How to Turn Your Employees Into Leaders
Added 15th Aug 2008Article Highlights
- 73 percent are CIOs-in-waiting who say that one-on-one coaching is effective in leadership development
- 95 percentage of CIOs-in-waiting say that stretch assignments have been very or extremely effective in their leadership development
- CIOs who are skilled at cultivating, empowering and rewarding IT leaders will see their efforts come full circle
- At Motorola, Morrison has seen 16 of her IT leaders go on to become CIOs at other companies
Motorola CIO Patty Morrison sleeps well at night. She takes real vacations. She has time to think. It doesn't sound like the typical description of life as a CIO, particularly an IT leader at a $42 billion (about Rs 168,000 crore) company in the midst of a major re-organization in the acutely competitive communications equipment market. Truth be told, there may be a little hyperbole in Morrison's
self portrayal. Her plate is full. She determines long-term IT strategy, works closely with executive peers to decide the right direction for the company, and travels the world to communicate the corporate mission to the enterprise and its customers.
“CIOs who are skilled at cultivating, empowering and rewarding IT leaders will see their efforts come full circle. The leaders they’ve encouraged will themselves encourage new leaders.”
But when it comes to the day-to-day operation and success of her 2,200-person technology department, Morrison's concerns are few. She doesn't get middle-of-the-night calls about network outages. She's not putting out IT fires instead of eating lunch. When Motorola created a new integrated supply chain division that IT had to support, Morrison barely broke a sweat. She sought out Cathie Kozik, corporate VP of IT, supplied her with the necessary resources and watched her create an effective IT group from scratch. Morrison's not lucky. Like most successful CIOs today, the 25-year IT veteran makes a concerted effort to foster leadership at all levels of her IT organization.
She knows that the benefits of pushing accountability for IT success further down the organizational chart, go beyond personal perks like getting a good eight hours of sleep. CIOs who want to succeed as business partners and strategists can't do it alone. "A CIO has a lot of priorities. As a general rule, they should spend at least half their time outside the four walls of their own organization," says Susan Cramm, IT leadership expert and founder of Valuedance. "You start thinking about how that can happen and you realize, 'Hey, wait a minute. CIOs need to think about how to drive accountability down.' It's a key issue." Otherwise talented CIOs who don't cultivate, empower and reward leadership in their departments, risk creating a rocky relationship between IT and the business and dooming themselves. "A CIO who is not able to empower other leaders will have a difficult time fulfilling his role," says Steven Agnoli, CIO of law firm Kirkpatrick & Lockhart.
"The CIO is never the successful one. Your success is almost entirely related to the success of the people within your group." Indeed, an employee's leadership failure becomes yours as well. "There are some IT organizations where the business feels quite comfortable with the CIO and maybe even his or her immediate reports," says Forrester VP Laurie Orlov. "But a level down, they're not. That leads to concerns about the long-term direction of IT." For Morrison, IT leadership development is just as important as other strategic priorities such as determining long-term IT plans and collaborating with peers on corporate strategy. Maybe more so. "Spending a lot of time on developing talent is the only way to be sure I can execute well," she says.
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