NetApp - Lessons from a Life of Service – Rusty’s Rants on Leadership, Technology, Customers Support, and Corporate Survival

10 Tips for New Managers

    

So you just got promoted into your first management job, and you don’t have the slightest idea what to do.  You’re not sure if you should “be bold” and do big, innovative things.  You’re not sure if you should “listen well” and keep your head down until you get better oriented.  Interestingly enough, the answer is “both”.  I’m in the process of writing a book designed to help brand new managers survive their first foray into the crazy and sometimes baffling world of management.  In that book, I deep dive into some very interesting, sometimes funny, and frequently irreverent subjects.  I need another half-dozen long, international flights to finish it, but I figured I’d share one of my “Top 10” lists with you.

    

What follows are the top 10 things you should do in your first 90 days as a manager … along with a “glimpse” of the editorial on this subject that I’ve targeted for my book:

    

Tip #1:  Fire someone worthless – Hire someone impressive:  Nothing gets everyone’s attention and establishes your leadership quite like the combination of (a) figuring out who desperately needs to go do something different, and (b) bringing someone on board that’s clearly stronger than the average person on the team.  It’s a way to fix what’s broken, and bulk up your team … all in one coordinated motion.  I know it sounds a little heartless, but trust me, I’ve never taken over a team where there wasn’t at least one person that literally “everyone” knew should be working somewhere else.

    

Tip #2:  Work harder AND smarter:  To this day, my biggest single fear is that a group of my employees would be sitting around at a bar having a beer, and talking about how they work “so much harder than Rusty”.  That prospect terrifies me.  I don’t have the genetic or educational advantage of working “smarter” and staying ahead via superior intelligence … so I make up for it by working harder.  When your team sees you bustin’ your butt for them, they’ll feel like they need to keep up, and the whole team runs fasters as a result.  If you think that managing means you’ve got an easier job … think again.  If you're not working harder than all of your employees, then you're doing it "wrong".

    

Tip #3:  Make your boss’s list your list:  I recommend that you sit down with your boss, figure out what is on his priority list, take the time to understand it, and then adopt it as your own.  Working in a direction that isn’t aligned with your boss is a little like kissing a hog … it makes you look silly and it only annoys the hog.

    

Tip #4:  Pee on the bushes, but don’t drown them:  It’s important to establish yourself as the leader, and make sure that you “mark your turf”.  The mistake a lot of new managers make is that they “over-mark their turf”, and try to over-manage their teams.  Being a good leader is a little like being a good rifle marksman.  Your job is to make sure the rifle is loaded, aimed correctly, and that the trigger is pulled.  Once the round leaves the barrel, you need to be OK with allowing it to take it’s own path to the target.  Sometimes if forces like wind and rain impede the course, you have to reload and try again.  That’s OK … and allowing your team to make mistakes is part of their growth.

    

Tip #5:  “Fewer and Bigger” is better than “Many and Small”:  Find a small number of very high-impact business projects, and then make them happen.  A lot of managers make the mistake of trying to get ahead by doing way too many little things well, instead of finding some “headlines” that matter to the company.  I’m not saying you should ignore all the small things that need to get done.  I’m saying that if all you do is small things, you’ll be considered a small manager.

    

Tip #6:  Remember the Parable of the Little Bird:  A small bird got a late start south.  He was flying over a Kansas field during a blizzard, and he iced up and dropped from the sky.  He thought “My life is over, I’m going to freeze, alone, in this snow pile.  Nothing could be worse.”  Then a cow walked by and … well … (it’s a G-Rated Blog) … so you know what happened.  Yup, right on top of the little bird.  He mused “I thought it couldn’t get worse, but now I’m going to freeze covered with this … (stuff).”  But then he started getting warmer from his ‘surroundings’, the feeling returned to his wings, and he figured out that if he could only get out from under this pile, he might be able to fly to safety.  He yelled “HELP – HELP”.  After a few minutes of yelling for help, he heard a scratching sound, and he saw a pin-hole of light.  “HELP HELP I’M DOWN HERE !!!” he yelled to his rescuer.  Then the hole opened, and a coyote reached, grabbed him and ate him.  The moral of the story is … “Not everyone that dumps on you is your enemy, and not everyone that offers to help you is your friend.”

    

Tip #7:  Embrace Incrementalism:  There was a time in my life when I thought Incrementalism was the surest form of mediocrity.  I was wrong.  Figure out what big things you want to do, break them into digestible chunks, and when you hit a milestone … throw a party and publicize it.  This business is a marathon, not a sprint, and you need to recharge your team regularly with a victory party.  If all you do is whip the mules, at some point, they’ll figure out how to whip you back.

