Transcript
So if you guys are new to the Leadership Lab and we're curious about what is involved in it, basically our goal for the IT Leadership Lab is to connect IT leaders with each other so they can share content, ask questions, learn from other experienced IT leaders and also be able to share everything that they know as an IT leader. So our goal today is to kind of just kick everything off with a live stream about IT leaders, what their experience is like and kind of get to know a few members of the community. So the lab specifically, you'll find templates for budgeting, hiring, management, things like that. We'll also have an expert Q&A. So we kind of have designated experts within the community and what we'll do is we'll filter any questions that are submitted to those experts. They'll answer, give us their feedback, things like that. You'll also see a lot of video clips around IT management topics. We also have a community and then we will have online events much like this one. So thank you all so much for taking the time to join us today. I'm going to go ahead and get started with some introductions. So I'm not sure if anybody wants to go first, Nick, but if someone wants to start with their name, job title, how long you've been in IT and then how you got your start in IT as well. Sure, I'll go ahead and kick us off. My name is Tim Lanning. I'm the vice president of IT. It's really weird because every other role I've had is IT and then blank. So it's really weird to be like VP of IT manager, right? Or something like that. I do it all the time. But I'm the VP of IT for SGRC Texas, which is a nonprofit entity that does child foster care, child welfare for a 27 county region around San Antonio, Texas. Crazy life, fully remote workforce with some rural sites that we manage as well. It's a fun time. I've been in IT for about 10 years. Really weird to say decade. So I'm not going to say it, but super excited. And really I've just kind of where I ended up here. I was brought on as our IT manager and then leadership just kind of saw fit to hand me the keys to the Maserati. And here I am. And it's a lot more convoluted than that, I promise. But there's a lot of trust put in me to kind of guide IT and I take that seriously. So super excited to be here. And hopefully I have some nuggets of wisdom to share. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, I completely feel you. Whenever my first job, they kind of said, okay, you've been working here for a year. Go ahead, start managing. And I was like, whoa, okay. And yeah, it was a lot more than I expected. But yeah, I'm sure you will have some awesome, awesome information to share. All right. Ernie, you want to go? Sure, I'll go. My name is Ernie Turner. I'm the director of IT for VetCorp. We are a veterinary services company. Basically we go out, we buy veterinary offices, generally when a older vet is ready to retire but doesn't want to close his practice to take it out of the community. Currently we have, we're too short of 900 locations across the US and Canada. We handle everything IT. So sort of, as Tim had a Maserati, mine is more like an old Pinto. And a lot of times when we get these and we get them changed out to where we're at least getting up to at least an accord or something of that nature that still runs smooth but gets good mileage. I've been in IT for 30 years. I've been in management and IT for the last 18 years. Have worked my way up from service desk all the way up to a director. And I handle, like I said, the day-to-day operations of IT for VetCorp. That's pretty much it. Well, I'm glad to be here. Awesome. Well, thank you all. Thank you for joining. I, you know, I'm sure you have a ton of experience in management and stuff that I'm sure you'll have some really awesome feedback to share. Also, my cat is here. So he did just leave. So we're good now. All right. And last, Dim or Brandon, would you like to introduce yourself? Whichever. I'm Brandon. I am the IT manager at a company called Smythe. We do, it's really hard to explain. And every time I explain it, I get the deer in the headlights look. So I brought props. All the labels that go on all these different packaging. We don't do the packaging, but we do the artwork application to said packaging. It's a weird niche genre of career or manufacturing that never knew existed until I applied here and got the job. It's very interesting, to say the least. We do everything from like Coke products to Victoria's Secret, to Jacqueline speak jerky, to everything, pretty wild stuff. I've been in IT for, I'll use the word decades. I'm embracing being old now that I'm almost 40, but a little over a decade now. I started at the service desk. Somebody took a flyer on me with no IT experience. And I just kind of worked my way up from there. I've been here, sorry, for about, we'll shoot like five years now. Okay. Man. A lot of, I also finally feel old because I'm now about to be 11 years working. Like in, I guess, not really IT. I do IT community management. So I don't have as hard of a job as y'all. I get to just talk on Discord all day. So youngsters, all of you. Yeah. Yeah. Although I'm not feeling super, super young. I have my first physical therapy appointment yesterday for my ankle and I'm like, is this it? Is this what it's like? Just like, well, it's just not working like it should. So, well, cool. Thank y'all so much for joining. And yeah, anybody in chat that has questions as they come up, there'll be an opportunity to ask them later, but also feel free to ask them as we're going. Cause I do want this to be an opportunity for people to be able to learn from the panel here. And get any information that they need or anything that they're curious about. But I'll go ahead and start by kicking things off with my first question. And this will kind of just be whoever wants to jump in, go for it. But how did your day-to-day change when you went from an individual contributor to a manager? And then how did you adjust to that change? And what was the hardest thing to adjust to? Well, I can start on that. It did change a lot because then I basically started having to make sure everybody else had work to do and that it was getting done in a timely fashion. And prioritization, my biggest issue on it whenever that did happen is I'm always still hands-on. I'm still very hands-on. I mean, I still build servers. I still do server migrations to keep my technical skills sharp. So that was always one of the hardest things was step back and let, trust my team that they know what they're doing and they can do it. They, it became more of a mentorship role and just sort of a nudging, hey, maybe look at doing this if they had