I was reading Kevin Eikenberry’s blog this evening, specifically his post on the Most Overlooked Networking Opportunity, about networking within your organization, and this bit really caught my eye:

Be a silo buster. If your organization operates in a fragmented, highly departmentalized, siloed way, decide to be the silo buster. All these ideas can help you do this, but the point here is to make a conscious decision to network with the purpose of building relationships that will begin to break down these barriers.

That certaily sounds like most IT departments to me. How many IT departments have a tech/(l)users mentality, where you don’t really see the people you supports as anything more than users, and they don’t see you as much more than a bad SNL skit? How much better would things work if your IT techs were seen as actual human beings? In this economic climate, how much more value to you appear to be bringing to the table when everyone knows you, talks to you, and respects you, when you’re taking the time to learn about what they do and how technology might be able to help? How much could that value mean when it comes time to decide who to lay off?

Give it a shot, you might be surprised just how talented and interesting those (l)users are.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 7:32 pm and is filed under Career, Mike McBride. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.