How I spent the week of April 8th, 2007

In a recent 1:1 (at Microsoft that is what we call meetings with only two people, usually between a manager and his staff) I was asked about how I spend my time. It got me thinking that many people, at work, my family and friends often have asked the same question. What exactly is it that you do? Some with more skepticism in their voice than others. Once you move from writing code (which people don't necessarily understand but will except as a legitimate job) to things more esoteric (like cross-group collaboration, vision setting, strategy development, etc) it gets incrementally harder to explain to people around you want exactly you do, and eventually you just give up and say I develop software. Or as my wife likes to say, I draw circle and boxes and connect them with sometime straight and sometimes curvy lines.

While for all of those that care I will try the following experiment. For the next 6 months I will add one blog post per week that is a summary of how I spent my time the previous week. Since this is an external blog I will need, on occasion, to make some of the activities more opaque than you might like, this isn't an effort to hide how I spent my time, just necessary to preserve Microsoft confidential information.

I don't get many comments on my blog. In fact I don't think I have ever received a single comment. Which makes this more of a diary than a true blog. Anyways I will judge the value of this over the next 6 months based on the feedback I receive, so if you find this interesting please let me know.

April 1-8, 2007

Monday

Normally on Mondays I have 1:1's with most of the Program Managers (PMs) on my team, these meetings are an opportunity for me to get an update on how things are going on all of the projects we are working on, provide help/coaching on any problems my directs are having and to talk about any other issues they may be having. In general I try and have a 1:1 with each of my direct reports on a weekly basis (but with travel and other emergencies I probably only have about 3 per month). I like to have a 50/50 mix of project and career development discussion in these meetings. This isn't to say that each meeting is exactly a 50/50 mix, more likely one meeting will be almost exclusively about project issues and others will almost exclusively be about career development/personal issues.

I had a 4 day long training event this week, which I thought started on Monday, so I cleared my calendar last month in preparation, it turns out the training actually didn't start until Tuesday, so I ended up with a pretty light Monday. Here is how I spent my time:

10-11 am - getting feedback from the current manager of a PM I am thinking about interviewing, I find that I spend probably 10% of my time on recruiting. For internally transfers I almost always talk to the persons current manager before committing to a full interview loop. Interview loops are pretty expensive (in terms of time) at Microsoft. The average candidate will go through about 5-6 full interviews, each person will spend one hour in the interview and probably around 30-45 additional minutes in prep work and providing feedback. In addition I spent probably 3 hours, including sending out interview guidance, preparing the interview list, preparing for my interview, reading interview feedback, etc. Add to that an additional 3-4 hours for HR/recruiting and we probably invest about 15 hours in a full interview loop.

11-12 pm - we are working on a demo for a potential customer in China for mobile search. Our group is working on porting technology we have in the US to work properly in Chinese. This meeting was a review of the User Interface (UI) for that demo. The output of this meeting was a list of changes to the UI. I rarely get involved at this level on many projects, however this demo is the first time we have really worked on mobile search, so I wanted a chance to influence the approach we took and ensure I was happy with the demo. During a recent trip to Redmond I made a commitment to get our team in China to help with the demo, so I felt it was necessary to stay involved with this project until we get some good momentum.

12-1pm - had lunch in my office and worked through emails. I probably eat downstairs in the Chinese restaurant about 3-4 times per week, but many of the people on my team that I usually eat with were not in the office, so I ended up just cooking some noodles and having a power bar.

1-2pm - I was in Redmond reviewing with our partners our plans for the next 6-9 months. This meeting was our first chance once we were back to review the feedback from the reviews and make sure we had owners assigned to each item and generally agreed what needed to be down. This involved the dev leads, test leads and PM from this project. This is the normal group of people I would meet with for project specific discussions.

Since I don't want to reveal too much about what we are working on specifically I will for the rest of these blog postings refer to the projects as follows:

Project A
Project C1
Project C2
Project D
Project S

This particular meeting was to review the feedback for Project C1/C2. The UI review I mentioned earlier is for Project C2.

2-3pm - One of my directs recognized that I was actually still in the office and quickly reschedule her 1:1.

3-4pm - worked on emails.

4pm - I went home early today as I was going to be at an off site training course until Friday and had only just returned from 10 days in the US, so I wanted to spend some time with my family before I left.

Tuesday - Friday

I was at a course call Management Excellence Foundation Event. This is an experiential training event focusing on management and leadership. For more information on experiential training you can go here. I'm sure there is a better description on wikipedia, but I am at home and in China you can't access wikipedia.org, so I can't find it right now.

I have attended a number of these times of training events in the past. And was reasonably prepared for the week. Basically the instructors spend a brief amount of time talking with you about some core skills, then create a fake work environment (some people are leaders, some people are managers and some people are workers), usually you rotate through these positions, other times you are stuck for the whole event with what you get, then they introduce some project work that the new teams need to accomplish and let you go.

During the event there is very little interaction with the facilitators. Their job is to make suggestions, provide feedback and coaching, but pretty much stay out of the way, no matter how hard you beg. And trust me I have seen some people beg pretty hard.

This type of training can be very powerful. I have usually walked away from these course with some powerful insights into myself and how I impact the systems around me.

These types of events are usually either tightly or loosely based on the work of Barry Oshry, although maybe there are others in this domain that are equally impactful. Most of the reading I have done is based on his work. You can read more on him and his work on power & systems here.

These events are always unique, as the participants are always different and the event is largely based on the system created by the participants. This event was particularly unique as almost all of the participants were of Chinese heritage and cultural background. In generally the most insightful moments at these events are caused by the pressure the system creates, under pressure people tend to break down and their unmasked self emerges, when you have this happen on a widespread basis you get a lot of friction and interpersonal conflict. This creates tremendous personal learning opportunities and challenges even the most seasoned managers and leaders.

An important part of these events is constant feedback. Unlikely in the workplace, were feedback is rare and often very guarded, you tend to find the feedback much more open and direct, and nearly constant. As that is the design of the course.

The pressure created by the system, the constant open/direct feedback and the complete lack of structure usually causes at least one person to break down in tears and one person to storm off in rage during the first 4-8 hours. I have been four times to these types of experiential learning events, this has happened during three of the events.

During the event in China this did not happen. I think this is primarily a culture artifact and for me I think it really limited the opportunities to learn and grown, for myself and for others.

The most complete version of this type of training is offered by Barry's company Power + Systems, they have a one week version where they essentially lock you in a fake town with nothing but the clothes on your back and a role as a leader, manager or worker. Below are some excerpts from a video they created from one of these events:

"Power Lab, Living in New Hope" Video 1
"Power Lab, Living in New Hope" Video 2

Well worth watching. I am hoping on attending this event at some point in my career. I have a copy of the full video and will plan on showing it at Sigma (that is the building I work at in Beijing) at some point in the near future.

In the past I have learnt a lot about how my style (communication, management and interaction) effects others. Over the years this has enabled me to make a lot of progress towards creating an environment that is more conducive to positive collaboration, higher morale and to building long term partnerships. In this event I re-learnt the importance that climate/morale play on group productivity and how people feel about an organization. Also about the positive effects diversity can have on climate.

In addition in this particular event there was a lot of focus on group identify and the power of shared vision. These are things I have understood and tried to practice, but as of late haven't been very focused on. It is easy for all of us to get very focused on managing the present, and forgetting the longer term work of creating a positive climate, creating and nurturing identify and helping the team to define a shared vision.

I hope I will be able to take many things that I learnt at this event and apply them to my everyday work.