Are IT people different?

Do you think your IT people are different?

How about other managers of your company, or the CFO, or the CEO? Do they think IT people are different?

You bet they do. I can tell you what you will hear if you ask the other non-IT managers of your company this question, , , it will be, “Absolutely, IT people are very different !!”

Do you know what makes IT people “tick”?

View the online segment out of my IT Manager Institute Self Study below to learn about IT employee work behavior tendencies.

It will be a real EYE OPENER

Information technology attracts a certain type of personality, and that’s a good thing. However, a challenge surfaces rather quickly when we try to transition from technical expert to manager. What they teach us to be excellent technicians doesn’t really prepare us to manage.

If you are to manage an IT organization well, it’s imperative that you learn something about the make-up, , , or personality, , , or better put, the work behavior tendencies of IT people, , , what makes them “tick”.

Are you aware that over 70% in IT have similar work behavior tendencies?

Would you be shocked to learn that 90% of us in IT actually have similar work behavior in 3 of 4 very measurable traits?

It doesn’t matter what your role in IT is, , , programmer, systems administrator, , , project manager, Help Desk, , , desktop support technician, database administrator, , , even IT manager or CIO. If you are in the IT organization, the odds are extremely high that you will operate (or approach your work) in very predictable ways.

If you had told me this in 1990 when I first got exposed to tools that measure a person’s behavior tendencies, I would have laughed at you. However, seeing is believing; I’ve seen too many things that reinforce the accuracy of these tools.

To some extent, our work behavior tendencies are very good and help us achieve success, , , especially when we have technical roles. In reality, there is nothing right or wrong with a person’s personality traits, , , it just means that’s how we are wired.

The challenge comes when we try to do things that do not come natural for us, , , our internal tendencies can actually work against us in many ways. Therefore, it is imperative that we have some level of understanding of these dynamics as it will help us overcome many of our challenges.

It also helps us understand what’s going on with our staff.

In my IT Manager Institute (both the classroom version and the IT Manager Institute Self Study), I spend the first part of the program to explain all of this so students can appreciate why some things work so well for us and some things are so difficult as we discuss the management processes throughout the rest of the program.

Rather than write an article about it, let me treat you to a segment from the first session of the IT Manager Institute Self Study. This section is about IT employee work behavior.