The Vital Communicator

Communicating in the Modern IT Landscape with David Mantica

• Tommy Re

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As organizations get flatter and more project-oriented, the agile framework that once dominated corporate IT departments is getting phased out. Now IT professionals need to work in smaller teams where self-leadership is more important than ever. In this episode, Tommy and training expert David Mantica explore how the IT industry has changed, where it’s heading, and what skills you can develop to stay ahead of the changing tide. 

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Tommy

If you need a case study in how the workplace is changing, look no further than the IT industry. As organizations get flatter and more project-oriented, the agile framework that once dominated corporate IT departments is getting phased out. Now IT professionals need to work in smaller teams where self-leadership is more important than ever. My colleague David Mantica has over 30 years of corporate training experience, and he specializes in empowering IT professionals with the skills they need to communicate effectively. In today’s episode, David and I explore how the industry has changed, where it’s heading, and what skills you can develop to stay ahead of the changing tide. Let’s get started.
 
 Hey, David, thanks for coming in today. It's great to have you in the studio.
 
 David

Thank you, Tommy. Thank you very much for having me. You bet. We very much appreciate it. 

Tommy

We've got David Mantica, the vice president and general manager of SoftEd here in the US. Tell me a little bit about your background. I don't know if all of our listeners are familiar with what you do at SoftEd. 

David

So been in the business to business training, corporate training space for 30 years now, since 1995. So different companies, large companies to small companies, SoftEd Skills Development Group. We are a small US based training company focused on teaching people how to deal with complex work environments, specifically in IT, using different frameworks and different processes to manage projects, to gather requirements and how to integrate Gen. AI into that as well. And then we're owned by a company out of New Zealand actually and we have little groups in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore as well. The thing for me is I just always love corporate training. Been out of it for a little bit. Drew me back in because it's like you're selling growth, like you're selling future
 opportunities, you're selling the ability for somebody to go from step A to step B and maintain their job and do a better job. You know, I just, I just for me it was just been so great because I just never saw myself selling a box or you know, selling maybe access to software. Yeah, that's great. I think that's one of the reasons why I enjoy being around you so much. 

Tommy

I think we share a lot of that in common and what we do at Vital is similar but a little bit different. You work more in the IT space. And today our conversation is going to be around teams and I think teams have transformed a lot over the last 20 years.
 
David

Especially in IT, yeah, especially in IT with agile methodology. So even the basic project methodology before, I mean IT was found in the midst of it like individual contributor, right, the guru in the in the back closet coding away. The engineer making the plumbing of the Internet work, right. This idea, the Super person Cape, the idea that that one person can really drive it and be successful. And this whole hero mentality, you know, kind of a Rambo mentality in a lot of cases. And that was pervasive for a long time. And then there was a lot of pushback about the quality of the output, longevity of IT professionals, the ability to actually really do what was needed. Sometimes IT just did the did the do because it was cool and there's lots of examples of that in corporate America where that's occurred and really affected companies. So we've had this transition I would say really since the mid 2000s when outsourcing didn't work because there was a trend towards outsourcing programming and IT support and just didn't give the outcomes that people were looking for. So when they brought it, started bringing it back in, there were people looking at more effective. Efficient, smart ways to provide IT output and not kill themselves, kill the people around them and not just build stuff to build stuff. Yeah. 

Tommy

And what did that look like? Did that look like adding more team-based
 work to projects?

David

It started out by, you know, looking at positions first. That's right. There really was this huge gap between the business and IT. Right. And maybe there was a manager somewhere that did some translation. Maybe the director of IT would work with some of the business stakeholders, but for the most part it was a wide gap. They had some needs, they listened a little bit and then they figured it out. So the first step is adding quasi technology professionals into the system to help translate. 

Tommy

So what's a quasi technology?

