The Great I T Disconnect

It’s time to take the steps that can keep your company safe. One of the most important steps you can take is to learn how to communicate with your IT team.

Realize that of all the professional relationships that can make or break your business, your relationship with your IT support staff is one of the most critical. In fact, it’s just as critical as is your relationship with your CPA, your banker, and even your attorney. When your IT staff feels supported and acknowledged, and when they’re armed with the proper technology, they can single-handedly keep your company from losing data, losing work time, and losing customer confidence. Your IT staff can prevent you from being like my client on the East coast discussed in the previous chapter—the one who lost a third of a million dollars due to an IT security breach.

Many CEOs believe their IT staff is intimidated by them. In reality, it’s simply that the IT professionals don’t know how to sell an executive on what needs to get done. Think of the typical IT professional as the antithesis of your star salesperson. Your star salesperson knows the art of persuasion. He or she knows how to make something important and meaningful to the listener.

Conversely, your typical IT professional can’t always put into words why the new technology the company needs is important, even though it is very important. Rather than focus on the bottom line benefit the new technology will give the company, the IT professional drones on and on about all the cool features of the new technology. And what do you do as the CEO? Most likely, your eyes glaze over and your mind drifts to some other topic. Before long you’re staring at your IT professional and you see his or her mouth moving, but you’re not hearing a word.

While your IT professional is saying things like, “This tool will log people on the Internet,” “This device will automatically back up our server,” and “This gadget will encrypt our data,” all you’re thinking is, “Is this thing going to stop people from wasting time on the Internet?” “Will the tool protect us against sexual harassment lawsuits?” “Can this new technology help us outsmart our competition?” In other words, you don’t care what it does day-to-day; you simply want to know what it will help you achieve long-term, preferably in terms of dollars and cents or productivity metrics.

So what’s a CEO to do? Here are some suggestions to help you develop the relationship with your IT team and get them on the same page as you.

* The first and most obvious suggestion is to send your IT professionals to some communication training.

* Second, when you’re talking with your IT professional and she drones on about the features of a new item, ask her point blank, “What is the ultimate benefit of this technology for the company?” Get your IT professionals in the habit of thinking in this manner.

* Send your IT professionals to project management training of some kind. Often IT professionals have to manage multiple projects that are behind schedule and over budget, yet few have formal project management training.

* Provide your IT professionals with some authority, but not too much. If the IT professional needs to tell someone, “I will fix your printer in a little while because the network server is about to crash,” then the IT professional needs the authority to make that decision without being reprimanded later.

Knowing how much authority to give your IT professional all boils down to levels of trust:

* How much of your trust have they earned, or in other words, how much do you trust them? You have to feel comfortable giving them authority and they have to know you are “for real” when you tell them they have the authority to tell a user, “Not right now.”

* How trustworthy are they? This varies in different facets of technology depending on their training, experience, and ability to communicate openly.

* Hold the IT professionals responsible for their actions and provide measurements to them so that they can see how effective they are at their jobs. Some companies choose to measure down-time, help desk requests, or other values that are easy to track.

* When you hire your next IT professional, seriously consider the person’s people skills as well as technical aptitude. If the person’s technical skills are lacking, but she has aptitude to learn more, you can send her to training for technical skills. But if her people skills are lacking, she won’t change until she reaches a hurt level in her life that is so bad that she decides to change herself.

* Understand that many IT professionals have a personality of wanting to work with “things” rather than “people.” That may or may not fit the culture of your company and the job position they are filling. Just don’t try to force a round pin into a square hole.

