Most of us enjoy drama, that is, as long as it is where it belongs, on television.

In the office, not so much.

So it probably won’t be a surprise to any of us that the culture of downton Abbey, the English Edwardian Period, was almost a perfect fit, set-up by the culture to generate a simmering pot of hidden agendas, plots, conflict and drama.

What you might not have considered is the ingredients of that “culture soup” — and if they might exist in your own workplace.

Today, I’ll talk about three of them, … and how to spot ‘em, starting with an example.

Season three begins with the quick end of a long time partnership. Suddenly Thomas Barrow, valet to Lord Grantham, is trying to get O’Brian, Maid to his wife, Cora, in trouble, so he takes advantage of the culture.

The Set Up

Barrow find Mosley, a sort of slow character, looking for a job for a friend’s daughter. Barrow tells him that Ms. O’Brein is going to leave soon, so perhaps she could ask for the job. so Mosley asks Lady Cora, in front of a large group, if his poor relation might be considered for O’Brien’s job. The room is obviously suprised.

Then the magic happens.

Lady Cora did not know that O’Brien was leaving, but she can’t admit it, because to admit it would mean that the mistress of the house is less informed than the servants.  In order to save face, Lady Cora pretends to know about this plan, giving credibility to the lie.

Next Cora confronts O’Brien.

Well.

Sort of.

She tries, Cora is bound by the rules of the age; she can not ask directly. Instead, Cora has to be indirect, asking “Do you have anything to tell me? Is something going on? Oh I really do wish if something were going on you would tell me.”

Of course, O’Brian has no earthly idea what is going on.

Cora leaves confused and sad that O’Brien won’t “tell her the truth”, when in reality that is exactly what O’Brien did; it’s just that the indirect methods fail when the other person isn’t in on the gag.

Finally, there is scarcity and competition. The reason that O’Brien and Barrow are fighting is because Alfred, O’Briens Nephew, has arrived to Downton to pursue a career, and Thomas is not willing or eager to help Alfred advance quickly.

Saving Face, Indirect speech, scarcity and competition. Put them together, bring to a boil, and have a breeding ground for secrets and scandal, which can lead to unofficial favors, which is really just the flip side of blackmail.

It may make for good television. It’s a nice place to visit as long I have an off button, but I sure wouldn’t want to work there.

And Workplace Culture

Leaders in the workplace build culture every day by their own example. And by leader, I do not mean someone with an impressive title.

By leader, I mean that people actually follow you.

So think about it: When was the last time you said “I don’t know” when discussing something, or were willing to save face, admit a mistake?

When was the last time you were direct when a straight answer could harm you? Or helped out someone who might, just maybe, benefit at your expense?

Writing cultural critiques of Edwardian social norms, that’s easy. Spotting the problems in your office, that’s probably easy too.

Taking steps to change it yourself?  That’ll take a little more work.  (Here’s my first step.)

What else is in the soup — and how can we avoid it?

Before I was inspired to write by a sudden, surprise, 1% linkedin email, I was interviewing David Gewirtz, a CBS correspondent, Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of “How to Save Jobs.”

It was the David’s work on economic policy that got me most interested in an interview.  Along the way, I wanted to find out what his own life was like, and how he steers between the freedom of freelancing and the reliability of steady employment.  

Let’s get back to it.

I’ve covered a lot of things on this blog in the past year and a half, but one of the recurring themes is going independent.  I’ve run interviews with Corey Haines, J.B. Rainsberger, David Hoppe, and Rosie Sherry, along with several posts about my own journey as a digital migrant.

A few people expressed concern over what I was writing.

After all, most North Americans are looking for those ‘job’ things, with the benefits, paid time off, corporate retirement plan with unemployment insurance if things go badly.  By pushing people to go against their natural instincts, I am pushing them to make an unnatural choice.

At least that’s the argument.

I’m not too worried about the person that shouldn’t go independent.  They won’t read these articles, or if they stumble on to them by some great accident, they certainly won’t do anything about it.

No, I am looking to find people on the fence, who have the inclination, but lack a little something – people who want to be inspired.

Today, I’m going to try to inspire you.

The Set Up

Imagine for a moment you are a director of IT, trying to plan out what you can do in the next year. You have, say, thirty employees (five supervisors, each with four direct reports), a fair amount of hardware, and influence over a few ancillary departments. Your fiefdom includes production app support/helpdesk, the Windows Server Team, the UNIX server team, the network guys, and the DBAs – or something like that. You’ve probably seen the setup before.