    

Tip #8:  Make friends with people that matter:  This business rock is too big and heavy to push up the hill … with people like HR, Finance, Facilities, and everyone else that might regularly annoy you sitting on top of the rock.  Figure out how to work “with” them instead of “against” them.  I’ll never forget what a wonderful guy I used to work for told me a few years back when I was yelling about how I just “knew” I was right and that knucklehead from HR was wrong.  He said “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be successful?”  I’ve never forgotten that question.  My team hears it often when they’re going through a “Knucklehead Drill”.

    

Tip #9:  Nothing gets you ahead quite like getting anyone but you ahead:  This is the one where you probably decide you’ll never buy my book.  It’s really counter-intuitive, but abidingly true.  Calling attention to yourself and your accomplishments is the “worst” way to forward your career.  Give credit for literally everything … to someone else … even if you did everything yourself.  As a matter of fact, if you really want to annoy someone you don’t like, find a situation where they significantly impeded your progress, but you persevered and accomplished your goal in spite of them.  Then make sure they’re publicly praised for the wonderful help and collaboration they provided in support of the project’s success.  Trust me, it’s fun.  Ignoring them only encourages them to do it again.  Praising them and acknowledging their support makes them feel obligated to do a better job next time.

    

Tip #10:  Learn your employee’s career aspirations, and help them get there:  This is the only overlap from my “Unrecruitable Employee” questions, and it’s the most important thing you can do to breed loyalty, manufacture hard work, and keep your people focused on their job.

    

So those are my “Top 10 Tips” for young managers to embrace in their first 90 days.  It’s a serious list, designed for managers that want to have an impact and drive their businesses to a new level.

    

My next “Top 10” list won’t be quite so serious.  But I’ll save that for another week or two.

It's the "Recovery" that gets remembered !!!

    

Over this past weekend, as I was leading a cross-functional team in a critical escalation for a major account, a situation came to mind where I was on the “customer” side of this type of experience.

    

A number of years ago, I was traveling on Swissair from the San Francisco area to Geneva Switzerland to speak at a conference of European Business Partners for what was then a company I worked for called Bay Networks (subsequently acquired by Nortel).  It was a weekend flight with a Sunday afternoon arrival in Geneva, changing planes at JFK Airport in New York. I arrived in Geneva to find that everyone had walked away from the luggage belt with their bags … except me. No bags!  I went to talk to the very nice lady behind the “Baggage Services” desk, who had me fill out some paperwork and committed to make some fast inquiries. A few minutes later, she came back and said “Mr. Walther, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that your bag has been located.  The bad news is that it’s currently enroute to Johannesburg, South Africa, and it's going to take 3 days to catch up to you.”

    

Well, since I was traveling that day in a sweatshirt, cut-off jeans, and sandals, and with about 500 people the following day in an audience expecting me in a suit and tie, I made darn sure that this nice lady knew that I was in a very tough situation. You see, I’m not one of those sizes that allows me to simply walk into the local department store and buy a suit off the rack.  Life isn’t that simple for me.  Let’s just say that there are elements of my physical composition that require a bit more “cloth” than the usual off-the-rack suit provides. (Those that know me will fully understand this cryptic comment.)  This was a full-blown, USDA Grade-AAA P1 Crisis for me, and I let her know that. She listened intently, asked a few good questions, and told me to have a seat and assured me that she’d try to help.

    

A short while later, she came back and asked me to follow her. She took me out to the curb, where a car was waiting for me. The driver took me to a local tailor shop where the proprietor met us, opened the shop (it was normally closed on Sunday), and over the next 30 minutes measured me for a new suit, along with all the accompaniments. About 9:00pm that evening, a driver for Swissair delivered my new suit to me at my hotel, right down to the cufflinks and shoes. My presentation the next day was a great success, and since the topic was Support-related, I managed to weave my previous day’s story into the dialogue. To this day, that suit holds a place of honor in my closet and is quite probably the highest quality suits that I own.

    

Back to my weekend escalation.  As I was watching a cross-functional team comprised of Support, Professional Services, Engineering and Product Management work together at 2:00am on a Saturday morning … in what ended up being about a 38 hour sleepless escalation helping the customer recover from a critical situation in time for the start of their Monday business day ... I remembered the abiding truth that I learned from my trip to Geneva.

    

In the world of Customer Service, it’s not about “perfection”, and customers know that cutting edge technology will sometimes present them with "challenges". The important question continues to be: “What are you doing to help your customer recover?”

