Posts Tagged ‘teamwork’

It Turns Out That Personal Skills ARE Important For IT Leaders

Thursday, January 28th, 2010
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Sure We’re Nerds, But We Still Need To Have Social Skills

Sure We’re Nerds, But We Still Need To Have Social Skills

Why Does Hacking Still Work So Well?

So here’s an interesting question for you: in this day and age, why is it still so easy to hack into a corporate computer system? I mean we’ve had years to invest in sophisticated encryption systems and multi-step identity verification systems. The answer is surprisingly simple – the weakest link remains the people who use the systems and a smooth talking criminal always seems to be able to get the info that he / she needs out of these people.

What this realization means is that no matter how sophisticated we make security technology, it’s always going to be personal skills that we’ll be battling against. This leads to another interesting point: just exactly what personal skills do IT Leaders need to have in order to do their (non-hacking) jobs well?

IT Leaders Don’t Know What They Don’t Know

I can almost see you grimacing when you read the words “personal skills”. Technical professionals have a tendency to poo-poo these types of discussions because we view these skills as being something that can’t be measured. This means that we don’t really value them – why bother if you can’t become Cisco certified in personal skills (would that be CCPS?)

Times they are a changing and IT Leaders are going to have to change along with them. Luis Fernandez-Sanz?” href=” http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MC.2009.329”>Luis Fernandez-Sanz has been taking a close look at what employers are looking for in IT Leaders and he’s detected a change in the requirements.

This all starts by taking a look at what skills IT Leaders often don’t bring to the table. Sure, we’re skilled technical professionals, but that doesn’t mean that we have all of the skills that will be needed to lead a team. Here’s where we often come up short:

  • Organizational abilities
  • Political skills
  • Public speaking
  • Understanding of business language and jargon

Fernandez-Sanz has found that IT Leaders are often viewed by the rest of the company as being good at what we do – solving technical problems. However, since we often work remotely from the rest of the business, we are also viewed as needing to improve our interpersonal skills.

What Social Skills Do We Need To Have?

When we sit down and try to determine just exactly what skills IT Leaders need to be working to acquire, we find some good news. Fernandez-Sanz has found that the needed skills are not unique to IT Leaders – they are the same skills that any business professional needs to develop.

Analysis of job postings for IT jobs has revealed a wealth of data. The first discovery should come as no surprise to any of us: IT is still a rapidly developing field and new types of jobs are constantly being created. Additionally, IT jobs can be classified into over 250 different areas that run from software development jobs to systems engineering jobs.

Studies of IT job postings over the past 16 years has revealed that not only is IT a growing field, it is also dynamic. It has been noted that the languages, tools, and technologies that are called for have changed dramatically over that time. Clearly this means that by entering into the IT field we have all signed up to a lifetime of constant learning.

In the area of IT leadership, the studies have revealed the top 5 personal skills that IT Leaders need to have. These results have been culled from descriptions of the skill sets that CIOs are asked to have:

  • Proactive behavior
  • Team management
  • Leadership
  • Teamwork
  • Communication skills

What All Of This Means For You

As an IT Leader, you will always be expected to be working to improve your skills. The challenge is to determine just exactly what skills you need to be working on. The technical skills that you’ll need to maintain will be constantly changing as IT moves forward.

Your real challenge will come in identifying the personal skills that you’ll need to be able to bring to the table. Although it is much more difficult to measure these skills, they are just as if not more important than your technical skills.

It turns out that the personal skills that you need to hone are the same skills that ever other business professional is working on. This won’t make your task any easier, but it certainly means that you’ll be in good company!

What do you think the most important personal skill for an IT Leader to have is?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Times of change can be difficult for everyone, including IT Leaders. We all know how hard it can be to lose your job. What this means is that we all have a basic understanding of what to do if it happens. But what if you don’t lose you job, it just changes on you. What do you do then?

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Are You A “Tuned In” IT Manager?