Your problem is that the world keeps changing, and as it changes, the skill sets you need change. The programmers are talking to the end customers about the benefits of cloud computing – how they could roll out changes at the push of a button – but you don’t trust Amazon’s EC2 and you don’t know anyone who knows OpenStack, and don’t have budget for Windows Server 2012. Even if you did, no one on staff knows Windows server 2012. Then there are the business users who want to get off Outlook and to go gmail — but who knows how to integrate LDAP with gmail? Not to mention the Business Intelligence Initiative. Now you’ve got to hire someone that knows how to support that tool, too. Not to mention (mumble mumble I could do this for three more paragraphs).

If that sounds convoluted, confusing, and too much at one time — well, welcome to the head of a typical director of IT.

If you are lucky, as an IT director, you might get budget for two full-time employees. There is just no way any two people will have the skills on all the new systems you need.

Or, for the price of one employee per year, you could hire five different freelancers for four weeks each — or ten for two weeks.

The freelancers come in, do the integration, train the staff, create the policies, and go away. No long-term impact on budget at all; next year, you can hire ten different people, with ten different skills.

It turns out this is an economically reasonable choice.

Do the math. 5 people 4 weeks = 20 weeks, means the typical freelance contract worker gets 2.5x the hourly rate of an employee. Add benefits, and it could be 3x.

And they should.

Long-term contract labor has some amount of job security; you get a six month contract. Regular employees get unemployment benefits and implied longer-term job security. The economic tradeoff for that is reduced wages.

I am not trying to be judgement here; I am speaking in terms of economics.

When I talk about going independent, some of my friends are scared.  They are worried.

But wait.  Take a moment.  Make a list of your strengths and skills – especially unique skills.  Are there skills in that list that some executive, somewhere, might find valuable enough to rent at a premium?

If the answer is yes, well, congratulations.  You could probably be talent if you’d like … but don’t quit your day job just yet.

All I am saying is that you might have more options than you previously realized.

Forget about living out of your car and starving — that IT director needs you.

You just need to find him.

Let’s keep talking.

So earlier in the week I was on craiglist, looking at gigs.

Yes, gigs. Not jobs.

Part-time, temporary, and flexible, gigs represent a different lifestyle, different risk profile, and different rewards.  You can start them with a day job, and have the best of both worlds … there is just one small problem.

They don’t pay much.  Or at least, they often don’t pay much.

This article is about how to change that — to get the high-paying gigs,  while doing good, ethical work, that you can tell your family about with pride.

About Talent

The first thing I notice about Craigslist gigs is the types. Labor, Crew, and Talent.  Labor is back-breaking work that anyone in reasonable shape can do – moving furniture, delivering pizzas.  Because there is high competition for labor gigs — they are often cash-by-the-day, ideal for undocumented workers – the pay is extremely low.  Crew is the next level up; it not differentiated, but a smaller number of people have the special equipment (typically a camera or A/V equipment) and skills to do it, thus it pays slightly higher.  Then there is talent.

Talent is where the money is.

When a cameraman gets sick on the set of “The Counselor“, Bradd Pitts new movie, you get a new cameraman, maybe from Craigslist.

When Brad Pitt gets sick, the whole dang movie shuts down.  You lose a few hundred thousand dollars a day, and you get a world-class doctor in really really fast.

Talent gets the nice office, fresh bagels, and can command the kind of rates that you would hope they could command.

Maybe not $20 million for a nine-month movie shoot, but yes, Virginia, Talent does exist in IT.

Talent In IT

Last week I was in New York, city, doing a live video-shoot with my friend, Michael Steinhart, about Cloud Computing Security fr TheSMBAuthority.com.  Here’s a still from the show (click-through to watch the entire episode):

I’m not showing you the link to show off.

Actually, quite the opposite.  Look at me real carefully.

I’ve got a weight problem.  I have an acne problem.  My shirt, though high-quality, wasn’t wearing right; it was bunching at the bottom.

Somehow, this very non-Brad-Pitt like dude got to do a day of consulting in New York City at a ‘talent’ level rate.  It’s not my first one; in November, I was in Malmö, Sweden, giving a slightly ironic talk called “Building Your Reputation Through Creative Disobedience.”  Yes, there is video.

Again:  I am not Brad Pitt.

Now watch the SMB video.  If you are a real operator in technology, you watch a video like that and say “hey man, that’s introductory stuff.  wide, sure, but not very deep. Why … I could do that.”

Yes, you probably could.

How ‘Talent’ Works

When I look at the classifies, I see two general categories of talent.  The first is work that many people can do, there there is an existing market for, but most of us would find distasteful.  (We don’t need to get into it here, but it involves things that are probably best kept private, and no, don’t click those links at work.)

The second way is to develop specialized expertise that is a known quantity.

The last step is to offer the services on an as-needed basis. That means you trade some personal risk for the ability to negotiate each assignment separately.

“The Counselor” could have any unknown actor for a hundred thousand dollars, but with Brad Pitt, the movie is sure to be a hit.

