CIOs: First Know Thyself
- 04 February, 2005 13:08
CIOs looking to improve their leadership skills must prepare to shift out of cost-cutting mode and start learning how to support business growth
In today's world of uncertain economics, raging consumerism and customer-driven metrics, if you aren't using technology for the purposes of attracting or keeping customers, or satisfying those customers' needs, you really should not be using it at all.
So CIOs casting around for ways to enhance their leadership skills could do worse than to start by becoming secret shoppers, according to Ron Ponder, PhD, one of the world's most celebrated and respected IT professionals. Act like a customer, he says, and go through the entire experience of the customer, because if you do not know what the customer is experiencing, you have no reference point for initiatives designed to make your service better.
"You must walk in your customer's shoes; you must be a part of your customer's experience, and I don't think many CIOs do that," says Ponder, the CIO and executive vice president of massive US health insurance company WellPoint, and a man who has accumulated a breadth of experience like few other IT executives.
"I maintain that you have to get outside of the company and look at the company through the eyes of the customer. You have to understand what the customer experiences and what the customer has to go through to navigate their way through a customer service experience. And you have to encourage your people to have the same kind of viewpoint of looking at the business outside in. You have to look at it from the viewpoint of the customer."
Such is leadership for today's CIOs. As the CIO role continues to evolve, there is constant reappraisal of the key leadership skills associated with the CIO function, including the way companies use the CIO, the CIO's relation to the senior officers and their performance expectations and evaluation process.
For instance, executive recruitment and development company Korn/Ferry International has developed a statistically valid success profile for CIOs that finds leading CIOs and CEOs are highly adaptive, open to change, have a good sense of humour, are likable and are excellent collaborators and team players. CIOs in the Korn/Ferry assessment score high on their ability to seek out the input of others and facilitate consensus-building, working through issues with peers and subordinates. Successful CIOs also display high levels of confidence and are emphatic enough to be able to deal well many different personality types.
However, as the criteria for a strong and effective CIO leader change CIOs would be wise to keep up. Research firm Gartner says with the next two years expected to differ sharply from the previous two for most IT management teams as the focus shifts from cost to growth, CIOs must urgently renew their leadership capabilities.
"The return of growth to the business agenda raises the bar for the business accountability of the IS organization," Gartner says. "IT leadership will need to demonstrate greater levels of accountability to support business growth than were required when cost cutting was the order of the day . . . Business leader scepticism over the value achieved from the installation of enterprise systems, such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and supply chain management, creates an unwillingness to invest before tangible results [can be seen]. Combine this with IS leadership's desire to retain the hard-won management disciplines during the past two years, and the importance of direct business accountability becomes clear.
"There are no more IT investments - only business investments - and playing a leading role requires that IT leaders have greater direct business accountability to participate in growth initiatives. A significant part of the IT leadership challenge involves more than running a tight IT ship - it requires building business credibility."
In Ponder's mind, the only way the CIO can build that credibility is to become part of the fabric of the business. You cannot just sit around, listen and take orders, and you cannot always talk about the latest technology gig. "You have to understand how to weave technology into the entire strategy of the business." However, he says becoming part of the fabric of business also demands the CIO install a series of leaders below themselves who share similar characteristics, because a CIO cannot be everywhere at once.
"You have to have a set of subordinates below you who, number one, must be better than you are, and two, must share those same attributes: they must be very business minded, they must understand that they have to go out and spend their time with the customer, they need to sit at the management tables of their customers, they have to live with their business customers.
"Then at the CIO level, you have to spend a lot of time with your business peers."
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Eye of the Beholder
A few years ago, based on its research, CSC Research Services published CEOs are from Mars, CIOs are from Pluto. Vice president William Koff says surveys showed that the many CIOs seen as being unsuccessful, including the 40 percent living in fear of being fired, were failing not because they couldn't provide cost-effective IT, but because they could neither contribute to business strategy nor communicate with top executives and were ineffective as change agents. (A comprehensive look at this report appeared in the March 2002 issue of CIO or go to www.cio.com.au March '02
CEOs want CIOs who exhibit openness, integrity, commercial awareness and a keen intellect; they want CIOs who have potential to add value to the business, who display leadership, energy, creativity, proactivity, passion and gravitas, and who have insight and action in equal proportions. They also want CIOs who show a propensity to change management, and who have vision and the ability to champion innovation.
"CSC's client executives like Ken Hill, vice president and CIO of General Dynamics, and leading recruiters Whitehead Mann, tell CSC CIOs must now position themselves as the leading change agent in the business," Koff says. That means they must: focus on processes, organization structures and values; develop a well-orchestrated vision and plan; promote the view that systems changes are not enough; challenge conventional practice; and build an innovation strategy.
The future belongs to CIOs and IT leadership teams that can build credibility and respect through consistent leadership practices, Gartner Group vice president and worldwide head of research Mark McDonald concludes. The 2004 Gartner Executive Programs (EXP) CIO survey found just 21 percent of respondents viewed their role as solely that of an IT service provider. The majority said his or her IS organization's role extended well beyond IT services to include business service delivery, business process management or technology innovation. Yet, surveys and anecdotal information indicate that business executives viewed IT leaders as merely technologists who keep the computers running.
The onus is thus on CIOs and IT leadership teams to build credibility by making commitments and keeping them. From this will come respect, as business leaders seek CIOs' opinions, expertise and recommendations on operating the enterprise. "Leadership credibility rests on operational credibility. The IT leadership team cannot be credible when the IS organization delivers poor results," McDonald notes.
But the research also shows another key leadership skill associated with CIOs is an ability to know their own limitations, and to build a team around them against those limitations. "So we find technically strong CIOs have recognized their business connection weaknesses and will invest in strong business relationship managers, and then we find the exact opposite as we find some CIOs who have a better business background obviously getting a CTO or some other group around them. The most recent manifestation of this is that CIOs are building Offices of the CIO (OCIOs) around them to shore up their weak spots and to give them the management capabilities and capacity that they need," McDonald says.
Effective CIO leaders can also abstract the current state of the business in order to improve or change it. Leading CIOs can "rise above the day-to-day grind of the business and its quest for competitive advantage", and recognize underlying structural and systems dynamics that must change in order to improve the business. That demands the CIO have a high sensitivity to the enterprise and its needs, as opposed to those of individual business units. The best CIOs, McDonald says, are highly curious about how elements of the business fit together and can recognize anything that breaks the pattern.
"The other thing we see in effective CIO leaders is that they have a strong project and project management mentality in terms of the drive to completion," McDonald says.
"One of the things we found relative to CIOs is that credible CIOs have delivered really three things over time. One is they deliver dial-tone-like service in terms of the IT services - [IT services] are just always there and they don't break. The other thing is that these CIOs deliver on their commitments to projects coming in on cost and on schedule. And the third one is that they are constantly able to demonstrate tangible connections to the business mission and vision."
When Gartner interviewed 50 high performing CIOs about what made them credible, three factors came through clearly. High performing CIOs say credibility starts with a baseline of delivering results (hence the importance of program project management discipline). It also comes from demonstrating clear alignment with the business and strategy, which makes business skills vital. And no CIO can perform well until they can attract executive attention by identifying the system dynamics and communicating those in business terms.
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Avoiding Hubris
But definitions of leadership can be tricky, and perceptions of what makes a good leader can differ, notes Peter McDougall, director of The Leadership Academy. Many IT people McDougall knows are "fascinatingly adept at doing magical things with IT equipment and systems". Many perceive themselves to be leaders in their field, particularly in their creative, technical and management areas, and they strive to do even better and bigger things in these areas. They see leadership as being "first" in their field, and to improve their position they focus on developing their personal creative, technical and management skills.
Like managers in many other areas of endeavour, but particularly in organizations that comprise very clever, creative people, such as universities and hospitals, McDougall says it is often a potent mix of self-confidence, self-interest and a certain amount of hubris that influences people to think and act in this way. But self-interest and hubris are the antithesis of the qualities needed for good leadership, and much empirical and anecdotal evidence indicates that they are two of the main reasons why managers fail.
"Our perception of leadership is that the role of a leader at any level is to create the environment in which they and their people can be successful in achieving their common goals. This involves maintaining a balance between three interrelated areas of need: one, to achieve the vision, mission, goals and objectives of the organization; two, to build and maintain their team; and, three, to develop the attitudes and skills of the individuals in the team," McDougall says.
"These needs must be kept in balance over a continuum because to neglect or over-emphasize one over any of the others will result in decreased overall performance and 'bottom line' outcomes. This requires the leader to develop and utilize many skills, some of them traditional management skills such as planning, organizing, coordinating and controlling, for we believe that leadership is not something that is mysterious or ephemeral, but is a difficult-to-acquire combination of art and skills that is practised within the real world of management, irrespective of the type or purpose of the organization."
McDougall says good leaders understand that even more important than credible management skills are the values, attitudes and skills of people within the organization, since people make the difference between outstanding and ordinary performance. People cannot be "managed" like materials, systems, processes and finance, or even ideas. They must be led by people who are committed not only to achieving the task, whatever it may be, but who genuinely believe in and demonstrate a selfless commitment to the team and to the individuals who are part of it.
"Within the limits of human frailties, they must do their best to learn, adopt and practise the values, attitudes and skills that they wish their people to possess and practise. They must lead by example, for it is not what leaders say that people follow, it is what they see them do.
"Leadership is primarily about people, and leaders of whatever ilk will only succeed if they work with and through them," he says.
SIDEBAR: The Model Leader
It is strong, capable IT leadership that will differentiate IS organizations that disappear into the back office of utility services from those that capitalize on opportunities during the next two years, notes Surinder Kahai, associate professor of MIS and fellow, Centre for Leadership Studies with The School of Management at Binghamton University.
Kahai is working on a paper exploring the development of a full range leadership model for CIOs, based on the work of colleagues Bruce J Avolio and Bernard M Bass. You can read more about the Full Range Model at the following sites:
Bass and Avolio developed the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) to determine the degree to which leaders exhibited transformational and transactional leadership and the degree to which their followers were satisfied with their leader and their leader's effectiveness.
A 21-item version of the frequently revised MLQ-6s has been available since 1992, designed to assess two transactional (contingent reward and management by exception) and four transformational (charisma or idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration) leadership factors, as well as Laissez-Faire Leadership.
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The MLQ has been used extensively during the past 20 years. Kahai says misaligned IT and ineffective IT spending seem to be critical reasons behind the failure of IT to improve organizational performance, and the major probable cause is inappropriate IS leadership exercised by the CIO. But while past research has made important contributions in describing behaviours or structural features of IS leadership and how these may be related to organizational and environmental factors, it has failed to allow IS executives to determine leadership behaviours that would enable a high level of IS unit performance.
"Enabling superior IS unit performance is an important goal for organizations and IS executives, and an understanding of leadership behaviours that would enable such a performance is likely to be very useful," Kahai says. To this end, Kahai has taken the Full Range Model, added Instrumental Leadership to it, as suggested in the paper at http://gli.unl.edu/conference/documents/paper10092.doc and applied that to CIO behaviour.
He has found the Modified Full Range Model does a good job in terms of describing in a general way the various leadership behaviours of successful CIOs. So far he has not been able to find corresponding specific CIO behaviours to match several behaviours within the Modified Full Range Model, but hopes to do so when his research is complete.
"The idea behind creating a mapping of CIO behaviours to the Full Range Model is that such a map would act as a first step in CIO leadership development. The Full Range Model has been validated by research, and by creating a mapping of specific CIO behaviours we would be providing a pair of glasses to CIOs to make sense of their behaviours with their followers (that is, see it through the perspective of the Full Range Model) and understand what impact their different behaviours can have," Kahai says.
"Right now they may be executing some of these behaviours - but not knowing the relevance of these behaviours and what impact they could have and when they might be appropriate, acts as a barrier to the development of leadership potential. Of course, just knowing about the relevant leadership behaviours is not enough - their enactment and learning from them is vital to the development of leadership. Hence, the mapping is just a first step."
Avolio says those organizations that have been most successful in achieving dramatic transformations in their leadership systems have had several distinguishing characteristics:
• First, they have articulated in terms of new systems and processes what they are hoping and expecting to evolve.
• Second, they have realized the need to replace old systems, and have spent time retiring them, while in the midst of creating new ones.
• Third, they have considered the needs of individuals at all levels who are used to operating in a different way, and have taken the time to explain, justify and ultimately reward operating in new and substantially different ways. In this regard, they have involved those being affected in the process of change, by including their ideas, needs, concerns and aspirations as part of the process of change.
• Fourth, they have made it worthwhile to change, motivating individuals to operate in line with the new system's requirements.
• Fifth, they have provided the necessary education to change rather than simply assuming that people know how to change.
• Sixth, they have demonstrated the courage to stay on course, regardless of the resistance to change, and have been patient, allowing for mistakes to occur along the way.
Interestingly enough, each of the distinguishing characteristics mentioned above represents a form of leadership, often described and observed at a systemic or organizational level. Indeed, it requires leadership to successfully transform the leadership systems in our organizations, Kahai says.