    

When I talk about Swissair, I spend about 2% of the time on my lost luggage. I spend about 98% of my time talking about their wonderful customer service, and why I continue 10 years later to fly with them every chance I get.

    

When this weekend’s customer thinks about their support experience, I hope they spend 2% of the time discussing the problem, and 98% of the time in glowing praise of our recovery efforts and singular focus on their business success.

    

The Best Kept Secret At NetApp

   

At some point in our history, some very smart people have done some very forward-looking and innovative “things”.  These innovative ideas have resulted in huge progress and incredible accomplishments.  Among these are …

   

• Reusable adhesive … giving birth to “Post-It-Notes”
• Fuzzy and pointy fabrics that stick together … making “Velcro” possible
• A suction cup on a stick … providing the bathroom “Plunger”

Think about what life would be like without those innovations … especially the last one (yuck).  About 12 years ago, some really smart engineers at NetApp sat around one day and thought about what it would be like to embed an intelligent "supportability engine” inside the operating system of a hardware-software storage filer, allowing that system to collect and deliver both operational and troubleshooting information back to it's "home", thereby making it much more supportable and easy to troubleshoot.

   

Luckily for us, they were able to sell the idea to the rest of the company, and “AutoSupport” was born here at NetApp.  Over the years, it has evolved, improved, expanded, and diversified … but its core focus has never changed.  It was a singularly unique innovation, that hit the market well ahead of its time, and to this day is the industry benchmark … the standard by which enterprise supportability systems must measure themselves.

   

So about six years ago, the Engineering Gods looked at AutoSupport … and saw that it was “Good”.  That’s when the blue-collar Support Gang across the street (maybe they were railroad tracks back then) looked at it and said “It can be better”.  They got another group of really smart people together, and figured out how to integrate AutoSupport’s intelligence with the Support Systems that analyze, initiate, entitle, process, document, and fulfill support requests.  They took “information”, and turned it into an “integrated solution” that solved customer problems in real-time, and frequently before they knew there was anything wrong.

   

Let me give you a simple example … in chronological order:

   

1. A disk drive in a storage shelf out in “NetApp Land” gets a little flakey (... say it ain't so ...)
2. The operating system tells AutoSupport that something is wrong
3. Failure characteristics are captures and forwarded to the “Mother Ship” at NetApp
4. An aggregation engine checks the failure against known issues and determines a drive replacement is necessary
5. A connection is made to NetApp’s Oracle Customer Database to determine the support entitlement (Next Day, 4-hour, 2-hour, etc.)
6. That entitlement is passed to NetApp’s Case Management system that opens a case and logs all pertinent information
7. A connection is made over a B2B link to our logistics stocking infrastructure
8. The closest part is identified, picked, and shipped to meet the logged SLA

The amazing part is that Steps 1 through 8 happen in less than one minute.  The customer sees the part arrive frequently before they even knew they had a failure.  Just think about the “Simplicity” that provides to the customer … and then think about the “Complexity” behind the scenes that enabled all that to happen without any human intervention.

   

This is just one example of the incredible value of AutoSupport.  Other examples include meaningful customer alerts, cases opened for Tech Support engagement, historical performance information, and many other uses for this data in both real-time and baselining situations.  This is the only place I've ever been in my entire career, where I've had systems so sophisticated that Tech Support calls customers to tell them about a problem, much more often than the customer calls NetApp to report it.

   

I recently held an Executive Advisory Council … a room with 14 very large NetApp Support customers ... most of them Operations VP's or Directors responsible for their corporate storage infrastructures.  When I asked them what they thought was the most innovative and useful feature of NetApp’s product portfolio, their answer wasn’t any recent product feature.  Their answer was “AutoSupport”, and they were unanimous in their confusion about why NetApp doesn’t exploit that incredible and unmatched capability out in the “Marketing World”.  I told them I wasn't the "Marketing Guy", but I'd pass along their feedback.

   

One of them had an wonderful observation … “As features, functions, speeds, and feeds mush together in the world of competitive products, you get my ‘interest’ with cool features.  You get my ‘money’ because of Autosupport.”

   

I brought that message back to the leaders that run Marketing and Engineering … and asked them to think about it.

   

I wish I could find those guys in the 90’s that sat in that room and invented AutoSupport.  I’d kiss them.  (That’s probably why nobody is admitting that they were involved.)

