Is IT support about people or technology?

This is a question that is often overlooked, yet should be addressed. It could also be posed as: What does emotional intelligence (EQ) have to do with IT support?

Unfortunately, the answer given to this question is typically: Not much. Which partly explains why technicians are often so hard to understand. Clearly, there is a shortage of EQ rather than IQ in the industry and hence the need for a renewed focus on developing EQ.

The challenge is that most technical staff, from the lowest level tech to the department manager, have no interest in EQ – let alone understand it – despite the fact that our industry of service provision is far more about dealing with people than it is about dealing with technology.

Let me explain what I mean.

As there are now so many answers to technical questions available on the web, support is more about communicating with people to help diagnose issues than it is about technology. In fact, acting as the interface between people and their technical problems is where technicians can add most value. So, as workplaces become more demanding of these soft skills, it is more important than ever for technicians to understand how to interact with people.

Unfortunately, as technology becomes ever more complicated with greater choice of tools for each business function (including traditional and cloud-based solutions), the training load on each technician can make the job of IT support seem insurmountable. EQ is therefore the last thing on their minds.

But to cope with this increased complexity, technicians now must be able to balance people and their expectations. For example, explaining succinctly why the simple solution they came back with after two hours of research was not immediately obvious when they took the question. Like so many aspects of holistic support, this requires high EQ.

Be warned – if nobody is working on EQ with the technical people that support your organisation, you’ll either get poor delivery of service or a team of very stressed technicians.

So, the question back to you as a business leader is: What are you doing to improve the EQ of your technical team?

The following link will take you to a TED video presentation by Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They talk about how they encourage people to work on the things they want to work on to drive innovation in small teams.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sergey_brin_and_larry_page_on_google.html

David Markus is the founder of Combo - the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.