questions. That's still something. And even for the managers that now work under me, that's something I'm having to work with them because they have the same issues. They all come from a technical background where they were the doers. And now we're the people telling people what to do. So that is always a big struggle if you come up like that, especially from us that have worked from like the help desk up. We're used to being the ones they ask a question and we go fix the issue. So that has always been a big issue. Honestly, still, even like I said, being in management for so long, I still have that problem at times because I just want to jump in there. Oh, I know what to do to fix it, but I'm like, I need to let my people actually do it. And then make sure everything else is just running. Mm-hmm, ditto, ditto that. I mean, there was a glorious moment where I was like, yes, I'm free of the ticket queue. And then I was like, oh no, it's a different thing. You know, and for me, it's been a lot more, I pretty, that shift was a little bit more, I don't know, easy for me because it was, they hired a tech right around the time that I was a manager here. And so it was really nice to, because almost simultaneously it was an offload. But then I had to do all of the like, now like politics stuff. You know, a lot of face-to-face time with upper management and external stakeholders, all that. You know, that's more what I had to spend my time on. And so I kind of, about a month into the role, like looked around, I was like, I'm not doing even remotely the same thing I was. Like what happened? At least that was for me. But I will say a lot of what Ernie said is entirely how it went for me too. You just have to step back. You have to be very deliberate. And I think there's a benefit there because your people can make mistakes and that's a learning experience for them too. And even if you, you know, obviously you say, hey, I've done this before. Here's how to do it. But then if they don't do it, that's a lesson in and of itself. So I've had to learn that too. Yeah, I guess did what both of them said, honestly. I'm glad I get to go third because they already had, they hit all the highlights. The biggest, the weirdest transition part though for me was the delegation piece. Whereas before I was a manager, I'm asking for help or asking somebody on the team to help us. And it kind of felt like you were off floating some of your own work in a weird way. And so I still retain that when I got to the point where I had to actually delegate as part of the job. I always felt like I was giving them something that I knew that I could do myself. I could go and close a ticket, you know, in five minutes as opposed to delegating it down and maybe it takes them seven minutes or something stupid like that, right? But that was the biggest hurdle, I guess, for me once he transitioned to management is just letting go of some of those things that I normally was just so accustomed to doing myself not feeling bad about it too. This is their opportunity to grow by utilizing all those problems for themselves. So. Yeah. Yeah. I completely agree. It's sometimes easier to just do things yourself, but at the end of the day, that's one, a detriment to them because they're not learning on the job. If you're just kind of taking over everything and then two, it's not great for you in the longterm because you're just continuing to do all of this work and then you have more work on top of it now. So I completely understand. What I was gonna ask too, is since y'all are talking about having to delegate a lot of tasks, you maybe have to talk to management and executives. How do you keep those technical skills sharp when you do have now a varied responsibility load where you might not be able to have that hands-on experience? I mean, I still am very much hands-on with a lot of things. Obviously the day-to-day kind of petty stuff, like working in Microsoft Word, Excel, how do I get Windows to do A, B, and C, that kind of stuff. I don't typically touch as much unless we have a lot of people on PTO or something crazy. But we do monthly, excuse me, weekly meetings twice a week and then we kind of go over some of the tickets and we pick random ones and everything too. So I try to ensure that we don't skip over that lower end stuff just to keep it fresh. My own benefit for one, but also for everybody else as well. And then, I mean, Brittany, you know me, I spend all day long habitually online on everything and on tech discord. So I see these things, they're in my space all the time. So I'm still surrounded by it. And I know where to go resource-wise if I need to get some help for myself when it comes to some of those things. Well, and yeah, I mean that you hit on exactly what I was going to say is, you know, you can be manager, director, VP. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't matter really. You, to keep those skills strong, I think the best part, if you have a team, have a meeting, have, you know, hey, let's go through the queue. Let's talk about what issues you're facing. And that gets your brain back in the groove. And, you know, then the other thing I like to do is I do like to just, I actually set up one-on-ones with each of my team. And I plan to do that regardless of how large my team is. We have 30 minutes, at least a week of time directly with me. They can bring anything to that. That's, so I'm, there's a potential that it just keeps my brain sharp. I would say if you don't have a, if you don't have a team at the moment, if you're one of those, you know, those managers, like I was in the role before this one. I was an IT manager, but it was myself. Those department meetings were lit because it was me, myself and I. But, you know, definitely just still attack it with that mindset of, hey, let's take a moment. Let's, you know, let's talk about the nitty gritty things that I might not, you know, I might be so up in the weeds at times or, you know, up in the clouds that I need to kind of take a step back and look. I think you have to be purposeful in that if you're just yourself in an IT team. But definitely if you have a full team, I encourage, make time for your techs. They'll bring stuff to you and they will keep you sharp. Yeah, I can definitely I do similar to both. I do one on ones, but unfortunately, I don't do it with every single person that is directly under my team. Unfortunately, it's too big. Otherwise, I wouldn't have time to do anything. But I do actually we do department meetings every week. We have for our different for our service desk or system administrator network. And those times are they bring up issues on that. And then it's everybody's