Archive for the ‘leadership training’ Category

How CIOs Can Manage Their Star Power

Wednesday, September 21st, 2011
Image Credit CIOs Need To Treat Stars Just A Bit Differently…

CIOs Need To Treat Stars Just A Bit Differently…

I won’t let the CIOs that I work with make a mistake. When they start to go off in the wrong direction, I grab them by the collar and yank them back on the path to IT glory. Lately I’ve been doing a whole lot of yanking and the reason is that for some odd reason CIOs just don’t seem to understand how to manage their star talent…

Stars Deserve Special Treatment

Jean Martin and Conrad Schmidt are researchers who have been looking into why CIOs should not be treating all of their employees the same.. What they have discovered goes against what most of us hold to be a workplace rule that is set in stone: treat everyone equally.

I’ve been telling the CIOs that I work with this for years: your star employees are special, that means that you need to treat them differently from all of the other IT employees. As you can well imagine, this type of guidance does not always go over very well. We all have some sort of built-in desire to level the playing field for everyone. This means that if we have to cut back, everyone needs to feel the pain. If we are going to be handing out rewards, everyone should benefit equally.

It turns out that this is the wrong thing to be doing. The reason is because all of your IT workers are not performing the same amount of work. Studies have shown that your star employees are potentially putting in up to 20% more effort than the rest of your IT staff.

If you don’t want your star IT employees to leave, then you’re going to have to give them what they really want: recognition. The #1 way that a CIO has to do this is through pay. Before you start pushing back and saying that the rest of the IT department is going to revolt, let me assure you that that just isn’t so. In fact, it turns out that most of your workers are going to be happy with a two-tier system – because they believe that they will eventually reach the higher tier and will be rewarded once they get there.

Stars Need To Drink The Corporate Kool-Aid

The reason that CIOs need to identify and then spend time developing star IT talent is because you hope that someday these are the individuals who will eventually lead the company’s IT department. This isn’t going to happen if you don’t take steps to get your stars hooked into the company’s strategy.

What CIOs need to realize is that your star IT talent is already highly aware of how the company is doing even if you are not talking to them about it. This is why if you want to keep them on board, you are going to have to create programs that will involve them in creating and reviewing the company’s strategic direction.

There are a lot of ways to go about doing this. One is to invite star employees to meetings where components of the strategy are being discussed and developed. A follow-on to this is to set up forums, either in person or online, where your star talent can discuss the company’s strategy and even offer their suggestions. All of this will lead to more star employee engagement and will make them more willing to stay with the company over the long haul.

What All Of This Means For You

Preventing CIOs from making mistakes is a big part of many of my days. When it comes to how best to handle the rising stars in an IT department, there are a lot of mistakes that CIOs tend to make.

The first is trying to be fair and treat everyone in the IT department equally. If you do this, then you run the risk of being unfair to your stars and having them end up leaving you. The next is to forget to make sure that your stars are closely tied in to the company’s corporate strategy. Since you are expecting them to eventually to play a key role in making that strategy happen, you need to involve them in it now.

Star IT employees are NOT like everyone else. They require extra care and feeding by CIOs. Yes, this does require more of a CIOs precious limited time; however, by making this investment now you can save yourself the additional expense in having to search for a replacement for your stars after they have gotten fed up and left the firm…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: How much more do you think it is fair for a star IT employee to make over a run-of-the-mill IT employee?

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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Don’t look now, but there’s something wrong in the world of CIOs. The CIOs that I’m working with are being asked to do more and more for their companies. It would be fair to say that IT has become an indispensible part of the companies that these CIOs work for. Then can you tell me why at some companies CIOs don’t report directly into the CEO?

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CIOs Know That Trial By Fire Is The Best Way To Pick New IT Leaders

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011
Image Credit True IT Management Talent Is Forged In The Fires Of Challenge

True IT Management Talent Is Forged In The Fires Of Challenge

I’ve got some bad news for all of you CIOs out there: it turns out that 25% of the best workers in the IT department are planning on leaving within the next 12 months. Not to depress you even more, but it turns out that those internal job change programs that you have perhaps created that are intended to develop the next generation of IT leaders don’t seem to be working – 40% of the internal rotations that are made by IT “high-pots” (high potential) employees end up in failure. Let’s take a look at what problems you need to solve …

Problem: The Wrong People Are Managing Your Top Talent

Jean Martin and Conrad Schmidt are researchers who have been looking into what makes leadership transitions successful. What they have discovered is basically bad news for CIOs.

In order for a CIO to grow their star talent, CIOs need to be able to first identify who this talent is and then they need to find ways to put them in positions of increasing responsibility in order to get them ready to lead the company. All too often this isn’t happening.

The people in the IT department who are best able to initially identify high potential candidates are the front-line managers and directors who are supervising the majority of the IT workers. If developing the best and the brightest talent is left to these members of the IT department, it’s just not going to happen.

Instead, what needs to happen is that you as CIO need to actively participate in the process. This means that you need to work with frontline manager so that when potential star talent is identified, they can be slotted into development programs. Make sure that you reward managers for finding high-quality talent so that they’ll be motivated to share their best with you and won’t be tempted to hoard those workers that they believe can make their lives easier.

Problem: Playing Over-Protective Parent To Your Up-And-Coming Future IT Leaders

Once you’ve identified your star IT talent and you’ve got them enrolled in your talent development program, you really don’t want them to fail. Or do you?

All too often what CIOs do is to hand pick the assignments that are given to up-and-coming IT managers. The goal is to find positions where they will be challenged, but not too much. Since you’ve already invested time and energy in getting them this far (and since there are a limited number of stars), you really don’t want them to fall flat on their face. This means that you don’t want to place them in a position where they might fail.

This is the wrong thinking. Although yes, you really don’t want to put anyone in a situation where they can’t win, at the same time you do want to put your best performers in difficult situations so that they can have a chance to become “battle hardened”. The military does this all the time – you have to have seen actual combat if you want to eventually become a General someday.

Only by coming face-to-face with a truly difficult IT / business situation will your talent be able to prove their mettle. Yes, some will fold under the pressure, but you’d rather find it out now than later on when you’ve invested even more in them. Place your best talent in situations where they can prove that they really are the best that the IT department has to offer.

What All Of This Means For You

Nobody ever said that growing the next round of IT leaders was going to be easy, but who knew that it was going to be this tough? Ensuring that the firm has a deep bench of future talent is one of a CIO’s key jobs.

Mistakes that a CIO needs to avoid when developing talent include allowing top talent to be discovered and managed by lower-level IT department staff. These individuals are too important to be left to chance within the small world of a given department. The other mistake is for CIOs to work too hard to shield their star talent from failures. Talent needs to be exposed to challenging circumstances in order to be given the ability to fully develop.

CIOs need to understand that they can’t put their best and brightest staff in a closet with the hopes that they can bring them out when the need arises. Instead, they need to spend time every day working to ensure that the talent is growing and getting ready for the positions that they’ll eventually fill.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: What do you think that a CIO should do if a star talent is put into a position in which they fail?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I won’t let the CIOs that I work with make a mistake. When they start to go off in the wrong direction, I grab them by the collar and yank them back on the path to IT glory. Lately I’ve been doing a whole lot of yanking and the reason is that for some odd reason CIOs just don’t seem to understand how to manage their star talent…

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5 Ways For CIOs To Become (Much) More Important

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010
Image Credit It's Not Easy To Get To The Top Of IT!

It's Not Easy To Get To The Top Of IT!

Once you become the CIO you’d think that you’ve have it made. Now that you are living at the top of the IT pyramid, life should be grand – the long, hard struggle to reach this position is now over. Actually, the job is just beginning. What you need to do now is to find ways to make sure that the CIO becomes a (more) important part of your company’s success. Here are some suggestions for how you can make this happen.

It’s All About The Cloud

Just as much as the next guy, I hate to jump on the “what’s trendy in IT” bandwagon; however, it’s really starting to look as though this cloud computing thing is here to stay. Looks like you’re going to have to come up with ways to work it into your IT department’s strategy.

The key thing for you to do is to understand why it’s so important. Cloud computing offers the CIO the ability to kill two birds with one stone: you have the ability to reduce your IT costs while at the same time allowing the company to expand its IT footprint. Opportunities like this don’t come along often enough and so you had better jump on it while it’s available to you.

Flipping the 80/20 Rule

When you become the CIO, one of the first things that you’re going to discover is just how little money you have to spend. Oh, your IT budget might be huge and it may be growing larger every year, but the size of the funds that are actually available to you to spend on new projects and new initiatives is probably quite small by comparison.

So where’s all the money going? In a nutshell, most of your IT budget is going to be spent just keeping the lights on – maintenance on all of those embedded applications that run the company today. This has got to change.

As CIO you are going to have to get your sharp budget knife out and start making cuts. Any IT support functions that don’t contribute to moving the company forward need to be moved from the inside to the outside. Free up more IT budget for transformation projects and everyone will view you as the best CIO ever.

Growing The Business / Growing The Customer

Although you don’t often hear about the CIO being talked about in the same sentence that revenue growth is mentioned, this is what you need to make happen. The reason the business exists is to generate more money, the IT department has to play a role in this or it becomes unnecessary.

Make sure that you don’t do what some CIOs have done and go out and start selling your own products. The role of IT is to support what the company does. IT’s contribution to the company’s top line revenue should be a result of how it helps other departments become more efficient.

Following Business Processes From End-To-End

The role of CIO is unique in the company: you actually have very few restrictions on what you are permitted to do. This is a fantastic gift that you need to take advantage of.

With the ability to follow a process from where it starts in the company to where it ends, a CIO can find things that nobody else can: waste, miscommunications, opportunities for automation, etc.

Introducing Business Intelligence

Most businesses do a good job of collecting lots of data on how the business is running. Very few businesses do a good job of using the data that they’ve collected.

The CIO has an opportunity to implement business intelligence solutions that can provide the rest of the company with new insights. This type of value add is exactly what the rest of the company needs their CIO to do for them.

What All Of This Means For You

When you become CIO, the real work is just starting. You are going to have to be constantly looking for ways to add value to the rest of the company.

There are many ways for you to do this. Some rely on technology such as how best to use cloud computing or implementing business intelligence solutions. However, more of them have to do with the business side of IT: maximizing your IT budget and improving the company’s end-to-end business processes.

CIOs that focus on improving the company’s revenues will be spending their time wisely. By doing so, they’ll create an opportunity to hang around and do even greater things in the future…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: How do you think that a CIO can discover what the company’s end-to-end business processes are?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Successful CIO Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The time has never been better to make an impact in the success of your company as the CIO. However, there are a lot of different things that can conspire to distract you from tacking the tasks that really need your attention. Here’s a list of 5 items that should be on every CIO’s to-do list…

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Out Of Time, Out Of Talent – Why IT Departments Fail

Monday, September 1st, 2008

IT Departments Need To Hire From Outside To Avoid Business Stalls
A business stall can hit a company / IT department at any time. There can be many reasons for what causes a stall including having a premium product or abandoning a good market segment too early as a company goes looking for greener grass. If that was all that could happen to a company, that would surly be enough. However, there is one more key contributor that can cause an otherwise successful company to lose forward momentum and go into a tailspin: they run out of talent.

In this day of IT layoffs and downsizings, it doesn’t seem possible that a firm could run out of the IT talent that they need. However, it’s having a lack of IT leaders and their associated staff who have the necessary IT capabilities and interpersonal skills that are so desperately needed in order to execute the company’s strategy.

We’re not talking about not having enough SQL knowledgeable programmers here. Rather what we are discussing is a lack of specific required capabilities that are needed by the firm. These capabilities can include such things as the ability to sell complex IT solutions, or perhaps some special skill in marketing IT solutions to a given market segment. This lack of talent becomes most glaring when it occurs at the executive level within the company.

How Do Talent Shortages Happen? It turns out that most internal shortfalls in skills are a result of a company’s too strict adherance to a “promote from within” policy. What’s interesting about this is that this situation is most often seen in company’s that are lauded for their strong sense of corporate culture. This internal promotion policy serves the company poorly when the company’s business environment presents it with a novel challenge or when their competition suddenly increases.

What Role Does Experience Play? A big one it turns out. Rapidly developing events in a company’s market place require the company to quickly respond by modifying how it does business. Having a narrow set of experiences in the executive suite means that the company’s ability to quickly respond to such changes can be severely limited.

So What’s The Solution? Quick question – does your IT department have any program in place to formally monitor the balance between both company lifers vs. those who have been brought in from the outside both in the executive team and lower on down the management ladder? It’s the outsiders who are going to bring in fresh approaches and perspectives. Even if the firm does bring in outsiders, does it incorporate them into the company? Studies show that between 35%-40% of senior executives don’t make it past their first 18 months. The correct way to solve this problem is to set up a formal IT department policy that states that HR will work to ensure that there is a mix of management. A good suggestion for a mix ratio that seems to work is to ensure that there is between 10% – 30% of management that is from the outside.

Where does your IT department’s management talent come from – inside or outside? Does your company actively hire from the outside? How long do new senior managers seem to last? Why do they leave? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Posted in business, ceo, CIO, leadership, leadership training | 5 Comments »