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Shut Mouth, Open Ears
While cross-training can be key to overhauling an IT organization, that step comes later in the process. The first step is much simpler: listening.
Tony Habash, director of IT strategy and planning for the senior citizen advocacy group AARP, recommends lots of it. "Just talk to the people in a very inviting fashion. Just listen, and listen carefully, for the first 90 days. Get a real sense for what the people are telling you," he says. If they complain about something, "Don't defend it. Don't try to justify anything. Just listen. Just absorb it. I think you'll be amazed at how much people will open up."
Habash took that tack seven years ago when he started his job at AARP. After his queries yielded plenty of complaints about the lack of integration between departments within IT, he began a campaign to increase communication.
He started by pulling everyone, from programmers to strategists, into a room and posing the same question to each group. "Tell me what you need from the rest of the units to be successful," he said, "and what do you think they need from you to be successful?"
By the end of the half-day session, "it was clear where the gaps were," Habash recalls. The session didn't instantly solve all of the IT department's internal communication problems, but it laid the foundation for better collaboration going forward.
Habash says it was key that the staff used the exercise to figure out its own problems. Improved communication and collaboration don't "happen by dictating. You have to have deep engagement" to get the staff to buy in, he says.
These days, in addition to one-on-one meetings with IT staff and with department heads, Habash fosters communication by walking around the department every morning, chatting up whoever is around to see what's on their mind. "I've found, to this day, that this is the most important avenue for getting close to the pulse" of the staff, he says.
Stack is also a fan of motivating staff through informal meetings. Sometimes as often as three times a week he takes a handful of randomly chosen staff members to lunch or invites them to his office to chat. In addition to hearing their concerns, the conversations are also a kind of litmus test. By talking to junior staff members, "I can gauge how well my organization is communicating down," he says.
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