David

A project manager is a quasi technology professional business analyst. Is a quasi technology professional and you know now there's going to be over 86 million people doing some type of project work in the US or not US internationally by 2023. I mean it is a tried and true position of the institute that does it started in 1969, but it really took off you know late 90s, early 2000s. So what you did is you just started adding quasi tech. Roles that would either spend more time with the tech group and a little bit with the business or more time with the business, a little bit of a tech group to trying to do these translation services and then try to make sure the project was run with some type of cohesion. And this is back in the day when a business would be for IT would be like 80% operations and then 20% projects. Now it's the exact opposite. IT is really. 70, 80% projects and 20, 30% operations. So there's just constant projects going on, right? 

Tommy

So when you think about projects, projects are executed by teams. 

David

That's right. That's the only way it's executed, right?

Tommy

So, so you know, we're all about communication here. What implications have there been for communication as a result of this reshaping the way work gets done. Yeah, in terms of what people, what skills people need or where people are maybe under skilled because they've been working in a silo before. 

David

I think the first thing is under skilled. I mean there was a very huge value attribute for the tech side of your experience, right? There was a very diminished view of the professional side of your experiences. You know, sticky in the closet, do your coding and you're a superstar. As that's eroded that what's because of the complexity of the projects, because of the complexity of needs, there's become more and more of a value associated with getting things done. In IT, that's very important, getting things done right. And the only way you can really get things done in complex and complicated environments is communication process. And frameworks. So you mentioned the agile framework. So the agile framework really tried to get smaller teams that were more intimately knowledgeable of what the customer wanted and then work in such a way as to constantly review to make sure that what they were doing made sense. So a project in the old school methodology might take. 15 months. An agile project might take 15 months as well, but there's every four weeks there's a check and you're rechecking and reevaluating and rechecking and reevaluating with all the communication going back to the business. Because what you want is you want to make sure that you're building something that these business people will actually use, right?

So you have to, you have to have the IT group has to be able to present those. Ideas, those deliverables, listen, listen, get feedback and process it and put it into their projects and put it back in their project. And all Agile did, Tommy, was put into a framework, right? Waterfall framework. You had a beginning and an end, you know, stair step. Agile said let's get rid of the stair step and let's put everything together in increments of time block boxes. So you don't have to worry about the plan because the plan will adjust. You don't have to worry about the scope. The scope will adjust, but you do have to worry about. When you're in that time box, you're working and you pop out of the time box, you review again, you get back in the time box, you review, you get back in the time box. But since it's all the same communication skills, it's just done within a certain structure. That's what Agile really ended up being. Now some people say there was no structure to Agile, but the reality is there is a good deal of process and thought and ceremony

Tommy

With Agile teams, David, do members of the team come in and out based on where they are?

David

Yeah, that's a big problem. They don't like that, right? So Agile was built to be something where you could actually keep a team together and have that team become a really high performance team over time. And then that team understands their strengths and weaknesses and can properly forecast. But that's not corporate America. So you've had to get very comfortable with. The production resources, that's a bad word to call people. People who are doing the work will pivot in and out. And then what you're doing is you're having these consistent positions that would orchestrate the communications. And that was where the term the scrum master came to be. And that was just basically the good, the orchestrator of the agile way of working. So as people moved in now, that person can keep, at least keep the orchestration going. 

Tommy

OK. So you can almost think of it like the conductor, right? 

David

Yeah, that's what ends up being.

Tommy

You may have a different first chair violin this year than you did last year.

David

And you have to understand how to work with that and you might have to educate that person more deeply into how to work in an agile way, how they do the story point estimating, how to deal with work within a retrospective. 

But what's happened because of speed and overhead companies have begun, especially large enterprise companies have begun to really chop their agile. Structures and go back to say these production resources have learned enough that they don't need the orchestrators. OK, they could do it themselves. Capital One is 1 company that did that. You can see Amazon did that with their agile and Meta's done that with their agile. And there's a lot of other companies that we've seen do this. And then what you're saying is I don't need the scrum master, I don't need the product owner, the team that's doing the work. The business analysts will do their things. They understand how to be agile. The tester will do their things. They understand how to be agile. The developer will do their things. They understand how to be agile. They don't need to be orchestrated. 

