Announcer:
This episode of TechPod is brought to you by THWACK. This year’s THWACKcamp is over, but all the sessions are now available on demand. For over 10 years, thousands of tech professionals have joined this lively interactive event for industry insights, product demos, and fresh perspectives on the ever-shifting IT landscape. Sessions include, You’re Only Half-Done, Going Beyond IT; BLOOP: Oh Great, Another Bleeping Alert!; And Shift-Left: A Better Approach to DataOps. Check them all out at THWACK.SolarWinds.com
Chrystal Taylor:
Welcome to SolarWinds TechPod. I’m your host, Chrystal Taylor, and with me as always is my lovely co-host, Sean Sebring. Today on TechPod, we’re going to explore a topic I’m very passionate about: your soft skills or non-technical skills or interpersonal skills, however you want to phrase them. And to help us with that, we have SolarWinds IT manager, Tara Bourke. Welcome, Tara.
Tara Bourke:
Yeah, so I have been with SolarWinds for seven years. I’m currently the IT service delivery manager for the EMEA region. So I look after a team of people who basically deal with all the IT issues from the company. So anything that touches an end user, which is pretty much every system, we are the face of IT in SolarWinds.
Chrystal Taylor:
Well, I think we could start with that. I know we’ve talked about this in the past, kind of what the face of IT looks like because for a lot of companies and a lot of roles, IT is kind of like a faceless void to the end users. It’s just like a generic, they will either have a company-wide emails that go out and don’t come from an individual or something like that where it’s just kind of like IT department and there’s no person associated with it. So talk to me a bit about being the face of IT.
Tara Bourke:
So particularly for SolarWinds in our major sites, we have help desk people on site, people that are visible at all times to the staff that work in the major sites and then we would have an ongoing connection with some of our smaller sites and remote staff. They would usually deal with the person that’s pretty much in their time zone and is someone who’s visible to them. So even though we don’t look after every facet of IT, we are the person that every user knows and it’s really important that we keep that connection there. You still log tickets through the same kind of systems as you would see in other companies, but we like to make it a little bit more personal and also sometimes things just need to be looked at in person.
Sean Sebring:
I saw actually just last week went to visit a customer and it seems that the tech bar theme is pretty popular now and I will say they did that when I went to our Austin office, they have the tech bar. So having I guess that person as a channel, when you think of them as different channels with IT, the person as a channel is a really nice option because everyone wants to communicate and interact different ways. So just having that human connection option is a really cool thing.
Tara Bourke:
Absolutely. And the tech bar is something that works really well in big offices because it’s really personal to the people that drop down, but also from an IT point of view, it means you don’t have to run through six floors of a massive building when someone has an issue, they come to you. So that’s why the tech bar became such a big thing is that it makes it easier for users to come to you but also makes it really easier on the IT person that they’re not running from one desk to another trying to find someone, trying to identify a user, trying to recognize someone in big offices as well can be a major issue for IT.
Sean Sebring:
Yeah, surfing through the sea of cubes to find the person who submitted the ticket. Yeah.
Chrystal Taylor:
I haven’t seen the in-person tech bar before, but I have experienced the virtual tech bar for us remote employees as well. There’s still an option there and you still end up talking to, I’ve done several things, had to do several things with IT and you still wind up talking to an actual person that has actual customer service skills being employed and I think it’s super important to making that process a bit smoother for the end user and for those of us in IT, because that is one of the biggest struggles is being in IT and working like a help desk is that people tend to take things out on you sometimes, right? They are experiencing frustration and that is something you experience a lot in customer service roles as well is like people are experiencing frustration and then they share that frustration with you and sometimes it’s not always a positive experience for them or for you. So it’s interesting to see how we’ve employed that in-person and virtually as well.
Tara Bourke:
Yeah, and I mean it’s been a big thing in our hiring practices that when we are recruiting for a role in the help desk, we’re not just looking for someone who’s technical. Technical skills can often be taught if a person has a willingness to learn, what we’re really looking for when we bring someone into the help desk is someone with great customer service skills, even if that person maybe came from a non-technical role. Working in hospitality is a big one where you have to deal with people and you have to be able to de-escalate situations and you really need to be able to get your point across without irritating someone. That’s a massive thing in IT is sometimes the user may be wrong, but you need to be able to relay that in such a way that it doesn’t sound like that and it comes across nice and polite. So we are really big on customer service skills.
Chrystal Taylor:
We’ve sort of circled around what we think are these soft skills. Right? Let’s illuminate that a little bit more. What do we consider to be soft skills? I consider almost any non-technical skill to be a soft skill. So we talked about customer service. I have in the past also talked about several other things, so any kind of people connection skills usually are considered soft skills, so the way that you talk to people, the way that you communicate, putting your face in front of people, all of those things are part of that purview. Is there anything that you would like to add to our overarching topic of what is a soft skill?
Tara Bourke:
Yeah, I suppose a major thing depending on whether you are front facing physically in person or whether you are behind the screen, when you’re physically in front of someone, another soft skill is your mannerisms and how you carry yourself. A lot is said by not saying anything and particularly in IT when you are at someone’s desk, you need to be able to carry yourself in a way that even if you don’t know what’s going on, you come across as if you do to the customer and you give them a sense of ease and that can all be communicated just by how you stand at a desk or how you approach someone.
Chrystal Taylor:
And your facial expressions for those of us with very expressive faces.
Tara Bourke:
That is a major thing as well and for people who have maybe dealt with customers on the phone, that can be a really big change going into a front facing role where you have to make small talk with a person that you maybe wouldn’t have had to before because you might be standing at their desk troubleshooting an issue. You still need to give off that ease.
Chrystal Taylor:
Yeah.
Sean Sebring:
People skills.
Tara Bourke:
Yep.
Sean Sebring:
No, I very much agree. I actually came from service desk background myself and customer service and Chrystal and I have spoken about this before that if we had our way, everyone would start in that kind of role. Just learn what it’s like to be on the other side of the abuse, so to speak, just so you learn an appreciation for what the other person has to go through when you ring them asking for help and it teaches such essential skills to patience, the de-escalation and those skills are transferable to any role in my opinion.
