Soft Skills In the IT Environment – Part 1 of 2Written by Carole Nicolaides
by Carole Nicolaides, Copyright © 2002, All Rights Reserved www.progressiveleadership.comIn today's competitive environment, it is not enough to be best in your field intellectually. Competency is only half of what you need to climb ladder of success. Retail giant Sears uses a very appropriate slogan: “Come see softer side of Sears.” Just like Sears, you need to show softer side of you in order to be successful. What is softer side exactly? It’s that part of you that will be liked, admired, trusted and remembered. As an IT executive, you may find this philosophy new because you have been required to be strong and flawless for so long. However, new knowledge economy demands that leaders have both soft and tough personas. Do not get fooled. Soft skills training is not for “softies.” Exactly opposite is true. Soft skills are important no matter what business you are in. Most managers were initially trained to focus on competencies of an individual when in a business role. We look at their education, their accomplishments, and their career growth. However, people are people. Regardless of what vocation they have, each one of us is a human being first and foremost. Soft skills equip us to deal with person first, and business venue second. The results are simply amazing! I have had opportunity to spend of lot of time working with IT people and it was a real learning experience for me. One of things that I realized was that, due to their character and communication styles, many times IT folks would shoot themselves in foot once they received a promotion to management and had people under them. They would get overwhelmed, be unable to communicate well, to bond, or to motivate their people. Setting visions for their team seemed to fall completely to wayside.
| | Satisfying your Customers is as Simple as this...Written by David Brewster
Customer service is everywhere. It seems everyone we deal with now is a 'customer service representative'. Remember when they were bank tellers, flight attendants or just person behind enquiries desk? So why is experience of fantastic, 'blow-your-mind' service still so rare?My family recently had one of those rare experiences in a small family restaurant. The food was good value, but that's not what made it memorable. What really made this meal was combination of decent food with a bright, clean environment, friendly, attentive, knowledgable staff and timely service. Our feeling of being well looked after - of receiving fantastic service - was not delivered by one 'knock-out blow'. Rather it resulted from coming together of a whole range of small things, each delivered really well. And that is secret ingredient in fantastic customer service: GETTING THE DELIVERY RIGHT. No matter how good food on plate, if it had taken an hour to get to us we would not have enjoyed it. And our feeling about this restaurant would have been tarnished. All too often businesses forget this. Larger organisations in particular seem to think customer service is about having a customer charter. Or running a public relations campaign. Or telling us that "your call is important to us". Or giving their staff title of 'customer service assistant'. The reality is that, as consumers, we don't care what title is of person we are dealing with. We only want them to be courteous, to give us their full attention and to know what they are talking about (as they did at our restaurant). And we want product or service we are buying delivered with minimum fuss.
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