Tommy

OK, so do they consider that a self-directed team? It sounds like a team that doesn't have a leader. 

David

Well, there's two things that happen with regard to agile. When you have your orchestration, that's a self-direct, that's a self-managed team, right? And that self-managed team is the team is given empowerment to make decisions about how they do their work. As things as you get strip aside, you know this orchestration piece, you're really getting the self leadership where each person doesn't even really have the team to rely on. They have to, they have to fit themselves into the production. They have to have the empowerment to understand that they have to take the responsibility to do it. And they have to deal with all the negotiation, the conflict, the frustration, all that stuff that occurs, the facilitation of the discussion to get things done. 

Tommy

So I think that brings up a point in terms of what are the specific skills that today's IT professionals really need to be successful when it comes to communication and interpersonal dynamics. 

David

Obviously the technical skills are the they're the ante. We're talking about the professional skills. And there's also a middle skill, which is power skills, which you get into. So really as an IT professional, I'm going to bring my technical skills to bear, but I have to remember they erode rapidly now. So I have to be really the biggest technical skill I can bring to the table is quick learner. Can I learn rapidly? Can I process new information quickly and absorb it and then figure out how do I adjust my technical acumen for that? And that's a huge challenge right now. And that's why you see a lot of disruption in technical positions because you just can't rely on that. So those are the technical skills on the power skill side. These are the things like system thinking, these are things like critical thinking, these are things like problem solving, right. And we're not really talking about that yet. What we want to get into and what you mentioned was the power. Excuse me, the professional skills. 

So you know, I see a stack that I talk about a lot and the stack starts with emotional intelligence. And I think you can't do anything in difficult IT environments about true emotional intelligence. And you probably say the same thing. Then you stack facilitation and negotiation. I mean, you've got to facilitate, you've got to negotiate and some people might flipflop, but then you have conflict. So you can even say something more like. All right. You have emotional, emotional intelligence. Then you can deal with conflict. Then you can facilitate and negotiate. Because if you can't facilitate and negotiate, if you're that individual person having to say, OK, what's my value, what's your value, which one are we going to do and move forward and keep working, it's going to stalemate. Then you have change. And that's what I'm seeing most in the IT side of corporate America around professional skills are dealing with change and dealing with conflict. And then the very top. Is where the magic happens, and that's influence. The best IT professionals is going to have the tech skills. They're going to understand system thinking, critical thinking. They're going to understand the difference between value attributes and they're going to be able to influence. Yeah, that influence skill is so critical. And even on your side, right? 

Tommy

Yeah, we talk about that. We talk about that all the time. And sometimes when we're in training programs with participants. We dissect it from the real world so that we can get a microscope on it and really look at kind of the sub skills that are underneath influence and persuasion. But it's really important to be able to bring that back so that they can see how it plays into their day-to-day. 

David

And it's so hard because they're already worried about this, right? They're already worried about the tech skills. They're already worried about, you know, am I thinking of value? Am I critically thinking? Am I looking at perspectives that might happen? Now I have to do this. And I think that's really one of the biggest struggles in IT as they flatten even more as they're starting to get rid of some of the framework constructs like agile, even flattening away from traditional PMI project management is you're really forcing people to have to bring in. Those three areas to be successful. And I think what will happen is there'll be some other communication framework that gets put in that's not there yet. And I think it'll have a lot to do with AI. So I think AI will come in and take some of the Artifact development and some of the orchestration away and that will do that with generative AI and then the team will be smaller because a smaller team can perform better given the you know as long you know you got to be careful of that. But you can usually a smaller team can perform better and I think that's what's going to happen. You have an AI tool, you're going to have a team that the AI tool is going to be used for a lot of the artifact, controlling the project, understanding the things they're supposed to do and then they're driving the production forward. 

Tommy

So there's so much we can talk about with AI and let's do that, come back and we'll talk about it again. But what are the implications for the managers?

David

So all this new change, management positions are going the way in IT. I mean, it's not a necessity. You'll see it in like help desk stuff. You'll see it maybe in the manager running a large department, but they're more going to be more strategic and they're going to rely on their teams to manage themselves to drive the work and that's part of the cost savings that companies are trying to get. 

