In order to understand your IT workers, you need to understand what their jobs are like. Most IT jobs consist of doing work in a reoccurring cycle: define, design, create, test, deploy, repeat. When workers get their first IT job or when they jump onto a new program, this can all seem so very new and exciting. However, once they reach the fourth or fifth cycle, it all starts to see the same. They also start to ask the BIG question: why am I doing this and does anyone at the company really care?

Ultimately this is THE BIG question. I know that my IT team members have grown bored with their IT jobs once they seemed to be repeating themselves. An interesting point to understand here is that just when your IT staff become most valuable to the company, they are no longer interested in doing the job. If you've got an IT team working for you, this is going to be a big problem for you too.

There are two ways to deal with this type of "IT job cycle" burnout that actually work. The first is to have a manager who is a real leader. The phrase that we always used was "I'd crawl over broken glass for him." These folks are very rare, but you'd recognize them by the fanatical loyalty that they create in their teams. The few times that I've see such a boss in action, I could see that his/her team really felt that he "had their back" and they work hard to make sure that "They have his back." He was able to convey to them a real sense of purpose that was much larger than the current development cycle that the team was working on. I truly felt that the staff felt that they were truly part of a team.

Alternatively, since such leaders are few and far between, if each member of your team is working on a longer term self improvement project then they will also be able to see beyond the current development cycle. This can be as simple as going back to school, getting some flavor of Cisco certification, or simply tutoring under your project's DB Master. Because of the desire of IT staff to improve their technical knowledge that is our core, the ability to have this longer term goal makes them happier living in the here and now.

In the end, I guess that once you become aware that the staff realizes that they are working in a never ending development cycle, they may become dissatisfied. However, if you can provide your team with a goal that is longer term than your current development cycle, then you can create stability and retention within your team.


- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting - The Accidental IT Leader Blog