September! All over the UK children are going back to school, neatly dressed in recently-bought uniform and clutching bags filled with new stationary. Some are optimistic, others are resentful of this return to daily learning.

Parents are heaving huge sighs of relief and re-gaining control of their homes, computers and TV remotes. Full-time Mums are plotting a little oasis of ‘me-time’ at the same time as tackling overdue household chores.

As we head back to work and discover that all the desks are occupied again, many of us are also filled with the echoes of a new term and the shift of the seasons. It’s interesting that this time offers both the sense of ‘getting back to normal’ and also of a ‘fresh start’. 

However, there’s no point in getting back to normal if ‘normal’ is a disaster and even less point in making a fresh start if what you’re doing is working well. The real opportunity is to distinguish between the areas that are working and those that are not and to have different approaches.

Overall, it makes sense to get back to doing the activities which have been successful for you and to make a fresh start in areas where you haven’t achieved as much. 

As a teenager, I found homework to be a real bore. I always did it, but usually I’d do it the evening before it had to be handed in. One September, I decided to change that. I came home from school after the first day of the new term and immediately sat down and completed the homework I’d been given that day. I felt good. I was impressed with myself (a rare experience in those days) and resolved to do the same the next day. The next day I came home, did the homework I’d been given and marvelled at this new me.

I don’t remember for how many days this continued. What I do remember VERY clearly is the day I came home from school and looked at my homework, looked at the timetable for the following day realised that I had already done all the homework that had to be handed in the next day. I could have an evening off. So I did.

And thereafter I went back to doing my homework the night before it had to be handed in.

So, nice experiment, good feelings for a few days, but nothing really changed. That’s not much of a ‘fresh start’ is it?

Maybe you’ve experienced something similar. You decide to start running in the morning before you go to work. Or to use your commute time to delve into those industry journals to which you faithfully subscribe to but never actually read. Or to keep your inbox clear with no more than 20 messages in it at the end of the day. Or whatever.

The likely result of these noble resolutions is this: You ‘try’ to adopt the new behaviour. You do it for a few days and feel proud of yourself. You grit your teeth and do it for a few more days, summoning up all the willpower you can muster. You overrule yourself when you feel drawn to the old habit and keep going until finally, exhausted with the effort of doing this new activity and of being a different person, you revert to the familiar.

After a few attempts you become accustomed to this pattern, conclude that ‘you can’t change who you are’ and settle into a comfortable cynicism about personal development and change. 

Have you ever wondered what’s really going in here? 

Your behaviour is the result of a variety of factors that are often outside of conscious awareness:

Beliefs and Values

Your beliefs and values are very powerful in driving behaviour from the unconscious level. Everything that you do will be driven by one or more of your values. Or to put it another way, everything we do is aimed at getting more of what’s important to us. So, if you value achievement you might be very motivated to complete everything on your daily plan. If you value your health and well-being you might be very keen to leave work at a sensible time. Sometimes these two will conflict and leave you unsure what to do. However, because this all going on outside of conscious awareness, you might simply feel stressed, anxious or de-motivated without really understanding why.

Goals

If you have a particular goal that is important, your behaviour will naturally tend to the opportunities to move closer to the goal. Unless there’s something blocking the way. 

Personal baggage

‘Personal baggage’ is the weight of bad experience that drags you down and stops you getting where you want to go. It includes negative beliefs, fears, phobias, cynicism and lies. If you keep telling yourself you can’t change, you won’t. If you think you’re no good at something you won’t start doing it. If you feel safer deriding an activity than doing it, you keep avoiding it. The important thing to understand about personal baggage is that it’s not the truth. It’s just a way of looking at the world in the light of your experience. If you hadn’t had that particular experience the world would look different – and still can.

Habit

A habit is a pattern of behaviour that a person uses over and over again. Why? Because it works. All the things you’re really good at you can do without thinking about. You’ve done them so many times you can ‘do it with your eyes closed’ or ‘do it in your sleep’. So once the first step in the pattern happens, the rest follow on automatically. Without conscious thought. This is a good thing when the habit results in productive, constructive behaviour, such as planning the next day before you finish work for the day or brushing your teeth before you get into bed. 

It’s not such a good thing when it results in procrastination or destructive behaviour such as checking your email every two minutes or being late for every meeting.

The reason we have habits that are not productive, is that the habit worked at some point in the past, but changes in circumstances mean that it no longer works. Nonetheless, the behaviour persists.