Tommy

Do you think there's any danger in having not as much connection to leadership in an approach like that? 

David

There could be and so that you know your risks are going to tie to you know, You build these really highly skilled people and Tommy, these people can command 350, four, $500,000 a year. We're not talking, we're talking some serious money. They put a kind of a title called technical program management on some of these roles, right? One is they become free agents. Just like back in the day when you were a really good routing professional back in the early 2000s, you could plumb plumber anything for the Internet. You were just going between companies. They would. So I think you got loyalty issues, right. I think you got going back again to I'm just going to do what I think is right, not tying it back to, you know, where the company is going. So I think there's some issues associated with that. 

And I think there's going to be some issues with flow, right, because I just don't have the skills to get through the conflict. Yeah. So there's not going to be flow and you know a good manager understands flow. They're getting their teams operating. There's a flow going on. Daniel Kahneman talks about that and system one system to thinking you're highly cognitive but you're flowing because there's psychological safety and you know you got you're connected to what you're supposed to do. 

Tommy

So but someone still has to set that up. So whether there's five managers. In the past and now there's only two-

David

There might be one.

Tommy

Those two or one that manager, that leader has to be -

David

Some of it, some of it they're going to get from the team. 

Tommy

So OK, so they're going to, they're going to move some of that over. 

David

So the team is really managing some of those things, the conflict. 

Tommy

So in order to do that, in order to do that well, all the team members need to be familiar with these concepts and techniques. 

David

PMI. Yeah, Project Management Institute. I do a ton of presentations for them. My gosh, I can tell you hundreds just got off of one and it was emotional intelligence and they eat it up. And these are somewhat technical, highly skilled professionals who may not have gone to management school. They probably don't have their MBA, but they're managing in complex environments and they're just eating up. But yeah, The thing is tougher though, is that companies don't necessarily want to pay for the more in-depth stuff. But I'm talking about this like in an hour session. 

Tommy

Yeah, we see that a lot. I was on a podcast the other day and someone asked me about that and I said the same thing. I said we've got it as instructional designers, as learning and development professionals, we have to help persuade our customers that you're not going to get that much out of one hour. You can't change behavior. It's a great starting place. It's a catalyst to get people thinking. But when it comes to skill development and the name of your group, the Skills Group, right, is all about giving people the opportunity to practice skills. 

David

That's all we are. We don't do any e-learning at Skills Development Group. There's no e-learning, which is heresy for most training companies. It's all live online or live physical and it's all building skills, art and science. So we're not doing the commercial for the company. What I'm saying is that these positions are art and science. These positions require a nuance of managing through a bunch of muck that they're not going to rely on the manager to help them hold their hand. They're going to have to do it themselves, and they're going to have to be able to work through things. And on top of all this, you've got to throw conflict in because you've got to flow cognitive diversity in because the great ideas. Come out of throwing cognitive diversity, good debate, dissenting voices. And of course, if you're highly stressed, that's the word. You just freak out, just fall apart. So there's a lot of dynamics. 

Tommy

So that's a big challenge for IT because they're under so many time constraints. And so that just that adds a lot of stress.

David

And more people know ITI mean marketing, the marketing VP, the CRO sometimes has more IT dollars than the CIO. Because technology is moving into been in marketing forever, if not growing is moving into sales. Technology is really stretching. So what happens is you’re your IT group doesn't necessarily know where is it where it quite fits. That's typical IT like help desk and software. I mean excuse me, help desk and applications. It's that programming group that's the gold in most companies now. It's the app developments, the people who manage the inventory control system, the point of sale system, the mortgage origination software, the financial update system, the ERP. I mean, these systems are gold. I mean, when you look at Fidelity Investments, they're an IT company, yeah. I mean you're engaging Fidelity because it's beautiful website, it's great tools, it's ease of use of moving your money around. Do I even speak to a broker? A lot of times you're Fidelity, maybe speak that, never sometimes a couple times, but you're engaging because of that environment. And so it's a it's a wild time. Yeah. 