   

Leadership Lesson #4: Watching Star Trek

Have you ever watched Star Trek?  OK … for any audience that would be reading this blog, that’s probably a rhetorical question.  I grew up watching it, and consider myself a fairly accomplish Star Trek Trivia Guru.  One of the things that’s always struck me about Star Trek is the way that throughout the continuum of versions, the messaging, priorities, ethics, and acceptable behaviors are very consistent.  The leaders on this show are wonderfully developed and complex personalities, that have much to teach us if we're paying attention.  My wife and daughters tell me that I'm wasting my time watching old Star Trek re-runs ... as they sit there on the couch watching "American Idol", "Sweet-16", and "Oprah's Big Give".  I struggle with that advice, but have learned to keep my mouth shut and walk away.  I might be the "Leader" in the home, but my wife is the "Boss" and my daughters are her "Enforcers".

    

I’ve learned several compelling and helpful things from these hour-long Star Trek “leadership lessons”, including but certainly not limited to:

    

The concept of the “Benevolent Hierarchy”:  Whether in the form-factor of James Kirk, Jean-Luc Piccard, or Katherine Janeway … the traits and characteristics of these larger-than-life leaders are the same.  Star Fleet leaders demonstrate a consuming commitment to their organization, their employees, and their ethics.  Their dedication to the pursuit of the truth and the unwavering accuracy of their moral compass is rock-steady.  They put the right things first … the commitment to their team, and accomplishment of the mission.  Self-interest is non-existent, and their faithfulness to their cause is absolute.

   

Mentoring is an obligation, not an option:  Whether it’s the development of Wesley Krusher into an officer, helping Commander Data achieve his goal of being more human, or the rehabilitation of Ensign Roe in the general direction of productivity … the responsibility of everyone in a position of authority is to (a) develop the talent below them, (b) optimize the performance of their teams, (c) role-model and demonstrate the traits and characteristics that the culture has defined as important.

   

Personal sacrifice starts at the top:  How many times have you seen a Star Trek officer, in a dire situation where someone must be sacrificed for the greater good, step up and say “Take me. Let them go.”  So frequently in business today, we tend to hear our leaders say “Take him. I’m too important to die.”  That concept is foreign to a culture that prioritizes organization above team, and team above self.

   

Individualism without selfishness:  While the goal of the ship is common progress, the nature of the ship is personal success. Sometimes we tend to act like the two are mutually exclusive, which is certainly not the case. Individualism is prized and even celebrated, and diversity is the cultural imperative as races and species mesh into a cohesive unit pushing towards a set of common objectives. Rank is achieved through longevity, results, and teamwork.  Selfishness is usually punished by death, and the abrupt end to an acting career.

   

There are many more examples, and I occasionally enjoy re-reading the book “Make it so.  Leadership Lessons from Star Trek” (http://www.amazon.ca/Make-So-Leadership-Lessons-Generation/dp/0671520970).  It tends to remind me what an advanced business “civilization” would look like, if we could ever achieve that lofty goal.

   

So … put on your woolen underwear, climb into bed, grab the channel-control, and turn to those 11:00pm Star Trek re-runs to “boldly go where no leader has gone before”. Hopefully, you’ll never look at an episode of Star Trek quite the same ever again.

This is the end of my 4-part series that I call "Leadership Lessons from Life".  I hope you've enjoyed the insight, and had as much fun reading it, as I did writing it.  Keep those cards and letters coming.  I'm always open to questions, ideas, discussion topics, and subjects that you'd like me to cover with you and the rest of our readers.

   

Why does a "brand" matter?

NetApp announced a new corporate branding and identity campaign today.

    

So … why should a Technical Support Engineer, working the Sunday-Wednesday, Midnight to 8:00am shift in North Carolina care about this?  What does it mean to a Field Support Engineer that is responding on-site to an interoperability problem at the National Bank of Nigeria?  Does it change anything about the way a Logistics Planner pours over reports of SLA compliance in Australia?  Why do these people care?  Why should they care?

    

The answer is simple, but subtle.  They care because a brand is a promise ... a commitment to the marketplace and to our customers that identifies an expectation that we must deliver on every hour of every day.  I’ve personally been very involved with the evolution of this new brand, and I can assure you it’s more than just a “cool logo”.  The company leadership has gone through a great deal of critical introspection, and determined that this is the message … the promise … that we are making to our customers that says we will do whatever it takes to deliver comprehensive solutions that allow them to make business progress that is simply not possible with other products and services.