brainstorming and trying to fix issues, or giving some direction on it. So that's how a lot of times I will try to stay sharp is on that. I do also read a lot of different online tech sites in the discord, I see stuff in there, I try to answer questions in there when I can. So it is a lot of it. I mean, I like it. I've been in IT, like I said, 30 years, so I sort of like it. And I do a lot of reading after hours and stuff on different things. I try to stay up on new technologies, new ways to do different things. Do I do as much technical stuff now? No. So it is times I have to actually think and I will say I use chat GPT and Google sometimes where I'll get a weird question, I'll pop it in there, see, and then from there, it'll Oh, let me go look at this, and I'll start researching more stuff. So a lot of mine is just research after hours when I'm actually sort of done for the day, I'll look at stuff that way. And then at my house, I've got, I've got my background, so you can't see my mask, but I've got so many different computers, servers and stuff. So I play around with it. I mean, run different OS's so I can just test stuff. And then it also helps me in my day to day for the overall company, too, by doing it. OK, you mentioned that you aren't able to meet one on one with everybody on your team. How big are y'all's IT teams? Because I think that definitely impacts how closely you have to be working on that hands on stuff. My team, I have 30 under in my team and the IT department, we have networking service desk, system administrator, we have practice management support teams. So we're fairly and honestly, while we're doing this here, I've got one of my managers, he's trying to hire three more system administrators. So we still actually need more. I really need to probably next year, I'm hoping to add about another 15 to 20 to my team. So, geez. That's wild. I've got nine. Nice. That's a stark difference from, yeah. Well, see, you say that. Right now, it's me and three people for 300 going on 800 people. If we grow the way we're trending, we may be adding some additional contracts. And so with that, obviously, IT is going to scale a little bit. So that's really fun to be part of, too, is I have right now an IT technician, a senior IT technician and an infrastructure engineer, which is my pedantic word for system admin, basically. But he's really that infrastructure engineer has really stepped into his own. And probably in the shuffling that we do to grow along with the company, we'll probably end up somewhere around the total headcount in the department being about nine. And he will be most likely our IT director, reporting under me, handling the help desk, doing all the stuff that he's showing himself to be excellent at. And so I may be stealing from another question that Brittany didn't tell us about. But I think seeing the growth of where your team excels, having conversations, keeping your finger on the pulse of their strengths and weaknesses, I think is huge because you can find those value people. So the three people I have right now, as we grow, they're actually going to split out into being more senior roles across three distinct departments. And I'm going to get that year, year to year of tenure automatically, because that's where they want to go. And I'm going to facilitate them getting there. So anyway, long story short, I mean, yeah, I got three people. So I do have the time. And I think even with nine, I might have the time to do that tens. But, you know, excited to grow. Yeah. Yeah, that's I did try to do that for a long time as we grew our team. But once we hit about the 20, 25 person mark, I just then we split them all up into separate silos. So we have like one team that has a manager of our services that has 12 people. Then we had our system administrator team that has 10 people and have a manager over it. So they meet one on one with all of their people that I meet one on one with my management staff and my senior people. And then we have weekly meetings for each one of those. And I do try to sit in on every single one of those as I can. Unfortunately, due to so many projects and stuff, sometimes I get double, triple booked and then I don't have to I have to go to those other meetings. But it is definitely good to sit down and do that. And like you, Tim, we also I do try to promote and move people into position. So I like to know what they're wanting to do. We're actually right now working on spinning up a IT security group. I've got a lot of people actually that are really big focused into IT security and they will probably be moving to that group once it actually comes into fruition. And we actually have that department set up and they will then take over doing all of our IT security stuff. So I agree 100 percent. I try to build from within before I go out and hire somebody unless it's something just brand new that we don't have that we're needing. Then we'll start looking because at least with it internally, I already know sort of their personality and how they're going to work. So it makes it much easier. And plus, it also helps them get to where they want to be. I had a lot of people that helped me do that in my years. So I feel like that's me just giving back and doing the same thing that my mentors told me to do. So that's why I do that too. If I can further digress and also shamelessly plug the leadership lab, one thing I found as we were in there was a certification matrix. And let me tell you, that was incredible to go through with my team. I sent that to them and I sent them a little template spreadsheet and I was like, I want to know what you want to do off this list, what you're doing now, what you want to do a year, two, three, four, five years from now. And that was really where we were able to determine, OK, you really want to go into security. You really want to go into server. That certification matrix that's available is incredible. It was so mind numbing to try to find that before and to have somebody boil that all down. Thank you, Brittany. But just doing those small things. And the best part is there's a decent chance that we're able to reimburse for these certifications. And so investing in that growth, I can go to my CFO with a number. I can say this is how much their growth will cost you. That's huge. That's just that that resource was incredible. So I wanted to call that out. Oh, well, well, I appreciate that. I put that together whenever we were first filling up the lab. And yeah, it was born out of me looking through and trying to find something that explained I.T. certifications and laid out all of the options. And even that is not all of the options. There are so many more