eCourse Sample

Learning is more easily accomplished in small steps...

The power of online eCourses lies in their brevity, their laser focus, and the fact that you can work on the lessons anywhere you choose, at your own pace. You're not tied down to sitting in a classroom at a time that's inconvenient to everyone but the instructor. Of equal importance is the personal and timely feedback you receive from your learning facilitator and coach. Below is a typical example of an eCourse lesson from our Leadership Foundation eCourse called, "The Five Key Roles of Successful Technical Leadership." [NOTE: Links in the following sample are not active.]

By Yvonne T. Ryan

Lesson 3 — Your Role as Creator

Introduction and Lesson Benefit(s)

In Lesson 2, I stressed the importance of knowing and developing your people to their full potential. The next key to attracting and retaining top technical talent is having an environment that promotes creativity and energy, one that helps your techies develop and maintain the motivation they need to perform at their best. For the most part, you are the creator of that environment. In this lesson, you will learn what constitutes such an environment and how to nurture creativity and motivation within that environment. The more motivated your people are, the better the results — and everyone wins.

Lesson - Promoting Creativity and High Performance by Nurturing Motivation

Techies operate by a different set of standards than the rest of the workforce; they have different priorities and are motivated by different factors. Most of these differences relate to the way techies think about the world and the demands of their work. In addition, the savvy leader recognizes that creating a good environment for techies is as much about understanding what de-motivates them as it is about what motivates them. This lesson touches on both sets of factors.

The Importance of Environment and Culture

To create a motivating environment conducive to creativity, you need to stimulate a techie's senses as well as his/her problem-solving intellect. Techies never fully grow out of their child-like appreciation for fun, sophomoric practical jokes, and "cool stuff." Conversely, the tasks performed by most techies require intense concentration, focus, and attention to detail. Therefore, a good techie environment needs to provide a balance between stimulation and isolation.

Over time, every group — whether it's a team, department, or company — evolves a culture that promotes cohesion and provides a flow to their interactions. This culture is comprised of standards and conventions that guide not only people's actions, but their view of the world as they know it. It has been theorized that a culture develops based upon the collective experiences of its members — in essence, as a result of experimentation (trial and error).

Some experts espouse the viewpoint that an organization must have one consistent culture and structure throughout, while others promote a more eclectic and "loose" or open environment in which many subcultures co-exist. Both approaches can work depending upon group makeup and the nature of their work, but the latter approach requires better leaders in order to run smoothly.

Motivating Factors

Concerning incentives: Techies are motivated more by internal incentives (such as challenge, engagement, personal freedom, independence, self-determination, justice, and integrity) and less by external incentives (money, stock options, prizes, etc.). Please note: I did not say the external factors don't matter at all, just that they are less important than the internal incentives. To a techie, money (although important) is usually less of a motivator than having something interesting to do. Money and stock options may be good for keeping score, but challenging work and intellectual prestige rank much higher as top incentives. A rich motivational environment for techies provides a healthy mix of both internal and external incentives.

Other motivating factors for techies include (listed in no particular order):

• Working with the best people
• Small, insulated groups with flatter structures
• Understanding the relevance and value of their work
• Acknowledgement of good work
• Providing perks like free beverages or food
• Fair, honest, and ethical practices
• Friendly competition
• Associating concrete projects with individual or group goals
• Promoting loyalty within groups/teams, and between techies and their leader(s)
• Managing resources, especially time (deadlines), wisely.

De-motivating Factors

The following factors (listed in no particular order) de-motivate techies:

• Spouting dogma and "accepted thinking" to a techie will only challenge them to prove you wrong (in the name of progress, of course!).
• Power and domination tactics (command and control) can push techies into full-scale rebellion.
• Using typical sales-based motivational techniques with most techies is a waste of time; they consider such tactics to be shallow and stupid, and will likely laugh at you if you employ them.
• Lying, holding back important facts, being inconsistent, excluding them from critical decisions, pushing artificial or "floating" deadlines — all of these serve to destroy techie trust; once lost, that trust is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to regain.
• Techies consider themselves very capable people; if you micro-manage them or fail to acknowledge their expertise, you will frustrate them, you will appear weak, and you will lose their respect.
• Techies survive on competence; if you try to "snow" them with claims to expertise you can't support, or if you offer an incompetent assessment of their work — they will scorn you and stop listening to you.
• Failure to acknowledge techies for their good work fosters a drop in both commitment and quality.

These motivating and de-motivating factors are explained in greater depth (with examples) in our Leader's Edge CA teleseminar Techies on the Rise™» program series.

Exercise 3 — Creating a Environment that Nurtures Motivation

Using what you know about your people, list ways in which you could modify their work environment to spark greater creativity and energy.

Action Step

Ask your people what they think would improve their environment. If their items are not on your list, you're out of touch! Commit to complete one environmental improvement within the next two weeks.

What's Next?

In the next installment, we'll look at role #3 for the successful techie leader — the Facilitator.

BONUS Reminder: Complete all of the assignments and submit your work to receive your special bonus — a 20-minute laser coaching session with me, Yvonne Ryan, your Techie Leadership Coach. Watch for more details.

Have questions? Comments?

You can contact me at: yvonne@leadersedgeca.com»

If you need assistance, contact Support».

References

Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead People Who Deliver Technology by P. Glen, San Francisco, CA:
Jossey-Bass», 2003. [book] Review»

Techies on the Rise™» seminar series by Yvonne T. Ryan, San Jose, CA: Leader's Edge Publishing, 2007
[teleseminar; classroom seminar]

Short eLessons similar to the one above make it possible for you to gain valuable education online at your own pace and from the comfort of your chosen environment without the need to sit for hours in a classroom listening to lectures. Some of these lessons are static and can be downloaded, while others are user-interactive lessons that must be viewed online for full interactivity. Our plan is to provide new eCourses about once or twice a quarter. Of course, we're always looking for eCourse topics of significant interest to our subscribers, so we encourage our subscribers to send us suggestions for topics they would like to learn more about.

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