We all know that IT provides value to the rest of the company, but how much value? That’s the question that CIOs are always trying to answer.
Dr. Jim Anderson tackles this issue by taking a look at what HP’s former CIO Randy Mott did. It turns out that he found a way to solve this problem. Dr. Anderson explains and shows you how you can use Randy’s technique.
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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 …
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.
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.
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?
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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…
First the bad news: it turns out that 25% of the best workers in the IT department are planning on leaving within the next 12 months. Do I have your attention now? Not to depress you even more, but it turns out that those internal job change programs that are intended to develop the next generation of IT leaders don’t work – 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 …
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.
Among the companies that they studied, what they found is that way too many of your IT rising stars are planning on becoming leaders at other firms! Specifically, 25% are currently planning on leaving your company within one year, 33% are not fully committed to their job (slackers), 20% have different career goals than they think the company has planned for them, and 40% have little confidence in their coworkers or the company’s senior management.
Clearly you have a problem here – your best & brightest are feeling disengaged. As CIO you need to find ways to get them to reengage with the company and with their careers at your company.
The researchers say that you can get them to both reengage and remain at your company. However, it’s going to take both time and effort on your part. What you are going to need to do is to provide them with the one thing that they crave above all others – public recognition for the work that they are doing. On top of this, you need to find ways to integrate their actions more closely with the company. This means that the company’s goals need to become their goals and you need to find ways to allow them to help tackle the company’s biggest challenges.
Every IT worker wants to be classified as being a high-potential worker. What does this really mean? Researchers point out that what a company really wants from its high potential workers are leaders who will be able to grow into larger jobs and then deliver results in those jobs.
Studies have shown that more than 70% of the IT workers who are classified as being “high potential” still lack critical skills that will be needed in order be successful in future bigger jobs. What this means for you as CIO is that you may be wasting your precious limited talent development budget and resources on the wrong people.
The researchers say that there are three characteristics that a CIO should be looking for when trying to determine if it would be worthwhile to make further investments in a high-potential IT workers: ability, engagement, and aspiration.
Your best IT workers need to have both the hard (technical) and soft (management) skills needed to take on bigger jobs. Additionally they are going to have be engaged with both the company and its mission – if they don’t believe, they won’t be willing to help you achieve. Finally, the IT worker’s career goals, their aspirations, also need to be in line with what the company is both willing and able to provide them with.
The job of CIO actually has very little to do with technology and everything to do with developing people. Not all IT workers are created the same and CIOs really want to find ways to hold on to their best workers. The problem is that they aren’t doing a very good job of this.
In order to keep your best and brightest IT workers engaged, you are going to have to make a special effort to recognize them and work with them to make sure that what they are working on really matters to the company. Likewise, not all high-pots are created equal. Only the ones with ability, true engagement in what the company does, and aspirations that are in line with what the company can offer will be the ones who can grow into true IT leaders.
A CIOs most important job is to grow and nurture the next generation of IT talent that will lead the company. In order to do this you are going to have to invest a great deal of your time in ensuring that your best workers don’t leave. It is possible to do this, but it needs to become one of your top tasks. If you can do this correctly, then both your career and the company will benefit from it…
- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™
Question For You: What percentage of a CIOs time should be spent on developing the company’s top IT talent?
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As the world slowly recovers from its great economic recession, CIOs are gearing up to help their companies do battle with their competitors. Everywhere in this great land you can hear the same words being repeated “I want more innovation!” Umm, ok. It turns out that innovation doesn’t just happen. Instead you need a whole bunch of little changes first. Maybe I should explain…
Just imagine that amazing moment in the future when you finally become the CIO! Now imagine yourself all alone – none of the other “C” level executives want to play with you. What’s going on here?
Something is seriously wrong in the world of CIOs. In most companies they are not being treated as a member of the senior management team. Instead, they are viewed as being simply viewed as technical specialists. Dang, what’s gone wrong here?
If you take a moment and talk with the other senior managers who are actually running the company you’ll start to hear the same things over and over again. CIOs just aren’t seen as having enough of the general management skills that it takes to participate in the process of running a company of any significant size. Other managers view the CIO as more often than not lacking both the strategic vision as well as the basic interpersonal skills that it takes to be a true leader.
What makes this a bit of a double whammy for a CIO is that the very skills that got you to this top spot in IT may be the ones that are holding you back now. Although this doesn’t really seem fair, there is good news here.
It turns out that the skills that a CIO needs in order to succeed can be learned (have I mentioned that Blue Elephant Consulting can help in this area?). The key is to understand just exactly what skills you will need.
A classic CIO is someone who waits around to be told what to do instead of taking the lead. This skill is the way that most projects are run within the IT department – we get requirements from the customers / end users and then we apply our IT knowledge to solving their issues.
However, in the real world of business things don’t work that way. The CIO needs to be out in front showing true leadership. He / she needs to be uncovering the issues that are holding the company back and then showing the rest of the company what parts of solving that problem can be handled by IT and how the rest of the company has to lend a hand.
Since the world of IT is often insulated from the world outside of the company, most CIOs have never had to think about how their actions (and now the IT department’s actions) impact the company’s competitive posture.
For that matter, most CIOs probably don’t know what the company’s current strategy is. It never mattered before. Once you become the CIO these things start to become very important. The key question that the CIO needs to be able to answer (every day) is what is the IT department doing to implement the company’s strategy right now?
As though staying on top of everything that is going on in the world of IT wasn’t enough, CIOs also have to be aware of what’s going on the rest of the company as well as in its marketplace. Needless to say, it can be easy to become overwhelmed with lots and lots of raw information.
In order to be able to contribute to the management of the company, CIOs need to be able to take all of this information in and process it. The ability to synthesis lots and lots of inputs and then make solid well-thought out decisions is what the rest of the management team is expecting the CIO to be able to do.
Gone are the days when a CIO could afford to be a wallflower in the executive boardroom. IT is too critical to how every company hopes to succeed to allow the CIO to not be a vital part of the company’s management team.
In order to make this happen when you become CIO, you’re going to need to make sure that you have the skills that the other senior managers are going to be expecting you to have. This will include the ability to lead, to think strategically, and to process large amounts of information.
Although this may all strike you as being just a bit scary, don’t be put off. Everything is doable and now that you know what will be expected of you, you can get a head start on learning what you need to know…
- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™
Question For You: What do you think the #1 skill that a CIO must have is?
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I’m not sure if this is going to make you feel any better, but it turns out that most CIOs are showing up for work only partially dressed when you consider what skills they are missing. Maybe we’d better have a talk about this…
So you want to be a CIO someday. Great. However, there may be a bit of a problem with your goal — the position of CIO may be going away. In fact, in about 10 years or so (is that when you are planning on seizing the reigns of IT control?) the position may look completely different from how it looks today. Hmm, a moving target. Maybe we should talk with some current CIOs to find out just what’s going on here…
Over at CIO Insight magazine they just got done doing their annual survey of CIOs. The results were, to say the least, eye-opening. The answer to the most asked question about the need for CIOs to have business skills is still a definite YES.
Current CIOs report that they are acting as much as business leaders as technology leaders. The days in which a CIO could lost himself / herself in the world of IT and be left alone appear to be long gone.
There is a bit of a double standard going one here however. CIOs are reporting that although they are being asked to implement programs that will result in fundamental business improvements, the position of CIO is still being pushed back to the second tier of senior management.
With all of this talk of business skills, won’t CIOs need to have solid technical knowledge going forward? The answer appears to be yes, but. CIOs are saying that the job skills that they use most include finance, business process modeling, written and spoken communications, and just a bit of sales and marketing skills. I sure didn’t see servers, bandwidth, application security, or API knowledge anywhere on that list.
In fact, CIOs are reporting that the folks who are currently getting hired into IT positions have, can you believe it, even less business knowledge than people did just two years ago. This is quickly going to cause a problem: there are going to be very few qualified candidates to become CIO over the next few years. Can anyone say “opportunity”?
You might be asking yourself, so what skills do I need to be working on to take advantage of the need for business savvy CIO candidates that will be coming in the future?
The list is actually fairly short. To start with, you need to have very good public speaking skills and the leadership skills that will be required to implement what you talk about. A detailed understanding of the business that you are working for (like how they REALLY make their money) and a solid understanding of corporate finance.
There is, of course, more to this list. Once you’ve mastered the basics, then you’ll have to keep adding skills. Today’s CIOs report that you’ll also need to know how to master the strategic use of information, how to lead enterprise-wide changes, perform business model innovation, and improve business processes.
The report from today’s CIOs is not all good. It sure looks like CIOs are currently being treated as second-class citizens in the C-suite. However, as we all know, IT is not going away and it sure is not getting any less important. I’m thinking that CIOs are actually going to become more important over time.
CIOs are reporting that although business skills are becoming an even more important part of the set of tools that a CIO needs to have, fewer and fewer IT hires are coming with these skills. Clearly this is opening the door for those who dream of someday becoming the CIO.
Although it looks like you might have a shot at the top spot, it’s not going to be handed to you. You’re going to have to work at it. We’ve laid out the skills that you need to develop. Not go out there and get ready for the day that they call your name to become the firm’s next CIO…!
Do you think that the position of CIO will still exist in 10 years?
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Forget the whole alignment thing, is it possible that a CIO’s behavior is the root of the problem that the IT side of the house and the business side of the house have never been able to get along? Could it be that this is the secret as to why there has always been such a gap between these groups?
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