that I just couldn't cover. But at that point, I had added hundreds of different certifications onto there that it was just I couldn't add more. But I realized that there was nothing really out there that there was no one source of truth for a ton of certificate, all the certifications that are out there. And so I appreciate that it was helpful. And, you know, hopefully we can continue to get some more resources like that. If if you guys ever have any ideas, either in the chat or here about different resources like that that you think would be helpful, just let me know because I'm always you know, we can either source them from the community or I can also create them, too. So we just want this lab to be helpful and help I.T. leaders have the resources they need to help themselves and help their team grow. And actually, there is a question from the chat that I want to ask, since we're kind of in that certification realm. John asked, can you talk about any formal education opportunities you take advantage of for yourself? I find it easy to get busy with the work and for years have limited time to only the casual evening tinkering that many I.T. pros do. So is there any continued education that you guys work on and that you're able to make time for? Oh, that that's that's a loaded question, I will say in the past I have done where I've audited some college courses there. We have a local community college here where I live and for a fairly decent price, you can actually go in there. I will say most of the ones I have done have not been I.T. related. They have been more business related, management related to help get a better understanding of managing people, different ones like that. That's always good. Those are usually fairly cheap if you're just doing auditing because you're not not actually working towards a degree or anything, but it's good. It gives you some information to go with. I also have a subscription to Pluralsight that I use for training for my guys. There is a ton of great courses in there that I've actually gone through, and I actually have a channel set up in ours whenever I have somebody that comes up into a leadership position that I make them go through because it is all about how do you deal with the team? How do you talk to people? How do you motivate? So that one's really good, and I can see the people, especially as I have them coming up, I can see the difference as they're going through it and how they talk with people. So that is a really good benefit and a good way to do it. It's not really formalized, but it's stuff out there from some really good people. So those are the two that I do a lot myself. I use Pluralsight as well. Pluralsight's fantastic. I've used that for the better part of a decade now. No complaints. I wish it was free. I wish everything was free, though, but it is what it is. Another one I'll check on, too. So I just got through a Nutanix certification. A lot of these vendors, like Nutanix and almost all of them, they have their own little online universities, and typically if you're a paying customer, if you're paying for support or whatever, they'll give you free access to that. And so usually whenever I get those, I make the team or the people that are going to be on with whatever the solution is, go through that with me as well. I always go through it as well. The Nutanix one was great. Those are always great. Other than that, though, it's all online stuff for the most part for me and kind of on my own time. To answer John, I think his name is John, John's question. Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, here's something, obviously for my particular case, I don't have my degree yet, and so kind of a little bit absurd to me that I'm a VP of IT and I don't have a So it was already part of the roadmap to be an IT director, and then the CFO came in and was like, you're the VP now. So it's a different thing, but it was on the roadmap to get my degree. So definitely that's been, you know, I'll call out Western Governors. They're great in my particular case. I know every university has its proponents and opponents, but I've had no problems with Western Governors. I really am appreciating the courses I'm going through. They're making a genuine difference in my career. I'm going for the accelerated bachelor's and master's, by the way. Just that program is amazing. Really enjoying that. I think that's probably my answer to this question, but I mean, y'all have shown me things I didn't even know about, so I'm going to look into that. So, you know, I appreciate the questions and the dialogue, and it just allows us all to speak to whatever we do. Yeah. Yeah. I have looked at Pluralsight a lot, but one thing that is free from Pluralsight is their YouTube page, I've found, actually has a lot of really good content. So I've been sharing some of that to the Leadership Lab too, but the Pluralsight YouTube, they have interviews with, you know, educators, people in HR, technical people, things like that. So if you're looking for something free to kind of start off with, YouTube, I find, is a super duper helpful resource too. I think there's so many good content creators out there that have stuff that you can learn from. And my cat's over here. YouTube is definitely, definitely, YouTube is definitely a good resource. I do use it a lot to look up different things. Yeah. Awesome. So one other thing I wanted to talk about was. was the things that you might do in your day-to-day that make your life easier. So, the cheat codes that you have to make your life easier as an IT manager, IT director, or VP of IT. What are those things that you might do, whether they're certain processes, certain documentation, things like that? Do that stuff. I know I do a bunch. One thing is I am a habitual note taker. I take notes on everything, even non-technical stuff. Like when it comes to performance reviews at the end of the year, I hate having to try and remember what A, B, and C happened three months ago or a year ago. Others in the military, actually, we used to do these things called NCOERs and you had to do bullet points that would go on your performance review, which would then go to the promotion boards. And every soldier would wait until that month. They're like, oh, shoot, what did I do over the last 12 months? And the best leaders that I had growing up, they would have documents, actual physical pages that they had taken notes whenever they saw this soldier do this out in the field or this guy did this back in January. So, I just translated that here. So, now I have literal notepads, just notepad.txt documents that I keep with for everything. Every time we have a meeting, I take notes in the