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Executive Coach: Better IT Through Cooperative Leadership

By Susan Cramm

January 01, 2006 — CIO —

Leadership is said to be a lonely job; the CIO job particularly so. CIOs often sound like Adlai Stevenson when he was running for political office: "This has sometimes been a lonely road, because I never meet anybody coming the other way."

Businesspeople have a hard time knowing how to meet IT halfway—the people and inner workings of IT often remain a mystery. IT managers also have difficulty helping the CIO strike the right balance among innovation, service, compliance, operational continuity and the financials, because their functional boundaries obscure their perception of the big picture.

Yet it’s possible for CIOs to position both their business counterparts and IT managers as partners in IT by redefining their respective roles. This article is the fourth and final in a series examining promising concepts to improve business-IT alignment (go to www.cio.com/executivecoach to see the series in full). So far, we have equipped Ernest, a real CIO at a large company, with four powerful ways to manage the demand and supply of IT. It’s time now for Ernest to ensure that these concepts yield results—by placing them in the hands of the right people.

Mini-CIOs Everywhere

A big part of Ernest’s job as a CIO lies in trying to connect with those in the business who drive IT demand and weigh in on IT decisions and performance. In doing so, Ernest has run himself ragged. He needs leaders at all levels in his IT organization to influence and collaborate with their business counterparts.

However, many IT professionals tend to operate as lone guns who don’t relate well to others—around 40 percent of the IT population (nearly twice the percentage of the general population) according to "The Human Dynamics of IT Teams," by consultants from Booz Allen Hamilton and OKA. Basic attributes can be hired and nurtured but not instilled, and the tendency to work alone cannot be trained or coached away. Ernest needs to handpick current and future leaders by identifying critical behavioral traits, and use an experience-based development approach in which leaders are "grown" and not "tested."

Delivery of IT services must occur without Ernest’s frequent involvement. From an organizational perspective, he must structure IT so that his first-level leaders are accountable for end-to-end service and project delivery (and possibly his second-level leaders too, depending on the size of the organization). To do so, he should organize the IT group in a manner similar to the business. He can place "mini-CIOs" within each business unit or function to manage the entire plan, build, run process and represent the IT portfolio for their business customers.

 

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