There are many managers who could be great Leaders, but always rely on management tactics when it comes to day-to-day running of a team. Most common reason given is that it is not easy leading such a *team*.

My personal belief is, yes it is difficult but not impossible. With bit of extra effort, it is possible to *lead* a team – than *manage* it.

Here is my list of 9 mantras for Leading a team:

1. Share the Vision. This has become a bit of a cliché but it still is true. I have seen managers coming up with great ideas, but just because it wasn’t shared early enough with the team, they don’t buy into it. Let them own the idea and see the difference.
2. Call on favors sparingly. But be available all the time. There are times when you need your team member to put in that extra hours. Don’t make that a habit – call on them once in a while when really necessary, protect them from unwanted overtime. But be available to them when they need you. Put in those extra hours yourself once in a while as well.
3. Lead with example. Set high ethical-standards for your work and see them reciprocate.
4. Empower them. Once the vision or any task for that matter is set and agreed on, empower them. Let them find their own way around, give them freedom to talk to other managers, senior managers, colleagues, etc. The more insecure you feel, more insecure your post will actually get. Step back and guide them.
5. Treat them with respect. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. Understand them, adapt to them and respect them for what they are. Give them tasks that they enjoy; the ones they are good at. It is good to have a team with various skill sets and of different level.
6. Give answers. A very simple statement, but yes I have seen many a times, a team member comes to you with a question and returns to his desk with more questions in his head and the original one is still unanswered. Give a bloody answer. More of ten than not they sincerely have a question for you and are not acting cheeky (i.e. testing your knowledge). If you don’t know the answer, accept it. Work with them, involve them in the process and find the solution. Don’t ignore them.
7. Get hands-on. This is mainly true with managers like me in technology area. There is nothing wrong in being less knowledgeable than your junior, what is not good is ignoring that and not doing anything about it. Get hands-on and try to understand what they are doing and how it works.
8. Ask for new ideas – and you’ll be surprised. Create a culture of continuous improvement. Motivate them to recommend new ways to improve their productivity at work. This could be tweaking the strict process your team has to follow or something like team building activities. Ask for ideas and of course carry out the practical ones.
9. Create a secure work environment. Everyone is an expert in their own right. Give them their space and opportunity to display their strengths. That does not mean you restrict them and not let them explore new challenges, but everyone once in a while likes to be in their comfort zone.

Adaptability – Quickly Adjusts to Change

People from the middle down are never the first to know anything in an organisation. They are usually not the decision makers or policy writers. As a result, they must learn to adapt quickly.

When it comes to leading in the middle, the more quickly you can adapt to change, the better it will be for the organisation. Here’s why. All organisations contain early, middle, and late adapters. The early adapters are won over by new ideas quickly, and they are ready to run with them. Middle adapters take more time. And then the late adapters slowly (and sometimes reluctantly) accept change.

Since you, as a leader in the middle, are going to be asked to help the people who follow you to accept the change, you need to process change quickly – the quicker the better. That may mean there will be times when you must embrace a change before you are even ready to do so emotionally. In such cases, the key is you ability to trust your leaders. If you can trust them, you will be able to do it. Just keep reminding yourself, Blessed are the flexible, for they will not be bent out of shape.

Need I say more? So if he is bending you out of shape, then you know what you need to do.

Happy bending!

…are some of the adjectives attached to someone who is ‘ready to change’ or NOT.

Many a times I’ve heard ‘Change is Inevitable. Growth is Intentional’. In regards to change what matters is:

• when you see it
• how you respond to it

I believe there are four types of people:

1. Some predict the change
2. Some are catalyst to it and help bring that change
3. Then there are some who adapt to the change. Sometimes willingly and other times not
4. And then there are those who ignore it and continue to live in their bubble

Which one are you?

I was recently recommended reading ‘Who moved my Cheese’. I’ve just started reading it, let’s see what lesson that comes up with.

I was reading The 360-degree Leader by John Maxwell in which he has listed when to Push and when to Back-off when leading up.

WHEN SHOULD I PUSH FORWARD?

