First Know Yourself
There are some CIOs who are natural leaders — whose grasp of change and its imperatives is already embedded in their way of working — and there are some for whom this level of understanding and capability will remain forever a mystery, Cunningham says. The very first thing a CIO had better understand is which type of person they are — and there’s absolutely no room for error, he says.
“If they recognise they are not the change agent they need [to be], they must find one — someone who can operate as the trusted party, the knowledgeable and effective agent for the transformation that is required — who can work closely with the CIO and indeed have a completely trusted relationship.
“At the same time, the very real skill the change agent needs is to avoid taking over the CIO’s authority during the change. Because the change agent will necessarily have a position of trust, that can lead to information and requirements coming to them that were not visible to (and would never have been revealed to) the CIO personally. This situation needs to be addressed very carefully.
“The change agent will from time to time have a different position from the CIO. For example, the CIO may decide that certain elements of professional services should be incented in a particular way. A skilled change agent will more than likely understand the impact of incentive schemes on behaviour better than the CIO, and may suggest changes to such a scheme, which are outside the CIO’s experience. This is again, a very tricky situation, as the effectiveness of the change may well hinge on such a detail. Therefore, a clear set of policies about how the change agent and the CIO will work together is a must — right at the start.”
Regardless of who manages the change program, Cunningham says, some degree of understanding of change management must be imparted to the CIO and the management team. A series of workshops on the elements of change are very useful, preferably held over several months. Organisational change can come only if there is personal change in the management team, so part of the focus of these workshops should be in getting the management team to accept a degree of change themselves, before it can begin with the rest of the organisation.
“When you get into the CIO chair, you’ve already accepted that you are technically obsolete at a detail level,” Don from Red Cross notes. “It’s the softer skills then that matter. It’s the influencing skills, it’s the negotiation skills you need in order to achieve something. I had a boss once who described it as less like negotiation and more like romance. But again I think it is just tailoring the value proposition to each individual.”
Don says he has worked with numbers of CIOs who simply weren’t people people — instead they were systems people or infrastructure people. He says CIOs looking at transformation of the whole business by leveraging some kind of technology, or even at change in the whole business through specifically not using technology, must know the business processes.
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