Always

I just finished reading the book The Secret: What Great Leaders Know -- And Do by Ken Blanchard and Mark Miller. Everyone should recognize Ken Blanchard as the author of The One Minute Manager. This is another short read and it follows the same style as his other books. In this story he follows the day-to-day life of a fictional manager, Debbie, who is on the management/leadership fast track. Debbie is assigned a mentor who happens to be the CEO of the company and he shares his SERVE principal with her.

Great leaders SERVE their team. They:

If you want more details on the five parts of the SERVE principal then read the book (borrow mine if you like). I took away two things that I think I need to work on. The first was how little time I spend just chatting with my team on a personal level. I don’t need to dive deep and become a close personal friend with each of them, but I definitely need to spend more time taking an interest in what they do outside of work. I’m genuinely interested; I plan to do better; And I think if I have a strong relationship with everyone they’ll know when I’m passionate about a goal and vice versa.

The second thing dealt with the interview process. I’ve already made a mistake or two in my hiring practices and those mistakes are painful. If I make a mistake and hire the wrong person that person becomes a liability and a complete drain on my resources. With each bad hire I have to spend precious time dealing with their inabilities when I should be focusing on the business and the customer. They recommend 4 interviews. That is 3 more than I ever do! They suggest that the candidate actually interview the manager. Give her a copy of your resume and your references and let her check you out. Spend time on the last interview trying to talk her out of the job and if she still wants it you’ve found the right person. To build a strong working relationship both parties have to be comfortable with each other and the only way to do that is to spend a significant amount of time with one another and one interview isn’t enough time.

So am I going to start interviewing each of my prospective candidates 4 times? Probably not face-to-face, but I can certainly collaborate with them in many other ways outside of the first interview (e-mail, IM, and of course a Google search) to get a better feel for how well they'll fit on our team.

Posted by Brian Levay at 11:15 AM | Permalink

I recently passed the Sun Certified Web Component Developer Exam and for those of you that plan on taking this exam I will pass on a few hints for you. There is always the debate about whether certifications are even worth the time and do employers value them. Being someone that actually hires people I can tell you that to me they mean something. Certifications don’t have anywhere close to the weight of good solid experience, but the fact that someone has a Programmer certification shows they at least have the capability to memorize content. There are a lot of people in this world that can’t do that and most of them you don’t want!

Did this certification make me a better developer? Of course it did. I thought I knew everything there was about Java Web Development. I even teach a college course on it. I think this exam helped round out some of my rough edges. It will definitely help me be a better instructor.

Now for the exam. It is freaking hard! There aren’t too many people that are going to just walk in and pass this exam without a significant amount of studying. You only need one thing to study for this exam and that is the Head First Servlets and JSP book by Kathy Sierra and team. The book is dead-on accurate with respect to everything you need to know to pass the test. It pretty much comes down to memorize everything (especially web.xml) and spend a week studying the tag lib chapters (read them 3 times if you have to).

Posted by Brian Levay at 10:58 AM | Permalink