October 13, 2010 at 8:01 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item From One of the Pack to ‘Top Dog’ – Honeymoon Period Over!
[font="Verdana"]Justin Hostettler-Davies[/font]
www.databaseexpertise.com
October 14, 2010 at 1:25 am
my friend
As a colleague with the same problems, I can tell you. You are the best suited for the role.
As sun tzu said: The truly adept general starts by studying the bayonet, and thinking about why the blood line is at it is.....
what i am trying to say, is that in this role, you need to know the minute details, and be able to talk the lingo... partly for the respect of your 'coworkers' but also for having the calm to say no.
Dont know if it makes sense to you, but I think you are good for the role.
October 14, 2010 at 1:35 am
This is a great series of posts - just wanted to say that 🙂
October 14, 2010 at 3:16 am
Given that you are the boss, you say who does the work, so if you like you can be the person who does the work. Best of both worlds 🙂
October 14, 2010 at 4:01 am
Hi Justin,
This is an excellent topic as I have some personal interest in it as well. In the past few months I have been quite torn about what "path" I should follow in my career. I have been working with SQL server and Oracle for the past 5 to 6 years and not only am I torn between being a Developer or DBA, I can't decide if I should now consider gaining some managerial experience. Both academic and hands-on work experience. I have a few questions for you and I hope I'm not being too nosy!
1) How long have you been working as a database techie?
2) How long were you at your current job before you were promoted and you personally felt that you had the skills to take on a managerial job?
3)At what age do you think someone should consider being a manger? How long do you think someone should work as a techie before they can consider themselves as being someone good at their job? (I realise this is quite a difficult question to answer!)
4) How important is certification to career progress?
As for your issues around being a manager I think it really depends on the individual. I'm guessing that you enjoy doing technical work. This will always work in your favour. I have worked with managers who had minimal technical know-how and they were not very well liked within the team. And more importantly they were not always good at making the right decisions. And sometimes they adopt a defensive attitude probably as a result of an inferiority complex! I have also worked with managers who were promoted after working within the team for many years and had very good technical knowledge. They were excellent at their job because they knew how things should be done and also the team members respected them and would never consider bluffing their way out of a tricky issue! But it’s certainly a very difficult balancing act to keep your friendships and at the same time be their boss. Plus you will probably lose touch with the tech stuff as time goes on but I think it's inevitable. Unless you want to be a technical consultant! Anyway Good Luck with your new role!
October 14, 2010 at 6:41 am
One of the most common mistakes and misconceptions about being a manager is the presumption that by being a manager you then have to be the expert, superstar, and lead 'personality' in all things. In my 30+ years in the business, 20+ at the management level I have learned that this formula is not only wrong, its a quick path to becoming inconsequential and eventually axed.
I learned what management is from a great mentor who told me this simple axiom; "The best manager is only as good as the team members he/she inspires to be their best".
I have worked for many managers whose egos far exceeded their talent. Those kinds of people don't inspire others, they intimidate them, or worse, become dictators - and we all know what eventually happens to dictators. They're gone! And while they are around, no one respects them, let alone likes them. Is that a formula for success?
If you want to be a great manager, remember a few things - if you inspire your people to be their best, and facilitate their path to that end, YOU are going to look good and effective. Treat your people as talented humans, each with their own skills. Nurture those skills, facilitate their professional growth - again, that makes YOU look good. And above all, as a manager, develop trust in BOTH directions. Let your people know you will go to bat for them, just as much as you need them to go to bat for you.
Think about it - who, to you, are the greatest leaders that ever lived? I would bet you did not think of any brutal dictators who might have achieved something through intimidation. Sure, they get things done for a while, but in the end, they fail. The best leaders who ever lived became the best by inspiring and facilitating - its just that simple.
After all, look at any successful championship sports team. Did the head coach "win" the games? No, the players did. But the coach inspired and facilitated - and THAT is what makes winners.
October 14, 2010 at 7:12 am
If you want to be a great manager, remember a few things - if you inspire your people to be their best, and facilitate their path to that end, YOU are going to look good and effective. Treat your people as talented humans, each with their own skills. Nurture those skills, facilitate their professional growth - again, that makes YOU look good.
Echo that. I'm no longer a manager, having started a new career as a DBA, but I learned that lesson the hard way. Fortunately, I had great -- and horrible -- managers to learn from, and the contrast was instructive.
Effective management and leadership are skills you can learn, just like writing stored procedures or designing a building foundation. No one starts out knowing how to trouble-shoot long-running queries; you learn as you go. You may never become the best at it, but everyone can become better. Treat it like any other skill: Strive to be better. Seek out others who excel and learn from their experience. Take training courses and practice what you learn. Accept your mistakes and learn from them.
Needing to stay abreast of the latest technology is utterly irrelevant: that's what your staff is supposed to do. Your job is to guide, to be a sounding board, to do the reality checks. You need to know enough about your business to ask relevant questions, certainly, but you'll be asking things like "This is a cool plan, Chris, but how does this meet the customer's objectives for maintainability?" Or "This runs well on our hardware, great. Have you tested it on 5-year-old servers like our customer has?"
You want to teach your staff to be thinking about these things, too.
