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Leadership is not something that just happens. Leadership must be measured, managed, and invested in. After all, how IT leaders are selected, trained, evaluated, and compensated materially impacts the future performance of the enterprise.

So, again, when was the last time you had a substantive conversation about leadership with your direct reports? How frequently do you critically examine whether your IT/digital organization is well led? What set of metrics does your organization employ to evaluate IT/digital leaders?

The IT industry is undergoing a crisis of confidence. This is due in no small part to the erroneous presumption that IT and digital organizations have their leadership game in order. Quality leadership is not something that can be taken for granted. It’s time to turn an analytical eye to the state of leadership in our industry — and here are five key questions IT leaders must ask themselves to truly know whether they are successfully leading IT.

Is your focus on point?

Daniel Barchi, Naval Academy grad and award-winning CIO at CommonSpirit Health, explained to me that there are three areas IT leaders can allocate their time: People, process, and technology. Barchi suggests the optimal allocation for IT leaders is 80% people, 15% process, and 5% technology. Unfortunately, many IT leaders — especially those of the order-taker type — invert that triumvirate, placing the lion’s share of their focus on technology.

Are you and your direct reports allocating enough time to leading people?

Are your people primed for success?

In Good to Great, Jim Collins suggests that decisions about people — who is on the bus — have to precede decisions about objectives — i.e., where the bus is going. Several CIOs have shared with me the anecdote regarding how Apple design icon Jonathan Ives typically responds to the question, “What’s the secret to your design success?” Ives reportedly responded, “We fire the A- people.” The point being that a group of passionate high performers is what is necessary to deliver the sought-for end state.

Talent is a differentiator. Are your IT leaders doing everything it takes to attract, nurture, grow, and retain the kind of talent necessary to succeed?

Are you helping your organization ‘see the future’?

Barbara Cooper was the beloved and now retired CIO at Toyota Motors North America. Having served as an IT leader in five industries, she is one of the top CIO “coaches” in North America. Barbara counseled me that it is not enough just to have a vision of the future. Our industry is too full of sic “transformational” CIOs being airlifted into enterprises only to slink away 18 to 24 months later having abjectly failed to create digital value.

Creating IT value requires a team effort. One has to get the organization to internalize and unite behind a collective vision of the future. Barbara jokingly quipped that “as a child of the ’60s” she learned that while you “can’t share the trip” — i.e., one person’s vision is not enough — you can get everyone moving in a common direction. To do this she set her direct reports down one day in the conference room:

“Ok, I want you to think out three years. ’Cuz five is a little much. I want you to pretend that you are driving into the parking lot. You are walking into your office. You are going to go through your day. You are going to have your first meeting of the day. You are talking to somebody in the door. You go and get your coffee. You have a series of hallway conversations. You are thinking about some of the things and the problems you have. I want you to play that out — almost like a storyboard in your head — what is going to be different three years from now?”

These individual visions were shared, consolidated, amplified, and linked to enterprise objectives.

Is that kind of collective vision-making part of your company culture?

Are you emphasizing the value of relationships?

Most of the voluminous academic literature on leadership focuses on the traits/idiosyncrasies of the individual leader and not on their relationships with key associates. As an IT leader, do you have a track record of helping or hindering colleagues in fulfilling their career objectives?

Vince Kellen, a digital force of nature and CIO at University of California San Diego, borrows insights from NHL scouts. He is looking for IT “skaters” who, when they step onto the ice, make the other four teammates better hockey players.

How leaders view themselves and others and how they are viewed by others is a critical causal driver of leadership success or failure. Tony Blair was able to reverse a multi-decade decline in Labour Party electoral success when he realized, “People judge us on their instincts about what they believe our instincts to be. And that man polishing his car was clear: His instincts were to get on in life, and he thought our instincts were to stop him.”

Leadership success requires connectedness to the community. How connected are your IT leaders throughout the ranks?

Are you effective at making a positive impact?

Franklin Pierce, America’s 14th president, is viewed by most historians as being one of the very worst presidents. Every action he took “made things worse,” as was discussed on “The First 15,” Episode 93 of the American POTUS podcast.

Have your actions made things better or worse?

Business IT Alignment, IT Leadership

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How many IT services vendors do you rely on?

Splitting responsibility for the IT organization into multiple outsourcing vendors, overseen (or overlooked in some unfortunate cases) by a small IT management team, has become a popular practice. Hardly “best practice” — a meaningless but popular justification for doing things a certain way — but popular nonetheless.

If you’re on top of an IT organization that’s structured like this, or if you’re thinking about joining the club as a bold way to turbocharge IT organizational performance, don’t be hasty. It’s an alternative that can work, but it can easily backfire.

Here’s a sampling of what can go wrong and what you can do to prevent it, or at a minimum mitigate the risks.

Service level addiction

Yes, yes, yes, if you can’t measure you can’t manage. That’s doubly so when assessing a vendor’s performance.

And yet …

When you’re leading an internal team there are intangibles you insist on — for example, you might ask for innovative thinking and a willingness to go a few extra miles to turn innovative thinking into innovative reality.

SLA-driven vendors can become complacent, and in the absence of a well-defined and tracked “innovation SLA” neither they nor their management will have any incentive to suggest anything new.

It’s tricky. On the one hand, the vendor you select should, in theory, have more expertise in their area of responsibility than an internal team might have, and so it should be able to offer a steady stream of improvement possibilities.

But on the other hand, many — perhaps most — improvement opportunities would reduce the vendor’s billings. It’s hardly reasonable to ask a vendor to take the initiative in reducing their own revenue, unless you can at least offer them increased margins or some other incentive.

Leadership voids

Leadership is about people and motivation. Management is about getting work out the door. In a very real sense, outsourcing is about shifting the CIO’s attention from leading to managing.

That’s a mistake. An outsourcer’s employees should certainly receive day-to-day leadership from the vendor’s account manager. But that’s in addition to the leadership they should get from their client’s CIO.

They are, after all, people, too.

Inter-vendor politics

Just as there’s no such thing as a perfect org chart — one that clearly and unambiguously defines each manager’s responsibilities in ways that avoid overlap — so there’s no such thing as a division of outsourcer responsibilities that avoids the potential for game playing.

Potential? The game playing is often overt, although concealed from view: Many vendors have regular internal strategy sessions in which they exchange ideas about their “endgame” — how they plan to eliminate a competing vendor from the IT organizational gameboard.

The most common examples of inter-vendor politics occur when one vendor needs data from another vendor in order to move a project forward, and the vendor that receives the request, instead of providing the asked-for data, emits an unending stream of excuses, or complains that providing it isn’t in the contract, and as a custom service it will cost a significant and unbudgeted sum.

Often, the stonewalled vendor will be hesitant to complain, on the grounds that this might look a lot like they’re playing inter-vendor politics themselves.

And there’s another layer of complexity to deal with when trying to prevent, or at least manage, inter-vendor politics: In addition to one vendor trying to torpedo a rival by failing to fulfill data requests, there are times a vendor will request data from a rival in order to uncover something damaging about that vendor’s performance.

The annoying solution to inter-vendor politics is to insert yourself into any and all inter-vendor interactions. Because Vendor A refusing to provide information to Vendor B is one thing. Refusing to provide it to you? It’s your data.

Exit mitigation migraines

Here in the USA our entire system of economics is built on a single empowerment, namely, that a customer can threaten to take their business elsewhere. When it comes to IT services vendors, however, this can be a hollow threat.

To be effective, an IT services vendor’s employees have to engage in the osmotic process of learning their customer — its key staff and their quirks and temperament just as much as the application portfolio and integration architecture.

Once a services vendor is firmly entrenched, transferring that incumbent’s tribal knowledge to a replacement vendor would be, to put it gently, a non-trivial task, and that’s just the quantitative view. The political dimension exacerbates the problem: Why would you expect a vendor you’re kicking to the curb make it any easier than necessary for their replacement to succeed?

Fair’s fair, though. The same was true for the IT staff the CIO kicked to the curb during the outsource.

And beyond the political angle, in many cases the services vendor will have installed its own toolkits to help in fulfilling its responsibilities. It will take that toolkit with it should you decide to make a change.

So on top of all the rest of your exit mitigation planning, make sure your contract includes an obligation to leave these toolkits in place for a long enough transition that the replacement vendor has the time it will need to install its own proprietary toolkit.

In any event, prudent CIOs have two possible exit strategies, and they’re complementary, not dichotomous.

The first: Keep a small cadre of IT professionals on staff to work alongside each vendor. That way, if circumstances dictate, they can smooth the transition to the next vendor.

And the second? Keep a close enough eye on your vendors that you can circumvent the need to replace any of them in the first place.

It’s a quandary. Managing outsourcing vendors is arguably more complicated than in-house management and staff, because CIOs who have outsourced IT services have fewer management tools at their disposal than those who need to lead employees.

After all, when you have to deal with poorly performing employees you can call on HR.

But when you’re dealing with a poorly performing vendor, in contrast, who do you have to call on?

That would be your company’s general counsel, who would be no happier about being called in than you’d be in calling them.

IT Leadership, Outsourcing

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Diversity is critical to IT performance. Diverse teams perform better, hire better talent, have more engaged members, and retain workers better than those that do not focus on diversity and inclusion, according to a 2020 report from McKinsey. Despite this, women remain widely underrepresented in IT roles.

 And the numbers back up this assertion, often in stark ways. Lack of representation for women in the IT industry can be attributed to a wide array of often interrelated factors, and its persistence has follow-on effects in terms of compensation, opportunity, and safety in the workplace. Companies that emphasize equity and inclusion, however, are making inroads when it comes to promoting the careers of women — and retaining them.

Statistics from the following 11 facets of IT careers, from pursuing a degree to navigating the workplace environment, paint a clear picture of the challenges women face in finding equal footing in a career in IT.

The employment gap

Despite national conversations about the lack of diversity in tech, women are disproportionally missing out on the ongoing boom in IT jobs. While women make up 47% of all employed adults in the US, as of 2022, they hold only 28% of computing and mathematical roles, according to data from Zippia, with women identifying as Asian or Pacific Islander making up just 7% of the IT workforce and Black and Hispanic women accounting for 3% and 2%, respectively.

In fact, the ratio of women to men in tech roles has declined in the past 35 years, with half of women who go into tech dropping out by the age of 35, according to data from Accenture. The study attributes much of this decline to a lack of inclusivity for women in the industry. For women of color and lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LBT) women, this lack of inclusivity plays an even larger factor. For example, 67% of women of color in less-inclusive college environments said they saw a “clear pathway from studying tech, engineering, or math to a related career,” compared to 79% of other women. When adjusted for more inclusive environments, that number jumps to 92%.

The promotion gap

Women also face more barriers to promotion and career growth. A 2022 report from McKinsey found that only 86 women are promoted to manager for every 100 men across every industry, but when isolated for tech, that number drops to 52 women for every 100 men. Women who work in more inclusive environments are 61% more likely to advance to management level, while that number jumps to 77% for women of color, according to data from Accenture. Men are even 15% more likely to get promoted to a management position when working in a more-inclusive environment.

The degree gap

According to data from the National Science Foundation, more women than ever are earning STEM degrees — and they are catching up to men in earning bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering (S&E) subjects. But isolated by field of study, women earned only 18% of computer science degrees at the bachelor level in 2021, having peaked at 37% in 1984, according to Zippia. Recent data from Accenture shows that as of 2022, only 25% of tech graduates are women, with a dropout rate of 37% for tech classes compared to just 30% for other programs.

Still, while women are less represented in undergrad CS departments, those who do pursue computer science degrees are more likely to pursue an advanced degree, with the percentage of master’s degrees in computer science earned by women rising to 31% in 2016, up from 28% in 1997.

The retention gap

Once a diploma is earned, the real work begins, and here the numbers for women in tech are even more troubling. Only 38% of women who majored in computer science are working in the field compared to 53% of men, according to data from the National Science Foundation. This is a consistent trend that has been dubbed a “leaky pipeline,” where it’s difficult to retain women in STEM jobs once they’ve graduated with a STEM degree.

Oftentimes, retention is a factor of workplace culture and inclusivity. It’s one thing to recruit women for IT roles, but organizations must be inclusive to get women to stay. Unfortunately, leaders and employees differing widely in how they perceive a company’s inclusivity, according to Accenture, which reported that 68% of leaders feel they have created “empowering environments where people have a sense of belonging,” while only 36% of employees agree. Accenture estimates that if every company were on par with the top 20% of companies in the study in terms of inclusivity, the annual attrition rate of women in tech could drop as much as 70%.

Workplace culture gap

Workplace culture also plays a role in women’s uphill battle in IT. According to a Pew Research Center report, 50% of women said they had experienced gender discrimination at work, while only 19% of men said the same. The numbers were even higher for women with a postgraduate degree (62%), working in computer jobs (74%), or in male-dominated workplaces (78%). When asked whether their gender made it harder to succeed at work, 20% of women said yes and 36% said sexual harassment is a problem in their workplace.

In addition to increasing the likelihood of gender-related discrimination against women, male-dominated workplaces pay less attention to gender diversity (43%) and cause women to feel a need to prove themselves all or some of the time (79%), according to Pew’s research. As a comparison, only 44% of women working in environments with a better gender-diversity balance said they experienced gender-related discrimination at work, 15% felt their organization paid “too little” attention to gender diversity, and 52% said they felt a need to prove themselves.

The representation gap

A lack of representation for women in tech can hinder a woman’s ability to succeed in the industry. It can put limits on their opportunities for mentorship and sponsorship and can foster “unconscious gender bias in company culture,” leaving many women “without a clear path forward,” according to a report from TrustRadius, which found that 72% of women in tech report being outnumbered by men in business meetings by a ratio of at least 2:1, while 26% report being outnumbered by 5:1 or more.   

Unfortunately, women in tech are accustomed to a lack of representation — 72% of whom said they have worked for a company where “bro culture” is “pervasive,” while only 41% of men said the same. TrustRadius defines “bro culture” broadly as anything from an “uncomfortable work environment to sexual harassment and assault.” This gap in reporting between genders may in part be due to a discrepancy in perception, according to the report, which notes that it “can be hard for those in power, or those not negatively affected, to recognize problems within the dominant culture.”

The equity gap

Women of color face more significant challenges in the tech industry — and they are greatly underrepresented. While a total of 27% of computing roles are held by women, only 3% and 2% are held by Black and Hispanic women, respectively, according to Accenture. Out of 390 women of color in tech surveyed, only 8% said it is “easy” for them to thrive, compared to 21% of all women. In less-inclusive company cultures, 62% of women of color say they’ve experienced “inappropriate remarks or comments,” a number that drops to 14% for inclusive cultures.

LBT women face similar barriers, with only 9% of LBT women IT workers reporting that it’s “easy” to thrive in tech, while 23% of non-LBT women say the same. LBT tech workers also face higher rates of experiencing public humiliation or embarrassment (24%) or bullying (20%) in the workplace. The survey found that 83% of LBT women working in more-inclusive cultures reported “loving” their jobs and 85% describe their workplace environment as “empowering,” compared to 35% and 20%, respectively, in less-inclusive environments. Similarly, LBT women in less-inclusive cultures were half as likely to say they experienced inappropriate remarks or comments, were made to feel that the job was not for “people like them.”

The founder gap

Startups are known for unconventional work environments, but women still struggle there — especially if they’re the founder. Only one in four startups have a female founder, 37% have at least one woman on the board of directors, and 53% have at least one woman in an executive position, according to a study from Silicon Valley Bank. And the founder’s gender has a direct impact on gender diversity, the study found. For startups with at least one female founder, 50% had a female CEO compared to just 5% for companies with no female founder.

Worse, startups with at least one female founder reported more difficulty finding funding, with 87% saying it was “somewhat or extremely challenging,” while only 78% of startups with no female founder said the same.

The pay gap

Women are not only underrepresented in tech, they are also underpaid. According to a report from Dice, 38% of women report being unsatisfied with their compensation compared to 33% of men. The average salary of a woman in tech who reports being satisfied with their compensation is $93,591, compared to an average $108,711 for men. On the opposite end, the average salary for women who report being dissatisfied with their compensation is $69,543, compared to $81,820 for men.

Women are also more concerned with compensation than most stereotypes would have you believe, according to a 2019 report on Women in Technology from IDC. There’s a myth that women are more preoccupied with benefits and flexibility, but 52% of women care about compensation and pay compared to 33% of men. Additionally, 75% of men believe their employer offers equal pay while only 42% of women say the same. Compensation is certainly a paramount concern for women in tech, who are often making less than their male colleagues.

The IT leadership gap

According to IDC, the percentage of women in senior leadership positions grew from 21% to 24% between 2018 and 2019. And that’s good news, because having women in senior leadership positions can positively impact female employee engagement and retention. In organizations where 50% or more senior leadership positions are held by women, they’re more likely to offer equal pay, and female employees are more likely to stay with the company longer than a year, report higher job satisfaction, and feel the company is trustworthy.

Although these statistics are trending upward, women still feel less enthusiastic about their senior leadership prospects than men. The report found that 54% of men said they felt it was likely that they’d be promoted to executive management in their company. Meanwhile, only 25% of women said the same, noting a lack of support, self-confidence, and mentorship, as well as feeling the need to “prove themselves more than men to get promoted.” 

McKinsey found that women leaders are stepping away from their roles in tech to find positions that offer better flexibility and opportunity. The report points to the fact that women find it harder to advance than men and that they’re more likely to experience microaggressions or to have their judgement questioned. Women leaders also reported carrying more responsibilities around supporting employee well-being and inclusion, but 40% say they go unrecognized for that work.

Black women leaders face even more barriers to leadership. They are more likely to have their competence questioned by colleagues (55%), or to be “subjected to demeaning behavior.” One in three Black women leaders report being denied or passed over for opportunities because of their race and gender.

The pandemic gap

Women in tech report facing more burnout than their male colleagues during the pandemic. According to TrustRadius, 57% of women surveyed said they experienced more burnout than normal during the pandemic, compared to 36% of men who said the same. That might be because 44% of women also report taking on extra responsibilities at work, compared to 33% of men. And a greater number of women (33%) report taking on more childcare responsibilities than men (19%) at home. Women in tech were also almost twice as likely to have lost their jobs or to have been furloughed during the pandemic than men (14% vs. 8%).

The pandemic has also left women less likely to ask for a raise or a promotion, compared to their male colleagues. In a report from Indeed, surveying 2,000 tech workers, 67% of male respondents said they would be comfortable asking for a raise in the next month and for a promotion. But only 52% of women said they’d be comfortable asking for a raise and 54% said they’d be comfortable asking for a promotion. Women were also less likely to say they felt comfortable asking for flexibility around work location, schedule, or hours than their male counterparts. As the study points out, if women feel discouraged from asking for a raise, while their male colleagues are comfortable doing so, that could lead to widening the gender pay gap in the tech industry even more.

This article was originally published on January 23, 2020, and updated on March 8, 2021.

More on Women in IT

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Careers, Diversity and Inclusion, IT Leadership, Technology Industry, Women in IT

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When New York-Presbyterian CIO Daniel Barchi arrives at work in the morning, he doesn’t sit down at his desk. That’s because he doesn’t have a desk — or an office — of his own. “I guide a very, very large team of IT people, but I don’t have one office where I go every day,” he says.

Instead, Barchi may spend the day working in the building that houses the company’s back-office systems. Or he may spend the day in one of its hospitals, meeting with executives or doing a walkthrough. Every day is different, and that’s the point, he says. “You can’t understand the needs of the clinicians unless you are meeting with them.”

Not every CIO can or should give up their own office, he adds. But his choice to do so reflects an inescapable fact: “The technology can work, but unless it works well for users in their environment, it’s not meeting their needs.”

That’s a hard truth every CIO must face. And it’s not the only one. Here are some more hard truths that CIOs and other technology experts say all technology leaders must learn, if they want to be effective at their jobs.

1. The business is not your customer

Phil Pettinato, CTO, Versapay

Versapay

When you use the word “customer,” do you mean an internal customer — someone who works for the same company that you do and who uses the technology IT provides? That’s a mistake, many experts believe. “The most significant thing CIOs get wrong about business-IT alignment is servicing other departments’ ‘internal customers,’ instead of the true business customer needs,” says Phil Pettinato, CTO of Versapay. “The CIO should push to transform processes so the internal stakeholders can create better customer experiences for the primary customer.”

Because, of course, external customers are your company’s customers, and that makes them your customers, too. Thinking of internal users as customers creates a division between business and IT that can undermine your efforts to create alignment. “I don’t believe there’s IT and the business,” says James Anderson, a vice president and analyst at Gartner. “The business includes IT. And your product is not IT, it’s the services enabled by IT that are used for business outcomes.”

Another reason it’s important for IT leaders to stop thinking of the business as a customer is so they can focus on actual customers — which is increasingly important in today’s tech-driven world, he says. “You should know and interact with and understand your company’s customers. That’s how you keep them customers.”

2. Like it or not, you are responsible for business outcomes

Uzi Dvir, global CIO, WalkMe

WalkMe

This hard truth is one most IT leaders miss, according to Uzi Dvir, global CIO at digital adoption platform WalkMe. In his experience, Dvir says, fewer than 5% of CIOs spend any time talking about business outcomes or measuring the business outcomes created by the technology they deploy.

“The CIOs I speak with often only look at cost,” Anderson says. “And then they’re challenged with, ‘What’s the ROI?’” That’s a question CIOs often can’t answer, he says. Back when he was in a different CIO role years ago, he was rolling out some automation systems. “The finance group would say, ‘What’s the ROI on that?’ We would say, ‘We’ve got this infrastructure, this application, the training, and the rollout. There is no ROI.’”

Today’s CIOs can’t afford to make that mistake. “It’s important to measure business outcomes, not just technology,” says Damon Venger, CIO at CompuCom, a managed services provider based in Boca Raton, Fla. “You implement a new piece of software. You completed the project, it’s live and has 10,000 users. You declare victory because it’s done. But if the business outcomes are not there, it’s not a success.” And that means business and IT are in disagreement, he says. “IT says success; business says failure.”

3. Alignment isn’t just about you — it’s about your team, too

Some CIOs treat IT-business alignment as their own responsibility. That’s a mistake, experts say. “The leadership team below the CIO also needs to be customer facing. It needs to be able to help solve problems. It shouldn’t just be going away and writing code,” Pettinato says. “To make it scalable, you need to take it beyond just one individual.”

Daniel Barchi, CIO, New York-Presbyterian

New York-Presbyterian

“I clearly can’t, myself, be involved in every organizational conversation,” Barchi says. “That is where trusting your team helps. There are many leaders on my team who are in these meetings day in and day out, solving problems in real time.”

In fact, he says, creating a team that’s capable of doing this is the most important part of his job. “As I’ve grown as a leader, I’ve recognized that my contribution is not my own technical skill and my ability to make decisions. It’s my ability to create a team that can do all of that,” Barchi says. “I think CIOs do well when we know that our job is not to be involved in every technology decision — it’s to create the environment where that can happen and create a team that can do that.”

4. If you say no, a vendor will say yes

Vendors, especially those selling cloud-based products, have made it a habit to call on business leaders in addition to — or instead of — IT leaders. And they’re making sales. “The business gets their door knocked on by vendors who say, ‘Hey, we can get you up and running on this solution tomorrow,’” Anderson says. “And when they go to IT with the same need, IT says, ‘It’s going to take us two weeks to evaluate your proposal.’”

James Anderson, vice president, Gartner

Gartner

That’s why IT leaders need to get better at quickly putting technologies in place that create business outcomes. “The reason shadow IT exists is because necessity trumps efficiency every single time,” he says. The business has a need, and a vendor helps them get a solution up and running. When the business brings in the IT department, IT says, “‘We have our own process for this.’ Then the business is unhappy with IT because it seems like they can’t stand up solutions as quickly as the vendors can,” Anderson says.

Of course, there may be good reasons why IT needs that extra time. Your team is considering security and governance, and integration with existing and planned systems — things vendors may not worry about. How can IT departments compete with vendors on this unlevel playing field?

The answer, Anderson says, is to discuss every new technology’s pros and cons in three areas: cost, value, and risk. The business may not look at those issues the same way you do, he says. “But those are the building blocks for a discussion on whether we should go with this vendor or internally.”

5. The business may not want to move at the same speed that you do

“CIOs need to recognize where the business comfort level is,” Barchi says. “Do they want to be cutting edge, or are they comfortable being a late adopter of a technology or tool?”

Being a late adopter can be a safer approach, while being an early adopter can confer competitive advantage.  “The CIO’s role is not to advocate for either, but to read the organization and understand how best to achieve its goals,” he says

This can be frustrating for technology leaders who often are impatient to deploy new technology that will bring new capabilities, he acknowledges. “Advanced technology is exciting. But our role as CIOs is not to be excited about the technology. It’s to be excited about our organizations, our missions, and the people we serve.”

Besides, he says, every new technology comes at a cost, not only in dollars but also in effort on the part of both IT and the business. “We need to decide how much of our resources we’re willing to expend to make sure it’s going to work,” he says. “Even technology with a lot of benefit has a cost burden associated with implementation and refinement and making sure it meets the needs of the organization. Is the benefit of that advanced technology worth that cost and that lift? Or would it be better to optimize what the organization is doing with current technology and then adopt the advanced technology later when it’s better suited to move smoothly into the enterprise?”

Barchi says he weighs considerations like these all the time. “That’s a tradeoff. There’s no right answer.”

6. The business really does need to understand what you do

Damon Venger, CIO, CompuCom

CompuCom

Experts stress that CIOs — and their teams — need to understand how the business operates, and be able to speak its language, to be effective. But, Venger says, the reverse is also true. Effective technology leaders need to be good at helping business leaders grasp the complexities of modern technology so that they can work with IT to make good technology decisions.

“I think it’s about being more transparent,” he adds. “I like to say, it’s like The Wizard of Oz. The business doesn’t know what’s going on behind the curtain. But if we’re transparent and we explain, ‘This is how it’s working. This is what we’re delivering on,’ maybe, collectively, we can come up with a better way because maybe they want different results. You make adjustments together with the business so you can make sure your internal team is focused on what’s going to help drive the business.”

Knowing how to have these conversations is a powerful skill for any CIO, he says. “Being able to translate complex technology into terms that make sense for business results. It’s not about speaking in layman’s terms or dumbing anything down. The only way to do it is to understand the business, and as much as you can, get the business to understand IT.”

7. You’re probably talking about the wrong things

Most CIOs are, Anderson says. For example: uptime. That’s value-expected as opposed to  value-added, he says. CIOs need to tell the business about both value-added and value-expected, but most don’t distinguish between the two.

“If you’re looking at two different ice cream shops, you’re not thinking, ‘Which one has the cold ice cream?’ That’s value-expected,” he says. Seventy to 80 percent of the typical IT budget is spent on value-expected, keep-the-lights-on work such as creating the “five nines” of availability many CIOs take pride in, he adds. But if you want to talk about availability, you need to go the extra step to connect that metric to a specific business outcome, Anderson says. “How is this suite of applications used? It’s used to close loans. What impacts my paycheck is how many days it takes to close a loan. So if you talk about how availability helps with these metrics you care about, that’s a game-changer in a conversation on the business value of IT.”

In general, Barchi says, IT leaders are doing things right to foster business-IT alignment and help drive business results. “We’ve grown to be responsive to the needs of our customers in every industry I’ve seen.” But, he says, some business leaders have been slow to understand how IT can and must fit into every initiative.

“In some of the industries I’ve served, the first reaction I get from my peers is, ‘Oh, you want to be embedded with us? Join our staff meeting every other Tuesday for the last five minutes, and we’ll save any IT issues and discuss them then,’” he says. That’s not a great approach because there’s some element of tech in almost every financial, customer experience, service, or operational conversation. “So not just technology leaders, but also business leaders, need to recognize that technology underpins most of what we do now, and it needs to be part of every conversation.”

It’s up to IT leaders to deliver that message, he adds. “The hard truth is that, as CIOs, it’s on us to show the value of being part of every conversation — mostly listening, and then coming up with solutions or helping to solve problems.”

Business IT Alignment, IT Leadership

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As anybody in IT can attest, the skills gap companies are facing is real, and it’s getting more pronounced. The Great Resignation trend is hitting IT hard. Nearly 90% of all employers either already have a shortage or expect to face one within a few years. And a third say the problem has already grown worse over the past year alone.

Employers are approaching the skills issue proactively. They’re offering more perks to attract highly qualified applicants, of course. Many are also setting up certification programs to arm their work forces with more of the IT “technical skills” that are in high demand – everything from networking to technical support to machine learning to cybersecurity and analytics.

Efforts like these can help raise the technical skill levels inside organizations. But they won’t ensure that IT teams have the broad range of skills, knowledge, overall business acumen and emotional intelligence they need to meet tomorrow’s challenges.

To manage increasingly complex IT environments, organizations need to add more of the “power skills” that aren’t usually associated with the IT profession. These include the interpersonal skills that enable teams to go way beyond tinkering with technology – everything from workplace collaboration to leadership to critical thinking. These are the skills that enable teams to make technology work optimally for the organization itself.

To a certain extent, these types of power skills are innate; certain people just seem to perform them better than others. But these skills can also be taught. And many organizations are building up skill levels in these areas by taking advantage of flexible, anytime, anywhere, learning-as-a-service models that enable workers to develop on the fly.

Here are six nontechnical talents your staff should be skilled up on, and how you can teach them:

Collaboration – Promoting Teamwork

In sports, teams that play together well generally have an edge over those who don’t. The same applies to tech organizations. “Team players” collaborate with each other on tasks, mentor each other and focus strategically on solving problems that hold back the larger group. Managers are responsible for creating a team dynamic. But individuals can learn what it takes to collaborate. Courses can focus on conflict management techniques, listening, assessing group dynamics, carving out a productive role and applying individual expertise to organizational goals.    

Critical Thinking – Digging into a Problem with a Broader Perspective

To perform effectively in their job, IT managers need to bring a lot of skills to the table. It’s not enough to just punch the clock and check off items from the to-do list. It’s important to think – deeply and broadly – about potential problems and how to solve them. Management training courses often devote segments to critical thinking skills. Concepts like analytical thinking, open-mindedness and self-regulation are central to the act of problem framing in a technology environment. This involves committing to gathering the best information, regardless of source, and shedding biases when it comes time to make a decision. Developing a sound critical thinking process establishes trust from peers and helps individuals keep aligned to the bigger picture.

Leading Through Ideation – Building Collaboration into the Process

While leaders have the final say, they can’t be the only ones talking. Others need to contribute ideas, and let the group decide on the right one to pursue. This requires an organizational commitment to ideation. Both managers and team members need to prioritize the practice – and work on it. There are techniques to employ that may seem obvious, but they can be taught. Brainstorming, for instance. Workshops can teach ways to create structured processes that encourage out-of-the-box proposals, keep contributors focused, collect ideas, track progress and develop feedback loops. Another technique – “bodystorming” – encourages participants to act out situations and put them in the user’s place. Teams that use their ideation skills to the fullest solve problems more quickly and effectively than those headed by autocratic leaders.

Practicing Inclusiveness – More Points of View Generate More Value  

In society the term “inclusiveness” has focused on acceptance of individuals regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation. It can be seen as even more broad-ranging – the ability to blend with others that are different from you in any way. This is a skill. The workplace is a melting pot of people with different experiences, approaches, talents, problem-solving abilities and work styles. Being able to listen to others, help others and be helped by others helps organizations advance overall levels of innovation.

Problem Solving – Removing Roadblocks Before They Happen

Work can be seen as a series of sequential, interconnected problems that need to be solved to ensure a smooth flow of progress. Inability to solve one problem invariably backs up the whole process. There are problem-solving techniques that can break the logjam. One that’s being taught across disciplines is to address specific issues in a journalistic who-what-where fashion. Who is most affected by this problem? What does this problem prevent from moving forward? Where did this problem take place? When does it take effect? Why is it happening? How is it affecting workflows and team members from being productive? Performing effective problem-solving helps individuals lower stress levels and remove roadblocks to eventual success. 

Decision Making – Ideation to Execution

Ideas are helpful, but they won’t benefit the organization’s mission if the best ones aren’t put into action. Decisions need to be made. Leaders, of course, have to control the big, sweeping moves, but rank-and-file technologists need to successfully decide how to move tasks forward on their agendas. How can they do that better? Courses and workshops can focus on specific decision-making techniques. Here’s one string to follow: 1) Identify the problem; 2) Gather relevant information; 3) Brainstorm possible solutions; 4) List potential consequences; 5) Make a decision; 6) Take action. Making timely, well-informed decisions advances business objectives and prepares each contributor to take on more responsibility.

Conclusion

Companies are only as effective as the people they employ. The technology sector is currently facing challenges recruiting and keeping qualified workers. Moving forward, they’ll need to double down on efforts to develop skills from within – not just in technologies themselves but also in the skill areas that advance the organizations as a whole.

For more information, visit HPE Education Services

About Drew Westra

Drew Westra is a Worldwide Marketing Leader in HPE Educational Services, with over 25 years’ experience in the information technology, telephony and wireless industries. As an entrepreneur, he has also successfully developed several small businesses into thriving organizations.

IT Leadership