Confidence
The IT industry tends to reward confidence, especially in leadership and consulting roles. People in those roles have to demonstrate conviction in their words and leadership style. It is because the C level audience wants the right solution to their problem. They need someone to tell them what to do.
The Experts
At the other end of the spectrum is the nerd, the technical expert. A person who has studied a technology and knows it inside and out. He can immediately tell you why you are wrong and why he is right. After all, he is the expert on the topic.
Always Being Right
The trouble with both of these personalities is they always have to be right. Always being right is wrong in many ways. First, it makes you blind to other alternatives. It reduces innovation because you fail to see the other possibilities. Second, it excludes many people from the conversation, and there is less collaboration. Thinking and collaboration are replaced by presentation and confidence. Or worse, a form of machoism that starts to exclude or belittle people. And third, it often hides the truth because the truth can be ugly. Or more mildly, it hides uncertainty. The IT world is full of uncertainty, especially with how long it takes to implement something.
Corporate Audience Likes Confidence
With the leader/consultant types, the corporate audience is looking for advice, and they respond better to people who have confidence in what they are saying, even if it is wrong. What you find in this situation is that when an audience member starts to voice some concern or disagreement in the approach, the other members of the audience often jump in to defend the direction or downplay the concerns. This is because they are sold on the approach or recommendation and see it as a way out. Our savior is here, telling us the right way out, and we should follow it. It is further reinforced by the confidence of the person delivering the message. How could he be wrong? After all, that person has facts, statistics, and slides. And most importantly confidence.
You see very few truly technical people at the leadership level in many corporations. They are typically from ‘the business’ or are project managers who climbed their way up the ladder by leading projects. They tend to have lost any technical knowledge years ago because they are mainly managing people. So now they have a technical problem to solve, and they need advice on how to solve that problem. So along comes Gartner or some other C level consultant, telling them what they should do. Lack of confidence in the delivery of the solution is like death. So the solution is delivered as the ‘right solution’, and the audience receives the solution with full acceptance. You would be on the wrong side to contradict the presentation. Everyone is happy. They don’t know it could be the wrong solution. Or don’t want to know.
Experts Drown You With Knowledge
With the nerd, their expertise can also lead you down the wrong path. Or worse, they drown out their adversaries with technical expertise. “Windows .Net sucks, Spring Boot is great”, says the Spring expert. How can you argue with a person with great expertise? Nothing is worse than a person with technical expertise and one solution.
Conferences Presenting Solutions
I have been to many technical conferences. The vendor conferences have presentations for both executives and the techies. Executives get wined and dined while the techies get food served on warming trays. Executives get special treatment. And solutions. Techies get bacon and code, and they are happy. What is prevalent at these conferences are the ‘right solutions’. Rooms and rooms full of solutions. After all, the vendors are always right. That is why you are here. To be awed.
Solutions
If you have been in the IT industry long enough, you learn there is no one right solution. There are many solutions. Old solutions fade away and disappear, only to be replace with newer solutions. Or at least they look new. Kind of like fashion. Pants is pants. Computer science is computer science. Very little is new in this world. It just cycles and emerges in a slightly different form. To the uniformed, it looks like a new solution. The right solution.
Can’t Say I Don’t Know
For some reason in the IT world, we just can’t say “I don’t know”. But most of the time, we don’t know and we hide it from the business. Why are projects always late and over budget? Because we are figuring things out, establishing a framework, creating a team, creating an approach, etc. The business does not want to pay for any of that. Technical people should know what they are doing, right? It is like building a house. You should know how to build a house, right? Because we can’t say we are figuring things out which would show weakness or uncertainty, we fudge the numbers and present them with confidence. In this situation, you have to be right and confident, or you will get slaughtered.
Women and IT
Why are there low numbers of women in IT? Could it be because we reward people who are always right? Confidence over understanding, collaboration, and the truth. Men with confidence presenting a solution tend to stomp all over complete understanding and the truth.
Sometimes it is almost like a fight. We want to win the argument, almost to be point of being rude or very forceful.
The expert nerds rule the technical world. They know the technology but are often ill equipped in their communication of that expertise. So they run run in packs. Technology wolf packs. They favor expertise over collaboration and communications.
So What Can We Do?
At the C level, ask questions. Have you ever done this before? How long does it take to implement the first release vs the third release? What are the alternatives? Tell me about your failures.
At the technical expert level, we need to learn to communicate more effectively. Reward those who can explain technologies and their alternatives. Be inclusive. Don’t retreat into your technology caves.
What are your thoughts?