* If you find that your staff reports that the IT professional is abrasive, and you want to stretch the IT professional into new areas of growth, try asking him how he “feels” about some specific issue you know is going on in your company. With some IT professionals, you may see a blank glazed over look. “Feel? What’s that?” they may think. If and when your IT professional discovers his own feelings, the next step is to ask him, “How do you suppose Suzie might feel when you tell her ____?” Frankly, this task of helping recover an abrasive IT professional is generally not worth the effort, but if you have some kind of co-dependent rescuer fantasy you want to act upon, be my guest. Somebody needs to help these lost people identify their plight. I’ve had IT professionals look me in the eye and say, “This boss is as bad as all the other five bosses I’ve had over the past two years.” They don’t “get it” that they, the IT professionals, are the common denominator in those multiple lost jobs. If the IT professional resorts to making threats and ultimatums, show him the door. You cannot afford to have someone who “holds the keys to your company” the way an IT professional does making threats.

* When you want to show appreciation to an IT professional, be sure to find out what she really likes. It may be that having a second monitor on her desk would mean more than a $1,000 bonus. Or maybe she wants to upgrade her computer twice a year. The key is to ask and find out.

* Tell your IT staff not to try to impress you with big words and acronyms. Explain that patient explanations that focus on the bottom line result is what will impress you.

* Some IT professionals suffer since they are forced to wear so many hats. To perform good IT work, IT professionals need uninterrupted periods during the day to focus. Having three hours a day of uninterrupted time, even if split into three one hour periods, would seem like nirvana to some IT professionals.

* The CEO, and the organization, owns the assets – NOT the IT professional. You ultimately make the decisions based on input from several areas including your IT professional.

Remember, as the CEO, it’s your job to initiate open dialogue with everyone on your team, including your IT team. If you don’t, you’ll end up in a situation where your IT professionals will believe they can’t come to you with issues that affect the company. They’ll think, “I can’t bring this up to the CEO. Sure, we need to fix the anti-virus problem, but he’s not going to approve the $19 per machine cost to upgrade.” Then you’ll never know where your company’s weaknesses are until it’s too late.

I have led three-hour presentation about what the IT professionals wish the executives knew, and what the executives wish the IT professionals knew. It’s a real eye-opener for both IT professionals and the executives they work with. I also lead a workshop for IT professionals that shows them project management skills as well as many other skills.

Author and business leader Jack Welch brings up an interesting point. He talks about a “twisted chain of command.” As he explains, “Far too often, crucial departments like IT and HR report to finance instead of the CEO.” He gives an example of a company where an employee reveals, “I work for a company where the information technology department reports to the head of finance. He [the head of finance] never has time to evaluate IT projects, so IT gets attention only when there’s a burning issue.”

I’ve seen this same issue happen time and time again.

One that comes to mind immediately is a company on the West Coast that’s now out of business. Their IT professional was going to CFO every month and explaining, “Our backup is not working. We have no backup. Do you understand that we have no backup? We need this $1,600 part to fix our backup.” This particular Controller knew a little bit about technology. Now we’ve all learned that a little bit of knowledge can be dangerous. So the Controller replied, “I know we have a RAID array. That’s enough for us right now. We won’t approve the cost for the part.” A RAID array means you have an extra drive in your server, so that if one drive fails, the data is, usually, still available. To that the IT guy kept saying, “No, a RAID array is not enough for us right now.” And the Controller kept replying, “Yes it is. Now go away.” Eventually the IT professional gave up.

Well, as you may have already suspected, they lost not one, but two drives one day, and the RAID array failed. As a result, the company went under. That was the only time I remember actually crying at a job site. I walked in and saw all those architects and their long faces. I started thinking about their families who were losing one of, if not the only, major income provider for the family. It was a very sad time, especially for something so ridiculous and that a $1,600 part would have fixed.

That’s why you need to make sure you have a good dialogue with your IT professionals. And if your IT department does have to report to finance for some reason, make sure that finance does not ignore them. Arm finance with the same communication tools you give your IT professionals. Get the relationship between the two departments established. Make sure everyone is listening to each other so you can avoid potential disaster.

Action Item: If your IT professional is willing, send him or her to school to learn more about keeping your network secure. Companies learned a long time ago how important it is to educate their teams. IT is becoming so complicated that it is more like the medical field. Nobody would expect an eye surgeon to be an expert cardiologist as well. Allow your IT professional to outsource when necessary.