    

The delivery of that promise rests primarily with the people on the front lines that interact with our customers every day.  The responsibility of the Support Teams around the world that are at the cutting edge of that “branding-sword” is intense.  If we are to deliver on the promise of “Go Further, Faster” … it will not just be about a “box”.  What the “box” does is important, but what the people around it do is much more critical to the fulfillment of that promise.  NetApp has the most capable, feature-rich, advanced technology systems and software in the storage market today.  Of that I am certain.  However, I’m just as certain that as features and functions jumble together in the world of competitive product specification … the abiding business relationships are formed in the Services and Support section of our business.  I’ve learned over my 25 years in this crazy world that customers buy a “product” the first time, but they make all future purchases based upon the ability of the Support ecosystem to ensure their long-term success.

    

It’s the job of the many hundreds of Support professionals around the world to deliver on the promise of this brand.  We take that job very seriously, and we understand that both our company, and our customers are depending upon us to deliver on this promise.

Leadership Lesson #3: The meaning of "Team"

Mid-way through my senior year of high school in 1976 (Yes ... I really am that old), I was plowing through college catalogs with my father, trying to figure out where I wanted to go to school.  My parents emphasized education all through my youth.  I watched my father graduate from Northeastern University with a BS in Electrical Engineering at 40-something when I was about 9 years old, having gone to school in the evenings for eight years to accomplish that goal in parallel with supporting a busy family.  My mother was my Kindergarten teacher (... you can't imagine how painful that was ...), and I went to several of her graduate degree ceremonies throughout my youth.  She has two Bachelors Degrees and two Masters Degrees that I’m aware of, and a few I’m not.  Both parents had drilled into me the value and importance of a college degree.

   

Back to the college discussion with my father …

   

So I threw down a catalog, and said “Dad, I’m tired of school.  I just want to take a few years off and maybe have some fun … maybe do a little traveling.  School will wait.”  Always a wise man, my father said “We’ll discuss it later”, and he went off to mow the lawn.  Fifteen minutes later, the phone rang and I picked it up.  “Hi, this is Sergeant Tritz and I wondered if you’d thought about the travel and adventure that the US Marine Corps could offer you as a graduating high school senior.”  I looked up at the phone and said “IT’S A SIGN !!!”

   

Three days later, I told my parents I wanted to join the Marine Corps, and leave for Boot Camp right after graduation.  I could hear the air leave my mothers lungs as she slumped into her chair.  My father looked surprised for a minute, scratched his chin a bit, and said something I’ve always remembered:  “You know, you need to grow up a bit.  It might be good for you.”  You see, my father came to the United States from Germany in the mid-30's as his family fled the political oppression there.  In his late teens, he enlisted in the US Navy and was sent to Radar Technician School, which he turned into a post-war job in Telecommunications and eventually a wonderful career as an Electrical Engineer. My father understood the value of a "growth opportunity" in the service.

   

Dad got it right.  It was VERY good for me.  Before I knew it, I had spent 16 years there, and left the Marine Corps in 1992 with the rank of Master Sergeant with a very valuable  background in Data Center Operations (1985 - 1992), and eight years prior to that flying C-130 transport airplanes (1976 - 1984).

   

The leadership lessons from these years in the Marine Corps serve me well, and daily, as I work in this fast-paced and demanding industry.  You learn very early that as a Marine, you have chosen a life of service.  Service to your country, and to your team.  Your highest calling and most rewarded achievements involve hard work and self-sacrifice for the greater good of someone else.  The concept of self-promotion is foreign to the very nature of the Marine Corps, and any reputation of “climbing the mountain over the bodies of your fallen comrades” will put you into a buddy-imposed penalty box that at best, ends your career ... and at worst, ends your life.

   

We use the word “team” a lot in business today.  Some use it compulsively.  My experience has taught me that those that use the word “team” the most … are usually the ones that wouldn’t understand the real meaning if it was printed in bold text on the inside of their reading-glasses.  When you put your life in the hands of another ... when you ask another to put their life in your hands, you truly learn the meaning of “team”.  The best leaders I've ever known never needed to use the word "team".  They lived their teamwork every day through their actions and their priorities.

   

Asa Candler, the founder of Coca Cola once said … “It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t care who gets the credit.”  To my knowledge, Asa never served in the Marine Corps, but he should have because he “gets it”.

   

Teamwork is about finding a way to make other people successful.  It’s about driving the success of a group of people in a way that doesn’t leave anybody behind.  It’s about trust, about respect, about loyalty, and about not caring who gets the credit.

   

I have now had 16 years of service in the civilian technology industry since leaving the Corps in 1992, but no lesson since then has ever been as important as the lessons I learned before.  They provide the foundation, the roots that ground me in the beliefs I have about teamwork, achievement, and devotion to the people in whose hands I’ve placed my career.  The care of those individuals and an overwelming concern for their achievement, success, recognition, and advancement, is the lesson I learned ... and the legacy I hope to leave behind.

