Happy Valentine’s Day from Leading Geeks
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Read MoreWant to own the future? Build rich relationships
For more than 20 years, I’ve been hearing complaints, concerns and panicked hysteria about the end of the IT career as we know it. Just below the surface, we all seem to think that we’re about to get the ax. And that’s because we persistently misunderstand what our business partners want most from us. We think they just need the best technician, but they don’t. What they need most, now and in the future, are technical people who can communicate and collaborate with nontechnical people. Regardless of their specialty, individuals who can work across the cultural divide...
Read More‘Nothing but the facts’ approach just won’t work with business people
I’ve been talking lately about how IT and business people have trouble communicating. It goes beyond speaking different languages. The two groups really think differently. If you believe I’m overstating my case, then try this experiment. The next time you give a presentation to business people, do a follow-up a day or two later. You will likely find that nearly everyone in your audience completely missed your point. The reason we often bomb when it comes to presenting to business people is that we misunderstand how they tend to process presentations and information. We make the...
Read MoreTalking to the business: our problems, their visions
The first meeting for a project is a tense affair. There can be a lot of new things coming at you all at once. New co-workers. New technology. New processes. And, perhaps most problematic, new business partners. These meetings tend to follow predictable patterns. You, the technical person, want to stick to a process, gathering basic requirements that can be put into a document. So you ask some questions about what’s going on with the business and what problems need to be solved. The business person talks rather vaguely about what she wants to accomplish. She seems excited about...
Read MoreWhen techies speak, the devil’s in the details
Every IT professional has been here: A business person asks you a question, and your thorough answer just isn’t good enough. You try to give more specific information in an attempt to break through the communication barrier. But the more you try, the worse things seem to get. In the end, the business person is seething with impatience, so you start to get confused and angry. Both parties walk away from such encounters convinced that it’s hopeless to communicate with “those types” of people. They both say of the other, “They don’t get it.” And as a...
Read MoreBuilding a cabin in the field of dreams
Here’s a story from our friend Kyle Shannon, former Creative Director and Founder of Agency.com. It aptly illustrates his experience of the gap between geeks and non-geeks. It’s a fable, and even has a moral. Once upon a time there was an open field of wildflowers with a stream running through it and birds and insects and deer bounding around. And it was decreed that in this field Geeks and Non-geeks would live together. Soon, the Non-geeks are running around catching butterflies and splashing in the water. And the Geeks are rolling their eyes. They realize that...
Read MoreWhen objectivity is a trap
While the advantages of objectivity are well known and irrefutable, it’s important to consider that intuition has an important role to play at work, and respect for intuition is very important if you want to build relationships with non-mechanical people. In fact, an absolute adherence to objectivity can hurt your effectiveness in the workplace. For those of us who love things to be objectively verifiable, sometimes we need to be reminded that things aren’t black and white. If objectivity is good, it doesn’t make intuition bad. Nor does it make objectivity always good. This post...
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