Can You Delegate Without Losing Control? 20 Years From IT Specialist to IT Leader | Alarqam Alkendi

But because I recognize that if I always provide a solution, the team

will become too dependent on me.

A strong team is built by developing people, not only by assigning tasks.

So I can say that after more than 20 years in IT, I still believe there is always

room to grow.

Today we have someone who has over two decades of experience in managing IT

operations over several different countries.

And he has gone from IT specialist to associate director

at the company he's working in.

Hi Alarqam, great to have you here today.

Hi, thank you for this podcast.

It's a pleasure to be here.

So one of the few questions that I would want to ask a person like you is who

has over two decades of experience.

How do you go from an IT specialist to someone who's managing

different teams and especially across different countries at the moment?

How do you grow from an engineer to a manager that you are today?

Okay, I started my IT career in 2004 working on a technical

support and infrastructure.

So over the years, I progressed from IT specialist to a KSA IT

manager and today I serve as IT associate director in the operation and security.

So I have more than 20 years of experience across healthcare and manufacturing

supporting complex IT operations in different locations and country.

So my journey has told me that technology is important, but people,

accountability and understanding the business are equally

important.

So when you started off as a manager back in 2011, I think that's the

year I got from your profile.

But back in 2011, when you first became a manager,

how was the first day like?

And if you were to recall, what were the few mistakes that you might have done

in that first year as a manager, as opposed to, you know, how you handle things on a

daily basis right now?

So I will tell you one thing that I would describe myself as a hands-on leader.

So my technical background helped me to understand the challenges and support the

engineers when needed.

But I trusted them changing or moving the mindset from technical

guy to managing people guy.

This is a big challenge that I face and changing this mentality is making

me focusing more on details and focusing more on

technical support, more than managing the people and how they can

improve themselves.

Then after that, gradually that I changed myself from

more technical guy to make a clear responsibility on

open communication and accountability.

So the leadership is about

continuous improvement.

It's not for me and myself and the team.

So this is the changing.

It was a challenge for me to move from this perspective to another perspective.

Do you often get into situations, especially I am hands-on as well, and across my

whole career, what I've noticed is people who are hands-on managers, as opposed to,

you know, being just a manager who's managing people.

It gets difficult to get that amount of transparency, as I might say,

in terms of what your team is doing.

So as a hands-on manager, for example, do you ever face such situations where, okay,

so this is going to take me five minutes to do and I exactly know how to do it.

But my personal team is taking the same task in two, three hours.

So how do you think about situations like these where you have to,

you know, stop yourself from going into that engineer mindset again?

Okay, so let me just do it because I can do it faster as opposed to, you know,

contributing towards the team growth or the growth of the person that you are

actually managing.

Yeah, that is true.

A strong team is built by developing people, not only by assigning tasks.

So what I'm trying to understand, what is the root cause of the

issue?

How I can support him to solve the issue step by step?

And also that is depend on the criticality of the issue.

If there is something critical, I cannot say just simply that, okay, do one, two,

three, four, and spend hours to solve the issue.

So while the business is affected, well, sometimes I have to involve myself, that's

for sure, that to make sure that I'm addressing the issue.

Then after that, see how we can solve this issue or avoid this issue in the future.

So because of that, I'm usually saying that putting standardizations across

all the IT is help the operations to be more reliable.

So the company, they can depend on the IT operation.

It's not like it just react, need to be proactive.

When you have something as a standard, according to the international standard, it's

set it inside the organization.

So that will avoid a lot of problems in the future.

Yeah, and especially when you talk about standards, it's mostly your job as

a manager is putting those standards as a form of processes that you and the

entire team that you're managing has to follow.

And your job is mostly going to revolve around identifying where the gaps are,

especially when you're managing people.

So in order to solve problem A, there are three steps that you will follow.

In order to solve problem B, there are five steps you will follow.

But not every time you would have the right manual or the steps written down or the

right process written down.

That's where your role as a manager comes in, where you have to define those steps

for your team to follow.

And you're going back to the same problem where we were discussing, it takes me

something five minutes or two.

And then there's an engineer on my team who's taking two or three hours to actually

do it.