Constructing the "Un-Recruitable" Employee

Let’s take a short break from the “Leadership Lesson From Life”, and talk about employee retention.

   

The CFO and your army of corporate accountants will compulsively talk your ear off about OpEx, CapEx, ROI, Gross Margin, and Operating Profits.  All of those are important to running a sound and healthy business. But you rarely hear the bean-counters talk about your most valuable resource … “Human Capital”. The costs of replacing a productive employee are, well, enormous. What are you doing to maximize your ROI in human capital? Over my many years in this crazy business, I’ve arrived at a very simple test … six questions … that when answered with a straightforward “Yes” or “No” will tell you whether or not you’ve got an “Un-Recruitable Employee”. That’s an employee that, when listening to a voicemail from a recruiter or head-hunter, simply deletes the message halfway through, and doesn’t even think about updating his or her resume.

   

I’d recommend that no less than a couple of times a year, EVERY manager has a coaching meeting with EVERY employee specifically to ask these six questions, and then take whatever steps are necessary to turn “No” answers into “Yes”.

   

Those questions, and the logic behind them follow:

   

(1)  Do you understand the vision and strategy of both our company and department, and do you agree with them?

   

Employees that fundamentally disagree with, or are confused by the strategic direction of a company or team are very easy to recruit away, since the “roots” they need to stay grounded simply don’t exist.

   

(2)  Can you draw a direct line from the job you do every day, to the vision and strategy of our company and department?

   

When people feel like they’re “toiling in obscurity”, or doing jobs that are generally meaningless to the greater good, they’ll always have an updated resume just one click away. Everyone wants to feel significant and important, and nothing says “Tell me a little about the opportunity” quite like working in a job without meaning.

   

(3)  Am I well led?  Do I trust and respect my leaders at all levels?  Are they experienced, competent, and effective?

    

The #1 reason good employees change jobs is that they have some issue with their management.  Uncovering those issues early and often allows for corrective action and recovery of key employee-management relationships.

    

(4)  Am I fairly compensated?

   

Notice I don’t say “Am I grossly overpaid?” I don’t even say “Do I make the money I think I should get?” This question is about “Fairness”.  It’s about parity in their team for those doing similar jobs, recognition of top performers, and a general sense that nobody is disadvantaged without good cause.

   

(5)  Am I praised publicly for my personal and team accomplishments, and coached privately on my areas for development?

   

Public praise, and even private praise for that matter … is the least expensive tool in the leadership toolbox, yet most managers guard it like it was a precious metal or a corporate secret. Conversely, if the first time an employee learns about an area where you’d like them to improve is during their annual Focal Review, then you’ve made a huge mistake. Employee praise should be a leadership “habit”, and employee coaching should be a “routine event”. You should surprise your employee on their birthday, not during their annual review.

   

(6)  Does my manager know my career goals and aspirations, and are we working together on a plan to achieve them someday?

   

Frequently when I discuss these six questions in various forums and formats, I get a lot of head-nodding where leaders “think” they’re doing well on numbers one through five. Number six rarely gets a nod and a smile, but it’s critical to the mental heath and job-satisfaction of the vast majority of employees.

   

So there you have it … my formula for constructing the “Un-Recruitable Employee”. I’ve done this with my team of direct reports for many years, but this past year I actually embedded this requirement into the Annual Focal Review for the 800+ people that work in Global Support at NetApp. Every manager was required to ask these six questions during their Focal Review discussions, document the responses, and creating the action plan for anything other than “Yes” answers.

   

My final warning, based upon years of asking these questions is … even when you think you know the answers, ask them anyway. Do this for two reasons:

   

Reason #1:  It will validate to the employee that you’re thinking about the right things.

   

Reason #2:  It will stimulate a very positive discussion that frequently leads to wonderful coaching opportunities.

   

Reason #3:  You will regularly be surprised (sometimes even “shocked”) by their answers.

 

Leadership Lesson #2: The Leadership "Mirror"

In the last entry, I mentioned something fairly cryptic about learning leadership traits from training my horse.  Let me give you a little window into my world.

   

I "retired" in 2002 after a couple of very successful start-ups (AboveNet and ONI Systems).  I had a dream of buying a small ranch, learning how to train horses, and spending my non-horse hours riding my Harley.  My family owned a couple of horses that were boarded nearby in a stable, and had a dream of living with them someday.  That dream came true, and we settled on a small piece of property in Contra Costa County, in the East Bay area of northern California.  I even bought myself a horse of my own ... T.C.Cruiser (the T.C. stands for "Trail Couch").  He's a big-boy, a cross between a Belgian Draft and an Appaloosa.  A wonderful demeanor, very gentle, very forgiving.  Just what I needed, since I had been tossed to the ground twice during my horse-shopping experiences.  Trust me ... when you're as old as I am ... it hurts.

