Blogging SIGUCCS: Tongue-Fu
When I go to conferences like these, I tend to shake-down the university for the couple hundred extra bucks it takes for me to attend one of the pre-conference workshops. These tend to focus on individual professional development, whereas the main conference sessions are (rightfully so) more topical. I also tend to take as much, if not more, from these half-day sessions as I do from the 5-10 two hour sessions of the conference proper.
For SIGUCCS, I chose a session called “Tongue-Fu: Dealing with Difficult People Without Becoming One Yourself”. At first shot, there are two areas the session has covered that I found particularly engaging:- When dealing with an exceptionally upset or unhappy person (could be an end user or, more likely in my day-to-day work, a staff or faculty), we should intervene with wishes instead of reasoning. This is striking because it runs counter to the discipline of troubleshooting technology — we are taught to rely on logic and reasoning to break down issues into logical components and find the component where the problem is happening. This approach is still necessary, but our support staff (and me, as well) must be trained to save the reasoning until after we’ve empathized with the user (“I wish this wasn’t happening. Let’s see what I can do for you…”) This is a complicated distinction and one that is not intuitive for most of us.
- Over the last year, as the number of people that I work for went up, my boss counseled me to play to their strengths, to put them in positions where they can best use what they are good at to succeed. One of the topics in this session put it another way: “We tend to overvalue what someone is not, and undervalue what they are.”
- “Any fool can work for a living. Invest your money.”
- “Beer is proof that God exists and wants us to be happy.”
- “Work to live, don’t live to work.”