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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

If you missed the news, the population just hit 6 billion.

That’s a lot of people. If we were all to lie down end-to-end on the ground, we would go around the earth about 2,600 times. If someone put us all in a swimming pool, packed tightly together like sardines or flying in coach-class, the pool would have to measure more than a quarter of a mile on each side.

Then there’s the Y3K problem: We’ll just about outweigh the earth itself by the year 3000. It’s enough to make you believe there are limits to growth.

Amazingly, with all these people to choose from, many IS hiring managers can’t find enough qualified applicants to fill their open positions.

We can’t solve everything at once, so today we’re going to focus on just one small part of the problem: the help desk.

For many of those running IS, the help desk is an afterthought. It isn’t strategic, executives don’t interact with it very much (and when they do they get special treatment), and it generates no measurable return on investment.

Let’s recalibrate. The level of trust and respect between IS and the rest of the business is pretty low these days. (I base this on a large volume of anecdotal evidence, not formal surveys; your mileage may vary.) Your help desk is, or at least should be, the most frequent point of contact between your organization and the employees whose trust and respect you need every time you implement new technology.

The first step in making sure your help desk increases that trust and respect is staffing it with people who can actually solve problems instead of simply dispatching a trouble ticket to a technician.

Except … Bob, you idiot! Haven’t you heard there’s an IT labor crunch? If we do find people like this, we have more important places to use them.

News flash: You don’t need computer science majors on the help desk. Chances are, they wouldn’t be able to figure out that the end-user has a notebook resting on one of the cursor keys anyway. Here’s who you do need on your help desk:

  • High school seniors: Sure, you’ll only get them for a few hours a day during the school year (more during the summer, of course). But who better to diagnose PC problems than someone who assembled a high-end gaming system from spare parts? You can pay a lot more than the local Taco Bell and still save a ton compared to those computer scientists you can’t find anyway.
  • College students: Yes, you’ll have to work around class schedules, and you’ll have to pay more than you would pay a high school student. Here’s the upside: You get highly qualified help desk analysts, still at low cost, and they’re all potential recruits when they graduate. After a year, you’ll know who you’re going to want to hire – offer them scholarships in exchange for two years as full-time employees when they leave college.
  • Internal PC mentors: These are the people employees call when they need help because they’ll solve the problem before your help desk would have finished writing up the trouble ticket. They’re already employees, they’ve already proven they can do the job, and many of them would love an opportunity to move into IS.
  • IS analysts: Rotate your analysts through stints on the help desk. Here’s what they’ll gain: humility (as they find out just how much they don’t know how to fix and how knowledgeable and sophisticated those dumb end-users really are); listening skills (because to fix problems they have to hear beyond the symptom to what’s really going on); a better understanding of how work gets done (they’ll see it first-hand); and, most important of all … they’ll learn what the rest of the company thinks of IS.

Staffing shortage? When it comes to the help desk, at least, we don’t suffer from a staffing shortage. All we suffer from is a lack of imagination.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Consultants collect team-building tools. There’s the “make a square out of these parts” exercise (solution — team members have to swap parts). There’s the penny exercise — everyone gets a penny (for their thoughts, of course) and has to relate a personal anecdote from the year the penny was coined (“1951 … I was conceived.”)

One year, I participated in “Match the secret to the team member,” so often that I didn’t need the Internet to eliminate my right to privacy — by the end of the year I’d even had to reveal that I’d played Glockenspiel in my high school marching band.

These are just ice-breakers. When you want to get hard-core about team building, nothing compares to personality profiling tools. Myers-Briggs, DISCO, Forte … you could choose one for each team member and have tools left over.

Don’t get me wrong — these things do have value. People tend to see the world through their own eyes. Lacking a degree in psychology I can only speculate as to why. My guess is that it’s because connecting someone else’s optic nerves to our own visual processing centers is too hard.

Unfortunately, content to use only our own eyes, we take the next illogical step and conclude that the way we think is the only valid one. That attitude leads to cliques, not to effective teams — when everyone thinks the same, whether two people or ten focus on a problem, the range of solutions they develop will be about the same.

Personality profiles help frame discussions of how different thought patterns complement each other in crafting optimal designs and solutions. With IS and Marketing interacting with increasing frequency, the importance of appreciating diversity of thought can’t be overstated.

Regrettably, that’s rarely where the conversation stops.

Instead, team members commonly use their personality profiles as a stereotyping tool. Having learned that there are just sixteen kinds of human being (or eight team roles, or four determinants of personality, or what-have-you), team members use each others profiles to build ad hominem arguments during disputes (“Well of course you think that — you’re a Perceiver!”) and excuses for themselves (“That’s not a natural act for me — I’m low-empathy.”)

The worst part of some of these tools is that they’re built on forced-choice selection of false dichotomies. Are you a driver or an analytical? Yes, I am … depending on what the circumstances require.

Okay, that’s the second-worst part. The worst part is that these tools should be opening people to new possibilities — new ways of thinking about things. They ought to be expanding horizons, and instead they have the exact opposite effect.

There’s another version of this “scientific stereotyping” that’s even more pernicious. You don’t have to look very far to find books and articles explaining how to manage Generation X’ers, the difference between male and female leadership styles, or how to motivate the vertically challenged (Hint: Don’t play Randy Newman over the intercom).

Let’s follow this logic: I have a 27-year-old team member. She works in my area, we work together on a regular basis, and I meet with her one-on-one every two weeks. To understand what motivates her … I know — I’ll read a book written by authors who have never met her!

Works for me.

Want to motivate a twenty-something employee? Want to understand a new female manager’s leadership style? Do you have an African-American on your team and you aren’t sure what he needs to succeed?

Here’s an advanced leadership technique, hitherto known only to Zen masters living at high altitude in remote regions, brought back to the United States by a courageous consultant since assassinated by the cult charged with protecting the secret:

Get to know your employees. Empathize with them. Ask them what’s important to them. Treat them as individuals.

I know it’s more complicated than administering a Myers-Briggs test and reading a book, but if you master these techniques you’ll be a far more effective leader.

But then, I have to think that way … I’m an INTP.

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