It is better to be that guy.

Hey, I’m an old fat guy, and I have my moments.

It takes a bit of work, but we can cover it here.

More on the how next time.

 I just got into Sweden for a conference, and I am immediately struck by how efficient the place is.  My room, which might be described as a small American room, had two additional roll-away twin sides beds in it.  When I asked the front desk what they were, the one person on duty (that is the standard shift size) explained that the room is so big that it usually fits three. The hotel had some extra space available, so they gave me a free upgrade.

There is also no storage space.  No dressers, just a one-foot-wide desk-like surface that goes the length of one wall, and a space wide enough for shirts with six inches of depth, a bar, and four hangers.

Most of the lights in the hotel are motion-sensitive; they waste no power.  In order to turn on the lights in my room, I have to insert my key-card.  If I want to get back in the room, I need to take my key-card out — making it impossible for me to accidentally leave the lights on.

Assuming you made your reservation right, sign-in is with a kiosk, not a person.

All of these efficiencies  make it possible for the company to have more guests per employee, to compete on price.

In a sense, that is a wonderful thing. The Swedish people are hard-working and view efficiency as a virtue.  The waste-basket is tiny because they don’t waste — these are the people that invented IKEA.

The downside is that this drive for efficiency destroys jobs.

That’s not new either; the luddite riots, when the “machines are taking our jobs away”, actually happened in 1812.

Unlike 1812, though, I do see some  forces at work that are a little troubling.

The IT Jobs Story

Companies get more efficient over time.  The mom and pop video store fell to blockbuster an the big-box retailers.  In April 2010, Blockbuster filed for backruptcy as it fell to Netflix.  Walden books, the store I spent half my youth in, recently disappeared, and was followed by its parent company, Borders, which filed for bankruptcy in February of 2011.  Amazon, which was widely considered the victor, might have followed, if they had not chosen to create the Kindle.

Amazon didn’t suffer for the Kindle, but traditional publishers certainly did.

In addition to efficiencies, employers have wised up  about redundancies.  When two companies merge, they can not only cross-sell, but generally end up with HR, legal, and IT departments that are smaller than the combined size of the original departments — saving money by eliminating real estate, consolidating data centers, and, yes, layoffs.

All that would be fine.  Efficiency is good.  Employees that don’t have to be on the assembly line can go do other valuable work for the company.

Even if you lay them off, the world still has the same goods and services as it did before – and now it has a surplus of time.  At the very least, the now-laid-off former employee should be able to go create a tech support company, or do yard work, or clean houses, or do laundry, or … something, right?  Each of those companies can make life just a little easier for other people in society.

But there is a problem.

The political and social climate does not favor small business.

There are facts to support this; a recent poll shows that 55% of small business owners would not start again today in this current business climate.

But we don’t need stats to prove that. I know the reactions of my friends and neighbors when I went independent, and I can drive the streets and see the pain of small business and victory of chains and franchises.

There’s More to Talk About

The opening sequence of Issac Asmov’s “The Caves of Steel” is scene of open revolt.  There is high unemployment; robots have just become automated enough to fit, size, and sell shoes.

When I checked in to the hotel today, at the Kiosk, after getting tickets from a kiosk, and riding a train without ever seeing a human, I have to worry, a bit, about what the singularity might really be.

It might not require a computer to become self-aware and tell us all what to do.  Instead, it might be a more graduatal separation of a producing class, a service class, and the folks who don’t fit in, Sadly Out of Luck (SOL).

But that’s a horrible, incomplete picture drawn on limited information.

Right now, I see two real choices:  Find ways to stay relevant as companies continue to merge and change, or get serious about that small business thing.

Over the next few months, I intend to cover both on this blog.

For tomorrow, though, I’m going to enjoy Sweden.  If you’d like me to blog some pictures, just ask.

This morning I ran across a blog post by Ben Horowitz about managers who don’t have one-on-one meetings.  In that post Ben drew a distinction between a ‘good organization’ and a ‘bad organization.’  According to Horowitz, people in bad organizations struggle to get anything done; the expectations are unclear, and the company culture fights any sort of forward progress.

Now believe it or not, I’m not going to say that, if you find yourself in a bad organization, you should immediately polish up your resume and move. There are just too many bad organizations for that; you’d be jumping ship every two months.

Instead, I’m going to assume that you are trying to stay, and hear some niggling, tingling voice in your ear that life is too short for this.

There are some things are are a bridge too far, that indicate, to me, it’s time to leave or transfer.  Here are my top three.

#1 - You get the reprimand that doesn’t make any sense.  

Large companies have policies to get rid of a problem employee; the written reprimand is usually step two.  If you get the reprimand, you have two options: Fight it through HR, or acknowledge the reprimand and create a personal improvement plan.

