New Digital Strategies Depend On It's Soft Skills

Moreover, innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it depends on effective social skills, communication, and the interaction of diverse perspectives.

Growing higher education acumen and technical expertise will be important, but developing the personal skills that make such knowledge useful, both in organizations and society, will be even more important. The era of “don’t let the programmers talk to the customer” must give way to a new era in which CIOs enable technology producers to venture out of the developer’s suite and computer operations center to converse with students, faculty and administrators to develop IT influence on digital strategy and drive broad participation for change.

This new IT worker who exhibits these soft skills is much different than the stereotypical introverted personality types IT managers have recruited and engineered into our traditional IT workforce. But if our IT organizations are going to be drivers of change to overcome the inertia in our institutions and subsequently digital enabled strategies, IT staff at all levels will require at least some of these soft skills:

• Communication, questioning and active listening skills to recognize both spoken and unspoken cues, develop cognitive and emotional empathy of other people’s situation to uncover new perspectives, motivations and ideas.

• Negotiation, political savvy, and conflict resolution skills for understanding others’ motivations, leveraging commonality, and building return-on-relationships for future collaboration.

• Creative thinking and problem solving skills to identify new ways of thinking about the business, combining disparate technologies, simplifying complex systems and prioritizing possibilities.

• Change management and influencing skills to manage expectations, promote new ideas, and build strong reputation with people that can influence change.

• Social networking skills to be interesting and interested in business and technology conversations that motivate people to want to share ideas and building diverse coalitions

• Leadership, followership and teamwork skills to be a good member of a high-performing team, taking responsibility, making effective decisions, setting goals, managing time, and persevering.

• Emotional intelligence skills for knowing what frustrates, motivates, and inspires you and understanding the value you and others bring to the team.

• Trust, positivity and growth mindset skills for embracing mistakes, shedding emotional baggage and blame, forgiving yourself and others, and learning from failures as a way of improving learning, growing, and changing for the better.

• Stress management skills for staying healthy, calm, centered and balanced in challenging situations so you can think clearly, receive constructive input, and take appropriate actions to not only survive, but thrive.

Investing in soft skill has other important tangential benefits including greater job satisfaction and retention of talent. Soft skills programs not only boost workplace morale, but also improve workers’ adaptability and flexibility while providing the basis for high-performing teams. It also provides foundational skills and pathways for up -coming millennials and generation Y staff who want to be team contributors and seek rapid upward mobility. The investment in soft skills development strengthens staff intrinsic motivations, connects them with our higher education mission, and allows institutions to compete for and retain top talent. In the absence of such talent, our ambitions to transform higher education are lost to banking, engineering, health care and other high-paying employers.

During more than 30 years of higher education IT leadership, I’ve always held that technology is a profoundly human thing. But given the growing pervasiveness of technology as essential mechanical infrastructure and managing the increasing complexities of technology, IT leadership can sometime lose sight of the fact that technology exists to improve the human experience. Putting people first in the context of technology is no longer a metaphor but a call to action. If we want technology in the higher education context to have a profoundly positive impact on the lives of our students and our communities, we must invest in the ability of our IT staff to engage our institutions in profoundly human ways.