Posts filed under ‘CIO’
Leadership Communication: From Ideas to Action
Communicating effectively with business colleagues has ranked as one of CIOs’ top three critical success factors for as long as I’ve been tracking these things — and I’ve been tracking them for a long time. I’ve wondered over the years why this issue hasn’t gone away. Why is it so damn hard for IT leaders to get their message across?
First of all, this is not just a CIO problem. People in general are terrible at conveying a concept or message intact from their brain to that of their “listener” (a misused term if ever there was one). As Celtics coach Red Auerbach used to say, “it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.” Influencing what people hear involves a lot more than just forming the right words.
To communicate successfully requires navigating a virtual land of ogres and sirens, often without a map. The territory between two brains is populated with two lifetimes of context, experience and expectation, and if you don’t understand any of that, your message will have a tough time reaching its destination in anything like its intended form.
What makes this more difficult for people who choose careers in IT is that they are typically strong analytical thinkers. This reinforces the idea that a well-reasoned proposal that “makes sense” must naturally be accepted. Wrong! Much of business and, indeed, human interaction, has nothing to do with reason at all. It has to do with intuition and “gut feel” and is influenced by examples and stories. Don’t get me wrong, you have to have good data to back up your position, but don’t for a minute think that’s all — or even the most important part — of your message.
Your message will have a much better chance of penetrating the thicket of your audience’s biases and defenses if you leave yours behind. Whatever the form (dialogue in a meeting; a written document; an e-mail; a speech), a message that is spare, direct and other-focused is less likely to get hung up along the way.
Effective communication both requires and creates engagement. Good communicators show people where they fit into the picture, how a new initiative will affect them and how their own actions will contribute to it, and thus to the organization’s success. It takes them beyond buy in to action, building essential momentum behind the effort.
Getting from ideas to action is what leadership communication is all about.
Five Steps to Successful Communication
- Put in the work to map the territory (understand your audience’s context) before you begin.
- Leave your own biases and defenses behind.
- Choose your time and place. If you can limit the distractions competing for your audience’s attention, your message will have a better chance of getting through.
- Make sure your audience is really listening. If not, why not, and what can you do about it?
- Show people where they fit into the story — how the change will affect them and how they will help create the change.
A Brief and Colorful History of Technology in Business
I was asked to give a couple of talks this spring giving my perspective on the current state of technology in business. I always think the present is better understood by looking at the past, so I put together a presentation looking at a) how things have developed over the past 20 or so years (not coincidentally, the span of time I was involved with CIO Magazine), and b) the challenges and opportunities I see businesses in general and CIOs in particular facing during this tumultuous time. I’ve posted a version of this talk on Slideshare, complete with an audio narration. Please check it out and let me know if your view lines up with mine or how you see things differently.
Here’s the presentation (or you can view it from the Slideshare site):
And here’s a link to the clip I reference at the beginning, of the comedian Louis CK on the Conan O’Brien show. The relevant segment is about 1/3 of the way in and it’s about a minute long, where he talks about cell phones and internet service on planes. This bit really defines the problem technologists face in making end users and business partners happy. The whole thing highlights an even more fundamental problem we all face in seeking happiness through external means. Very Zen….
update: unfortunately, NBC has taken down this clip, though there are still a couple of versions floating around on YouTube
Experience Matters
In today’s tough economy, many companies find they must lay off some of their most experienced (i.e., expensive) employees in favor of lower cost labor. But research — and history — shows that experience has value that can’t be achieved any other way.
I’m reading a report just out on “Women CIOs & the Art of Influence” from the CIO Executive Council, in partnership with The Leader’s Edge (you can access the report on the Council’s website). One of the findings shows that when it comes to effectiveness and the ability to influence outcomes, age and seniority matter. Women with more than 25 years of experience and with senior IT leadership titles were more effective than those with less than 25 years on the job and lower level titles. The ability to influence, deemed “very important” by 92 percent of study participants, manifests itself in various ways, including that “more senior IT leaders consider what’s in it for the stakeholder more frequently than do their less experienced counterparts.”
This reminds me of a story I once heard about the founding of Outward Bound, the wilderness-based training program whose stated mission is “To help people discover and develop their potential to care for themselves, others and the world around them through challenging experiences in unfamiliar settings.”
During World War II, someone observed that contrary to expectations, younger, more physically fit sailors had more trouble surviving shipwrecks than their older shipmates. It seemed that experience — having dealt with similar situations in the past — made the older sailors better able to survive, even if the were less physically fit. The owner of a shipping company began looking for a training program for young sailors who seemed to lose “the tenacity and fortitude needed to survive the rigors of war and shipwreck” when confronted with emergency situations. Outward Bound was formed to simulate such experiences and better prepare them to survive.
Businesses should pay heed to this example and make sure they a) retain enough experience managers to help them navigate these challenging times and b) find ways to quickly expose less-experienced managers to situations that will give them the seasoning they need.
The Risks of Being Risk Averse
The paradox of tough times is they usually call for dramatic measures, yet it’s human nature to keep a low profile and avoid risk, both corporate and personal. This is the dilemma facing CIOs today.
As I wrote in a column a few months ago, incrementalism won’t cut it for many businesses in this economy. But according to Paul Gaffney, former CIO and head of supply chain at Staples and current COO of Desktone, that’s the path most CIOs will take.
I had lunch with Paul yesterday (Blue Ginger in Wellesley – if you go, you have to try the Alaskan butterfish). It seems to me the next few years would provide tremendous opportunities for his company, which provides desktops as a service. After all, that’s one of the main areas this year’s CIO Hall of Famers were enthusiastic about. Gaffney (himself a member of the CIO Hall of Fame) pointed out that this group represented not the market but the vanguard. CIOs like Blockbuster’s Keith Morrow, PG&E’s Pat Lawicki, Bechtel’s Geir Ramleth and Motorola’s (former) Patty Morrison might advocate and take bold action into uncharted territory, because they really do understand the new technologies and business models and can successfully calculate the benefits and risks. But the vast majority of CIOs will try to work within the parameters of what they know to ride out the current economic storm.
This is completely understandable – and even, I suppose, prudent. It would be foolhardy for a CIO to advocate a path that he or she didn’t have a pretty good grasp of.
What this suggests to me is CIOs should be finding out as much as they can as quickly as they can about things like desktop virtualization, software as a service and cloud computing. Because in business as in the law, when it comes to missteps and missed opportunities, ignorance is no excuse.
Paul Gaffney
Paul Gaffney led IT and supply chain efforts at Staples and built OfficeDepot.com's e-commerce site. He's now rolling out new desktop as a service capabilities as COO of Desktone.