meeting. Every time somebody does something exceptional, I'll add it to their note document. So, then later on, when it comes performance time, performance review time, excuse me, I can just pull that up and we can start hitting those bullet points from there. So, taking notes has been the biggest asset for me personally, because my brain goes at like 14,000 miles per hour in every direction. So, being able to have that information handy is clutch. Yeah, I'll definitely note. So, I've got a handy, I'm old school. I still actually keep notebooks. Oh, I've got that too. Hundreds. Yeah, I've got hundreds of notebooks that go back probably 15 years of different notes of different things. I do use, I don't use Notepad++. I use Sublime Text, basically does the same thing. I use it. I have also got some automation set up to like, if I, when an email comes in and stuff, I can tag it and it'll actually puts it on a list for me. So, I've got different tags that'll go like on a high priority list, just a work to do list or meetings list. So, I live by those. That's the only way, as you can imagine, I've got so much stuff coming that if I don't have some type of list to go off of, I can't keep up. So, those are some of my big things. Most mornings I start at about 6.30 a.m. I'm starting to go through emails and that's where I'm starting to put stuff on my list for today. And then that's just all throughout the day. And then meetings, I will say this, if you do a lot of meetings, there are several different note-taking apps out there. The one that we use is called fireflies.ai. It is very good. You invite it to a meeting, it transcribes the whole meeting and then it will give you a summary of the meeting. And then if you do anything like say, okay, that's an action point, it'll actually put that information in action points for you. So, I use that for almost all of my meetings except for some very sensitive meetings, more like employee discipline meetings and stuff of that nature. Just because it's also a part of our team. So, I have other team members that can see those meetings too. But that has been a godsend of remembering stuff because yeah, I'll jot stuff down and then I look at it and it's like, I have no clue what the heck I wrote here. So, that's a good way to be able to do it. So, if you haven't looked at it, I would suggest looking at something like that. I know Google has stuff like that now. Microsoft's, theirs, their co-pilot and stuff is starting to get to where they can do all of it. Look at it, see, especially if you have a lot of meetings, it is so beneficial. It's definitely worth the price to have. Yeah, completely agreed. We use co-pilot here. I'm one of the three trial users for it. We're kind of a, there's a little bit of hesitancy toward AI and so we did a kind of a pilot group with our CEO, the fun stuff. And she's the big AI proponent. And it's good, I really enjoy it. And I think it is, that's a cheat code because that's notes I don't have to sit there and take. And I obviously trust, verify. One thing I will say as well, and I'll put it in the chat, is I actually am starting to tinker with this. It's called Obsidian and it's a note taking app but it allows you to like do links and stuff between all the various notes that you take. And that's just, I'm a mind map person. That's how my brain works. And my notes in physical form sometimes look like, shout out to Aldridge. Thanks for the lunch and learn. But anyway, they resemble spaghetti more than anything. So I think, and John in the chat actually kind of stole what I was gonna say. So thanks, John. But I'm a big fan of at the end of my day, going through and looking at my tomorrow. And okay, this is obviously, John called it out too, stuff's gonna happen. Your day is just gonna go off the rails, welcome to IT. But if you can kind of understand, okay, around 10 o'clock, I need to be here. Noon, I have this going on. You can really try to find the other things that you can do to really level up what you're doing. And you're not just wasting an entire day. I think building that discipline is hard, but it really pays off when it's fully there. And you're not reacting as much. You're able to be proactive. And let me tell you, I can say that it's still really hard. So don't get me wrong. Yeah, that's actually, I was gonna chime in. That is actually something also I do. I just saw John's message. I do actually, I do three bullets of things I need to accomplish the next day. So if it's checking up on a project or something of that nature, I do have that. And then that way I can check it off. And then, and I limit it to a set number. Because if you put too many things on there, you get overwhelmed. You just have to get your most important things. Like, I know I've gotta get this done tomorrow. And then you just keep doing that. And like Tim said, building that, okay, I need to make sure I do that. Repetition is what you have to do to make it work properly. I use Microsoft to do actually, to do all of that stuff. I set three in the morning. I limit myself to three. If I don't get them done, then I carry it over for placeholder for the next day. It doesn't replace tickets or anything like that, but it's just kind of a big high level view of the things I know I gotta check off for that day. So, and I have a long-term one. I have it on my phone, I have it on my second monitor. So it's kind of like my second ticketing system in a way for just myself, so. Yeah. I use the Apple Reminders because well, I pretty much use Apple stuff. So same thing, but yes, I have used to do and it works great also, yeah. Yeah, for sure. So how does that play into your longer term projects? So, you know, you say, okay, this is my day tomorrow. I need to take care of these three action items or whatever. How does that, how do long-term projects actually kind of play into that? And do you have to create yourself tasks? Because I personally have to create tasks in advance and have it on some sort of timeline so that I have every single thing I need to do laid out for the next month, something like that. How do y'all handle those long-term projects as opposed to the things that you might have to just do tomorrow? Well, it depends on the project itself, but for a lot, I'd say majority of our projects, we'll have a project meeting to start to kick it off. We'll kind of go over what we think the high level tasks and what the steps are to get to wherever the end goal may be. And then we'll divvy out those steps and then we'll just start churning through them. And we'll actually assign tickets to each of those steps and put it in the person's queue just so it's something that's not forgotten or in the back of their mind. And then in our, I mentioned earlier that we do two weekly meetings. Usually the second one is where we go over more of the long-term stuff we're talking about next week and then the projects and whatnot. The first one that we do on Monday is typically, if we're gonna do this, how are we gonna start off the week or is there anything big that we need to focus on? That second one is where it's like more out in the distance. So yeah, just stay on top of it that way. Again, it's in our technique system, so it's front and center. I put them on my to-dos as well just because I like having that double verification so I don't forget about something. Those big ones are hard to forget anyways, but just in case. And just bring them up and make sure that people are getting the necessary resources needed to be successful in whatever their task is in the project. Once they complete it, we can move on to the next. I'll call out project management apps here. The one we use is Microsoft Project and I definitely am here for putting things in tickets. That's how my techs work. And so kind of the manual process that I could probably automate at some point is kind of getting that project to ticket flow a little more. Right now it's just, hey, I need you to go do this as part of this project. But having that just in its own, like again, mind map person here, having that board where I can see everything and literally move it into the different buckets is huge. And so Project has been good to me, but I've used just about every project management app possible. And they all just, it's an organization tool. It's to help you understand the cadences and the deadlines and everything that you need when it comes to a big project. But some of those ad hoc projects, it is just, you gotta take a step back. You gotta break it down into its component parts. You need to keep track of all those things in the way that works best for you. And you need to give people that are working it, if it's not you, a way to report that success back to you or whoever's managing it, if that makes sense. Mm-hmm. Yeah, we're, I'm like Tim. We use Project Management. We use Asana for ours. Though I imagine once we're currently going through a Google to Microsoft migration, once we're probably fully on that, we'll probably switch over to Microsoft Project. I've used multiples in the past, but yes, we go in and we actually already have templates built for some of our projects that we do. That way that we have all the different checklists. We have the date times, the timeline, everything. So we sort of know, and then we can track our percentage of where we're sitting on that. So that is really how we do our long-term projects. And it's not just us. I mean, all of our different, pretty much all of our major departments in the company, we use Asana for that. Whether it's where we're going out and investigating opportunities to acquire locations, or if we're just like one, we're implementing a new accounting software. So they've got a whole project built on that of different things they got to make sure that they've done. That way we don't miss anything because unfortunately sort of our size, if we miss something, it can be very detrimental. So we have to make sure we have everything tracked so we can make sure everything goes as smooth as possible. But yeah, that's realistically for the long-terms, that's the only way you can do it for once we get into the stuff that we're trying to do, we have to have some type of project management to do it. And I do also keep them sort of like you said, on my personal to-do sort of that way. That reminds me to go, oh, I need to go check the project and see where people are because they put notes in there and stuff. And I will say I get probably 30, 40 different updates a day from different projects because I've get copied on every single entry that's put in. So it can be a little overwhelming at times to say the least. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. Our next live stream actually is on the topic of managing IT projects. So we'll be talking to an IT consultant that handles a lot of different IT projects to see exactly how he goes through that process. So definitely there's a lot more to discuss when it comes to IT projects, because I feel like there's just so many moving parts. Well, there were a couple of other questions I kind of wanted to focus on as well. This one is kind of twofold. So what's the biggest thing you struggle with as an IT leader? And then what is your favorite thing about being an IT leader? Because it's a lot that goes into it. Well, I mean, as far as favorite thing, I'll start with a positive first. Maybe that says something about me. I really derive value from tasks being completed. I get my wins based off of that. And now as a manager, seeing other people get those wins and being able to deflect. If someone's like, Tim, you did an amazing job. I was like, I did nothing. It was this guy over here. I didn't do squat, right? So, you know. So, you know, being able to give credit where credit is due and, hey, you did a good job, like seeing the effect that has when it's something they really, really worked toward and really, really accomplished. That's to me. That's it. I'm done. That's my day. Right. Day made. The thing I struggle with the most, I think, is kind of paradoxical with the fact that we were just talking about organization. I really do struggle with it. I'm so used to being just myself, that having a team, having all the aspects of that, it has eaten my lunch for so long. And so it's where I'm grateful for stuff like the leadership lab and everything that everyone's mentioning here. It's just resources to help me be like, oh, dummy, you're doing it wrong. All right. That makes sense. You know, that's the thing I struggle with, as well as what we touched on at the very first question of not doing the work myself. It's really hard for me to jump on a call with somebody and be like, okay, here you go. I'm remoting in. I'm like, wait a minute. Is this the best use of my time? That's the question I ask myself. It answers a lot. Typically, no, it's not really. Get off of Reddit, you idiot. I wish I would have gotten first. I always have a one-on-one answer as Tim. I mean, like, literally, I'm a very team-oriented guy, a parent, so I love watching my kids succeed. I love watching my teammates succeed. Same kind of feelings, same kind of rush, that high that you get when you mentored somebody and you see the fruits of your labor, and they're actually doing the things they couldn't do a year prior, whatever it may be, and they're knocking it out of the park, completing projects, knocking