THE UNOFFICIAL GUIDE TO
IT Leaders and security professionals get constant push back on the urgency of patching and security remediation efforts from end users and the business. Often times they view it as a disruption to their work or business...however the alternative is a much greater threat to their business and customers. Threat actors only need a small window of time to attack. This Comcast breach is a glaring example of that. https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/19/comcast-xfinity-hackers-36-million-customers/
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I came across another great CIO.com article by Christina Wood on preparing the next set of IT leaders on your teams. There are lots of great topics in the article I have previously wrote about here that are important to leadership development within IT…coaching, soft skills, learning from mistakes, and putting in sweat equity outside of work. If you are new to a senior IT leadership position, take a few minutes to read about some of these thoughts and insights about how your leadership development needs to evolve as you develop your future IT leaders One other key point raised in the article was a recent topic of discussion at work. It is important to remember that great technical people don't always make the best managers. There can be this false assumption that to retain or advance talent in your organization, you need promote your best team members into management roles. Advancement can take many forms and shouldn’t be limited to management roles! Get to know the “why” behind advancement desires of your team. https://www.cio.com/article/432763/coaching-it-pros-for-leadership-roles.html A former colleague shared a great Simon Sinek video with me showing a simple illustration of performance vs trust and how it impacts leadership and culture within an organization. Picking and promoting leaders isn't strictly about looking at metrics.
Everyone wants high performance / high trust individuals leading in your organization. But choosing wrong leaders, especially those who may be high performance but low trust is a toxic combination that is a cancer to an an organization. It is important on HOW you grow and promote leadership in your organizations and not just blindly look at metrics. I came across this article on CIO.com the other day and thought it might be worthwhile to share and break it down a bit. Guy Hadari, CIO of Biogen, talks about key management skills that sets good IT leaders apart from the pack. His comments were insightful and certainly something I have experienced and reinforced over the course of my own career. Many good technical IT staff members and even managers often focus solely on the technical aspects of their roles. That’s partly because many of them were drawn to the profession because they enjoyed the technical components or had the aptitude to deal with the complexity that comes with it. Many people outside of IT also paint these IT people into a technology box as well, often not appreciating the value they can bring the organization outside of IT. The key difference between a good IT staff member or manager and a great IT leader is what they bring to the table in the non-technical areas. As Hadari points out, “Most people consider the CIO to be a technology person, and they want to put them in a technology box, but technology should be only 20% of a CIO’s job,” says Hadari, who has been leading IT for the $15 billion biotech business since March 2021. “CIOs need to understand infrastructure, security, and business applications at a high level, but it is more important that they know how to manage a business function. A CIO with a half billion-dollar budget is essentially the CEO of a very complex business.” Early in my career, I had the benefit of working for a company that emphasized the importance of IT leadership being a business leader as much as it did an IT leader. The two go hand in hand. I probably didn’t see or understand that as much a few years out of college, but today the impact was very important. I was provided the opportunity to work outside of IT heading up a purchasing department and managing a demand planning system as part of cross training development program for 2 years. That opportunity provided solid experience in business operations not solely based in IT. It ultimately led me to purse my MBA and further build out my business background as fully as I did my IT background. Many rising IT professionals aren’t necessarily prepared or trained adequately to deal with the management aspects of their roles that come with being an IT leader. Their comfort zone is the technical, the analytics, and innovation. They often thrive on the chaotic and ever-changing nature of the IT space. However, businesses and their leaders want and expect consistency of their leaders and the organizations under them. It is the business acumen and the ability to manage and lead across the organization speaking the language of business that will set them apart as IT leaders. Those who can’t make that jump and learn to embrace the other 80% of non-IT related parts of their role will be destined to see their rise up the organization stop. CEOs, COOs, and other good business leaders are looking for IT leaders who can talk and lead in their language of business. Those IT leaders need to take the technical concepts and then mountains of data, information, and analytics and distill them down to the most important high level IT topics and business drivers. If you want to become one of these trusted IT leaders who see your careers advance, make sure you are taking your career on a path that provide these business and management experiences to help you become a better IT leader. |
About Shawn:My philosophy as an IT leader today is that I believe you must first and foremost be a business leader. It is my goal to be a strategic partner with the business to help it make money, save money, and be the absolute best in the industry at what we do. Having the technology competencies and experience is just your entry fee to sit at the table. Every day, I am bringing 20+ years of IT experience to the table in the areas such as:
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