Friday, January 9th, 2009
Great IT Leaders Know How To Resonate With Their Staff And Make Gut Decisions

Great IT Leaders Know How To Resonate With Their Staff And Make Gut Decisions

Just how do great IT managers go about making decisions? We all have different ways of doing this, but many of us talk about making “gut decisions”. What this is really a way of saying is that an IT leader who has good business instincts is a great value to the company that they work for.

Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis have written an article in the Harvard Business Review in which they call this type of leadership as being the ability to recognize patterns. We’d all like to have more of this kind of accurate decision making ability – so where does it come from? Bad news here – it comes from extensive experience.

If you want to become known as someone who can make good, quick decisions, then start trusting your gut; however, also make sure that you get as many inputs from others as possible. The time that it requires to get inputs from others can often take too long to collect. What’s an IT leader to do?

It turns out that you can probably trust your gut. This is because in your brain you have a class of neuron cells that are called “spindle cells”. This type of neurons both attaches to other cells easier and transmits information to them quicker.

The ability to quickly connect and transmit judgments, beliefs, and emotions creates what scientists like to call our “social guidance system”. This system gets used whenever we have to make a choice among several different alternatives.

This system also helps us to make up our minds as to if someone that we meet is trustworthy. It turns out that within 1/20th of a second these spindle cells will fire and we’ll decide how we feel about someone. Studies have shown that these quick decisions actually turn out to be quite accurate.

What all this means is that as long as you can “tune in” to your staff’s moods, you should feel comfortable trusting your gut instincts. There is a physical side to all of this that can impact your staff.

It’s called “resonance”. Researcher Annie McKee says that this is similar to what you see when you see people dancing together, getting ready to kiss, or when they are playing musical instruments together. Teams that are being lead by a skilled IT leader are often physically coordinated in how and when their bodies move together during meetings.

Give this some thought and start trusting your gut more. It appears as though your first thought is more often then not the right decision!

Do you trust your first impressions? Do you ever seek inputs from others in order to confirm what your initial impression was? Do your first impressions turn out more often than not to be right or wrong? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Mirrror, Mirror On The Wall, Who’s The Best IT Manager Of All?

Friday, January 2nd, 2009
It Turns Out That An IT Leader's Emotions Are Often Reflected By Your Staff

It Turns Out That An IT Leader's Emotions Are Often Reflected By Your Staff

Those boys who get locked up and do work on behavior neuroscience continue to come up with new and interesting discoveries all the time.  This time around they’ve made a stunning discovery that will have a long lasting impact on how IT managers do their job. Do I have your interest yet?

Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis have written an article in the Harvard Business Review in which they describe what’s been going on in the world of neuroscience. Neuroscientists have discovered something called “mirror neurons” that are spread out all over our brains. Our brains have lots and lots of neurons. This newly discovered type appear to mimic (or “mirror”) what someone else is doing.

These neurons were discovered by Italian neuroscientists who were studying one particular type of cell in a monkey’s brain. This cell only fired when the monkey raised its arm. One day an assistant in the lab raised some food to his mouth and the cell in the monkey fired.

What this all means is that when we detect someone’s (consciously or unconsciously) emotions by observing their actions, these newly discovered mirror neurons reproduce the emotions that we believe that they are feeling. Taken all together, these neurons allow us to create a virtually instant sense of having a shared experience.

Why do we care about all of this brain stuff? It’s the key to being a great IT leader. It turns out that your emotions and your actions are what your department / team are going to be mirroring. If you can activate the mirror neurons in those who are following you, then you will have tapped into a very powerful force.

Additional studies that have been done on groups to measure the effects of activating these neurons has revealed even more. It turns out that when you are addressing your department / team, HOW you communicate is much more important than WHAT you communicate.

This means that if you want to get the best performance out of your team, you need to be demanding (of course) but do in in such a way that creates a happy positive mood in you team. This is all based on the simple fact that when your people feel better, then you’ll get better performance out of them.