out tickets, whatever it may be. As far as the worst, yeah, I still struggle with removing myself from doing a lot of the nitty-gritty, hands-on things that I should not be touching, that I should be delegating out, especially if we're up against, like, a time crunch. I know I just need to delegate out and let people fail or succeed on their own. Oftentimes, I'll look at it like, well, I can take care of this right now, real quick, and just knock it out. I struggle with doing that sometimes. Yeah, and the over... Sometimes I make the job itself into a job of just trying to manage. I overthink it sometimes, and instead of just following the basic steps that I've set out for myself as far as a leader and a manager goes, I try and find what's the perfect way and optimized way to do A, B, and C with this amount of staff or these specific types of staff. When I overthink it, I tend to spend so much more time on it to where it's become its own job in and of itself, just trying to optimize my job. It's weird. I don't know. I don't know how you explain that. Yeah. Like I said, I'm almost one-to-one with Tim said, so. You said it's not mine. His is a lot more eloquent than mine, so. Yeah. And honestly, I'm going to sort of echo both Tim and Daniel. He's copying you. One of the biggest things, one of my favorite... Yeah, I'm copying you. One of my favorite things is seeing somebody succeed and then being able to get them the recognition of that. We do monthly with the management, well, with our, what we call our corporate staff, we do monthly meetings and they always have our superstars. And I, every time it comes up, I always put some of my people in that have done something great. And I love more than anything being able to see them recognized in front of 300, 400 of their other, of the corporate staff. And then being able to, and just like you, when people are like, oh, you did a great job on this. I'm like, no, that wasn't me. That was Carl or that was Ed or some of my other staff. No, that was them. They're the ones that get the kudos, not me. I just asked them to do it. You asked me to do it. I asked them to do it. And being able to do that. And one of the things that I still struggle with, too, is still it's the organization. With ours, we have so many things going at so many times that if I don't stay on top of that, like if I take a couple of days off for something, I come back and I've got 5,000 emails I've got to go through in just like two or three days because we have so much stuff. And it's just, if you don't stay up on it and it it's enough for somebody that's organized, it'll drive you nuts because it's just so much stuff. It's chaos. I saw a comment. Somebody's like, they're herding kittens. Yeah, we're doing that with kittens and with dogs mixed in, too, and they're fighting all the time. So that is a true struggle. But then I'm also like, oh, this is something I can take care of really quickly. And I have to stop. No, I need to make sure that because it's not only am I taking an opportunity away from my staff, I'm also training the people we support, other clients and other employees. Oh, I can just bypass the regular thing and go directly to the director and he'll get it done for me. So I'm trying not and then that makes it hard when my staff says, no, here's how we got to do it. So it's also it's a two part thing. It's remembering that, yes, I can do it really quickly. But if I'm doing that, I'm going to pay. I'm going to take something away from my people. But I'm also enforcing a bad precedence with the other employees that they can just get whatever they want by bypassing. So it's always a struggle. You got to remember that sometimes. All really, really good feedback. I'm glad that everyone seems to be on the same page as far as the pros and cons of being a leader. And I think that's something that's really important in being a manager. And that's definitely a green flag for everyone here is that you just really care about your team. And I think that's like the biggest sign of a good manager is that you just care about their growth and development and getting them recognized for things. That's that's definitely huge. I do want to open it up for Q&A at the end. So if anybody does have any questions, definitely get them in now. But I had one last personal question, and that is if you were to talk to a brand new IT manager, what advice would you give them? How much time do I have? You have nine minutes. Yeah, mine is always don't sweat messing up. You're going to you're going to fail at some point. You just got to recognize it, fix it, and then keep going. And also, if you have questions, come to me. That's what I'm here for. Or come to my boss and talk with him. He's also been in the game for a long time, too. And we're always there. Rely on us if you've got issues. Quick story. One of my managers had the first time he had to terminate a person because of poor performance, and he was concerned about it. So I actually went with him to do it and just let him run it. But I was there sort of handholding. And then he got done. He's like, that really sucks. I'm like, yeah, it always sucks, especially when they're a nice person. They're good. And it's a performance issue that due to other things that you have to take into account, but you have to take that into account for your team. Yeah. I mean, if and here's the thing is kind of the theme I'm seeing in the chat, and this is if leadership above you is good, right? Like leadership above me, my C-suite that I report directly to, if that's good leadership, which it should be, right? We don't all want to go work for sucky businesses, right? Like ideally, that's something that you've thought through and you're acceptable. Leadership is, you know, I'd say if you're stepping into a leadership role and that leadership is good, then don't be afraid to ask for help. It does not reflect poorly on you. In fact, people reward that, right? Like people see that they see that you're, they're going to call it team player. You know, it is, but you know, you, you are aware of your limits and you're, you know, where to go when you've hit that limit. The other thing I would say, and I would give to, to anyone is just put your nose down, do the work, right? You don't, don't sit here and try to self, you know, inflate your, your worth or anything, you know, let your work speak for that. You know, obviously you gotta, you gotta fight for yourself. There's a difference there, but don't try to inflate every single thing to a big win. To me, to me, I'm going to make this a personally to me. Maybe this doesn't apply to everyone, but I would rather my work speak for what I do and who I am