My experience tells me that people who fight the reprimand are gone in six months. Nobody really knows why, they just are.  If you want to stay, you need to work on a PIP.

The problem is if the reprimand doesn’t make any sense.  It is vague, or inconsistent.  Example: In my only written reprimand ever, I was rebuked for not providing a leader with a document while I was away at a conference.  I asked what document he was referring to, and he could not remember.

If the reprimand doesn’t make sense, then you can’t make a personal improvement plan.  You’ve got nothing to fix.

It is time to sharpen up that resume, or, in my case, look for a manager to transfer to who’s expectations were clear and consistent.

#2 – You Are (Highly) Criticized for Telling the Truth

At the same organization, year after year, I got feedback to improve my people skills.

I took that feedback seriously.  I read How To Win Friends and Influence People, and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and Getting To Yes, I went to seminars and sought feedback from my friends.

Eventually I realized that no matter how much you I dressed it up, the company was putting me in a position to tell “no” to very powerful people — people who expected to hear ‘yes.’

The problem wasn’t the form, it was the message itself.

When I looked around for examples of how to handle the problem, the main alternative was to either become a ‘yes’ man, or, in the words of Dilbert Creator Scott Adams, to take the ‘weasel way’, finding some excuse or reason to keep myself off the hook.

Which brings me to reason number three.

#3 – The Company Is Rewarding the Wrong Behavior

It is one thing to work in a failing system, to have rules that aren’t helpful and slow everyone down.   It is another entirely to work in a system where the people who are promoted are the game-players and abusers.

So take a moment and look at the people who have been promoted over the past few years.  How do they act?  Are you willing, and able, to act in that way?  Does that sort of behavior align with your sense of ideals and values?

If yes, then your situation is fortunate.  Stay in the fight, and keep me posted.

If you are not willing to act like that, but you are fine technically, you can probably keep your job … just don’t expect to be promoted.

If that isn’t enough — if you want that promotion — then it may just be time to move on.

Of course, those are just my top three reasons to think seriously about leaving.

What are yours?

Last time, my friend Shawn introduced his premise — that IT Workers are the coal miners of the 21st Century.

This time, Shawn’s back, to explain how the shift from hourly work to exempt has changed the nature of the work itself … and not for the better.

Obviously, Shawn’s comments are an analogy. Certainly, working conditions and employment opportunities looked much more dim for the West Virginia coal miner of 1897.  Where the coal miner risked a collapsed mine, lack of oxygen, and poisoned lungs, an IT worker might face a paper cut, or, perhaps, repetitive stress injury from too much typing.

Still, there are things going on in how IT workers are treated; his ideas may cause you to pause and refect.

Back to you, Shawn …

Back in the “bad old days” before Y2K and the dot.com bust, I worked for a software company that had a mainframe.  They employed “computer operators.” On a legitimate 2nd and 3rd shift schedule.

There was someone behind that console 24 hours a day, schlepping backup tapes, running jobs, confirming the mail servers were still up, reading a magazine, etc. Someone complained: “I saw the operators and they had their feet up, reading a book.”  The operations manager’s response? “Yup, but when you need to have your job loaded at 11pm, or the your printer fed paper, he puts his book down and handles it.”

The point here is, nobody in their right mind would expect the first-shift operators to cover the second shift, unpaid, as part of the company’s IT operations manning, right?  “Hey, Smith, you’re on call for 2nd shift tonight, in case someone needs a tape loaded.  While you’re at it, check the backups, make sure the mail server is up…”

The real problem is, when you know you’re going to wind up working crazy stupid hours anyway, as a rank-and-file worker, where is the motivation to do your darndest to accomplish the mission between 8:30 and 5:30?  No matter how hard you just worked to make things right with the world before quitting time, because you’re also required to cover production of the 2nd shift, you’re still going to be dealing with the aftermath of someone else’s screwup potentially at 9pm instead of watching The Big Bang Theory.

Which is unlike the salaried marketing manager mentioned above, who probably busted her butt after lunch to be sure the latest ad copy left no participle dangling. Sure, maybe she worked an hour past “quitting time” to do so, but due to her diligence there, she’s done for the night and will likely go home at her normal time tomorrow and the day after. The extra hour she put in ensured that the project was done today and out the door to the printer in a way that met the company’s schedule. Thats the purpose and intent of making employees “exempt”: that they work somewhat flexible hours to ensure that the job gets done, whether its extra hours, or a couple less hours.

Now imagine if Wily E. Coyote and Sam the Sheepdog were were “exempt” employees. The whistle would blow and they’d have to go right on kicking the daylights out of each other.  Not nearly as much fun to watch as them punching the time clock and being cordial as they collect their respective lunchpails and walk into the sunset