By: Herbert W. Lovelace

indy had made another one of her fantastic Friday night dinners. It has become a ritual for us that Friday night meals, when we are not going out, are eaten somewhat later than normal and consist of a gourmet's delight. I look forward to these quiet times together since, in addition to being uncommonly attractive (she claims I am biased), Cindy's a great cook. The only problem was t hat even though the food was superb and the Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay was really good, I was preoccupied-and Cindy wanted to know why.

I finally explained that not only was the week at work as tough as always, but I had been checking my InformationWeek E-mail and was depressed by what I had been reading. I had gotten more than a few letters about Fred, the fellow I didn't promote (IW, March 10, p. 128). Cindy, who's not a big fan of my writing the column-she claims I should take what little spare time I have and relax-sighed and asked what people were saying that was upsetting me.

I told her that it wasn't that some of them were disagreeing with how I handled the situation; I didn't have a problem with that. I have confidence in my judgment and, besides, more people than not thought I had done the right thing.

What was troubling me was that so many of them felt communication skills weren't as important as technical skills; they saw no reason why, since Fred was a great technician, he couldn't lea rn in short order everything he needed to work with people.

I had received quite a few angry letters, I continued, from people telling me that the reason managers were big on communication was because they were poor technicians and could not understand that the Freds of the world keep everything together. The worst ones were the letters saying that even if getting along with others was that important, which they doubted, a guy like Fred could pick it up as quick as a wink.

I told her I was spending a lot of time thinking about their comments and I had decided to devote two of my Web-site "Ask The Secret CIO" columns to the subject. (You can read some of the letters I received and my answers to the people who wrote them at www.informationweek.com).

We talked about it for a while-and part of the way through the main course, she made an interesting observation. She said I was dealing with a very common dilemma: The less people understand about what's involved in doing something, the easier they think it is to accomplish.

Further, she pointed out, too many people have the habit of not assigning much value to those things at which they themselves are not good. The line of reasoning is: If I can't do it well, it must be worth very little. I thought about what she had said and realized that it fit.

Most of those users who noticeably refuse to give any credit to our IS people have no idea how complicated the tasks they do are. Not only that-as shown by their reluctance to include analysts in strategy meetings at the beginning of a project-users don't see much value in skills that they have not mastered themselves. The same goes for highly technical people faced with the notion that good interpersonal skills are unimportant and no more difficult to learn than falling off of a log.

All in all, it was an interesting dinner. It's not often that I get fed sumptuously and learn something at the same time. As we headed into the weekend, I had more than 48 hours left before I had to face any more heavy-du ty problems, and I intended to make the most of the time.

Herbert W. Lovelace is CIO at a multibillion-dollar international company. Herb practices his day job under an alias and has changed the names of colleagues to protect the guilty. Send him E-mail at secret@cmp.com . He'll provide real answers-and whimsical comments-to your questions on InformationWeek Online at techweb.cmp.com/iw/current/secret.htm .

Back to Columnists

Send Us Your Feedback

Top of the Page