   

The strategy worked flawlessly and my "retirement" was everything I'd hoped for … for about six months until the weather got lousy.  At this point, I started getting on my wife's nerves.  She simply didn't appreciate my "productivity suggestions" about how she could better organize her day.  We figured out that we really enjoyed having breakfast together, but didn't particularly want to see each other at lunch time.  So I went back to work.

    

During that time, I took some classes on horse training, went to some clinics, hooked up with a local trainer, and basically immersed myself in the art and science of horsemanship.  I never thought that those lessons learned would show their greatest reward in my return to corporate life. 

 

What I learned was that horses are "Demeanor Mirrors".  They are remarkable creatures, in that they have an uncanny ability to sense the demeanor of their handler, and will mirror that demeanor back at the human. 

   

Approach a horse after a lousy day with annoyance and impatience, and the horse will be stubborn and difficult to handle.

    

Approach a horse nervously or with fear in your heart, and the horse will be skittish and jumpy.

    

Approach a horse with a submissive attitude, and the horse will take control away from you.

   

Approach with confidence, respect, and kindness … and the horse will mirror those traits back at you.

   

Where am I going with this?  The "Golden Nugget" that I learned is that organizations invariably take on, and mirror the demeanor of their leader.  They may not start out that way, but they will evolve into mirror images of the personality that is in a leadership position.

   

Think about it for few minutes, and I'm sure you'll agree with me.  Consider organizations you've known in the past that have had a year or two of the same leadership?  Check-point their "demeanor" against what you know of their leader.

   

As you approach every leadership situation in your business and personal life, I'd encourage you to ask yourself what reflection you want to see in that group.  As you walk away from every leadership encounter or opportunity … ask yourself if the traits and characteristics that you've just demonstrated, are the traits and characteristics you'd like your organization to reflect back at you, your company, and your customers.  Some days you'll get it right.  Some days ... well ... you won't.  If you're thinking about it and working to remember this principle, you'll probably like what you see in the mirror looking back at you.

   

Something to think about that next time you drive by a field full of horses.

Leadership Lesson #1: Coaching Under-9 Girl's Soccer

My oldest daughter is 24 years old and just finished Grad-School at VCU in Richmond, VA.  She is, in a word … wonderful.  The child every parent hopes for.  Smart, pretty, thoughtful, grateful, ambitious, resourceful, and happy.  It wasn’t always so.  At around 15, aliens abducted my daughter and replaced her for about a year with her evil twin “Skippy”.  Around 13 she learned the power of peer pressure.  At 8-years-old, she simply “knew” she was going to the Olympics as a soccer mid-fielder.  During that “Under-9” soccer season, Heather’s coach was transferred mid-year, although since they hadn’t won a game, the parents were pretty sure he simply quit out of frustration.  I took over the team, having never coached soccer and not knowing which end of the ball to kick.

    

This experience ended up being one of the most important events in my life in shaping my leadership and management skills.  I learned three very valuable lessons that I apply virtually every day in my current role.  I decided to use this forum to share those three lessons.

    

The first lesson I learned from coaching Under-9 Girl’s Soccer was the difference between “Influence” and “Control”.  This is a very simple concept, but one that absolutely kicks the butts of some of the highest potential and lowest achieving individuals I’ve ever met.  So often, I see good leaders make bad mistakes as they attempt to control something they should really be influencing and worse yet, passively influencing something that they should be more aggressively controlling.  The third category is what I call the “Rest of the World” (ROTW) that you neither control nor influence, and you need to be OK as a spectator believing that the world will unfold as it should.  Not a week goes by that I don’t sit down with either an individual contributor or a manager, and help them understand how to size up a situation to determine if it should be handled with influence, control, or simply ignored.

    

The second lesson I learned during this time in my life was the concept of a leader’s role in determining “Position Play”.  The team had a lot of complaints about where the former coach had asked them to play, so I spent the first week of practice simply playing soccer.  I told them to pick teams, and play whatever position they wanted.  Over time, I saw girls try positions, move around, and eventually settle in the place they were most comfortable.  We as leaders have a responsibility to find the roles and situations where our people can be successful, and that play to their strengths.  Conversely, it is also our responsibilities to quickly size up situations that are overwhelming someone, and get that person moved to a role where they can succeed.  Letting your team “try out” new positions and helping them find just the right place where they can settle into a successful rhythm is very important.