So again, that’s why Chrystal and I think agree on that, that it’s such a necessary skill set and it’s very humbling to be on that side of things. And also you learn more about the company than people realize just getting to see others’ personalities or how they handle situations. Instead of it just being day-to-day work, for you it’s your day-to-day work, but for them this is a potentially really frustrating issue. So you get to see different sides of the organization than the people who typically are doing business, so to speak.
Tara Bourke:
Yeah, it’s somewhere where you really build relationships and I suppose that’s what allows your soft skills to work better for people. You’re building a relationship with the person, whether it’s via chat, whether it’s over the phone, whether it’s in person, you’re creating that one-to-one relationship, which even when you then have to relay bad news or something doesn’t work or it doesn’t go according to plan, they trust in you because you’ve built that relationship even if it’s just over one conversation.
Chrystal Taylor:
Yeah, I think … So Sean kind of hinted around it that we’ve talked about this in the past and one of the reasons why I think it’s so important to work on these soft skills, I don’t care what you do in IT or any other role in your life, having a job previously that you can fall back on for those interpersonal skills like that. Either you worked in the food service industry or you worked on help desk or you worked retail-
Tara Bourke:
Retail.
Chrystal Taylor:
Retail is a big one, right? Hospitality you mentioned, right? It’s just a matter of where you got the experience from, having that experience working with other people and dealing with conflict resolution on some scale, even if it’s a very small scale. You worked at Geek Squad, at Best Buy or whatever, some small scale of having to deal with that interpersonal conflict resolution is hugely important to your career. You can have the best technical skills in the world, but if no one wants to work with you, you’re not going to progress very well. You’re just not going to elevate yourself. You’re going to be in that individual contributor role forever and if that’s where you want to stay, great, good. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it, but if you ever wanted to move up or you wanted to move to a different type of role, having those interpersonal skills can really make a huge difference in your career.
Tara Bourke:
I can assess that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean you really have to learn how to talk to different kind of people and that’s where the likes of retail and stuff gives really good experience because you never know what’s coming at you. You never know what kind of person, what their communication style is, and when you have that kind of experience, you can both tailor your communication style to each individual person and that allows you to work I suppose, on their level. And that’s really important for any role you’re in is being able to change how you communicate to match the person and then maybe tailoring it a little bit to you and that’s when you’re working in a team, that’s when you’re working for leadership, when you’re working in customer service role for someone else, that’s really important.
Sean Sebring:
You know, it’s a cool thing I like about those skills. I have a passion for helping my friends and my circle find jobs. I helped them with their resumes. Since I am a people person, I pride myself in being good at interviewing and so when people come and ask for help, tips with interviewing, I say think of yourself as the customer service provider and the person interviewing you is actually your customer. Because if you change your mindset and just think of using those same skills in an interview, you’re acting, like you said here, with confidence, you’re approaching them with the assumption of you have the knowledge, the correct answer. You’re speaking with politeness, right? So taking that skillset, it’s a really versatile skillset and obviously it goes in many different areas, but I think interviewing is one of my favorite places that I advise people, “Hey, use your soft skills here. Pretend you’re on a phone call.”
Tara Bourke:
Yeah, because you’re really looking for that flow of conversation. I know when I interview people and I do it a lot like yes, you want to get the answers to the questions you’re asking, but sometimes they don’t have the answer. But if they can continue the conversation, if they can-
Sean Sebring:
Exactly.
Tara Bourke:
… go ahead with the flow and don’t act as if they’re completely thrown by it, that shows great resilience.
Sean Sebring:
Yeah. And mentally, hopefully if they’re a nervous interviewer, it changes the perspective a bit to say, just pretend that you’re on a customer service call and you’re answering someone’s question.
Chrystal Taylor:
Yeah. Well, while we’re on the topic of interviewing, you had mentioned earlier that non-technical skills are part of the onboarding process. So talk to me a little bit about how that is included in our onboarding process.
Tara Bourke:
Yeah, I suppose from an IT point of view, when we are onboarding someone, we want to make sure that they’re up and running with the technology that we give them. However, just sending someone a load of slides, making them watch a video, it’s not exactly useful. So when we onboard someone, we are talking them through the things that they actually need to do, how to change their password, how to get logged into stuff, how to get up and running, and oftentimes we are letting them lead the conversation because they may have had a list of things that they need, maybe they want to have their screen set up in a certain way and based off that information then we’re kind of tailoring how we do the setup for them.
We don’t have a particular script, we have a list of things that we need to get done, but that maybe doesn’t follow the same route with every person because some people are much more technical, some people not. Some people have worked on the operating system that they’re using now. Some people have never used the operating system. So rather than keeping everything robotic and keeping it in a script, we are tailoring everything we do to the individual person and dealing with them on that level.
Chrystal Taylor:
Now that sounds like it would be much more time-consuming?
Tara Bourke:
Yes, it absolutely is.
Chrystal Taylor:
It also sounds like you think that’s worth it. So talk to me a little bit about that part because I feel like from an audience perspective for our TechPod listeners that part of the issue with being too invested in our personal skills in this way, what you’re talking about, tailoring things to the individual rather than the masses is that it takes too much time. I guess talk to me about the reasoning and how we come about with that being worth doing.
Tara Bourke:
So I suppose if we spend an hour sitting down with a person on their first day, and if it’s a group of people starting on the same day, that reduces the time a little bit. We help them to get up and running. Right? So yes, it does take that hour time. If we do not do that, how many times are they going to have contact us to log a ticket? How much extra time and effort is spent into the ticket going in, the person responding to it and trying to get the relevant information, which sometimes is harder to get over a ticketing system or a virtual tech bar, maybe they don’t really know the question they’re asking and that gives a bad experience and then you’re reaching out to the person again and going back and going back.
Whereas if you get that interpersonal kind of talk on the first day, let people ask their questions that they have, you’re not then spending that time going back over something with the user again. So it’s really important that you get that done and that people are up and running because otherwise when you’re starting a new job and you need to come back and talk to the IT person 10 times a day, that’s a really bad experience. But also from the IT side, it’s taking up so much more time than if I had just sat down for an hour, answered all your questions and got you set up and ready to go.
Chrystal Taylor:
Short-term investment versus long-term investment.
Tara Bourke:
Absolutely
Chrystal Taylor:
It’s a hundred percent worth it.
Tara Bourke:
Teaching people how to self-serve. That’s something we do on the onboarding because if I can show you where to find the information, if I can show you, you might not need this now, but you might need this in a couple of hours when you’re trying to do something, this is where you get the information for this, that then saves time in the long run of people having to come back and reach back out to the help desk for something they needed. If I can show you where you can find that information, you can self-serve a lot of the time.
Sean Sebring:
I want to come back to something you said and it’s a specific soft skill in my mind, but I want to hear your thoughts, Tara. You’d said they might not know what question they’re asking and I think that an incredibly crucial soft skill is almost like detective work with being able to deduce what’s really the issue, trying to ask your questions in order to get them to be able to ask their real question or find out what’s really the crux of an issue. So yeah, I don’t really have a label for that skill, but I think we may all know what I’m talking about.
Tara Bourke:
Probing questions.
Sean Sebring:
Probing questions. Yeah, there you go.
Tara Bourke:
So in IT, probing questions are a huge thing because a lot of time someone will say to me, “I’m locked out.” That is the whole information you get. So the first thing I need to deduce is what system are you talking about? Can you tell me what screen you’re on? Can you tell me what you can see? That’s often something that we use to just in IT is like you may not be able to tell me exactly what you’re trying to do, but you can describe to me what you’re seeing. And from that I can often deduce what system you’re in, whether it’s your machine, whether it’s a browser window, whether it’s a particular application. And when you work somewhere long enough, sometimes they can describe the colors on a certain application because they can’t remember the name of it and you can pick it up from there because with the way things have gone and with single sign on and with the way the security is changing, people often don’t know what they’re using because they’re using things so seamlessly these days.
I would have someone come to me and they might say, “I can’t get into my account,” but they’re talking about an application that’s done through a single sign-on through a portal through the password for their laptop, but they don’t even know that’s happening because it’s all working in the background. So it’s not that that application isn’t working, it may be that your password expired and that password has to sync through all those systems, but all you notice on the back end is that you can’t get into this one thing and I need to be able to ask those probing questions to figure out where you were, to almost backtrack, to figure out where the real issue lies.
Chrystal Taylor:
You said something there about dealing with someone or earlier maybe about dealing with people who have different levels of technical skill. We’re talking about end users that know what they’re doing still sometimes need assistance. We don’t have the access to go do administrative resets or to my password expired, I forgot to reset it because we’re moving to password, this has happened to me two times now, we’re moving to passwordless and so I use my YubiKey and I don’t have to use my password as often because I have a PIN and so I keep forgetting what my password is and then I can’t reset it. It’s a thing that’s been happening lately because we’re transitioning.
So I have to reach out via the virtual tech bar to get it reset and I obviously can tell them in more information because I have experience working on a help desk or arguably something close to a help desk and I have some experience working with things, but I also have a lot of experience in customer service, so I really do my best to not be a pain in the butt for the person on the other side also.
What is that for training purposes, when you’re training new techs coming in that are going to be working help desk, they’re going to be working with end users a lot. How do you go about expressing the way that they’re going to be dealing with people if they have varying levels of technical skills? I certainly know some people who have a bit of an ego like me just saying that right now, I have a certain level of technical skills, so I will assume I already have done XYZ steps before we’re talking to you, even though sometimes I forget to do one. And then when you guys tell me I’m like, “Oh duh, why didn’t I do that?” But what does that look like for you guys, that interpersonal skills that are left in the training to how do you deal with those varying levels of technical knowledge?
Tara Bourke:
So what we going to do is sometimes you may have experience dealing with a particular user and you might know that they’re more technical or you might know that they’re not, but you still need to make sure that they’ve done all the steps and things like that. So sometimes it’s about how you word it. So if you’ve come to me with that issue, you know what I’m like, “Did you turn it off and turn it back on again?” Someone might be offended by that look, it is-
Chrystal Taylor:
It’s just because it works.
Tara Bourke:
A hundred percent, it works 90% of the time, let’s be honest. But sometimes people are offended by that. So sometimes it’s something as simple as saying, “Can I assume you’ve already done….?” And then you list out the things because you’re wording that in such a way that you’re putting your faith in them and you’re saying, “Look, I know you’ve probably already tried this, I just have to ask you.” And then sometimes maybe they haven’t and they come back and they’re like, “Oh, I actually forgot this.” But when I respond in that way, just by a simple changing of wording, instead of being like, “You need to do X, Y, Z” that makes people be almost less offended if they’re maybe a bit more technical and they’re like, “Of course I’ve done that.” You’ve said, “Am I to assume you’ve done that or can I just check with you that you’ve tried these things?” Very simple, subtle changes in language make a huge difference to how someone reacts to you.
Sean Sebring:
I think ego is a key word there, Chrystal.
Tara Bourke:
Yeah.
Sean Sebring:
And it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Sometimes it’s just coming from a place of I do have technical knowledge, so I’m probably, in fact sometimes I am guilty of this as well, Chrystal. I may think, oh, I’ve already done a lot of their work for them here, so they probably appreciate how technical I am. They’re like, “Oh, this guy’s at least more technical than the last.” And so I think that that sense of ego is unintentional and it happens more often than we realize. So yeah, dealing with that and the way you’d address that Tara I think is kind of putting the ball in their court, so to speak, giving them a sense of power, control, giving them some confidence back since they’re coming from a place of vulnerability that they have an issue. So I agree it’s a little bit of a mind game, but it’s helpful and it really, I think it does wonders.
Tara Bourke:
Yeah. And I mean have on occasion have to deal with people who are quite technical and I have given them a specific set of steps and they’ve said something didn’t work and based on my previous knowledge and the steps, this usually works. So sometimes I have to find a way to say, “Oh, that’s unusual that that’s not working for you now, would you mind sending me a picture of when you do this part?” And then they’ll do it and then I’m able to deduce from that. Okay, they didn’t actually follow the steps. There is a particular thing with a lockout method where you have to click on a box, type a dot backslash, then click on another box before you put in the password.
And when I put instructions in that simple way, I need you to do it in that order. And when it’s not in person, sometimes it doesn’t get done, but I don’t want to say, “Hey, you clearly didn’t do what I asked you to do.” So then I’m saying, “Look, would you mind sending me on that so I can just see what’s going on there?” And then I can see from that screenshot that maybe there’s a step that they haven’t taken. I say, “Oh, look like you may have forgotten to do this.” Instead of going back and saying, “You didn’t do….” It’s about the language you use there. It’s a big thing.
Chrystal Taylor:
You may have missed this step.
Tara Bourke:
Yes.
Chrystal Taylor:
I think that that’s really … I’m over here kind of chuckling to myself because following instructions is arguably the first thing we learn how to do in any kind of schooling or anything. And somehow always is an issue forever. It’s the simplest thing, did you follow the instructions I laid out for you? And yet like, oh, I’ll just skip this stuff. I don’t need that. You still do it. And as a person with I’ll say a healthy ego, I definitely have done that, right? Where you’re just like, oh yeah, I’m just going to bypass that. I don’t need to do that. And sometimes that is the problem. So listening to you talk about how you have to deal with that. I was like, yeah, it never fails.
Tara Bourke:
We used to use a particular brand of headsets maybe five or six years ago that had this black base and sometimes the USB would malfunction on them. It was a known issue. And in order to reset that, you had to plug out the power cable, leave that out, then plug out the USB-C cable, then plug back in the power cable and then plug back in the USB-C cable. And it had to be done in that order. And if you did not do it in that exact order, it did not work. And you would tell people that. And I think sometimes that they would just be like, “Yeah, I plugged out the power. I’ve plugged out the USB and I plugged it back in. It’s not working.”
And I had to find a way to, particularly during the pandemic, when people started bringing these guys home and I wasn’t able to go over to their desk and do it, I had to communicate to them that like, “Oh, would you mind doing that again?” And sometimes I would not communicate the steps all in one go. I would say, “Can you do this?” And wait for them to respond. Then can you do this? Wait for them to respond, then can you do this? Because that way I knew that it was happening in the exact order and it was such a weird thing. It was just this one weird thing. And sometimes you put all those four steps together and they think that I’m taking … That I’m just messing completely. Yeah, she’s telling me to plug this out and plug it back in a specific order.
Sean Sebring:
Classic Tara mansplaining how to unplug a headset.
Tara Bourke:
That’s exactly it. And it does sound like that because it sounds so ridiculous. And I know the first time I did it, I tried to do it in another order and it didn’t work. And then I was like, oh, I better go back and read the article again now. And it did have to be done that way. So rather than having that conversation with someone, I just would send one step at a time and that way I knew that they were taking those exact steps because if it was me who had tried it, I had found it on Google, I did it. I didn’t follow the instructions and it didn’t work. And then I went back and I read the instructions and it worked.
Sean Sebring:
I have a similar use case or story from when I was doing video game support and turning it into … Just changing the tone of the whole situation really helps, like you said, I think sending one instruction at a time and making it a dialogue where you sent one step, they’ve confirmed the one step, then you send the second step. But one of the things that I had tried is there’s two ways I approached it, is let them know it’s ridiculous up front so that they’re already aware that the fact that it seems ridiculous, it is, right? And so now they’re on board with, okay, let me engage these four silly steps in this order.
But the other way for me was I made it really silly. So it was about a deleted character and in order to get the character back with its original name, you had to do something to kind of free up the name basically. So long story short is I said, okay, now this is going to be really weird because they wouldn’t do it in the right order. I said, I need you to go make a character and name it banana peels, which is absolutely ridiculous. But they’re thrown off by that. So they’re now engaged in, okay, this isn’t going to make any sense. Let me just follow these instructions. So it was just a distractor to get them on board with the steps I’m trying to communicate instead of assuming they know what I want them to do.
Chrystal Taylor:
Love that.
Sean Sebring:
So banana peels.
Chrystal Taylor:
I love that. We talked earlier about, I think at the top you talked about how sometimes during the interview process that the non-technical skills are almost more important to highlight because the technical skills can be more easily taught. I want to dive into that a little bit because I know that there are also resources out there for learning non-technical skills. So if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, this actually sounds like a good idea, I should work on these skills and I do think you should, I don’t care how much experience you have, I do think you should continue to work on them. I have a friend who practices interviewing whether or not they’re going to look for a new job anytime soon, several times a year. They just keep brush up on the skill. Like I just need to keep working on it in case I ever need it.
And I think the same thing is true with any of these non-technical skills. You should work on them. Just because I worked in retail a million years ago doesn’t mean that I still remember all of the ways. Sometimes my ego gets in the way, sometimes something else happens where I’m like, oh, you’re frustrated. I mean you may forget to use those skills because you’re having a bad day. So I think you should continue to work on those skills. Since I worked here, I took a writing course, a communications writing course for writing better emails, and I took a communications course for writing better blogs because I do that. So I think that it’s important to note that you can learn these things, but often the way that you go about learning these things is working with another person. So you still need to have some level of willingness to ask for assistance.
I need someone to do a mock interview with me. I need someone to show me how your sales calls go. Like salespeople are generally, but well-versed in using customer service skills, they’re trying to get something out of the other person on the end of the line. So they’re generally much better versed at using those skills than someone in IT would be normally, right? They don’t use them as often maybe or you’re a sysadmin, so you don’t interact with people, you’re not front-facing. Definitely there are people around you or at your company that could help you even if it’s just by observing them. So what do you guys recommend to people for continuing to work on and explore expanding their interpersonal skills?
Tara Bourke:
Well, for me, I would look at if there’s anything available locally. So depending on where you are located, a lot of countries and stuff like that have chambers of commerce or business groups that often offer soft skill workshops and in-person in your location because with the changing face of the environment, some people may work in a location where nobody else from their company works there. And an in-person workshop is not something that you can then do, but for your soft skills, sometimes you do need that in-person touch. So there are other facets available to find. They may not all be working in IT. They may all be working in different kind of companies, but you can get enrolled in these workshops in person. And I know that in a previous life I used to do a lot of these and we would engage people by showing them how soft skills don’t work.
So rather than telling them this is what you should do, we do a little demo where you sit back to back and someone changes their body language, the person’s told, they cross their arms, they make a face and they continue to say the sentence, but you can’t see them. The person on the other side then has to relay, that sentence sounded different even though they said the same thing. And then we would talk about how your body language, how your facial language affects what you say, even if you say the same thing. So there are lots of places globally that offer those kind of workshops where you can go in and just see how things work and discuss it and discuss it with other people as well. I think it’s really important.
You can work on your soft skills on your own, but you really need other people like you said, so they don’t have to be the people you work with. They don’t have to be the company you work with. They can be, they’re toast masters groups in different company or different countries and stuff like that where you can practice a lot of these things and also sometimes meet new people.
Chrystal Taylor:
I mean to that argument, they could be not in the field at all, right? They can be in some other field, they can be family members. My mom has worked retail for forever and oftentimes she is my best person to bounce things off of because she doesn’t understand tech stuff at all. So if I can … Legitimately, she has no idea. She called me on Christmas when she got a new iPad to explain to her how to get her Wi-Fi password. She has like, no clue. And she’s not even that old. So she doesn’t really have excuse. That’s why I tell her I all the time, “You don’t even have an excuse,” but she’s really not technical at all. And so what is wonderful is that whenever I am trying to figure out a way to express something, if I can say it in a way that she can grasp the core concept, then I know that anyone else will get it, right?
If you have a small amount of technical skills, then you know that you’ll get it because I have to do public speaking. So if I can say something in a way that anyone in the audience will be able to understand it, for me, that’s a win. So maybe it doesn’t have to be necessarily a workshop and it doesn’t have to cost you money either. There are lots of free courses out there. The communications course I talked about was a free online course for a written communication because I was trying to improve that, but there are options out there, you just have to look around a bit.
Sean Sebring:
One of my ways that I engage in my soft skills now is, and actually I’m curious for your thoughts if this even counts as soft skills because I think it’s a spectrum. When we first talk about soft skills, we kind of assume we’re talking about the niceties of just a call from customer support to an end user. But I think soft skills, as we mentioned, I bring them into interviews and things of that nature. I think they continue far past and they actually evolve into, I would almost say close to politics in the workplace. You have to have soft skills when you want to engage with peers to have difficult conversation. And that’s still soft skills. One of the things that I do is I constantly find mentors and just so we can talk about, “Hey, I had to have this really weird discussion with this person. I was stepping on their toes a little bit, but I had to in order to get this done, how could I have gone about that better?”
And to me a little bit of that is still soft skills because I’m thinking of ways that I could better communicate, that I could better interact with people. And so again, to me, mentors is one way I approach it, which Chrystal I think was your question, but to me that’s still soft skills. It’s just kind of like the next gen of soft skills, not just your basics of, hey, how are you? Let me fix your problem. But taking it even further and recognizing that you’re not going to be the best if you don’t keep honing your skills and finding a mentor also addresses the ego problem because then you’re admitting to yourself, hey, I’m not the best. Let me go to this person and say, I want you to give me something that maybe we’re equals at but you have different skills.
And so, ideally you’re going to them and saying, let’s help each other, but sometimes it’s just you’re taking, which is fine. But a mentor I think is so valuable in many ways. But I use it a lot for the soft skills, but also I think it’s a good humbling experience for us to look at ourselves and say, we’re always learning and growing.
Tara Bourke:
Absolutely. I think finding a mentor, some people think it’s this really big thing where you have to go through a specific program, you have to set a person up as your mentor, but informal mentorship is a huge thing in the workplace. A lot of the times it may be a person you have worked with previously that’s no longer in your department. For me, I utilize a previous manager who was my manager when I started and now manages a completely different department. And I am in the role that he had been in previously. So I often can go across and sit down and be like, “Okay, so this is what’s going on, this is how I’m going to approach it.” Or sometimes it’s something as simple as being like, “Can you read this email and take a look at it before I send it?”
And it’s sometimes you may not mean for something to come across in a certain way and sometimes all you need is a second set of eyes to take a quick scan over it and particularly someone who’s out of the situation, whatever it is, and see what tone they pick up from it. But yeah, I really find it valuable having a mentor like that and just being able to bounce ideas off different people. And I suppose for me, I am lucky that the office that I work in and I do work here a couple of days a week, there are everybody who has done my job before me, particularly my first job that I started here sits within five desks.
Chrystal Taylor:
Wow.
Tara Bourke:
So from the very first help desk person, the person he hired, the person he hired, and then me and the people I have hired after me, we are all within a couple of chairs of each other. So if I find something that happened in this office 15 years ago, I can ask the person why.
Chrystal Taylor:
That’s lucky.
Tara Bourke:
Yeah, it just means that they’ve come across these situations before or something similar. Nothing is ever new. Things are cyclical. So I can have those conversations in an informal way and just be like, “What did you do when you had to do this? How did you approach this?” And then maybe they did it a terrible way and they’re like, “Don’t do this.” Or maybe that works as well.
Chrystal Taylor:
Sharing your learning experiences. I really love this conversation about informal and formal mentorship. I think it’s really important, but I wanted to explore a little bit something that Sean said was that basically we’ve explored the positive ends of this, but there are also the other side of it. I think it’s still is a non-technical or soft skill. You still need to learn how to say no, you need to learn how to negotiate on your own behalf. These are not necessarily skills that are just all positive, but they are skills that are necessary. We talked about conflict resolution. That’s a thing that you should work on. Problem solving is a thing that you should work on all the time. And part of that is just learning how to ask the right questions like we talked about earlier, but also being able and willing to say no or to stand up for yourself when you need to or for someone else when they need it.
If you’re a manager or anything like that, you need to learn, you need to work on those skills or you need to be able to stand up for your team. You need to be able to stand up for yourself. We didn’t do it this way because… Some of that also is presenting bad news. Stuff happens. This world is not perfect. Everything doesn’t go the way we want it to. You just referenced maybe someone did something and they were like, “Don’t do it this way in the future.” But part of a role, especially if you’re in management or higher, is being able to translate that bad news to the higher ups or if you can’t get budget for something, I’ve got to translate that bad news to my team. There are a lot of those skills that I think are less highlighted but are no less important as part of this larger conversation of non-technical skills. It’s all interpersonal communication really.
Tara Bourke:
Absolutely. Yeah. For me, so when I came into IT seven years ago, I didn’t have a formal technical background and I’m also one of very little women in IT. So at the start, I really didn’t know how to say no or how to advocate for myself because I always felt like I needed to prove myself to do better, to ensure that I could lift the monitors the same as the man who was in the job before me and things like that. I really felt like I needed to prove myself. And after some self-reflection and some coaching and stuff, I realized that I didn’t have to say yes to everything and I needed to be able to advocate for myself and that at the end of the day, people would often accept that answer if it’s communicated in a correct way. I didn’t need to be saying no to everyone for no reason, but I did need to be able to say, okay, maybe not now. That’s also an acceptable answer. And sometimes no is a full sentence.
Chrystal Taylor:
Yes.
Sean Sebring:
I like that. Sometimes no is a full sentence.
Chrystal Taylor:
Yeah.
Tara Bourke:
Sometimes you don’t need to explain the reasons why you can’t do something. But it is nice when you can and when you can communicate and when you can justify. This is why people are a lot more understanding.
Chrystal Taylor:
Yeah, I actually think over-explaining the reasons for something is an issue. It’s like on the other side of too much communication can also be an issue. You’re over-explaining why you’d made this decision or whatever. It can cause more questions that leads to more problems. So finding that balance I think is important.
Tara Bourke:
Yeah. And just being able to say as well, maybe I don’t have the answer for you right now. And that’s something that you couldn’t, in technical jobs you can really struggle with because you are often the person that finds the solution. Sometimes you can’t. And it is okay to say, “Look, we can’t resolve this right now, but I will get back to you.” And then keeping those lines of communication open, so be it that you have to escalate to another team, you have to go to a vendor, you have to start researching something. The main thing is that you get the person up and running so that they can continue their day-to-day job. And then you keep those lines of communication open and you just say, “Look, it can’t be solved right now, but I will continue to try and fix the screen.”
Sean Sebring:
I guess on that note, this is a good segue. Sometimes a no, a really mean, an angry no, I’m just kidding. But sometimes a no turns into an escalation. It’s not always because of a no, it could be because of something else you said, which is we can’t find the answer and that’s just not satisfactory for someone. Either way, an escalation. What tips do you have for folks from the soft skills side of things, Tara, for de-escalation?
Tara Bourke:
Yeah, I suppose if something gets escalated, the main thing that I would say is that before you give an answer or before you dig into it more, do your research. So if it’s being escalated, look back at how it happened, why it happened. Because sometimes something is escalated because a person is frustrated. And if you go back and you look at the start of be it the conversation, the ticket, the interpersonal conversation, sometimes you need to think about if you were in the user side, how you would also be frustrated and then think about what you would like to be done for you. Because sometimes it is as simple as saying, look, I understand and this is why we can’t do it this way, or this is why we can’t get a new computer to you right now, or this is why this is not working.
But also relaying that you understand why they are frustrated and that if you were in their situation, you would also be frustrated, showing that empathy and showing that relation to someone. It can often be appreciated that they’re saying, okay, look, I totally get that you can’t fix it for me now. And you are saying that you would also be frustrated by that, so I know that you’re continuing to advocate for me and sometimes it is that.
Chrystal Taylor:
Yeah, that-
Sean Sebring:
So this research through a lens of empathy.
Tara Bourke:
Yeah, absolutely.
Sean Sebring:
I think empathy is a massive way to relate to somebody. It shows you’re on their side, it shows you’re in it together. And I think that does worlds because as you kind of mentioned, most of the time the escalation is because of someone’s emotional factor, not because of something technical or unresolvable.
Chrystal Taylor:
Yeah, it’s creating and keeping up those connections, those personal connections with people. You are also a person and not a robot. This would also be frustrating for me to experience. I think that that’s huge for relating for people relating to you. Going back to our original not being a faceless void, like IT not being a faceless void, being able to express empathy and situational awareness and those kinds of things. I get it. This sucks. I wouldn’t want to be in this situation either, and I’m sorry that I can’t help you. I think that that can go a really long way towards de-escalating those situations.
Tara Bourke:
Absolutely. Because a lot of times when we get an escalation, it’s either due to lack of communication where maybe stuff is being done in the background and the person doesn’t know what’s going on or why it’s taking so long or it’s because there’s over-communication where it was a simple issue and someone has dug into it a little bit more. So looking at that and trying to figure out, okay, do we just need someone else to look at this with fresh eyes and resolve it? Or is there nothing we can do and do we just need to make a better, I suppose, do we just need to communicate to the end user differently and explain to them, look, this is what’s actually been going on, even though you might think nothing’s been happening, this has all been going on in the background. And sometimes it’s just about giving them that information.
Chrystal Taylor:
Yeah. And part of it can definitely also be just poorly-set expectations. And sometimes those expectations have nothing to do with you. They already had expectations from working with someone previous or they have had this issue before and it didn’t take as long to resolve, but maybe this is the fifth time, so we’re trying to find root cause of why this keeps happening or whatever. There is a lot of reasons why they can have poorly-set expectations. And so part of your communication process should be ensuring that those expectations are clear. It will help you in the long run.
Tara Bourke:
Absolutely. I’m a big fan of under-promise and over-deliver. So if you think something is going to take 15 minutes to resolve, I would rather say, “Look, this could take up to an hour and do you have anything that you need to do? Can I borrow your computer from that time?” And if it’s solved within the 10, 15 minutes, that’s great. They’re happy to get their laptop back, but if it takes longer, you have that extra buffer of time. So I would never want to communicate to a user that something would take less time than what it made off. I’d always want to under-promise, over-deliver. It’s a big thing.
Sean Sebring:
Yeah. I want to visit something Chrystal said. I think earlier you said, “This sucks.” And what you were referring to is again, we were talking about the empathy and relating to people, and I think the particular soft skill there is in text. Text can be very informal, it can be dehumanizing. It’s really hard to see tone and coming from my customer service support background, of course mine was in the video game industry, so I was dealing with a particular set of clients, so to speak. So the expected tone or their language may have been a little different, but I’ve carried that into all of my communication via text. Now I try to use emotion in the text, which can be tricky.
So Tara, I want to hear some of your thoughts on that. For example, I’ll almost always start with my greeting, having an exclamation point at the end. Howdy is also something I always say because I wanted to know that it is coming from me. I’m a human. I wrote this, this is my language. So that if I was in front of you talking, it would sound almost the same if you’re reading it off the paper.
Tara Bourke:
That’s exactly it. I start all of my greetings off with, “Hey,” that’s something that is particular to Ireland and stuff. Hey! And what we had to work on as well in the service desk is we have multiple customers across multiple geos. So usually you can tell by the text where the person is located, how they communicate, and then changing it a little bit. The message that I might send to someone here in Cork might be a little bit more informal than the message I might send to someone in Austin, or particularly in the Philippines, it’s a little bit more formal as to how they communicate. Something that I’ve noticed over the years is that people like to be addressed by different things in different geos.
So again, adding that to your communication, I would never send a message to someone in Europe calling them sir or madam. That would be very strange. But in other countries like the Philippines, it’s very common to use that. So I do tailor my communication to the location as well because then they also know that you’re talking back to them in how they would expect to be spoken to. And that’s something that takes a while to get used to when you’re dealing with customers and end users across massive geos. Then we would also structure our texts in a little bit less formal way. So we wouldn’t say regards or anything too formal or things like thanks for that. We’re keeping it really personal.
Sean Sebring:
Keeping it real.
Chrystal Taylor:
I do want to throw out there too, be cautious with being too impersonal as well. There’s pitfalls involved in that. You have to be impersonal and yet still professional I think is the key. You still have to be a professional at the end of the day, you’re going to be working with this person again, most likely. And so having create, that’s another balance. Yes, we want to be ourselves, but also yourself at work, not yourself at home. I think you can be very cautious about it. But you said something very specific there about tailoring it for geos because people around the world communicate very vastly differently. So I have heard in the past, especially people who’ve never worked with someone on the other side of the world, they can be a lot more formalized in their communication processes and they don’t appreciate as much the informal readings and all of that.
But how do you … Without offending someone the first time said that’s the hard way and that’s how you learned that. What do we have in place? What do we do to help people realize this is how we communicate in this geo? This is a better way to communicate in this geo? I keep thinking too about, we were talking earlier about tailoring things to the individual, and I keep thinking about work, several different jobs over the years I’ve done, we’ve done personality tests on how to work better with people, and that’s not a thing that’s available for you with your end users most of the time is like, this person works better in this way. So all of that kind of is in the same vein of how do you figure out what is going to work best for the person that you’re talking to?
Tara Bourke:
Yeah, I mean some of it is going to be trial and error and where you have worked before, but a lot of it for us is that you have historical data and tickets in virtual tech bars where you can kind of see how the person has communicated before, but you don’t always have time to look up that when you’re trying to fix something. But again, you’re kind of going on the basics that, I’ll give you a prime example, when I first started working here, someone in a particular region kept calling me madam. And that is if someone called you madam in Ireland, they’re insulting you. They’re talking in a derogatory tone. It’s not in their culture. Calling Madam is just a polite way. So then it was someone I was working with directly on the help desk, and I said to them, “Oh, I get that’s really polite there, but you might want to be careful saying that to particular end users, because they don’t like that, that’s quite an insult.”
And we have group chats between our global teams and we would have a lot of informal conversation there. And sometimes you’re learning phrases that people use, things that they say, how they communicate. Sometimes it’s just jokes. Does that joke go over well? Sometimes it’s a case of people might put something in a ticket and someone will send it in and be like, “What does this really mean?” Prime example of someone asking what’s the crack in a ticket? And what they meant is what’s going on? That’s an Irish slang term. And one of our techs in Brno was like, “What does this mean? Is this English?” It’s like kind of.
So we would often have those informal conversations between the team, and we also have global meetings and stuff where we don’t just talk about work, we talk to each other, and you kind of learn how different people in different regions communicate informally. And that allows you then to take that to the end users as well. And then sometimes if you really get the opportunity visiting other sites, not every company gets that. Not everyone gets that. But when you can actually visit other regions in person, you really get a great sense of how they work. And that for me has been super helpful.
Sean Sebring:
Let’s go back to something Chrystal brought up earlier where has been struggling lately with her password woes because she’s had too seamless of an experience with the YubiKey and it does create some confusion. I can sympathize there, empathize even because it’s easy to forget when you never use it anymore. Point is that was a big change for us. And so even as slightly technical people, it was impactful. So Tara, I want to hear your thoughts on addressing big changes like that, especially when we’re talking about communication to the masses.
Tara Bourke:
Yeah, so I suppose normally when these kind of changes take place within any company, there’s usually one global communication that goes out to every end user. And as I’m sure you all know, putting yourself in the end user thing, do you always read those company-wide emails? No. And that happens and we have to then work with that. There’s no point in just assuming that’s going to work. So what we like to do is we also send them and we also maybe put them out globally in some of our Teams channels, but what we like to do then is take a local approach to that. So particularly in an office where there is a help desk technician or a remote area that deal with a particular help desk technician, what we like to do is get them to send a follow-up email to their offices that they deal with. It could be something as simple as resending the email. It can be a reply saying, “Hey guys, have you all seen this? Just want to give you the heads-up.” And we will often do it both in email and in Teams.
And some people prefer the Teams communication in the channels. We have site-specific Teams. Some people prefer to read through emails. But what we find is when it comes from someone that you have dealt with and that you may need them to fix your computer the next day, you are more likely to read an email from a person whose name you recognize rather than a simple email like IT notices or IT operations. So we’re tailoring that communication style to the end users to make sure that they get that information. And then in some of the big offices, sometimes we print things out and put them on a wall. Sometimes we stick them by the coffee machine.
