I recently had the opportunity to talk with six outstanding CIOs who epitomize the phrase “leader as teacher.” I wanted to find out more about why they view teaching as a critical responsibility of leadership, what it means in practice, and how they maintain a teaching mindset and make it a priority in their very busy schedules. This prestigious group included:
Dani Brown, Vice President and CIO, Brunswick Corporation
Bill Fortwangler, CIO, Dollar Bank
Claus Jensen, Chief Digital Officer and Head of Technology, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Sue Kozik, SVP and CIO, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana
Teena Piccione, Global CIO and Executive Vice President, RTI International
Ken Piddington, Vice President and CIO, U.S. Silica Company
I featured key lessons and takeaways from these leaders in my CIO Whisperers column at CIO.com, but as you can imagine, when you’re picking the brains of some of the top IT executives around, you’re going to end up with more valuable insights and advice than you can fit into one column. > Read on for some additional nuggets that you will want to read and share with anyone who shares your commitment to elevating their leadership game.
Talk to any CIO or IT executive who’s ever mentored an up-and-coming leader and you’ll quickly discover that they’re getting as much out of the experience as their mentees are. Not only does IT mentoring gives the executive a satisfying way to pay it forward, it’s also a great way to engage star talent, learn about new tech, and relate to younger workers.
When CIOs and other IT executives volunteer to become mentors in O&A’s TechLX program, we ask them to share their thoughts on the value of mentoring as a professional development tool and what they hope to gain from the relationship.
> Read on to hear what these leading CxOs are saying about the value of IT mentoring.
Customer-centricity has become a hot buzzword across industries today, both in B2C and B2B companies. And there’s a good reason for that. Customer-obsessed organizations are winning. But when we start to apply the concepts of customer-centricity and service excellence to IT organizations, we often find that CIOs and IT leaders don’t really understand what the terms mean in practice. So before we talk about what good service looks like for IT, we need to understand what good service doesn’t look like.
> Read on to learn what good service does — and doesn’t — look like and how to build an IT service mindset.
“Technology is the engine. If we don’t have the leadership pipeline, it’s not going to happen.”
That’s O&A’s Dan Roberts, talking with Technology Partners Founder Lisa Nichols recently about what we need to do to prepare our communities, leaders, and entire workforces for an increasingly disruptive world. Lisa caught up with Dan for an episode of her Something Extra podcast.
In a wide-ranging conversation about technology and what great leaders are doing to become trusted advisors in their organization, Dan and Lisa discussed how IT can deliver more strategic value, the importance of building a culture of learning agility, and why a “net-giver” mindset makes all the difference.
When the average person is bombarded with 10,000 messages a day, how do you make sure yours are the ones people remember? Today’s technology leaders have to become a voice of the brand, able to communicate effectively and persuasively to a variety of stakeholders, both internally and externally, about the value that IT delivers. Now more than ever, no IT leader can afford to neglect their communications responsibilities. The stakes are too high.
> Read on to learn how to take advantage of IT’s end-to-end view of the enterprise to lead the conversation, paint a picture of the future, and drive the disruption that will future-proof our organizations.
In a hyper-digital world that’s changing at a relentless pace, the pressure to stay up-to-date with technical and core skills is mounting, and so is the pressure to retain top talent. Across the more than 3,500 diverse IT organizations O&A has worked with, leaders are increasingly concerned about whether or not they have the in-house skills and talent to support these critical business transformation efforts.
True digital fluency involves understanding the entire digital landscape and being able to appropriately and confidently select technology to solve a business problem. Being digitally fluent often means being an effective communicator who’s competent at pushing forward an implementation and encouraging adoption. Put simply, people who are digitally fluent are able to understand and use digital technology while possessing the key soft skills necessary to drive business functions.
> Read on to learn more about what you should be thinking about to address this growing skills gap.
There is a way to be prepared for marketplace disruption. Certainly you must look at emerging technologies and digital strategies, but you must do more than see what’s coming. You have to prepare your company to react quickly to new circumstances. More important than identifying your industry’s next “killer app,” you need to maximize your ability to embrace change on any front.
Discussions of digital disruption often center on the CEO, who ultimately owns strategy, and talk of digital transformation almost always focuses on the CIO, who owns the technology stack. But strategies are executed, and technologies adopted, by your workforce. Too often, business strategy and IT strategy lack the partnership of an equally important IT workforce strategy. And strategic shifts or new tech implementations can’t succeed without a corporate culture that’s ready to execute.
> Read on to learn how to optimize your IT workforce strategy with a focus on developing a future-ready IT workforce.
The first line of our book Unleashing the Power of IT points out that “there has never been a better time to be an IT professional.” We hear CIOs repeating that to their teams all the time. But IT professionals need to be equipped with the right skills to be successful at leading the business through disruption and digital transformation.
O&A conducted a year-long research study with Babson College, resulting in the IT Maturity Curve, a topic that we write and speak about quite often. There are two key points that deserve special emphasis in relation to your IT workforce strategy.
> Read on to learn about navigating the IT Maturity Curve and the specific skills required to evolve through each stage.