    

The third lesson I learned from my one and only coaching experience played out as I watched the early part of the season from the “Parents’ Side” of the field.  I noticed that the girls would run towards the goal, and always over-estimating their strength and skill, they would shoot the ball too early.  Their shot would either roll slowly into the goalkeeper’s hands, or simply run out of gas long before reaching the goal.  With great fanfare I announced that for the rest of the season, we were NOT going to take a single shot on goal.  The stunned looks turned to laughs when I said that instead, we were going to run the ball into the goal every time, and that they’d know they were done when the ball, and the girl, were both standing in the goal together.

    

The first six games before taking on this adventure, the team was 0-and-6.  In the second half of the season, after a hard-fought 2-2 tie, the girls went 5-and-0, and truly enjoyed the rest of the season.  My professional life got significantly more complex the following year, and I never coached children’s sports again.  But as I said earlier, the lessons I learned from this experience have framed a leadership demeanor and a set of beliefs that I use virtually every day to lead my business teams to success.

    

• Teach your teams the difference between “Influence” and “Control” … and help them to apply the right actions to the right situations
• Encourage your people to try new positions as they find the one that works for them … but remember your responsibility to put them in places that shield their weaknesses
• Finish what you start … decide on a way to verify total completion and then manage to that end-point

I always find it interesting that the two places where I learned the most about real leadership was on a soccer field full of little girls, and in the company of a horse that needed training.  If you think working with children is tough … wait until you try training a horse when he’s having a bad “mane-day”.  But the horse stories are for next week’s rants and ramblings.

Do you "lead" ... or do you "manage"?

By way of introduction … I’m Senior Vice President of Global Support at NetApp. Preceding my arrival in the Silicon Valley in 1992, I spent 16 years in the US Marine Corps, with eight years flying C-130’s and eight years running large government Data Centers. Since leaving government service after my “Club Fed” vacation to Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm in 1991 and 1992, I’ve had quite a ride.  I’ve lived through building BIG companies like Bay Networks, 3Com, and Nortel … only to watch them crumble.  I’ve survived three start-ups with two successful IPO’s (AboveNet and ONI Systems) … and then watched them disappear as the dot.com bubble burst.  I’ve cashed out .10cent stock at $140 … and owned $140 options that ended up as worthless paper.  I’ve been acquired, sold, merged, and divested no less than six times.  I’ve made a living out of knowing when it’s time to change companies.

All of this qualifies me to deliver exactly “squat” to you for advice, but having a pretty strong track record of public speaking, a lot of published writings, and generally good reputation for being a strong motivator … the geniuses at NetApp that run that black art that I call “Marketing” asked me if I’d consider a NetApp-sponsored blog.  I set down a few conditions, we argued a bit, they gave in, and here I am.

   

This blog will be a safe place to talk about Service & Support, leadership, high achievement, and to try to figure out the answer to the following question:

   

“If we’re all such great leaders … then where did all the crappy managers come from?”
   

Last summer I was speaking to a group of scrubbed and freckle-faced NetApp Interns that were serving their summer in indentured servitude to NetApp in the hopes of someday working here.  One of them actually asked a really good question.  He said “Rusty, what do you think is the best way to describe the difference between ‘management’ and ‘leadership’?”. What I blurted out next has been used in a lot of public forums since then. I said:

   

“Management” is determining what your employees are willing to do, and then reporting on that activity. “Leadership” is assessing what your team is capable of accomplishing, and then guiding them to that high achievement.
   

Think about that difference for a minute, and ask yourself which category best describes the way you handle your employees and the work you’re asked to accomplish.
   

I’d love to hear from anyone out there that has a similar “Management vs. Leadership” definition, and see if you’ve got one that works even better than this version.

   

In the weeks ahead, I’m going to have a little fun, and profile the four places where I feel like I’ve learned the most about leading and mentoring high-performing teams. As a “teaser”, I’ll let you know that those four places were, but I won’t yet tell you what I learned:
   

• Marine Corps Boot Camp
• Coaching 9-Year-Old Girl’s Soccer
• Training my horse “Cruiser
• Watching Star Trek

In each of the next four weeks, I’ll share the insights from one of those learnings, and give you a window into the experiences, thoughts, philosophy and choices that have resulted in my own personal leadership style. Between the two of us, and via interaction on this blog … maybe we can figure out where all the lousy managers came from, and how to get them all to change careers to selling Real Estate, or Cutco Knives, or something else that keeps them out of our hair

   

You can find me on this blog, or Email me directly at rwalther@netapp.com.

   

Thanks for listening.