The central role of behavioral skills in the IT function

With the advent of new information technologies, new organizational cultures and new digital users, organizations need to totally rethink the IT function. In fact, today like never before, IT teams are asked to be proactive and collaborative in defending their expertise (even when breaking innovative ground) and in building trust with all the counterparties they work with.

Just think of cloud computing in all its facets, or the vast range of uses for AI: both demand a new relationship between IT specialists inside and outside of the company, and often remind us of the spectrum of jobs in IT operations and the automation of business processes. By the same token, “mono-bi-tri-modal” models for the IT function have spawned no small number of problems, both inside IT teams and in relationships with customers and suppliers.

So now the IT function is being asked to step up the effort in relationship management. In this context, like never before, paramount are behavioral skills, which include a set of transversal abilities (problem solving, relationship management, stress management, conflict management, etc.). Such skills help people become keenly aware of their behavior, their reactions and their attitudes when interacting with internal business customers, suppliers, and collaborators. And all this proves to be essential in generating results and guaranteeing successful IT projects or services, productive meetings with the project team, a better internal organizational climate, and superior performance in general.

To find out which IT behavioral skills organizations prioritize, recently SDA Bocconi School of Management launched an online study submitted to a population of IT managers. The study sample counted 201 managers with different seniority working in different industries (the majority in manufacturing), ranging in age from 46 to 55. Respondents were asked to complete a questionnaire describing typical IT situations; when faced with specific problems, they could choose between two pairs of possible behaviors and reactions. The answers were then linked to a set of behavioral skills which respondents ranked in order of importance, indicating which ones were indispensable.

From an analysis of our results, what emerges is that the skills in highest demand have to do with: communication management and the interaction of IT with all the typical stakeholders; problem solving and conflict management inside and outside the IT function, promoting organizational change as well as personal development and motivation of IT personnel.

More in detail, certain key behaviors and attitudes surfaced in our survey that would enable IT to deal with internal and external relationship management.

• There is a problem of trust in suppliers (exacerbated today by remote data management and cloud computing); despite this IT managers still have a positive attitude toward suppliers.
• IT managers prefer informal contact with all the people they deal with, and communicating face-to-face rather than via technological devices.
• In difficult situations when conflicts arise, the overriding attitude is to onboard internal customers and smooth over disagreements.
• There is a strong tendency to identity key business partners and keep collegiality in customer relationships to a minimum.
• Escalation to higher levels of responsibility (of customers or suppliers) is rare, and “welcoming” and “exploring” behaviors are more common.
• IT managers are less tolerant when it comes to unorthodox behaviors among some IT collaborators; instead they try to maintain a standard of behavior and shared goals, and to encourage team building.
• There is a positive, pragmatic, and prudent attitude toward digital innovation and whomever its champion may be (in certain business units or outside of the company).
• In general there is a moderate orientation toward listening, a skill that many say is “improvable.”

Some of these orientations today are drastically impacted by the pandemic we’ve been dealing with for over a year now. And we are seeing striking ripple effects from the forced proliferation of the methods for remote interaction. One effect we immediately notice that managers are far less effective in handling critical situations that call for sensitivity to emotional aspects of the interaction and greater equilibrium in a search for shared solutions. Having fewer non-verbal clues inevitably affects the quality of interactions and specifically the behavioral flexibility that we adopt when we perceive ourselves to be in or out of synch with the people we’re talking to.

In any case, interesting to note is that when situations are not complex from a relational standpoint, the ‘relational distance’ enhances the content quality of communication, and facilitates more clear, succinct exchanges. In other words, as long as interactions don’t reach high levels of managerial complexity, physical distancing between communicators has triggered interesting and effective communication paths.

Research and onsite observation show that there is a difference in results when IT managers adopt positive behaviors and attitudes in typical interactions that occur in relations with internal customers, suppliers, or among IT colleagues. And this is even more pronounced in this somewhat chaotic stage of relaunching digitalization. The positive outcome of these relationships depends not only on how well IT processes are structured, or how many IT management tools are available. A major factor is the ability of IT managers and professionals to listen, and to manage dialogue, conflict, and unexpected reactions from the people they normally engage with.

The forced distancing between colleagues, managers and collaborators due to the pandemic, like the ‘emergency mode’ management of projects through smart or remote working, make investments in IT behavioral skills more critical than ever before. These skills are increasingly essential to:

• achieve greater self-awareness of behaviors in typical IT situations, both ordinary and extraordinary;
• embark on a path of personal development.

Before implementing any initiative aiming to hone these skills, companies absolutely must do an internal assessment of behavioral orientations of IT personnel. The results of this assessment should then serve as indispensable input for training programs that simulate typical situations that IT managers find themselves facing on a daily basis.