It's sometimes or most of the time, it's a knowledge problem that you have to

upscale your team and provide them the process.

Okay, so this is step one, step two, step three.

And this is how you get done in five minutes, as opposed to letting them figure out

something.

As you said, if this critical situation or business operation is factored, you won't

wait them to go through the entire process and learn it by themselves.

You need to be there and get it done, as opposed to just watching from the

sidelines.

But sometimes as managers, we do have that moment where we are

watching from the sidelines, just because we want you guys or our team members to

learn by going through the process by themselves, make those mistakes, get that

experience so they can implement it better next time.

So, Alaykum, if we were to talk about your week, I remember when I was starting

out as a manager, I used to have a lot of meetings

scheduled throughout my day.

And I would go meeting, meeting, and meeting.

And this would be a constant, you know, one-on-ones or team updates, right?

That I'm getting back-to-back.

When you're managing operations, especially across different countries right now,

and you're providing that operational support as a manager, how does your week look

like?

So, there is one thing that this is one of the challenges.

I'm continuing working on it.

Because of my technical background, sometimes I get involved in troubleshooting and

guide engineers step-by-step.

That is, for sure, is having our day-to-day work.

But because I recognize that if I always provide a solution,

the team will become too dependent on me.

You get my point?

So, I'm working toward giving the engineers more ownership while

maintaining the right level of oversight.

So, and I believe also solving the problem is not only by IT department.

This is, I'm trying to guide the people, how the end user themselves, they can solve

the problem by themselves.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, what we have, actually, that I'm trying to build it over the years, knowledge

base.

The knowledge base about the frequently issues we are facing it, the people they are

raising the tickets about, I need to configure Outlook.

So, you can go next, next, next, next, next.

So, that will take time from my team.

And also, take time from the business.

That's because the employees, they are stuck on, that I need to communicate with the

people through the email.

They cannot.

So I'm usually also out of my experience and technical experience and the team

technical experience on a knowledge-based system that when anyone he raise service

request, he can protect from those keywords what is the suggested

solution he can follow up step by step to solve the problem from their side.

So that will save time for the business, save time from the user, from my team.

So having a lot of meetings is not usually useful

for the team, especially if there is no agenda, there is no objective,

there is no target, responsibility, ownership about that.

So usually I'm trying to have a monthly meeting with my team to give them that,

to be aligned with the management target, to be aligned with the management

objective and result.

So what we, the business needs from our side to be aligned with them.

So there is another one-to-one meeting for sure, for them, is not

about something to give them that this is the issue, you have to follow this issue,

you have to follow step by step.

This is to know from them what is the challenges they are facing.

How can I support them?

What is the, yeah, sometime to understand

the people, to understand their strengths, how you can improve,

yeah.

Yes, so you have got a lot of one-to-ones on your calendar and that's major leap

for understanding where your team members are at, right.

And we can contribute more to help them figure out solution to problems, which they

might not have knowledge about right now.

And when you specifically talk about a monthly meeting and what I got curious about,

how do you set KPIs right now for your team?

Those KPIs have to be in relation to what the business KPIs are.

As you said, in the monthly meetings, you're discussing KPIs.

But if we were to talk about individual metrics, do you do quarterly reviews,

monthly reviews?

How do you do it currently?

There is a KPI for sure that should be aligned with the business needs.

Usually, the KPI, I don't, I'm focusing on making the KPI built

on business, on systems.

It's not built on my relation with the MVPs.

It's not built based on something.

There is SLA, for example, that I have a system.

You have a ticketing system.

When you receive the ticketing system, when you resolve it, there is a, what is the

average resolution time for them?

Is it acceptable?

Is it not acceptable?

So I need from this system to just give the people

a fairness about my evaluation.

It's not about something.

I am happy from Abdul Wahab or X.

That's okay.

I will give him the full grade.

I'm not happy about it.

I will not give him that required grade.

I usually try to link their performance with something system can record

that performance.

And from that SLA, there is other dependencies also.

I'm trying to understand what is the root cause of this bad performance.

Sometimes the issue is from lack of experience and clear expectation, maybe process

problems.

So the things about the people, they have to