The skills that got you to CIO are now your worst enemy

All those skills that we used to get promoted through the IT ranks to eventually become a CIO’s such as being detail orientated, methodical, structured and risk adverse are totally the inappropriate for a CIO who wants to lead strategy and transform their organisation and to have a seat at the executive table. I don’t mean these skills are not valued, just that they are not valued at the executive table. It poses a real problem especially for managers such as me who do not come from a sales or marketing background. To play with the big dogs you need to behave like them with big picture thinking, lots of blue sky and playing with ambiguous ideas and strategies.

It is critical to avoid being associated with the attributes of your craft such as structured and conservative decision making. One way to do this, is to bring one of your team into the meeting whenever there is a IT presentation or project to explain the “technical” stuff, allowing you to align with the rest of the execs in playing a high level game of review.

Now I can’t take credit for this idea, that goes to Linda Price from Gartner who made the observation during a roundtable discussion at the IT Management Program at the University of Technology Sydney, it does make great sense to me and is consistent with my own experiences. What do you think?