1. Do I know something my boss doesn’t but needs to?
2. Is time running out?
3. Are my responsibilities at risk?
4. Can I help my boss win?

WHEN SHOULD I BACK OFF

1. Am I promoting my own personal agenda?
2. Have I already made my point?
3. Must everyone but me take the risk?
4. Does the atmosphere say “No”?
5. Is the timing right only for me?
6. Does my request exceed our relationship?

It’s a simple math here but also depends on the situation, that whenever you are going to go to your manager with an idea there are more chances of it being a wrong time than right.

Everything from writing a job description, to the job ad and various other interview tools are equally important in the recruitment process.

Here are some of the recruitment tools that one should try and use, like the job-application form, theory test, practical test, interview, team-fit interview, reference checks, etc.

I was reading the following white paper: Why Stupid People Get Hired and came across some interesting points.

Be Wary of the “Best Applicants”
The goal is to hire the best employees, but too often what we hire are the “best applicants.”

Some Common Myths

1. “I can tell when somebody’s lying.” The truth is, you can’t tell.
2. “You can’t get references anymore.” Well, you can get references.
3. “If you make it too hard to get the job, the good applicants will drop out.”
   The truth is, you should be making it hard to get the job.
4. “I have to see at least three to five people to make sure I’m hiring the best.”
   Those words simply mean you haven’t identified in advance what makes a job applicant a winner.
5. “I can just tell if someone is going to be good or bad.” Your gut feel is important. If it says,
   “Don’t hire them,” then don’t hire them. But at the same time, if your gut says “hire them,”
   you should doubt it.

I kind of connected with all the five points mentioned above. Quite often we make the recruitment process so easy that often not-so-good applicants make it through to the interview stage. I believe there should be enough filters before the interview stage that should allow you to get rid of such applicants. Your time is precious – why waste your time in interviewing someone not so great?

I have interviewed and hired quite a few testers by now. Many a times I have gone with my gut feel and not hired someone – and I cannot say if that was a correct decision as I didn’t work with them; but I must say at least once I went with my gut feel to hire someone and it turned out to be not a great decision.

I am sure no one has ever had a 100% success rate in recruiting people, but I believe having a good recruitment process guarantees a very low failure rate.

Happy Recruiting!!

The good thing about them is that the interviewees are not restricted to people from just one part of the world; neither to at what stage of their career they are at. We have just released our 25th episode of TWiST. We’ve had participants from all over the world who are at various stage of their career, though most of them are pros and have been around for a while.

My role in this is to identify potential speakers/interviewees from down under and organise recording sessions with Matt. I am also the co-producer of the show. Here are direct links to podcasts from down under:

• TWiST #11 – with Jared Quinert and Brian Osman
• TWiST #17 – with Marlena Compton, Oliver Erlewein and Farid Vaswani.

This is the link to a bonus podcast where I interviewed Geoff Horne: http://www.softwaretestpro.com/Item/4879/Bonus-Thursday/Software-Testing-Test-and-QA.

These podcasts are a great source of knowledge and helps one learn from other people’s experiences. If you are a tester then I’d highly recommend you subscribing to these – TWiST.

Happy Listening!!!

One lesson I brought home from it was – What is *Your* Elevator Pitch?

Elevator pitch is normally used by entrepreneurs (of start-ups mostly) to present their idea to potential investors; and the pitch needs to be short enough to be completed while you’re in an ‘elevator’.

The presenter recommended that every individual should have their personal elevator pitch – as in what is their vision in life, where they see their self in next 2 years, 5 years or 10 years.

Elevator pitch is also applicable when you introduce yourself. I’ve done this in past while introducing myself - “I’m a tester < period >”. And the person at other end has to guess rest of it. Instead you can make it easier on them by describing a bit more about yourself or profession - depending on the situation. I may say “I’m a software tester… specializing in process improvements… with a keen interest in technical testing…”

So – What is *Your* Elevator Pitch?

I’m sure most of you out there have one. If not – may be it’s time to prepare one

All The Best!!

