Seminar

February 24, 2009

Association for Information Technology Professionals

Melville Marriott

Since Information Technology has shifted to a vertical profession

and is permeating all levels of the organization, what extra skills do we

need to bring to business? That was the question we dealt with this

morning. And the answer was to enrich our technical expertise with

skillful human interaction. We’ve already established what psychology

calls “legitimate authority” in the field based on our skills, knowledge

and understanding. As we move to broader positions in the

corporation, there is a pressure to extend our authority to the world of

relationships.

Could we do that? Could we compete with people who have

spent their professional careers developing people skills? The answer

was a resounding “Yes!” There is a “way in” that is particularly

appealing to people with a scientific grounding and a reliance on logic,

analysis and problem-solving. It is the intellectual counterpart of

psychology, which can be both intellectual and emotional. We could

demonstrate a set of empirically-grounded skills to establish ourselves

as influencers and leaders with “legitimate authority,” and we focused

on one of those skills today: Modeling

 Modeling is performing in a way that induces similar

behavior in others.

We saw how eye contact, smiling, using names, and reaching out

with a handshake moved relationships along in a successful manner.

But this conversation was extended to the bigger arena of business

productivity. If we want to see people work together in teams,

concentrate on big problems, create a human flow of work that

expedite all the company’s processes, how could we model that?

The participants were quick to recognize that with our eye on

that goal, we demonstrate the behaviors to colleagues that would get

the company moving. Modeling was described as a behavior that is

observable, teachable and transparently expressed. Everybody “gets

it” on one level or another, and it’s “catching.” Examples were

provided by the audience of ways to model “flow-of-work” behaviors to

make the company successful and competitive. Some examples:

1. In order to get help moving up the organization, help people

move up the organization.

2. In order to get positive responses to your ideas, requests and

instructions give positive responses to ideas, requests and

instructions.

3. In order to get respect, give respect.

 4. In order to teach people to depend on you, demonstrate how you

are able to depend on someone yourself.

The beauty of modeling is that it leads to imitative learning, and as

the person does what you are doing, he comes to internalize that

behavior. He is not only internalizing the behavior but internalizing

you, too, and over time you become a “board member” in his mind.

When he’s in a situation that throws him off, he can ask himself, “What

would Jack do?” And there it was, a way into the emotional world. We

could affect others around us profoundly just by the way we carried

ourselves.

We found that modeling had a shortcoming. If teams are working

with a quick turnaround time and the pressure is on, this sort of

incremental relationship-building seemed ill-suited. That’s why we had

a number of other skills to tap, and perhaps we’ll get into them at our

next seminar in May. There was also a worry that people could be

insincere, smile when they really didn’t want to, for example. One

answer to that was that if smiling is a skill that we need to learn, then

practice makes perfect, and we need to do it even if we don’t feel it

right away. After a while, the feelings would catch up. Still, the other

person might not enjoy us while we’re moving along our learning

curve. There was something important to do in this case, and that

brought us to the final theme of the seminar:

 You can get going right away with modeling if you have a

weekly roundtable group where you can get support,

encouragement and you can report the results of your growth

efforts.

We discussed how the I.Q. of a group exceeds that of the individual,

that a group run for support and without criticism would allow the

person to explore further ways to talk with people in the company. So

if someone tells us that he finds our smile insincere, we could talk this

out in our roundtable meetings, and come up with the next step in the

relationship. We might ask how we aroused that feeling, and we might

apologize that our smile led to it. But we would certainly learn that

someone able to be that direct with us would also help us move the

relationship along.

An idea emerged in the discussion, concerning what a “people

skill” is in the first place. Developed over the millennia, it is better

seen as built-in and available, just needing the right conditions to come

out, and the right support to stay in our repertoire. That’s why we can

come out of the gate moving with some good speed. The seminar

ended with high energy among the dedicated and motivated

colleagues who came to learn this morning.

George Bouklas, Ph.D.