Soft Skills & Bad Apples at SNW

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Storage Networking World (SNW) -- If you want a successful IT management career, you should sharpen your skills and get rid of the bad apples on your team. This was the warning from career development experts at the SNW trade show here today.

"I know a lot of people that think that [developing business and communication skills] is a bunch of crap, and that's baloney," warned Howard Goldstein, principal of analyst firm HGAI, during a career development presentation this morning. "Spending the same amount of time on a soft skill [as a technical skill] can give you an exponential benefit."

These sentiments were echoed by another speaker, Patty Then, principal product manager for storage recovery management at CA Inc. (NYSE: CA). "The communication side tends to be the glue to making things successful," she told Byte & Switch. Projects often fail for simple reasons, she said, such as forgetting to plan for future storage needs.

"In today's business world you have to have soft skills if you want to succeed and retain your employees," agreed Douglas Overfelt, who manages the launch processing system at the Kennedy Space Center. "There's a lot more jobs than individuals, especially in this market."

The exec told Byte and Switch that he makes a real effort to understand his 35-strong staff of ITers. "You can't just look at the work they are doing, you have to look at them as individuals," he explained. This can be particularly important when dealing with younger IT professionals, he said."With the younger generation, there's a lot of things that they appreciate more than finances," said Overfelt, such as having the opportunity to work individually on challenging projects.

But IT managers should also start weeding out team members with bad attitudes if they want to succeed in their own careers, according to Goldstein. "Dont ignore attitudes. Rotten attitudes ruin a team," he explained. IT managers, he says, should be on the lookout for petty jealousies, inability to forgive wrongdoing, and what he characterizes as a "critical" or negative spirit.

"Great talent but rotten attitude equals a bad team -- look at the Yankees," quipped the Red Sox fan, prompting laughter from the audience.

Other SNW attendees admitted that bad apples are a major problem within their own data centers. "There's always that ten percent of people," said an IT manager from a Midwestern research lab, who asked not to be named.

These people, if left alone, could eventually wreck their manager's career, according to the exec. "When you have a bad apple, you have to remove that person from the situation -- that means that the team will have more respect for you as a leader," he explained.During his presentation, Goldstein also urged IT managers to think about the political dynamics within their data centers and be aware of potential threats to their position. "All of us know that the official leader may or may not be the leader," he said.

But the analyst also challenged conventional thinking concerning the role of the individual within the team. "There is no 'I' in 'team' but there ought to be," he said. "There is far too much emphasis on team performance without the accomplishments of individual performers... We have too much emphasis, for example, in the school system, on group grading, without the teacher taking the time to find out who contributed to the grade."

— James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch