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w a t i t i s . u w a t e r l o o . c a@ w a t i t i s c o n f

BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS IN IT

Bob HicksDirector, Client Services, IST

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RESEARCH FOR THIS TALK

• Day-to-day observations from past 37.5 years, both at work and in volunteer positions in the community, and at the university

• Lots of reading• Taking courses• Asking others for advice• This is a topic that you can always learn more about. And

remember that what got us here won’t get us there.

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BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS

• In IT we have gone from a centralized model, to decentralized, and are now working on a federated model.

• What does federated model mean to you? How are we doing?

• In order to be successful with the federated model, we have to work on building relationships.

• Tight budgets will require us to work harder on our federated model, and force us to build strong relationships.

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YOU BUILD RELATIONSHIPS ALL THE TIME• Colleagues in your group• Your staff• Other colleagues at the university• With people in business• With colleagues at other universities I have always been impressed with how

much our colleagues at other universities are willing to share and partner. There’s potential to do a lot more of this.

• Friends• Partners• Family• Teammates

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WHY BOTHER BUILDING WORKING RELATIONSHIPS AT WORK? • Kenneth McLaughlin’s book

‘Innovation and Entrepreneurship are in the Waterloo Genome’ provides an opportunity to reflect on our history at the university – and understand innovation wouldn’t have happened here without the many relationships that formed along the way. Perhaps this book should be mandatory reading for all new faculty and staff.

• Benefits of Relationship BuildingUtilize strengths on campusMeet and work with people from across campusSave time and moneyInnovationIt’s funIt’s rewarding

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WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BUILD WORKING RELATIONSHIPS?• Willingness to do it – a collaborative culture• Leadership - Leadership has been defined as inspiring people and planning for

the future with motivating factors of relationship building and community service

• Trust• Need to understand the benefits of building relationships. • Understand it takes time and effort. • Excellent soft skills - “next-gen IT leaders will need to shift from thinking from

traditional perspectives to ones that include many of the soft skills that are important in dealing with people” (Educause Review, Nov-Dec 2015).

• Understand that you don’t always get your way. • Take responsibility if there is a mess to clean up

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REASONS FOR NOT BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS• Lots of work/time• Personality – not easy to move out of your

comfort zone • Job security• Mistrust from the start• Lost authority

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HOW DO YOU BUILD A RELATIONSHIP? • It’s not easy • Have fun• Communication: not long winded. Be a good listener. • Trust – Do the right thing. It’s hard to build it back if you lose it• Willing to work together as partners• Willing to change• Keep in touch• Show an interest in others – remember their stories/challenges • Gee, it’s kind of like being married!

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B U I L D I N G P R O D U C T I V E A N D C O L L A B O R AT I V E R E L AT I O N S H I P S AT T H E S P E E D O F T R U S T AT C O R N E L L U N I V E R S I T Y

http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/3/building-productive-and-collaborative-relationships-at-the-speed-of-trust

Steps:• Get on the same page with a face-to-face meeting: Ask

how we are doing. Need to know if something is broken. Follow up if something is broken.

• Build and Establish Trust: Follow up and follow through.

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MORE STEPS

• Providing The Tools and Expectations for Success: email is an often overused tool when working through issues. Document your decisions. Action items, ownership, and deadlines are followed up.

• Clarify Process Ownership and Associated Responsiblities: Processes and tasks must have a defined owner.

• Recognize the Desired Performance and Celebrate Success: congratulatory emails and share in meetings.

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MORE APPROACHES TO BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS• Consider follow up meetings if there are issues identified in first meeting that

need to be resolved. Could be over a coffee or over lunch. • Let the past go, especially if there have been relationship issues. • Don’t promise the world – set realistic goals.• You are not likely to agree on everything. Agree to disagree, out of respect for

your colleague. • Be supportive. Be respectful. Involve the right people. • E-mail can destroy relationships. Don’t say anything in an email that you would

not say in person. Schedule a meeting if you sense an email trail is going into dangerous territory. Use the 24 hour rule when you are replying to an email that has upset you.

• Universities provide opportunities to participate in initiatives/projects, opportunities to network/collaborate, and to be become involved.

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SHARED SERVICES

• We’ll see an increase in shared services. They work best when there are good relationships in place.

• Shared services within the universities, other universities, and with vendors, many in the cloud.

• How do you start? What are the steps? What questions need to be asked? What agreements need to be prepared and signed?

• Need to document service expectations, for benefit of both provider and consumer.

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SUCCESSFUL EXAMPLES AT UWATERLOO• Lots of them described in the ‘Innovation and

Entrepreneurship” book written by Kenneth McLaughlin. • Collaborative groups like CTSC, FACCUS, UCIST, Web

Advisory and others. • Nexus• Student Portal • Campus Network• WCMS• SEW• IST Account reps• SLA, MoU, OLA, SLE• Others successful examples

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BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS WITH STAFF YOU MANAGE• Hire talented and dedicated staff. • Let staff do their job...stay out of the way, but stay informed, and provide

advice if needed. Help to clear paths when there are obstacles.• Don’t take credit for things you didn’t do. Show appreciation, internally and

externally. • Be supportive. • Push your staff to move out of their comfort zone. Look and promote

opportunities for your staff to collaborate with others on campus. • Promote professional development, both soft and hard skills. • Promote fun.• Promote and attend social events. • Your staff want to know how much you care, before they care how much you

know.

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LEARN FROM OTHERS

• Bruce Campbell• Alan George• Ian Goulden

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B R U C E :

W H A T S U G G E S T I O N ( S ) W O U L D Y O U G I V E T O S O M E O N E L O O K I N G T O I M P R O V E R E L A T I O N S H I P B U I L D I N G S K I L L S A T W O R K ?

• Understand that in most working relationships, things can go wrong , whether it be someone not meeting an expectation, a misunderstanding, occasional lack of respect for your time/expertise, etc.   You can’t control everything, but you can control how you react to the occasional disappointments and frustrations that happen in a workplace .   You can also control how you communicate when something isn’t meeting your expectations.

• When thinking about how to respond to a situation that was disappointing for whatever reason, try to imagine whether your approach will de-escalate the matter (make it better), or escalate it (make it worse).   You may have an urge to win, and have the other person lose .   While this can be temporarily gratifying, it doesn’t  solve anything, and only increases the potential for future conflict.

• Do not attempt to solve inter personal conflicts or major disagreements via e-mail.   Ideally you need to have an in person discussion.   This isn’t always practical.   You may need to ask your manager for advice.

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B R U C E

I F A R E L AT I O N S H I P I S S T R A I N E D , W H AT A P P R O A C H D O Y O U R E C O M M E N D T O H E L P I M P R O V E I T ?

• Try to remember what triggered the strained relationship,  and accept that you likely played a role in it (i.e. it wasn’t all their fault).   While this doesn’t fix anything immediately, it helps you to identify what behaviors in yourself can result in strained relationships.

• While you can get advice and assistance from your manager, and other campus resources, ultimately you need to make a decision that you want to improve a strained relationship, and you will need to put effort into it.

• Be patient and keep your expectations reasonable• Try to put past problems behind you (if they are insurmountable, you’ll need

help from your manager)

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BRUCEIs there anything else you would like to mention that would help build better relationships to foster collaboration on campus?

Think of yourself as an ambassador for your department.

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ALAN:W H AT S U G G E S T I O N ( S ) W O U L D Y O U G I V E T O S O M E O N E L O O K I N G T O I M P R O V E R E L AT I O N S H I P - B U I L D I N G S K I L L S AT W O R K ?

The golden rule still applies. Try to see issues from other’s perspectives – put yourself in their shoes.If you are a manager, walk around. Poke your head into offices and say hello. Ask how things are going and listen to what they have to say. You can learn a lot that way!

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ALAN:I F A R E L AT I O N S H I P I S S T R A I N E D , W H AT A P P R O A C H D O Y O U R E C O M M E N D T O H E L P I M P R O V E I T ?

It really depends on the context but, if at all possible, have a chat (or several!)  Sometime just “opening the channel” and letting the other person know you would like to understand and improve the situation is all it takes.

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ALAN: I S T H E R E A N Y T H I N G E L S E Y O U W O U L D L I K E T O M E N T I O N T H AT W O U L D H E L P B U I L D B E T T E R R E L AT I O N S H I P S T O F O S T E R C O L L A B O R AT I O N O N C A M P U S ?

I have a bias, of course, but I think creating the CTSC was helpful. It gave those across campus who are intimately involved in IT service delivery an opportunity to share ideas and possible solutions to campus-wide problems.  In addition, perhaps equally important, people in the Faculties and IST got to know each other much better than they might have otherwise.Create teams drawing from IT groups across campus tasked with developing solutions to campus-wide problems. This would promote a “web of relationships” and help collaboration generally.  This has been done from time to time in the past, but perhaps could/should be done more often.

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I A N : W H A T S U G G E S T I O N ( S ) W O U L D Y O U G I V E T O S O M E O N E L O O K I N G T O I M P R O V E R E L A T I O N S H I P - B U I L D I N G S K I L L S A T W O R K ?

• In my opinion/experience, relationships are built most fundamentally on trust, both in relationships between individuals and between organizations. There are many components to trust - but perhaps the most important in your context are trust that the person/organization is honest (reliable, intends to keep their promises, etc.) AND trust that the person/organization has the appropriate expertise (to successfully carry out their promises, etc.)

• Trust works two ways, can be lost easily and, once lost, is relatively hard to rebuild. It’s probably pretty obvious what it means to have one’s HONESTY trusted, but EXPERTISE is easy to overlook - no person/organization should assume that their expertise is trusted, and this might be something especially for an IT organization to think about; the technical details of IT are often mysterious to outsiders, so those outsiders can’t really judge the level of expertise in the IT organization - they also can't judge whether their expectations are reasonable, and so they need to TRUST that the IT organization e.g., can do what it promises to do by various deadlines, etc. (Of course, reciprocally, the expertise of a client organization is also involved, say that it can be trusted to get specs for a new system correct, that it will fully participate in the change management needed to properly get the new system welcomed and running well, etc.)

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I A N :I F A R E L AT I O N S H I P I S S T R A I N E D , W H AT A P P R O A C H D O Y O U R E C O M M E N D T O H E L P I M P R O V E I T ?

• Relationships at all levels are greatly facilitated by a strong communications platform, but no matter how transparent and efficient the use of various technologies are in this platform , it will always help (be necessary?) to incorporate direct, face-to-face in-person contact between individuals, and this takes time, and a long term approach. e.g., it is much  harder to handle a difficult situation with another person if the first meeting those people have together is about that difficult situation - I have found it a good watchword to go and see various people that you/your organization might interact with just to touch base, understand their point of view, see whether there is something they could do together, any changes now that might help avoid crises, NOT PROMPTED by a crisis itself. Over time, this will surely help to build trust, and a relationship that can help greatly if/when a crisis occurs.

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I A N :I S T H E R E A N Y T H I N G E L S E Y O U W O U L D L I K E T O M E N T I O N T H AT W O U L D H E L P B U I L D B E T T E R R E L AT I O N S H I P S T O F O S T E R C O L L A B O R AT I O N O N C A M P U S ?

• It has never ceased to amaze me how differently people of good will can perceive the same circumstances to be. This is part of the reason that I have come to believe that we should all strive to go what we perceive to be MORE than half way towards others in order to work collaboratively together (e.g., suppose we try to go exactly half way only, and the other person/organization tries to go exactly half way only - then any perceptual difference between the parties could lead to a gap, in which one party judges that the other is not going far enough to meet in the middle, and the relationship is badly damaged/broken thereby).

• Two people/organizations working together successfully depends critically on their relationship. Over time it can be helpful, for this relationship, to practice working together, say on a smaller project initially, before embarking on a big project . This may be especially useful to think about in a situation where a relationship is strained. 

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FINAL THOUGHTS (1 OF 2)

• Don’t forget where you came from• The Waterloo way, and proud of it. • Wear your university hat when you go to meetings with colleagues

across campus.• When you retire or leave the university, people will forget what you

did, but will never forget how you made them feel. • It’s a small world. Don’t burn bridges.• Act professionally in bad times. • Be reliable.

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FINAL THOUGHTS (2 OF 2)

• Lots of retirements in the next 5 years. The university will survive, and there is potential to be stronger. The next generation of IT leaders need to have the right skills. Ability to build collaborative relationships, leadership, vision are 3 of the “right skills”.

• Leadership happens at all levels...from front-line, to management to CIO. • The client perspective is very important, as we define new services, eliminate

services, explore the Lean way of doing things. IT is an important part of Lean. • Don’t lose touch with our clients – faculty, staff, students, and everyone we

interact with (peers, campus partners, vendors). An example of this is understand client needs (e.g. sharing files).

• Hope is the campus community will want to use our IT services, as opposed to have to use our services (the old way of thinking).

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QUESTIONS

• Here Comes the Sun