One of the first things I learned as a manager was how to encourage staff to make your priorities be their priorities. So, for example, whenever I met with one of my staff and gave her a new project, she was not to walk out of my office without a clear understanding of these 3 essentials: scope, schedule, and budget. If she was unclear on any of those 3, she was expected to ask as many questions as necessary until she was clear. Many times, the scope wasn't known, and that was fine: we'd come up with a checkpoint with a small budget to perform enough work to nail down the project's overall scope, schedule and budget.
A very enjoyable book that describes one man's transition from a dictatorial to an inclusive management style is It's Your Ship .
Good luck!
Rich
October 14, 2010 at 7:37 am
As a great mentor of mine once said "One day you will become a Chief, but never ever forget, or lose touch with the fact that you were once just an Indian." Lot of managers do forget this:-D
"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"
October 14, 2010 at 9:06 am
feersum_endjinn (10/14/2010)
3) At what age do you think someone should consider being a manger? How long do you think someone should work as a techie before they can consider themselves as being someone good at their job? (I realise this is quite a difficult question to answer!)
It varies. Someone with the innate skills necessary will be ready earlier than someone who has to learn/develop them. Which skills those are would the subject of an interesting discussion. People with the wrong personality will never be ready. Contrary to popular (techie) belief, it is possible to be a good manager without technical knowledge, but it depends on the job definition.
feersum_endjinn (10/14/2010)
4) How important is certification to career progress?
The importance of certification is inversely proportional to the number of jobs around, so at the moment it's quite/very important; three years ago it wasn't.
October 14, 2010 at 9:13 am
rmechaber (10/14/2010)
A very enjoyable book that describes one man's transition from a dictatorial to an inclusive management style is It's Your Ship .
Good job, Justin, and a second vote for "It's Your Ship" as a great management book.
October 14, 2010 at 9:16 am
I noticed that a transition from a DBA to manager is getting more and more difficult. Today's managers are largely business graduates with technical skills, no longer techies with (some) management skills.
Over the past three years I have seen six techies promoted to management roles; only two of them succeeded. It is a risky move, becausee if you do not succeed as a manager, you (usually) cqannot go back to your old role -- you have to find another employer.
October 14, 2010 at 9:27 am
The article's author wrote:
I’m never going to be the manager that simply lets the team research/evaluate and recommend solutions, but is this a workable approach?
My advice would be to set the general technical direction you wish your staffers to take, but then stand back and let them do their job; that's what you're paying them for, and they need to feel they have some 'skin in the game', too.
Once they've returned their recommended solutions to you, sit down with them:
* Talk about how and why they reached the solutions they did, so you might have an insight into their thinking before taking any further action.
* If you're unhappy with the results, be very careful about how, when, and where you offer any criticism. Critique the work, not the individual. Never belittle anyone, especially not in front of others. Offer your own thoughts and ideas about how the technical problem should be solved, but allow your staffers to critique those, too.
* Seek to find the best overall solution that fits within the known technical and fiscal constraints, and avoid accepting a solution strictly for political reasons whenever possible. Solutions to complex problems will likely require the contributions from a number of individuals; it will be your job to identify the best of them, and to meld them effectively.
Good luck. You've taken on a very tough job, and you'll make mistakes along the way. Learn from them, and be persistent. At the end of the day, the rewards of doing the job well are many.
October 14, 2010 at 9:28 am
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Needing to stay abreast of the latest technology is utterly irrelevant: that's what your staff is supposed to do.
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This is true for some environments. In my role I'm also the database architect as well as the database manager. Part of my job is to stay abreast of upcoming technologies so I can lay a path for the future. I think to chart the technical course for a particular platform you need deep knowledge about your options. If one didn't have that knowledge, I don't see how that person could drive the platform forward. At that point I think the role is reduced to more of a care-taker role, just maintaining status quo, which is fine for some environments. I think if the environment is in a growth phase, the real value from the database manager role is someone who can initiate and drive creative technical solutions which constantly help scale the platform.
October 15, 2010 at 1:49 am
david.wright-948385 (10/14/2010)
People with the wrong personality will never be ready.
I completely agree with this! Although if you don't have the right personality hopefully you'll be good enough at the technical stuff to progress down that career path.
david.wright-948385 (10/14/2010)
The importance of certification is inversely proportional to the number of jobs around, so at the moment it's quite/very important; three years ago it wasn't.
I better start looking in at certification then! With Lloyds TSB laying of 1600 odd IT staff the job market is going to be even more competitive.
What really annoys me with the Oracle certification is their insistence on attending a hands-on course before you can get your certification. So if you don't or can't afford to pay the £2500 fee to attend one of these you can never be certified. Even after you pass the written exams.
October 15, 2010 at 6:56 am
LSCIV (10/14/2010)
Needing to stay abreast of the latest technology is utterly irrelevant: that's what your staff is supposed to do.
This is true for some environments. In my role I'm also the database architect as well as the database manager. Part of my job is to stay abreast of upcoming technologies so I can lay a path for the future.
It's true for your architect job, not the manager job. If you are strictly a manager, and I think that is important, than you shouldn't need lots of technical knowledge.
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