Yes, you can choose your behaviour, but a huge proportion of what you do in a day, you do without thinking about it. It’s all happening below consciousness.

Habits are the way we deal with recurring situations.  We do the same thing everything time, without consciously deciding what to do. That frees up mental space for new experiences and decisions to be made. The thing about habits, is that you can be half-way doing something you’d planned to NOT do, before you realise what’s happening. You’re on auto-pilot and simply doing what you usually do in the situation. The situation becomes a trigger for a particular pattern of behaviour, such as ‘I’d given up coffee until I met my friend in the local coffee shop and before I realised what I was doing I’d ordered my usual cappuccino and starting drinking it’. 

State

Your state – the way you feel – will also affect your behaviour. All beliefs are state-dependent. So, if you’re tired and have a headache, you may think that certain activities are beyond you, whereas if you’re well-rested and full of energy you might think you can do anything. Neither is necessarily true, but they will feel like reality at the time.

 

With all these different factors impacting your behaviour; if you find it hard to do a specific task or activity it might be worth taking some time to explore the situation in more detail. 

If you feel no motivation to do the task, that’s usually because there is no clear connection with any of your values. Ask yourself what’s important about the task, what are the consequences or doing it or not doing it. Is it part of a bigger picture?

If you find yourself exerting a lot of ‘willpower’ to get something done, what that really means is that you’re fighting with yourself. On one level you want to do it, but there’s also a drive to NOT do it. It’s easy to just dismiss it as ‘I’m lazy’ but if you keep bludgeoning that aspect of yourself into submission and forcing yourself to do something you don’t feel motivated about, at some point there will be payback. It might simply be breaking the new habit (like me and my homework) but it could be more dramatic. Sometimes this kind of internal conflict leads to physical symptoms and emotional stress.

Here’s how to incorporate a new behaviour in to your day-to-day activity. As already mentioned, if you have a clear path from A to B, you have enough unconscious processes to naturally take the path and follow it to the end. But it must be clear.

If A is the starting place, making it clear involves being honest with yourself about the current state of play. Maybe the reason you haven’t enrolled in that course for your professional qualifications isn’t that you haven’t got around to completing the application. It’s actually that you’re intimidated by the amount of study involved. Admit that, and the next step is rather different.

If B is the end point, the goal, it also needs to be clear and it must align with your values in some way. Otherwise it will seem pointless and there will be no motivation. This is where the NLP ‘well-formed outcome’ pattern comes into its own. By working through a structured process that considers the big picture and the factors that might be holding you back, this process clears the way in your mind for the new behaviour.

Sometimes it highlights a bit of personal baggage that’s getting in the way, often it simply raises awareness of all the relevant aspects and enables you to choose the best route from A to B.

Sometimes it highlights the need to learn a new skill or discover some new information. For example, someone who was habitually late but wanted to start being punctual discovered that he had never developed the skill of planning his time and therefore often overloaded his day and couldn’t possibly keep his commitments. 

The ‘bottom line’ is, when we decide to do something new or different, that’s rarely all it takes. By considering the full range of factors that influence what we do in a particular situation we gain more choice and control. That’s worth spending a little thinking time and mental energy to achieve.

Some people love change.  They get really motivated by the prospect of something new or different and they’re excited by the opportunity to do something they haven’t done before. 

Not everyone is like that.  Other people enjoy stability and continuity.  They’re motivated by knowing what’s going to happen, how to deal with it and when to act.  They like the predictability of cyclical work and the rhythm of repetition.

And of course, there are people in between who like some change so long as it’s not too often.

Now, consider:  when you’re planning a significant change in your team or organisation, who are you most likely to choose to be its champion?

…the person who loves change of course!

And that’s where the problems begin.  The person who loves change will talk about this change to others and they will enthuse about the aspects that they personally find most motivating:

“This is like nothing else we’ve ever done”

“It’s so different to the old system, you won’t believe what it can do!”

“It’s a completely new approach”

“It’s going to make a difference to everything we do”

All this is music to the ears of a person who loves change, but to someone who prefers continuity, it’s painful to hear.  They want to hear about what’s staying the same, what’s improving a little bit or how results will come more easily.

Next time you announce a change to your team, see what happens if you tell them what’s staying the same as well as what’s changing.  I think you might be pleased with the response you get.

Most IT departments have a very large training budget and most of them spend it all. On technical training.