Which now brings us to the subject of laughter. I’m not talking about having your team laugh at you (they may already be doing this). Instead, I’m talking about how often you get your team to laugh with you. Studies have shown that the best IT leaders got their employees to laugh on average three times as often as did midperforming IT leaders.

When you are in a good mood, this helps the people who work with and for you to both take in the information that you are providing as well as react quicker and with more creativity.

How often do you make your team members laugh? Have you found that your emotions cause your team to feel the same way that you do? Do you often find yourself feeling the same way that your boss is feeling? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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How Can An IT Leader Change An Engineer Into A Team Player?

Monday, October 20th, 2008
IT Leaders Need To Be Able To Change Engineers Into Team Players

IT Leaders Need To Be Able To Change Engineers Into Team Players

At my core, I am an engineer. I recognize this, I accept this, I am proud of this. However, during my career many mentors have been kind enough to hold up that damning mirror of self-vision and have allowed me to see myself as I was: an engineer’s engineer. One key characteristic of this part of an engineer’s personality is that everything in the world is seen as falling into one of two buckets: right or wrong. Oh, and an another characteristic of the engineer’s personality is that we’ll have no problem speaking up and letting you know just exactly where we think something falls. That might be why an engineer’s life is so hard.

It took me 20+ years to develop a “wrapper” to put around my engineering personality. This wrapper helped my career progress, made difficult tasks much easier, and just all around simplified my life. I was reminded just how important this evolution of my personality was today when a younger version of myself asked to talk with me. He’s involved in the electrical power generation industry and he’s been having a tough time of it lately. He told me that he felt that he was just “banging his head against the wall” and that he was finding it really hard to get anything done at work. He described himself as a “guns ‘a blazing” sorta of guy who feared no conversation. Read this as classic engineer talk for “I’ll tell you when you’re wrong.” Clearly this was a social / political career crash that was just waiting to happen. What could I tell him that would help him to save himself?

The first thing that I realized is that I wasn’t going to be able to help him until he wanted to be helped. Right now he just wanted to complain about how wrong everyone else was. I let him vent for awhile and then asked him a few questions. It turns out that he’s had a number of projects (both work and social) that he’s been the leader for. In the past, a number of them have flat out failed. This is classic engineer talk: “they just didn’t get what I wanted them to do!” Recently he did organize a successful gathering and I probed to find out more about why that one worked. It turns out that others helped him out with that one. This was a bit of an eye opener – he had not realized that he had always failed when he tried to do everything by himself.

Next we talked about that whole “guns ‘a blazing” thing. He had just gotten off of a call that had started badly and he’d gone in shooting the meeting leader for not being clear about the purpose of the meeting. After he got a few shots off, he basically tuned out of the whole meeting. Clearly, this had been a showdown in the OK Corral that had turned out badly for everyone. My big challenge here was to find a way to make him see himself as the world sees him. My first try, “what do you think the other person though of you” didn’t go very far – he was too fixated on the fact that the other guy was “wrong” to consider this. I then asked him if the call had been successful – he admitted that it had not been. I then asked him that if it had been his assignment to make sure that the call was a success, while still playing the subordinate role that he had played, what would he have done differently? This question floored him. He didn’t have an answer – an engineer hates it when he doesn’t know the answer.

Having gotten his attention and partially getting him to understand that his actions had not moved the call closer to a successful ending, I then went in for the kill. I suggested that the only way to accomplish his goal of making sure that the call was successful, would have been to understand what the call leader was feeling and then persuade him to move in a direction that would make the call successful. My young friend considered this for a bit and agreed. Hey, it’s sorta like a control system problem back in school. I finished by pointing out the the “guns ‘a blazing” approach would never persuade anyone to move in the direction that you wanted them to move. He agreed. Now all I have to do is teach him how to be successful when interacting with others and I will have changed an engineer into a team player!

Do you have any classic engineering personalities on your team? Do they hurt your ability to solve team problems more than they help? What have you tried to get them to temper their engineering personality in order to create more teamwork? Has it worked? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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