Like many other professions, the career path of an IT leader, VP, CTO or CIO usually starts out at a lower level within an organizational hierarchy, and may take many routes. A business analyst fresh out of college moves through the project management ranks, leading larger teams and programs until he is responsible for an enterprise-wide technology portfolio. A developer writes quality code for a few years, then leads a team of developers, and eventually finds herself as CTO for a software company managing hundreds.
The road to greater responsibility requires constant adjustment, from being an individual contributor to a manager, from being self-directed to a motivator of a large team. Many have correctly noted that organizations don’t usually provide much in the way of support resources for these transitions – they just happen, summed up well by the line “Poof, you’re a boss.”
Many of the challenges described by IT leaders as they move up the ladder can be categorized as changes of scale – how managing 100 people will differ from managing 5, the volume and types of HR issues to be encountered with a larger group, etc… and are all valid concerns.
Yet, at some point on the trip up the ladder (and dependent on the size of the organization), an entirely new set of expectations appears, for which a leader may initially feel completely out of his depth, finds he doesn’t enjoy in the slightest, and has real difficulty understanding how they benefit the organization.
These activities are often referred to as flying at a different level within an organization, and could very well require the majority of one’s time in the new role. What are a few of the new activities?
- Senior management meetings, planning and Board preparations. Depending on the organization these activities may now consume several days of a typical week. Knowing that your team is executing on a major technology migration while you and your management peers are locked in a room discussing a pending legal issue, or a new customer proposal, can present a real challenge, and getting Blackberry updates is not the same as actually being in on the action.
- Business partnerships, operations, and strategic planning. Its likely that you will be spending more time in aggregate with your internal business partners than with your own management team. You know that your team has its own wish list of high-priority projects you could be discussing and planning for, but instead you are playing the role of a stenographer, documenting every request made by your customers, and offering consultative advice on how technology can assist their teams.
- External customer interactions and product sales. You may never have considered yourself a salesperson, in fact, you may have considered sales to be a messy business you would never be involved in, yet here you are, flying around the country as part of a senior-level sales call.
I’ll not spend much time articulating the rationale for the above activities (and others) within this new responsibility list – suffice it to say that they are in fact critical responsibilities for senior IT leaders in organizations of any size, whether one likes it or not. In summary:
- If you were lucky enough to be granted a seat at the table within the senior management team, you’ll need to be engaged and involved in all the discussions, including those (the majority) having nothing to do with IT.
- The quality of your partnership and alignment with internal customers will be a determining factor in your success as a senior leader, and will require a substantial, ongoing investment of time and attention on your part.
- You are now the face of the IT organization and its technology capabilities to external customers and business partners, and your sales skills (or lack thereof) may have a material impact on the organization’s bottom line.
A good number of IT senior leaders struggle with these new responsibilities, the commitment of time required, and the tug-of-war between these new priorities (which they may not enjoy), and their prior, more comfortable, internally-facing IT duties. Some struggle with this issue for their entire careers.
The struggle may present itself as a series of strategic IT partnership opportunities that die on the vine while the CIO is hunkered down within his own department working on trivial issues. A focus on incremental improvements within the IT department may come at the expense of larger strategic plans that would guarantee the long-term health of the organization. In other cases the new leader has difficulty viewing the organization’s challenges through a macro-level lens, and attempts to apply a prior area of specialization to each issue – if you were an architect, everything may appear to be an architecture problem for example (the same holds true for every other speciality).
The leaders who struggle with flying at the right level in their IT management careers may be judged overall as adequate performers, but everyone around them notices that key strategic activities are left undone while the individual in question is internally focused on his preferred area of interest. Failures in performing these strategic-level activities may be given higher visibility than the actual operational performance within the department – the IT metrics all look great on paper, but one’s peers and the CEO are less than pleased. A hard-earned seat at the table may be lost, and the new leader marginalized over time.
Those prescient new senior leaders will try to identify the emerging senior-level responsibility list early on in their tenure, and if they feel they are lacking any of these tools, will take appropriate steps to build the skills needed as well as their confidence level. In addition, new senior leaders would be wise to discuss the changing responsibility landscape within their own leadership team, and set new expectations accordingly, in a conversation such as:
“In my new role and based upon my conversations with the organization’s senior leadership, I’ve determined that I’ll need to spend substantially more time on X, Y and Z going forward. Therefore, as my managers, I’ll need you to take over A, B and C… from now on. Let’s talk about how we can make this happen…”
There will always be potential excuses for not attending to the strategic-level activities, especially if they are not enjoyed:
- A data center issue could be managed very well by the team you have put in place over time, but it wouldn’t hurt to just sit in for a few hours on the call…
- A new project is in very capable hands with the PMO you built but hey, I’d be nice to sit in on the requirements walk-through for the afternoon just to make sure…
These small day-to-day decisions can represent a substantial opportunity cost for the organization over time, in strategic-level activities that are not being attended to. For many, especially those who do not take easily to their new set of responsibilities, this will be a constant internal struggle, and a growth opportunity for those that can stick with it and thrive. The daily internal conversation for those that have recognized this challenge and embraced it may include items such as:
- What should I be working on to move the organization forward, right now, in my larger role?
- Should I be out meeting with external customers even though I don’t enjoy it?
- Should I be setting up a meeting with that colleague in department X, who doesn’t have a great perception of my team?
- Should I be listening in on the phones down in customer service for the afternoon?
- How can I be influencing the larger planning process for next year?
It’s an interesting fact of management that, when looking down any list of to-do items, those few items one would least enjoy at the particular moment, and have been putting off for some time, are in many cases the items that would also have the largest positive impact to the organization.
What new responsibilities have you found to be the most difficult to transition to as you moved up the career ladder?
Your comments are welcome. If this post was helpful, you might like to subscribe to the RSS feed, sign up for weekly updates via email or follow me on Twitter.