Technology moves forward at an ever-increasing pace and it’s important to keep people’s skills up-to-date. So IT professionals expect to do a lot of learning. Usually they’re good at it and welcome the opportunity for further training. In technology.

At the recruitment stage…

Most people are taken on into IT roles for their technical ability and not much else. ‘The Business’ relies on its technology to function and gaps in the technical capability can’t be tolerated for long.

Often, roles are filled with contract staff that use their specialist knowledge to command higher than average rates of pay and remain detached from the organisation.

Sometimes, a manager will put up with inappropriate behaviour, poor relationships or unprofessional personal presentation, just to keep the required technical skills in a team. 

IT Managers are promoted for technical ability, not leadership skills

That same manager, putting up with poor behaviour from team members, was probably promoted for his technical ability, not his leadership skills. 

He doesn’t see himself as a leader and doesn’t believe he could become a leader – that’s for extraverts. So he may not be totally confident about tackling the non-technical problems in his team. It’s easier to ignore them – and get on with the (technical) work.

That lack of confidence in tackling the problems is likely to be the same lack of confidence that keeps an IT Project Manager from giving praise to team members for a job well done. 

Intelligent introverts are particularly sensitive to inauthenticity

The Project Manager knows there’s a danger he’ll look patronising and insincere if he says ‘well done’. So he plays safe and says nothing.

He doesn’t tell his boss what a great job his team has done, either. He doesn’t want to be seen to be ‘showing off’ or ‘blowing his own trumpet’ like those loud types in Sales and Marketing.  His team has done what’s expected of them and the boss should know it.  If he doesn’t know it – or doesn’t show it (for all the same reasons) – then it just goes to show, for all the talk the company really doesn’t care.

One size fits all leadership training

It’s clear that IT Managers will not respond well to being sent on management or leadership training with managers from all over the organisation. They get bored at the slow pace of most training programmes, think they know it all already and LOATHE role-playing with a passion. 

And the fact that they go away no better off and no more able to deal with the difficult people just reinforces the view that the training was a waste of time and ‘you’ve either got it or you haven’t’.

If you want to avoid doing the wrong thing and making your IT Professionals even more cynical and even less engaged with the organisation’s goals, read the full report here:

‘The 3 Main Reasons the IT Department Nearly Always Comes Bottom in the Staff Survey – And What You Do About It’

If your goals for the year include a promotion, a new role or new business then you’ll need to be able to sell yourself effectively. Lots of people dislike 'blowing their own trumpet’ because they’re afraid of seeming boastful, big-headed or boring.

This is a recording of me talking to my friend Andy Gooday of My Brand Academy and Round Peg Search & Selection, about how to blow your own trumpet without putting people off. Enjoy…
 

 

 

Leave me a comment.  I'd love to hear your thoughts.

There is a type of personality that is attracted to working in IT. You know it, the HR team knows it and most of the rest of the organisation knows it too. 

What most of them don’t know, however, is how that personality type is structured.

Think of IT Professionals as the ‘intelligent introverts’.  If you take stock of all the personalities in your IT department you’ll find on average:

• High IQ
• Introversion
• A broad view of most situations
• Logical thinking
• Good memory

In Myers-Briggs terms, they’re often INTJs: in Insights Discovery, they’re the Cool Blues; in Social Styles they’re the Analytics and in NLP terms the Digitals.

Of course, not every person in the IT department has all of these personality traits, but overall, this is the picture I expect you’ll find.

Let’s look at how these personality traits can lead to the kind of scepticism and cynicism that you so often find in the IT Department.

High IQ

These are smart people. They can think faster than most of the rest of the company and can spot the flaws in an argument while everyone else is still digesting the ideas. Most of them ‘don’t suffer fools gladly’ and will instantly lose respect for someone who gets their facts wrong, makes errors of spelling or grammar or, even worse, tries to cover up a mistake.

They tend to be very good at spotting problems and solving them.  Sometimes before anyone else has realised there could be a problem.

They respect and value intelligence.  They have little patience with incompetence.

Introversion

An introvert is someone who gets their energy and motivation from their own thoughts, rather than from interacting with others. 

Introverts value thought, not activity and rarely get involved in doing work that has no personal meaning for them. 

As a result, they usually have a quiet intensity in their dealing with others and are turned off by over-enthusiasm, what they see as unnecessary ‘hype’ and insincerity.  They can spot inauthenticity in other people and will use it a reason not to engage.

Introverts tend to be great observers. They see what’s going on, they listen to other people and they draw conclusions.