Tommy

So I know, I know that we have a lot of listeners and viewers that are managers and managers in IT. We also have a lot of. Individual contributors that are looking to build their communication skills, whether they're in IT or pharmaceuticals or insurance, whatever it might be. What advice would you give professionals today, whether they're young professionals coming out of school or seasoned professionals, about learning to communicate better in teams?

David

It's really easy, actually. We have to teach people how the brain operates. There's been a lot of conversation now, which is great, about, you know, understanding the neurological function of our brains. And I like to talk about how your brain is the worst thing for knowledge work. Your brain is built directly opposite of what you need for knowledge work. So learning how what elements of the brain affects your abilities. To fit in the knowledge work, then can help you better understand emotional intelligence, right? Then can better understand how do you negotiate because you know what's going on both inside your mind and your head as well as what's going on inside somebody else's, right? You know, I, you know, you label somebody a jerk and you realize they're suffering from loss regret. They're scared to change, yeah. You know, they're not a jerk. Their brain is wired that change means I have to think. I don't want to think. I'm scared of it. Don't tell me I should change. So, OK, once you understand that, then you can gauge that person differently with different storytelling techniques to get them to try to get beyond their lost regret. So I think getting in and really understanding the operation of the human brain and understanding how it's different than it doesn't necessarily fit knowledge work. And what that means. And then also I think just some basic psychological tools like cognitive behavioral therapy, I think is understanding CBT and where beliefs build thoughts, thoughts and thoughts build feelings, thoughts and feelings build behaviors and actions. It's a great way for self-awareness and emotional intelligence. 

Tommy

Yeah. So it really sounds more like personal development than training. 

David

I think you can train it though. 

Tommy

You can learn it in a classroom through a training experience. But these topics are really lifelong development topics that we can still work on and we can continue to grow. 

David

You almost can't like sit still, right? You just have to be able to say, OK, gosh, I forgot, I'm predisposed to pessimism because that's how we evolved, right? Let me go back and reevaluate my growth mindset because of that pessimism. Oh, crap. I know I'm pessimistic. So this change initiative is coming down. I can already hear the negative self-talk. OK, let me take a step back, reprocess, reframe and maybe come back and look at a different perspective. And that's where, you know, in most anything around this type of training, somebody at some point is going to talk about the growth mindset, right. And at least in IT, the large corporations have embraced that. Now a lot of people think it's phooey, phooey, right? But I go back to they're all logical science of your emotional brain, your cognitive brain, the neurotransmitters that are occurring based on fear seeking for fear versus seeking systems. And it's like, guys, you can't Foo Foo this. Your growth mindset is going to produce, you know, natural chemicals that are going to drive curiosity. It's going to make you feel more open to learning something new. Or you could sit there and be, you know, this sucks and you're going to build up cortisol and forget about it. You're not going to be able to cognate. 

Tommy

Well, that's really interesting. I think we use the DiSC model and DiSC instruments and tools to help people start to understand some of their own work styles, their own preferences, aspects of their personality. What other tools are out there that you like?

David

I'm not a big tool guy. It's funny I should be, but I'm not. And I think you'd be better tuned to really talk through that. I'm a pragmatist in a lot of ways. I sometimes tease and say, I don't know if I quite agree with the tools. Maybe that's part of my, you know. Anti culture in some ways, but the best, best, best, best, best tool regardless of what vendor you're going to use is a 360 evaluator. I would tell you without a doubt. And even if you could do a 180 evaluation, just being able to get outside yourself. I mean, I wrote an article once many years ago about doing the family 360. It would be great to sit down with your kid and say how do I really be honest and tell me?

Tommy

How am I doing?

