Management Skills in IT

Shaping your career

• Publisher: BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781780171036
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Management

This collection of articles by IT industry experts explores the challenges IT professionals face when moving from a technical into a managerial role. The authors look at the skills required to scale the career ladder, the opportunities for training and development and how to progress from a first job in IT to CIO. Each article ends with a range of current resources and recommendations including blogs, books and websites.

SECTION 1:
MANAGEMENT AND PERSONAL SKILLS

1 DO WE NEED A SOFTER SIDE?

Jooli Atkins, August 2011

I was interested to read that, according to recent CW Jobs research, the lack of ‘soft’ skills is the latest IT career regression factor. My experience, however, is that many IT professionals believe that they don’t need ‘soft’ skills and that technical skills are the only ones needed for an IT role.

For many years, I have designed, developed and delivered workshops to help IT professionals develop their communication, customer service and training skills. So often the IT managers recognise the need for such skills in their staff, but when the staff themselves are ‘sent’ on a course, they are often resistant and have no understanding of why such skills are important in their role. Of course that could be because the managers are ‘sending’ their staff and don’t have the relevant skill to prepare them sufficiently in the first place, but it is also apparent that technical skills are often seen as more important.

One such experience was with a group of IT helpdesk staff for a local authority whose role was to support teachers in schools. They were attending a ‘Customer Service for IT Professionals’ workshop and, as part of this, were asked to represent their customers in some way. Most groups chose to draw a representation, which had disturbing similarities. Customers were represented as stupid, illiterate (in IT terms) and incapable of understanding simple (in the helpdesk staff’s terms) instruction – and these are qualified teachers, remember.

The helpdesk staff’s perception of their customers was compounded by the fact that they saw no benefit in gaining any insight into their customers’ perspective because ‘if they don’t get it … it’s not our fault!’ You may be pleased to know that a few customer/supplier barriers were broken down that day, but not before a lot of soul-searching from some.

Contrast that with another experience with an internet giant (beginning with Y), whose specialists are worldwide experts in some of the narrowest of technical fields and so are often asked to train others in their subject-matter expertise. We were asked to help them to deliver more effective learning. At the end of the workshop, one of the cleverest men I have ever met admitted that he had ‘been doing it wrong all this time’. He absolutely ‘got’ how enhancing his soft skills could help him to be an even better technician. To a man (because, sadly, they were all men) that team benefited from their learning and could see how improving on their soft skills would help them to help others. Maybe it was the organisation that made the difference – they were very open-minded and not threatened by the ‘softer’ demands on them. They had the technical skills, but they also understood that that is not all that’s needed to make us good at our jobs.

So how can we get IT professionals to accept that they need help? Perhaps this CW Jobs research will help, but I doubt that the people who need it will even look at the Computer Weekly article because it is categorised under IT Management, Staffing and Training.

About the author

Jooli Atkins FBCS CITP FIITT has been involved in the IT profession for the past 25 years, mainly in IT training. She is the Chair of the BCS Learning and Development Specialist Group as well as being an active member of the Learning and Performance Institute (formerly IITT).

Links

Jooli’s blog: Lessons Learnt: www.bcs.org/content/conBlog/11

Computer Weekly IT Management, Staffing and Training section: www.computerweekly.com/it-management/staffing-and-training

BCS Learning and Development Specialist Group: www.bcs.org/category/9399

Learning and Performance Institute: www.learningandperformanceinstitute.com

2 EQUIPPING IT LEADERS

Simon Mitchell, December 2010

IT people can have great technical skills, which set them up for promotion, but are they the right skills to take them on to the next stage in their professional career? Simon Mitchell provides a valuable insight into some of the difficulties that emerging IT leaders face when moving from an operational to a leadership role and how companies can support them in this critical transition.

Being invited to take the next step into a management or leadership role can be flattering and exciting and, understandably, many accept a rise in salary and status without full consideration of the skills and attributes required to make the new role a success.

Yet as a person progresses into management, skills often become more about people and less about technical competency and those that are not given the support to gain these skills may find themselves floundering.

It is important to realise that leaders are not born with all the skills they will need in their roles and, faced with a skills gap, organisations can take one of two approaches:

• let them acquire the skills on the job (the sink or swim approach); or
• provide structured skills acquisition and other relevant support.

Not surprisingly, the latter offers by far the best results.

In 2008, Development Dimensions International (DDI) carried out a survey of 600 managers worldwide to look at how the transition to a leadership role impacts the individual and what companies can do to support them.

The biggest and most stressful challenge to taking on a new leadership role was found to be the mental shift required for the next level of management, which includes new skills in communication, planning and team-building.

However, some of the stresses of moving to a leadership role were outweighed by the opportunity to make things happen, a greater respect from peers, increased self-esteem and the opportunity to help others succeed.

SO HOW DO IT COMPANIES IDENTIFY THEIR FUTURE LEADERS?

Wanting and having the right leadership skills are two very different things and, likewise, having the ambition for promotion does not mean the person will easily slip into a manager’s shoes.

The first way to identify new leaders is to set clear parameters of which leadership skills will be required in the role and how they will support the company’s overall objectives. By doing this, it is possible to identify candidates that have the necessary skills and mindset to take them into a leadership role.

There are many different tools, tests and simulations that can help support the identification process, ranging from simple tick sheets to psychometric profiles and half-day simulation exercises. For any of them to be genuinely useful, there needs to be an understanding from the start about which leadership skills are essential for the new role.

WHAT ARE THE INDICATORS OF SUCCESSFUL LEADERS?

DDI identifies seven distinguishing features of a leader:

• personal awareness and the motivation to learn continuously;
• a motivation to lead;
• a willingness to get results from others and let others take the credit;
• the ability to juggle many competing tasks and deal with ambiguity in the workplace;
• a good track record;
• speed of intellect to meet organisational needs and objectives;
• an ability to balance results with the company culture.

LEAVING THE PAST BEHIND

Leaders at all levels leave behind elements of their previous role with reluctance. After all, it was past achievement that got them into the new role, and moving away from what they know can be uncomfortable.

Organisations need to recognise this and communicate to their new leaders what they should stop doing, as well as provide a clear path in terms of what they should be doing. This will help leaders understand what is expected of them, minimise workload stress and allow them to slip into their new role more comfortably.

IT’S LONELY AT THE TOP

IT is a fast-paced industry with considerable opportunity to fast-track along a career path. However, this means that less experienced leaders are being asked to take on larger workloads and responsibilities. As a result, they need to manage larger teams and take a more hands-off approach to daily activities, focusing more on strategy and team performance, for example.

Leaders can feel more isolated and afraid to admit that some new responsibilities represent a challenge for them. In many cases, the old support network of work colleagues and line manager may not be the right network to offer them constructive support in their new role.

Instead, in the absence of systematic organisational support, new leaders may look outside of the organisation for their support. This should be a warning sign to an organisation and could be indicative of a problem with the support culture within.

In DDI’s survey, 41 per cent of new leaders cited family and friends as their biggest support network. Work colleagues can also be a big source of support, although the use of work colleagues for support declines the higher up an organisation you go. Mainly this is due to fewer equal peers and fewer again with whom you might want to share feelings of vulnerability.

If a company can facilitate support networks through opportunities t...