For most IT staffers the idea of giving a presentation or explaining the business case for purchasing new servers or a suite of software is probably as alien as writing code would be to the head of HR.
Yet if your staff, or most of them anyway, had these communication skills or even skills that simply helped them deal better with each other and the rest of the company, IT and the company as a whole would better off, contend the experts.
"I think that technology is entering more and more into overall business as a key driver to revenue growth ... ," said Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director of Robert Half Technology (RHT). "So for those folks that have an IT background to be able to communicate with non-technical professionals is becoming more and more important."
This is because so much of business today passes through IT before it reaches the bottom line. If your IT staff have the ability to understand why a certain GUI needs to be written a certain way to enable the sales team to better interact with the company's legacy CRM system, for example, then the sales people are going to be happier and more productive and the IT staff is going to be less stressed and therefore happier because the sales people are less stressed and so on.
But, the way things are today, according to RHT, is just over half (53%) of all IT departments offer non-technical training -- email etiquette, presentation skills, listening skills, business writing, etc. -- to their staffs. The good news here is at least more than half of those surveyed do understand the need for IT staff to be able to talk to their peers outside of IT in non-technical ways. The bad news is just about half do not (unless, of course, you are in the half that do then your company will have an advantage over the half that doesn't ... or so goes the logic).
And its not just the "happiness factor" that is fostered by better communication between IT and the rest of the company. Projects tend to meet end-user's expectations when IT knows how to talk to the business units they are serving. The ever-elusive goal of IT/business alignment will be easier to achieve and it might even be easier to get more money for IT projects, personnel and equipment if end-users are not continually complaining about the department, said Al Borowski, a professional speaker, author and communications coach.
"The reason this is important is that, particularly for IT people, in order for the company to be successful the IT people have to find out from the end users what they want how they want it and when they want it," he said. "And, if they're on one plain and the users are on another plain it's going to mean a lot of wasted time and frustration and maybe embarrassment and it could be extremely costly."
Ted Demopoulos, founder of the communications coaching firm Demopoulos Associates, has worked both sides of the fence experiencing poor soft skills as a programmer and a user. That is why he founded a company that strives to bridge the gap between the two.
"They'll talk but they won't communicate," he said. "There's not any alignment between the business needs and what the people in technology are doing."
As a programmer some years ago Demopoulos and his colleagues used to enter and leave the building through a separate door and even eat in a different part of the building from the people they were supposed to be serving. This led to a detached and somewhat ambivalent relationship between IT and the rest of the company. Which, in turn, led to IT not meeting the needs of its constituents as well as it could have, he said.
To overcome this, Demopoulos suggests blending IT and the rest of the company as much as possible. Even having everyone enter and leave through the same door is a start.
"Typically it has to be more in terms of a training program or a re-education program when it comes to soft skills, where you not only want to teach IT people things about soft skills, like 'smile when you are going to inconvenience somebody', but also to some how add follow on interaction with the people their going to be dealing with," he said.
Some may cite cost and time away from important projects as a reason for not offering this kind of training. But not providing IT folks with the kind of skills that enable them to better understand the business as a whole and the constituencies they serve, in the end, may end up costing you more in time and money because, overall, your department will be less productive and spend more time fixing what could have been done right in the first place.
As IT becomes less about bites and bytes, improved communication skills for staffers are becoming essential.
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