, we need to wear many hats. That includes your IT managers. We need (‘we’ meaning  business technology leaders) to maintain our technical skills, but we also need to grow the more business results oriented strategic planning, relationship, and project skills.

Skills, Results: Let me paint an example

As a growing business lets imagine that you have reached the point where you have decided that you need to invest in a larger resource planning (ERP) or financial application.

This can be a huge investment, so after many discussions with your peers, and maybe a consultant or two from your local Chamber of Commerce, you think that a particular product will be perfect for you. Lets also assume that those same discussions convinced you that to support this type of technology initiative, you will need to go beyond your current break/fix  tech geeks to a true business technology leader who can be responsible for delivering the value you need for this investment.

Answer this question;

When you call the placement agency, or publish the advertisement, what importance do you think skill with the product you chose should carry in your hiring decision?

The answer is not necessarily much!

Next, lets assume you are now interviewing a few candidates for that IT leadership position.

One particular candidate looks excellent. She has great recommendations, and has successfully implemented ERP or financial software a few times already!

But! she has never used, or even seen that particular ERP or financial vendor’s product that you want to implement. Do you think that matters? Do you write her off the short list?

Here is a tip!

A strong business technology candidate will pick up different software skills easily. Example; I was once flown in to fix a problem with software environments I had never seen before, it was less than two days until I understood enough to fix the issue.

It is the skills to discuss, negotiate and implement the processes behind the software are the harder ones!

Your candidate can demonstrate that he or she has obtained the results that you are looking for several times, it is only because each time she was using products that are competitive to the product you have chosen that you are considering knocking her off the short list.

So in this example, the demonstrated results this candidate can show far outweighs their lack of skill with your chosen software package.

The SMB Takeaway

Skill and experience with a particular product can be critical when you are hiring someone to babysit a particular tool or product, but demonstrated results is the critical metric when you need leadership to provide business benefits from your IT investments.

Hire Well!

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Canadian SME ‘C’ Level Execs, Call for New IT Manager Interview Questions

I have been invited to submit a freelance article to a Canadian print publication on SME Owners and Executives that have decided that they need to interview and hire that first IT Leader that goes beyond being a caretaker of PC’s and into contributing to the strategic delivery of services that support a growing businesses goals, these could include;

- boosting sales
- maximizing profits
- improving collaboration, both internal and external
- effective knowledge sharing
- improving internal processes
- Developing new products and services
- etc

This article is then to outline sample interview questions that non-technology oriented general managers can ask to tease out some of those desired skill sets.

I will be including questions on budgeting and financial controls, process and people management frameworks, as well as roles and objectives, (among other ideas.)

If you as a General Manager in the Canadian SME space have a questions that you have used (or found out later that you wish you had used!) and would like to be quoted, please feel free to leave a comment here with contact information or email me at elliotross@sympatico.ca

Please include the the why of desired skills or behaviour of your question.

Please note

“invited” equals not 100% guarantee of publishing!

Regards

Elliot Ross

It’s Only Obvious If You Think About It

Brad Feld on the Ask The VC blog pointed me to Greg Gottesman’s TechFlash article titled; Thirteen key characteristics of a great startup culture

Beyond the subject of Corporate Culture, it is actually some of the comments to that article that I want to address in this one.

One commenter by the handle of Ronin asks if this applies only to tech outfits (sort of a VC mainstay!)- I say no – as an example, a president I know of an SMB distribution company relies on it. In his words;

Hire good people, and let them do it. I only get involved if they need me.

Second, many, many commenter’s – (all to the point I read to anyway, remained anonymous – isn’t it amazing that people who just attempt to cut people down with a holier-than-thou attitude can only do it anonymously?)

Sorry, I digressed

Many of these anonymous quotes were along the line of;

these are both obvious and a few of the 10,000+ things you have to do

And I gotta say

It is usually the obvious that most owners and general managers of SME’s fail at.

It is obvious that your customers are the one paying the bills – but too many don’t remember that.

It is obvious that regardless of your educational or functional expertise, as an owner and general manager of an SME, you need to have knowledge to the relevant level of detail of all aspects of your business, and that includes IT.

It is obvious that delegation is not abdication. So why do they abdicate so much?

The Takeaway?

Something that is obvious to me, may not be obvious to you. And something obvious to you may not be obvious to me. We can learn from others, or we can choose to think we know everything.

And you can take this to the bank – the only time you know-it-all is when you are 13 years old

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Hiring IT; Looking Up Help Is Good

A number of years ago I was looking to hire a junior tech staff member.

Once I reached the point where I had my short list of candidates, I set up a computer with a few common things “broken’.

Nothing really difficult or strange, but common things that often need troubleshooting on our SME computer networks.

After the interview questions  process, the candidates were turned loose on that computer. I was not looking over their shoulder, but I was close enough to observe their behaviour.

Of that days candidates, one of them started using the Windows Help system to assist him in fixing some of those problems.

I hired that individual on the spot.

We cannot always know the answers. And I want people who will go out of their way to find the answers.

That candidate was with me for a couple of years and was later hired by a large organization as a senior tech staff member. Even working with different (UNIX) servers. 

I knew he could do it!

I knew it because he was not afraid to dive and learn what he did not know.

Let me tell you people, folks like that are solid gold.

In IT, or any where else in your business.

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Talent vs. Experience

The concepts in this post were going to be covered in future posts on hiring IT staff in the SMB space. However Oliviér Blanchard’s inspiring post called Talent Vs. Experience on the BrandBuilder blog challenged me to bring it forward in time.

