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SeminarFebruary 24, 2009Association for Information Technology ProfessionalsMelville MarriottSince Information Technology has shifted to a vertical professionand is permeating all levels of the organization, what extra skills do weneed to bring to business? That was the question we dealt with thismorning. And the answer was to enrich our technical expertise withskillful human interaction. We’ve already established what psychologycalls “legitimate authority” in the field based on our skills, knowledgeand understanding. As we move to broader positions in thecorporation, there is a pressure to extend our authority to the world of relationships.Could we do that? Could we compete with people who havespent their professional careers developing people skills? The answerwas a resounding “Yes!” There is a “way in” that is particularlyappealing 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 coulddemonstrate a set of empirically-grounded skills to establish ourselvesas influencers and leaders with “legitimate authority,” and we focusedon one of those skills today: Modeling

Modeling is performing in a way that induces similarbehavior in others.

We saw how eye contact, smiling, using names, and reaching outwith a handshake moved relationships along in a successful manner.But this conversation was extended to the bigger arena of businessproductivity. If we want to see people work together in teams,concentrate on big problems, create a human flow of work thatexpedite all the company’s processes, how could we model that? The participants were quick to recognize that with our eye onthat goal, we demonstrate the behaviors to colleagues that would getthe company moving. Modeling was described as a behavior that isobservable, teachable and transparently expressed. Everybody “getsit” on one level or another, and it’s “catching.” Examples wereprovided by the audience of ways to model “flow-of-work” behaviors tomake the company successful and competitive. Some examples:1.In order to get help moving up the organization, help peoplemove up the organization.2.In order to get positive responses to your ideas, requests andinstructions give positive responses to ideas, requests andinstructions.3.In order to get respect, give respect.

4.In order to teach people to depend on you, demonstrate how youare able to depend on someone yourself. The beauty of modeling is that it leads to imitative learning, and asthe person does what you are doing, he comes to internalize thatbehavior. He is not only internalizing the behavior but internalizingyou, 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, “Whatwould Jack do?” And there it was, a way into the emotional world. Wecould affect others around us profoundly just by the way we carriedourselves.We found that modeling had a shortcoming. If teams are workingwith a quick turnaround time and the pressure is on, this sort of incremental relationship-building seemed ill-suited. That’s why we hada number of other skills to tap, and perhaps we’ll get into them at ournext seminar in May. There was also a worry that people could beinsincere, smile when they really didn’t want to, for example. Oneanswer to that was that if smiling is a skill that we need to learn, thenpractice makes perfect, and we need to do it even if we don’t feel itright away. After a while, the feelings would catch up. Still, the otherperson might not enjoy us while we’re moving along our learningcurve. There was something important to do in this case, and thatbrought us to the final theme of the seminar: