I heard the saying "Your attitude determines your altitude" for the first time last week (I obviously live a very sheltered life).
It seemed very apt on both a personal and professional level. And, as with any clever saying, I like to find its origin — upon which the every-trusty Google gave me an even better quote:
"Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude" ~ Zig Ziglar
And a week later, it's still with me as think about what needs to change within IT.
So hence this blog. It's a little bit random, and a little bit wooly, but please try to stick with it until the questions as the end.
Building the modern corporate IT organization
We've probably all read about, or sat through presentations on, the need for internal IT organizations, for IT roles, and for employees to evolve or change. That:
- With Gartner's Nexus of Forces and Forrester's Age of the Customer in particular, new IT and non-IT skills will be required (such as service management, financial management, negotiating, business relationship management, etc.).
- New people will be required to fulfill new or change roles.
- We need to move away from being IT-infrastructure-centric (or merely administrators of the IT infrastructure) to focus on services and service delivery, and to help business colleagues deliver innovation.
But is this enough? Are we looking at just a single dimension of what's needed from the people employed within the internal IT organization? Could they possibly be "the right people" based on aptitude but miss the mark in terms of attitude?
IMO it's easy to get lost in the constant talk of "the business perspective"
I've written before, sadly often repeating myself, about the fact that:
- The IT organization should focus less on the IT itself and more on how the IT makes a difference to business operations.
- It's what IT helps to achieve, at a business level, rather than what it does, at an IT level, that's really important.
- IT continues to measure its success at the wrong point — that's at the point of IT creation rather than at the point of IT service consumption.
- IT employees need to look beyond the tin and cables to see the people (and processes) that are either helped or hindered by IT and what they do (and achieve).
And through other, similar, lenses such that IT strategy, operations, and performance is consistently viewed from a business rather than technology perspective.
But I feel as though we could be rowing with just one arm. Is this continued external focus a little like baking a cake where you're meeting the consumer's requirement for a cake, you're using a recipe that's known to work, and you have the right quantities of all the required ingredients. But, and it's a big but, you have failed to ensure that you have ingredients of the right quality. The cake should meet the consumer's requirements, but sadly it doesn't.
It's probably a bad analogy but hopefully you get my point.
Hiring for aptitude — the bane of mediocre IT organizations?
So how often do we focus on aptitude, and neglect the attitude, of staff? That's favoring "the natural ability to do something" over "the way a person views something or tends to behave towards it, often in an evaluative way."
And, going off tangentially somewhat, how often is "a good attitude to work" seen as the commitment to work long hours and being a team player (you could cynically read: "just going along with the person at the top of the organizational tree for an easier life")? Does this engender a professional meeting attender and random email generator — and surely these are things that can slow down or impede an organizational unit, IT or otherwise? But people have to fill their long days doing something.
So do IT organizations see working long days as a primary success metric for its human assets? BTW I used the phrase "human assets" deliberately here, so please don't take offense. Instead, ask yourself this: "Would I use a laptop that had a massive 24 hour battery-life if things took six times as long to achieve while using it?" Probably not — hopefully you would opt for a shorter battery-life and accomplish what you need to achieve in a sixth of the time. So why are we wanting a longer human "battery life"? It's not really a way to get value for money from people as my Scandinavian friends could testify too.
So back to attitude then …
For me attitude is about wanting to make, and then making, a difference — that's doing the things that actually make a difference rather than doing as much as possible (or sitting at a desk for as long as possible). It's the proverbial "quality over quantity." However, some cultures seem to drive employees to arriving to work early and leaving late.
It reminds me of the common service desk metric that drives service desk agents to deal with the easy incidents first, to maintain a high incidents-per-hour rate, rather than first dealing with the incidents that would make a bigger difference to business operations (once resolved). Oh how I imagine those service desk agents are revered as their company rewards quantity over quality (and misses the bigger picture).
I'm also reminded of a story (although I'm unsure how true it is) I heard twenty-odd years ago — where UK radio/TV presenter Chris Evans' company required every member of staff to contribute a new idea each week. So working long hours, attending meetings, and emailing until their fingers bled was not enough. He wanted to raise people above meetings (where "minutes are saved and hours are lost") and administrative tasks, to ensure that they actively contributed to the success of the company.
I did warm you that this is an odd blog …
There's a point in here somewhere, about attitude versus attendance and aptitude.
I wanted to get you to the point of being able to consider:
- Is your company hiring solely on aptitude or are you looking for attitude too? Are people driven by, and measured, based on the things that they do or the difference they make?
- How is the attitude of your team? And how do you promote the right attitude?
- If your team thinks that working long hours (plus not taking vacation time) is how to be the best that they can be?
- Does your organization systematically squeeze the (good) attitude out of employees through bureaucracy and micromanagement?
And finally, in trying to get the most from staff, possibly hired because of aptitude rather than attitude, are you doing your company a disservice? In my experience, tired employees are less creative and work slower than those that work reasonable hours — it's a false economy. And the attitude of blocked and micromanaged employees … well that's food for a different blog.
I really ought to find some proper stats on this now.
Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/not_really_art/