In the small business / medium business space, senior IT professionals are too often hired for a particular level of technical experience rather than great talent or performance. In a comment I made on Oliviér’s post, I (half) jokingly pointed at the technology industry looking for people with 10 years of experience in a 6 month old technology.

This may be caused by lack of senior management knowledge of what skills they are actually looking for when hiring what may be their first business technology team leader or manager.

Or, it may be that an organization may apply a senior title, but the job description and job specification is truly looking for a Business Technology electrician. (Which is an event that I have seen more than once.)

You can debate the term talent as either learned, or innate. I will leave that to experts such as Geoff Colvin,  because for the concept here, there is no relevance either way.

Experience

I am not denigrating experience here. If you currently are running a line of business, or enterprise technology platform, perhaps resource planning, point of sale, or financial, perhaps you need that experienced electrician to dive into the wiring to keep the power flowing.

But relying too much on experience does not help you when something changes.

If the rules change, the old way of doing things may not work anymore.

Define Talent?

If we look at talent as a particular aptitude,  then an individuals previous experience with something is absolutely no inhibitor to excellence in something new.

Don’t believe me?

I have a lifetime of experience in the English language, but I am not talented in its usage. (as any creative author, journalist or editor would attest!)

I can therefor guarantee that a talented writer to whom English may be their second or third language, will provide you a better result than I can with a lifetime of  experience.

Talent

In the technology space, a talented individual is more likely to think outside of the current constraints.

They can think beyond the ‘it has always been done this way dilemma.

A talented individual knows the constructs that can affect outcomes and deliverables, even if they have not been seen before.

This is not limited to technology. In what we call the skilled trades, there is high variability of the work being done. This variability meaning that no two issues (jobs) are identical.

So talent is building on your framework of skill and knowledge to accomplish what you have not seen before.

Talent + Experience

It goes without saying, having both is solid gold!

I will go into more detail and examples that I have run into over the years in future ‘hiring IT’ in SMB space posts.

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SMB’s and Employee Contribution

With the current economic climate, a good article by Karen D. Schwartz at eWeek Midmarket;

The article dives into performance indicators and metrics that can be key for smaller organizations in the SME space to be watching.

One metric she mentions is the high cost of turnover;

Let’s say your number of employees grow every year by 5%. On the surface that looks really good, but if you’re losing 20% of your employees every year and have to rehire now 25% you are incurring incredible expenses having to do with administration, retraining and separation,”

The only thing I caution when just looking at pure turnover, is why that turnover is there.

I worked at an organization that actively helped, and encouraged entry level employees to improve their skills. Borrowing from the old Tom Cruise movie title, informally the team were the Top Guns.

Yes, entry level position turnover can be high.

But if that turnover is into higher value places in the organization – it can be a benefit to you.

The hiring cost of more senior positions will be higher, plus the newly transferred employee needs far less retraining to get comfortable in the role.

Not to mention that the esprit de corp makes finding the replacement for the entry level position a lot easier.

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SMB IT: Hiring Part 1

Over the years I have had many discussions with small business / mid market business Managers and Owners regarding the hiring of IT staff.

Unless your business is a technology business, hiring IT staff or suppliers can be a pain the ass.

That pain comes from;

* How do you know what you need?

* If someone is telling you what you need, is it true or snake oil?

* What questions do I need to know about my business, and what am I really looking for?

* Do I hire? or should I just contract it out?

* What land mines exist in hiring IT staff?

* When should I look at hiring IT staff?

As I wrote in this post,  our businesses are all not the same, there is no one size fits all answer.

The metrics of ‘number of staff’, or revenue do not always paint the picture. You and I could both 100 staff, yours may be writing orders or software on computers, while mine are in the loading area.

More accurate metrics consist of how many technology assets are under management, (internal or hosted) and the effect or benefit of technology on your business.

No Tech No Prob?

Means that you can most likely not be as worried about internal tech staffers long after the similar sized organization that relies on certain technology to operate or generate revenue.

Over this next series of posts I will outline some of my experiences and lessons learned in hiring IT staff in the SME space.

Photo Credit

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Enter In Ignorance

Over the years, when I have been interviewed to join new organizations I have been asked what the first things I would do to fix a certain issue or problem. Invariably my response is something along the theme of “learn”.

While experience and skills can provide a framework to apply, every situation is unique. As Peter Drucker is reported to have stated, he entered his consulting roles with mammoth organizations such as GE not from a position of expertise, but a position of ignorance.

Hiring, Or Being Hired

As a business manager In the SMB space, it can be difficult to accurately assess the skills that you want to hire as far as technology goes. Maybe it is the “first IT individual” you are hiring. Or you realize that you need a more strategic managerial view of your IT spending.

My comments of “learn” is exactly that. No preconceived notions or assumptions. Something that seems obvious on the surface, may have a root cause that is completely different.

When hiring, (or if you are being hired as a small business IT staffer)

Don’t: Assume that the world can be changed the day after a new hire starts. (warning flag if they say they will!)

Do: Ensure that you have documented the expectations that you have for the position – Especially for a more senior strategic role, this is not necessarily a “job description” – but the fundamental goal that you want the position to achieve.

Don’t: Set it and forget it. As detailed in other posts on this blog, it takes continuing management.

Do: Ensure that speaking in business terms, not “geek speak” is the norm.

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