than any amount of what my words are. So if someone can look back and say, Tim was, did an excellent job on these projects and did a great job leading the team, that's better than any relationship I could have with somebody. If that makes sense. Hopefully that does. Yeah. It makes sense. Yeah. I mean, those are both great answers. And I agree with a hundred percent of what he's saying too. I think at first, when I first became a manager, I had it in my head that I had to be perfect and I had to be like the SME, the shining example to my team of what an IT person is, you know, that old kind of deal. You don't got to do that at all. You're allowed to fail. Like, like he said, you're allowed to ask for help. I think you should be encouraged to ask for help. You should show that it's okay to ask for help. And beyond that, it's just taking care of the guys below you. Make sure that you're mentoring them. You're motivating them. You're giving them the tools they need to succeed. You're being clear and concise with directions. You're documenting everything, ensuring that they're also documenting everything as well. So nobody's lost when it comes to what did we do last year for A, B, and C. And then make sure they're getting the recognition and the praise they deserve when they do a good job. So those would be the basics, I guess, if I had to talk to this other IT manager. Sweet. So a question that I actually got from Jonathan that I think would be great to ask is, do you feel like you had, and he asked this to the chat, but I'll ask it to you all. Do you feel like you had mentors slash support whenever you first became an IT leader? Or did you kind of have to figure things out on your own? I had a bunch when I wasn't an IT leader. When I was lower on the totem pole, I really looked up to, and I still look up to to this day, and I kind of emulate a lot of what they did when I was in those positions. When I first got my IT manager title, I didn't have anybody. I was just kind of thrown into it, and I had to figure out myself, which I think most people, a lot of people are in that same situation. But again, I had those other guys reflect upon from previous employers that, obviously, I have a huge community online, too, that I can talk with and network with of other IT pros and other IT leaders of various degrees. So it is definitely helpful to have a mentor, though, I will say that. Yeah, I had some really good mentors, and I had some really good examples of how not to be a leader. And those are just as valuable as the good ones. Because if you see how they treat, and then you determine, oh, I'm not going to do that, that is a good thing. Because there are some out there that they just think they're the bee's knees, and they are not. And it is, the only reason I use that, that was one of them, that's what they actually describe themselves as. So, you can have both good and bad examples. The good examples, definitely try to emulate in your own style. The bad examples will give you a good idea of what not to do. Because those are the ones you see that, oh, people didn't stay there very long. Because of how they acted. Here's the interesting thing about looking, it's an interesting question, because I looked back at my 10 years so far, and every single role I've been in, it's gone like this. Someone has taken an incredible chance on me to put me in a role I probably in a million years would never get. But they saw something, I don't know what that was, but they saw something, and put me there, starting at a help desk, whatever, all the way up to here. And then, there's been good and bad versions of this, but almost always, I have never had a mentor that's like, hey, here's how to do what you're doing. It has always been, figure it out, you got this. The good ones have had the addition of, come to me for help, if you need it. The bad ones have just been like, nope, figure it out, or I fire you. That's a different motivator. Didn't stay there very long. That's a bad example. That's a bad example, like I already said. But I think it just goes to show that mentors and resources are important, but just as important as people taking chances, and seeing the hard work that you produce, and rewarding that, and being, I think that the key is, surround yourself with people that are willing to help when you need it. Whether that's your boss, whether that's a mentor, whether that's a community, whatever. You're not alone. You don't have to be alone. If you don't have a direct mentor or somebody in your team, it's really helpful to find somebody. And they'll help you figure it out. And that's, I think, my takeaway there. Because I've had to do it. In like five different roles. It's great. Love it. Anyway. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting that you say that because that's how my management experience went. It was, oh, hey, we need somebody to do this and I think you can do it. And then I just went up the ladder and then I went to a different company as an individual contributor and then suddenly they were like, hey, do you want to be a manager? And I was like, I don't know what's going on here. What kind of vibe I'm giving off, but apparently it's that. And somebody mentioned it the other day in the Ninja One Discord is they wanted a topic about imposter syndrome in IT because I feel like that is a very common thing that people feel. They're like, how did I end up here? Am I supposed to be doing this? Things like that. So it's interesting that you mentioned that because that's something I do want to talk about one of these days. Thirty years in IT and I still suffer from that from time to time. Everybody I know that works in IT, they do. It's I think part of it, unfortunately. I guess you're not an imposter if everyone's suffering from imposter syndrome. Then you're just normal. Yeah. Well, awesome. We are at time. So I'll kind of leave it on that. But thank you all so much for joining both y'all in the chat and you guys here. I really, really appreciate your time. This will be recorded. So as soon as I end this, it'll be in the leadership lab so anybody can kind of refer back to it. And yeah, if you guys have any recommendations for any other topics for streams, we're trying to do these once every couple of weeks for the time being. And yeah, if there's anything else that that y'all can think of as far as new topics, let us know. But any any final thoughts or y'all? Y'all good? OK, perfect. Awesome. Well, thank you so much again for being here. And in a couple of weeks, we'll have one on project management. That one is going to be in the lab as well. So. All right. Well, thank you all for your time. Have a good afternoon. Bye.