Sean Sebring:
I was about to bring that up. Yep, I read that every time I get coffee. It’s the Teams conference room coming to you soon. I can’t remember the exact phrasing, but it works. It works. I’m standing there waiting for coffee anyway.
Tara Bourke:
Exactly.
Sean Sebring:
And actually Tara, you control in our Cork office, the TVs, we’ve got TVs-
Tara Bourke:
I do indeed.
Sean Sebring:
… with events coming up or changes coming up or even people visiting a lot, right? Just kind let folks know and that’s super helpful because I was walking past the TV anyway, big screen, short message, succinct communication there. So it’s super helpful stuff.
Chrystal Taylor:
I will say for IT people, it’s just like the NOC, right? You’re looking at if you’re used to using a NOC, you have it up on the screen, it’s just like a main dashboard when you walk by, something is red, now I need to go look at it. I think that those TVs operate in the same way, but for not-technical things necessarily or maybe for technical changes, but for communication rather than strictly IT things.
Tara Bourke:
Yeah, absolutely. We like to put up just little things in there like reminder, this is happening on this date, be it an event or we recently rolled out the upgrade of Windows 11 to all our machines globally. And so we sent out an email, we did our informal comms, we directly emailed some users, but then we just put the dates up on the TV. Just a reminder, guys, if you haven’t done it, your machine’s going to shut down on this date at this time. And it was really simple but effective. And then we also, in certain areas, we will run in-person meetings, be it for the whole office. And sometimes I’ll just stand at the top and be like, “Oh, don’t forget this is happening.” That is the simplest, cheapest form of communication is literally yelling at people in the office.
I know it’s not the modern way of doing things and yes, we absolutely want to do the modern things, but sometimes it’s a simple reminder. I will often, if we’re doing big changes and we need someone to take action and we have a list of action and sometimes we have some stragglers, if they’re located in an office, sometimes I’ll say, “Can you get up and walk to their desk and just make sure they’re all right or make sure they remember?” And it’s personal.
Chrystal Taylor:
I think the important takeaway from this part of the conversation is that people absorb information differently and so you must provide the information in different ways. You can’t expect everyone to read the one global email even if you want to, even if you’re like, “I told everyone, I told them it was happening.” Right? Because see, there is some frustration on your behalf when you then have to deal with 15 tickets or whatever when you’re like, “I told them it was happening.” But at the same time, people absorb information differently and not everyone looks at everything in the same way and that’s true of any learning at all. So you have to think about it for communication as well. Having multiple methods is only going to serve you better in the end and it really does not take that much more investment of time.
Sean Sebring:
I was just saying my takeaway from this is that Tara will stand in the middle of the floor and yell when we have changes coming.
Tara Bourke:
I’m surprised you haven’t heard me do that yet.
Sean Sebring:
Very effective. That’s going to stick in my head. I won’t forget that one actually.
Tara Bourke:
Yeah, I suppose it’s just we all know these days that everybody has different learning styles and we know from the school systems and stuff that no one way fits all for all of that. So why would one way fit all for communication? And instead of expecting people to change how they take in information, we’re the one that needs them to take in the information. So we change how we distribute that information, be it email, be it Teams, be it shouting at someone back in the day when computers had company screensavers, you might put it up on those kind of things. We don’t really do that anymore. It’s a little bit of an old-fashioned thing to do. So we use the TVs, we put things up and sometimes we put signs in the toilets and the coffee docks, places where you’re going to read things if it’s something really important.
Chrystal Taylor:
I love that you’re just whatever works. Just anything that works. I think that we are inundated by information constantly all the time, so people just will, I don’t have time, especially for email. I think you get to a point where you’re like, “I’m busy. I don’t have time to look at this.” And then now it’s marked as unread and you’ll never see it again.
Tara Bourke:
Yeah, sometimes it’s attention span. The way things have gone, people’s attention span is lower. So I actually found some really good accounts that do 30-second TikToks on new features on Outlook and stuff like that. And that’s something that I have pitched to start sending out in the company because I’m like, “Oh, I looked at this guy and he did, it was 30 seconds and he showed me all these new things that are available in Teams.” Maybe we can start doing something like that. Maybe other companies can start circulating that information-
Chrystal Taylor:
That TikTok.
Tara Bourke:
You want to just grab it. Yeah, absolutely.
Chrystal Taylor:
The company TikTok. Watch out. It’s coming for you.
Tara Bourke:
Yeah.
Chrystal Taylor:
This has been fantastic. Before we wrap up, Tara, is there anything else you would like to share of importance with using soft skills in IT?
Tara Bourke:
Yeah, I suppose for me, at the end of the day, your soft skills is the most important thing. How you come across to people is great. It is great to work on that and it will get you really far no matter whether you decide to stay in IT. If you want to go to management, you want to change to a completely different field altogether, it’s going to work for you. Even so much as say you decide to not go to work tomorrow and you are just working on your relationships at home, you still need the communication skills. It’s never going to go away. You’re never truly going to be on your own. So it’s always worth investing in those skills.
Chrystal Taylor:
Absolutely. Even as a consumer, when you have to call a help desk client for some other company and not at work, having those skills can actually streamline your process getting through those cues, so those skills are useful everywhere. People are people and no matter where you have to deal with them, learning how to deal with them appropriately can make a huge difference in your life.
Well, awesome. I did want to throw out there that we briefly sort of talked about our move to passwordless and how we’re dealing with that and that part of that was the YubiKey roll out. I did want to say that if you wanted a different perspective on that, we did also talk to Noel Barbee during THWACKcamp this year about that process and also about those interpersonal skills and how they were used during that process. So you can go check that episode out on demand and it is the Playing 4D Chess: The Modern Security Story episode if you want to hear more about that. But thank you so much Tara for joining us today on to discuss the importance of non-technical skills because I don’t like the term soft skills, non-technical skills in the workplace and in IT.
Tara Bourke:
Thanks so much for having me.
Chrystal Taylor:
And thank you to our listeners of SolarWinds TechPod. We look forward to continuing having episodes on varying topics all the time. I’m your host, Chrystal Taylor, joined by fellow host Sean Sebring, and if you haven’t yet, make sure to subscribe and follow for more TechPod content. Thanks for tuning in.