There is a principle that says:

“If you don’t know what an extravert thinks then you haven’t listened. If you don’t know what an introvert thinks, you haven’t asked”

Your average IT professional won’t offer his opinions about what’s going on in the organisation, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t got any. If the only time you ask is in an annual staff survey, you’re going to get it with both barrels!

A Broad View (also known as joined-up thinking)

Because someone can go into detail about a technical specialism, it’s tempting to think that they won’t also see the big picture. The reality is, the more intelligent a person is, the more detail they can handle at once. So the intelligent introvert has a ‘big picture’ view on things that’s a bit like a 5000-piece jigsaw. There’s nothing general about their big picture, it’s all based on absolute detailed fact.

Which means that that they can spot it a mile away if the business strategy doesn’t quite stack up. Or if the sales figures have been ‘spun’ a little bit to paint a slightly rosier picture than is really the case. Or if your competitors are implementing an innovation that will lead to serious competitive advantage and you don’t seem to be responding.

But remember, if you haven’t asked, they won’t tell you what they’re thinking.

Logical Thinking

Most IT Professionals started their love affair with technology at an early age. They learned to code and coding requires absolute logic. It’s the only language that computers can work with. 

So most of the people in your IT department are logical thinkers. What you tell them must ‘make sense’ or it will be dismissed and disregarded.

Can you honestly say that the person who put together your staff survey has a similar commitment to logic? If not, if there are some inconsistencies in the questions, or responses not catered for in a multiple choice selection, or even if you ask the same question in several different ways – it will irritate your intelligent introvert.

If it seems to him that there are inconsistencies in the questions, he’ll lose respect for the whole process. Then it becomes irritating to have to participate at all.

If the multiple choice questions don’t cater for the response he wants to make then you appear to be asking his opinion, but you’re making it impossible for him to tell you what he really thinks – no wonder he gets annoyed. 

And if you ask the same question in different ways? It’s common practice in personality profiles and staff surveys to ask the same question in a variety of ways to see if you get a consistent answer. To the intelligent introvert, this makes no sense. The answer is the answer. Why do you need to ask 3 times? Now he’s getting quite impatient with the whole process.

…and of course that will be reflected in the answers he makes to the questions in the survey.

Good memory

Many of your intelligent introverts have an excellent memory. Some of this is because they go about their business quietly and thoughtfully, they have time to order their thoughts and file them away for future reference. Some of it is to do with logic and process and some is related to other aspects of the mind.

So it’s not universally true, but you’re likely to have a lot of good memories in your IT department. Long memories.

Which means that they’ll remember the last time there was a ‘culture change’ that made no difference. And the last time the sales department started the year full of big talk and ended it below target. And the last time they told you that the system was overloaded and dangerously unstable but were ignored.

No wonder they get a bit cynical!

And I’m sorry to say, that the combination of all these personality traits can also make your IT professionals somewhat sensitive to slights and given to holding grudges. So once you lose their confidence and respect, getting it back again is hard.

What not to do

You can see now, why the conventional approach to boosting staff morale and engagement isn’t going to work here. You send in a team of bubbly, upbeat, positive-thinking types from HR to – well, to do anything really – and they will be as welcome as a slug in a salad.

Want some ideas on how to turn them these traits to your advantage, engaging the profitable brain power of your IT professionals and transforming the relationships between IT and ‘the business’?

You can download the full report: ‘The 3 Main Reasons the IT Department Nearly Always Comes Bottom in the Staff Survey’ here: https://www.www.brilliantminds.co.uk/itreport

Most organisations couldn’t function without their IT. In many industries you need the latest technology just to be in the game and if you aren’t making the most of that technology to create competitive advantage then your market share can dwindle rapidly.

Your business needs its geeks

And yet, some companies still don’t have a CIO who holds a Board-level position. Many don’t consult the CIO and IT team about the business strategy. 

The result is a disconnect between the business plan and the technology plan. It can result in the waste of massive budgets on the ‘wrong’ technology because nobody asked the IT professionals for their opinions.

“The Business”

Then there’s the fact that the IT department thinks of everyone else as ‘the Business’ and doesn’t include IT in the business.  Plus the fact that ‘the Business’ usually regards IT as a kind of support function and dismisses them as ‘geeks and freaks’ who don’t know anything except technology.

As a consequence, the IT department becomes detached from the rest of the organisation.