David

How am I doing? Go to your wife one day and your partner, whomever it's going to be and say how I'm doing, it's going to scare you a little bit. I think, I think we live in bubbles and those bubbles develop heuristic patterns and we use those heuristic patterns over and over again without realizing they're to our detriment, right. So I think a really well done 360 or 180 evaluation if you don't include customers is a great tool to help. You at least begin to see yourself in a different perspective and see maybe some of the externalities. Like in the presentation they did just recently, I talked about, you know, a pig pen from the peanuts, right? You see his externality, right? You can at least see it. We don't see it unless somebody comes to us and tells us we don't see that pile of muck that we create. Within our daily work. And so I think that's the best tool. Now what vendor? I don't know. But there's, I would say the 360 or two, was it 270 or 180, whatever my geometric, you know, angles are supposed to be there. But I would say that was the best tool.

Tommy

Yeah, that's a great tool. I think any of those things that help build that self-awareness, you know, there are a ton of great tools out there and there also needs to be qualified people that can help individuals go through and work through their results. 

David

Let's talk about this for a second. You know, you ever watch the show Billions. You ever hear the show Billions? 

Tommy

No. 

David

Basically, I heard high, high, high end hedge fund, you know, scammy brokers. But the skinny was high performance, high stress. Number one position was a psychiatrist psychologist whose job was to just ensure that the team is operating as peak efficiency as possible. I do think there's room for a corporate psychologist and I'm sure there's some, you know, liability concerns associated with that, but. Well, look, look at what's been going on right now. 

Tommy

First of all, look at sports and athletes. Oh, they all have their top performing athletes, musicians, any performer. that is at the top of their industry. 

David

They're having a therapist, right? Like a therapist. It'd just be some type of business guru, psychological guru, someone who's in there helping them. 

Tommy

Yeah, and you even got the democratization of coaching now, right? With better up and better help. They're a little bit different, but you see more and more of that. 

David

Well, because there's so many talented people. It's like this world has so many talented people. It's not just one guru like Marshall Goldsmith. Or Tony Robbins or something like that. No, there's lots of great talent out there. Yeah, absolutely. But yes, I would say to me, I get really excited about that. I don't quite see the trend. Yeah. I know some companies that have a corporate preacher. Yeah. You know, someone who comes in, helps with marital issues and that's got to be more of a private company, but it's under the same concept, the same concept. 

Tommy

So I think in many ways until that, we have more, more of that, that's part of the manager's role. And you know, managers, you would, you would say, well, you know, we're not trained to be psychologists. Well, managers aren't trained to be lawyers, but they need to know the law. They need to know employment law. And so in the same way, managers need to upskill themselves about how to help people. 

David

Yeah, it's no longer about them. A manager is all about the performance of the team, right? How to bring out the best in their people. It's not just delegating work, it's helping people thrive. And that all happens through communication. Well, the sad thing about the management side of things that kind of broke it down, I think, is the failure to understand that the best performer isn't the best manager. And it's so pathetic how that happens in sales organizations particularly. Oh, that's a person that meets quota all the time. We're going to make that person be the sales manager. It's the exact opposite skill. Successful salespersons myopically focused on themselves and reaching their goals, right? Was that a good manager? Right. So what you said there is beautiful. The challenge, though, is we really haven't truly understood that that manager job is about getting the most of the team. And that's what the Scrum Master is supposed to do, right? And the Agile construct, the Scrum Master is supposed to, when done right, get the most out of that team, right? And help that team grow and get them not only to produce high value, high quality, but do so in the proper time box. Yeah, 32 hours. If you're not working 40 hours, you got to go to the bathroom, you can have lunch. You got to do all those human things and not doing it in 50 hours and no bathroom breaks. So helping people develop like that, develop the communication skills to be able to do that. That's something that we have in common. 

Tommy

This has been a great conversation. I really appreciate it. I want to keep going on this conversation. Let's talk next time about the role of AI in building organizations and building teams. 

David

So it's going to be so great if they do it right. If we do it right, it's going to solve a lot of problems. But I don't know if we're going to do it right. We'll see. Well, my right. I could be wrong. 

Tommy

David, it's great to have you. Thanks so much for coming to the studio. I appreciate it. 

David

No problem, brother. 

Tommy

OK, see you.

David

Bye bye.

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