Update: A video on what is an Elevator Pitch – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq0tan49rmc

There were some great minds present there and my general feeling was no one is in this industry to just earn their bread and butter, but also because they love the art of testing and care about it’s future.

In addition to various presentations we also had some open discussions and the topic that got everyone excited was ‘Certification’ or ‘Degree’ in Testing.

Carol Cornelius did an interesting presentation on certification. Which as expected was received with mixed responses. Interestingly one of the attendees also raised a concern why don’t we have a university degree for Testing?

There were some other concerns as well like:

• Google is developing a car which drives itself – in future we might have softwares or development platforms which may *test* itself?
• The other common consensus seemed to be that with lately technology changing so drastically and quickly there is a growing requirement for technical testers.

Talking about degrees/certifications in testing – my take on it is yes having a degree in software testing would be a great benefit to the testing industry and hopefully we will have one in future. This degree may cover all types of software testing methodologies, technologies and terminologies. It is then up to each individual what (s)he would like to specialise in. Isn’t this what happens with other degrees or certifications like Chartered Accountant (CA) – people do these courses and then go on to do different stuff?

Certifications are a good start but I think we need some hands-on, practical, detailed curriculum for a full-fledged Degree in Software Testing.

Last year I blogged about ANZTB’s (Australia & New Zealand Testing Board) Test conference and mentioned that if things work out well I might be doing a presentation there – fortunately they did!

Yay – my abstract got accepted by the panel of experts from ANZTB and earlier this year (February 2010) I traveled to Melbourne to do my first International Presentation.

It was a pleasurable experience. Of course I had goosebumps all over, but my wife and David Hayman (current Chairman of ANZTB) gave me all the support and motivation to do my presentation confidently.

What was more exciting was the feedback I received after the presentation. Attendees liked the presentation, especially the topic I presented on. Quite often companies are facing similar problems like ours and they were quite impressed to see how we had tackled those challenges.

Here is the presentation for your reference:

—-

I was responsible for planning and managing testing for the project. As a testing Manager I was directly managing a (great) team of six testers, indirectly managing 12 process team testers and almost 40 UAT testers.

It was an implementation of PeopleSoft Campus Solutions (CS) v9 and project team did an amazing job delivering it in time! It was a real team effort – including all the managers, leads and team members. All worked with all the enthusiasm and I am sure we all are proud to be have been associated with the project and delivered a great solution at the end. Mind you when I say PeopleSoft CSv9, the project was not just limited to that, there were number of process changes, at least 3 web apps (in Java/Grails) (AFA, Library, IDCards) and 25+ weblogic integration interfaces (web services) were developed from scratch.

It is exactly 2 months now since the system (and all the other bits) went live and feedback so far has been quite positive and encouraging from the business and users.

2 months! So what took me so long to write this post. Well – time to recover, I was almost brain dead after it and all my quota of speech and text was used up in the project. Reports, meetings, catch-ups, minutes providing all this was no mean task. But what made it all easy was my testing team.

I must specially mention my QA/Test team – they were a great bunch of people. I took utmost care in making sure that I have a perfect team with good mix of skill sets. Couple of times I had spent almost 6-8 weeks to find the correct candidate – someone who fitted the bill in terms skills, money, culture fit and specially a great team player. In the end the efforts just payed off. I am sure they have learnt a lot on the project as I too did from the project. Now since the project has finished they all have a new job, in fact some had an offer even before they finished. That is a proof in itself how good they were. If you are looking for some great testers give me a call and I’ll be more than happy to refer them to you.

If I was to single out what quality in me helped me to deliver this project, then I would definitely say ‘Quick Learner’. As I said I learnt a lot on the project – a big learning curve for me. I learnt from each and everyone on the project team. But just quick learning is not enough, one also needs to make ‘quick decisions’ when you are learning new things every moment.

Anyways it’s enough for now, need to get going. Long weekend has just started and we’re going to Mt Ruapehu. BTW it’s been a while since my last post so I’ll be spamming the site with number of posts once I am back. See you soon.

Takliya!!