The coffee machine and the air conditioning

The average non-technical manager in the rest of the organisation doesn’t usually have any awareness of the variety of work undertaken in an IT Department.  The applications of technology can be widely varied in a big organisation. From desktop pcs to manufacturing automation and from order processing systems to marketing websites it’s all just referred to as ‘IT’.

Do people appreciate the complexity and variety of the technology in their workplace? No, they take it for granted. Like the coffee machine and the air-conditioning. They only pay attention when it goes wrong.

And you know who gets the blame when the technology doesn’t do everything that ‘the Business’ wants? Yes, the IT department.

Intelligent introverts

Worse still, they’re derided as a bunch of ‘techies’ who know nothing about business. They could retaliate and tell the business they’re a bunch of idiots who know nothing about technology. But the intelligent introverts keep their thoughts to themselves. They don’t hit back.

Until you send them a staff survey…

“The 3 Main Reasons Why the IT Department Nearly Always Comes Bottom in the Staff Survey – and What You Do About It”. Read the full report here.

When I was growing up, it seemed to me that the primary factor in a person’s status in the world was the extent of their personal intelligence. The smarter someone was, the more opportunities came their way, the more attention and admiration they received and the happier they appeared to be for it.

I guess that back then, schools wanted us to think that was true. Teachers wanted us to be motivated to work hard at our studies in the belief that it was the only route to success.

Then came Daniel Goleman and ‘Emotional Intelligence’. Goleman highlighted important research that showed us academic excellence was no guarantee of future success or happiness.  What really mattered was Emotional Intelligence.

Hurrah!

That was the cry from all the people who had found their academic studies a chore. From everyone who hadn’t excelled at school, who hadn’t made it to University, but still knew that they didn’t deserve to be consigned to life’s scrapheap.

Hurrah!

The same cry from parents of less-than-gifted children. Now it doesn’t matter if you can’t analyse, calculate, comprehend, parse or paraphrase.  You can be a success if you have Emotional Intelligence.

Oh!

The embarrassed deflation of the intelligent elite. The rug pulled out from beneath their feet and laid in the path of those they were to accustomed to looking down upon.

Wonderful! 

There is no longer any reason to feel inferior to people with a high IQ. It’s EQ that matters. You can get to the top if you’re prepared to build a network, take a few knocks and learn from your experience.

Who needs brains?

Fast forward a few decades.

It’s still true that academic excellence is not a good predictor of personal success in life. Being ‘clever’ is no longer regarded as a virtue. In fact, it’s sometimes regarded as a disability – it won’t make you successful, you know.

But what of the collective success?

The eggheads of yesteryear may not all have been personally successful. But how many of them contributed to the success of teams, of organisations, of research establishments, of pioneering start-up businesses, of Nations?

Behind most successful brands there are teams of people who embody the technical excellence of their employer. Every company has its powerhouse of intellectual property, market analysis, statistical modelling, technical advancement or ground-breaking innovation.

What would we do without them?

In the scramble to claim a share of personal success, I think many of today’s leaders have overlooked an important point. Organisations need intelligence. Successful businesses need people who are clever. Functional teams need people who can analyse information and work out causes or consequences.

The triumph of style over substance may work for an individual, but that doesn’t mean the world doesn’t need the substance.

Some years ago I had a coaching client who I regard as one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. In one of our sessions he told me how a Senior Executive had rocked his self-confidence by returning to him a report he’d written. My client explained that the Senior Executive had been aggressive in his criticism, “You’ve used words I don’t understand!”

My client was confused. He thought he was generally quite an effective communicator; he deliberately avoided technical jargon and unnecessarily complex detail.

The words the Senior Executive didn’t understand were not technical words.

Interesting? Thirty years ago if a Senior Executive didn’t understand certain words in a report, he’d have looked them up in a dictionary and kept quiet about it. Now, it seems, such an incident can be used against the writer of the report.

I guess that’s what they mean by ‘dumbing down’.

But this is what concerns me: Can we really afford to undermine the brains behind the business? Can organisations survive successfully without academic and technical know-how? Can we reasonably ignore the input of the merely ‘clever’ if we have the guidance of the ‘street-smart?’

Or could it be…

…that’s how we got into the current economic mess?

Don’t ask me. How would I know?  I was an academic success.

I think most people, if asked about leadership, would say it’s about relationship and communication because it’s all about getting other people engaged and having them do something. So it’s not surprising that good leaders usually have good communication skills. But there’s another aspect that I think is almost more important – it’s what makes the biggest difference between good leaders and really outstanding leaders…