Post Technical Stress Disorder: Don’t be the CIO unable to run IT

Every day I see two clear goals: lead the team of IT professionals responsible for technology, process and collaboration in a manner that maximizes the contribution towards corporate objectives and cooperate with other senior executives to influence and understand the objectives.

Working with other senior executives as a partner, translator and leader has been the focus of my post technical endeavors. Post technical simply being the time in my career where checking source out of team foundation server and rolling up my sleeves to make some ASP.net changes is no longer part of my daily routine. It is very rare to find a Chief Information Officer or SVP of some critical IT service participating in daily stand-ups, backlog grooming sessions or taking coding assignments with their team in a sprint to meet the objectives of a user story. As a matter of fact, most of the executives we work for or with would probably frown on this type of endeavor as a distraction from your primary responsibilities and concerns.  I agree with them. A CIO has a much broader set of opportunities and objectives than to be the super-coder of the team or the only person who knows how to update the firmware on that one router you should have replaced 5 years ago.

However, the paradox we face is intriguing. A post technical focus is critical to many CIO’s ongoing success; the teams we manage respond better to our leadership when the post technical mindset is skewed by as much detail on how IT works and how the people in IT perform their job as possible.

Fortunately, the people you are managing and leading every day probably have low expectations. Let’s be honest with each other – how many network admins and developers expect you to have relevant technical skills at this point in your career?

So, you are starting to wonder, if my peers don’t expect me to have retained deeply  technical skills, my team doesn’t expect me to have retained deeply technical skills and my primary objective as CIO probably doesn’t depend on deeply technical skills – why do I care? You care because as the senior IT executive in your business you want to be able to manage and interface with your domain. You care because at some level you want to validate the information you are given about projects, technology choices and procedures. You care because you want to be connected to every person put in your care.

If none of those reasons work I will give you one more that should matter to every single person in IT – self preservation.

The next generation of CIOs, CTOs and senior IT leaders are going to retain significantly more technical expertise deeper into their career than the current crop of senior IT executives. These up and coming leaders have grown up with more complicated technology, process and capability than the people currently running the show. They are and will be well versed in agile practices, collaborative styles and tools, social computing and exposure to scripting and source code models as a hobby not a profession.

Many of today’s IT leaders are feeling the stress and pain of not being able to comprehend the practices and technologies of their team. When I see this start to set in I always envision a condition I call “Post Technology Stress Disorder”. A condition where you start to feel disconnected and unable to deeply manage your area of responsibilities due to the natural and relevant focus of your career versus the area you lead. You are managing with a post technical emphasis while the teams are pushing further and further into technologies and practices you have no direct experience applying. Eventually this disconnect puts you into a situation where your ability to directly manage the IT function starts to attrite and you are only able to manage the people who manage IT.

You might find this to be a natural part of a progressive senior IT career, but I would challenge that thinking and ask you to instead see the counterpoint – what could be better for an organization than a CIO able to perform well as a post technical leader and an inspirational technologist for the IT enterprise?

So, assuming you have an interest in maintaining or refreshing your technology management skills you will find the remedy for Post Technical Stress Disorder is simple. Don’t be afraid to start at the beginning. Learn the basics of mark up languages, scripting environments and modern operating systems. Spend time one on one with your team mates. Ask them to show you what they do and how. Go to meetings where technical decisions get made. Learn. You don’t have to be and shouldn’t be the expert, but you will be a better CIO and a better executive if you know how your team members perform their jobs.

Are you the CIO or Chief Problem Solver? Boardroom vs. War Room Part 3 of 3

If you have been following the trilogy of “Boardroom vs. War Room” you already know where we are. In Part 1 I discussed the importance of being valuable within your organization and reaching a position of importance should have nothing to do with a fixation on title. Getting to the Boardroom has everything to do with the company you work for and the value proposition you bring to life. It has little, and perhaps nothing, to do with your title. Part 2 was a deep dive into the value of the War Room and how a Senior Information Technology leader or Chief Information Officer can be relevant and critical in the trenches too. In the last part I want to walk you through how you can be the bridge between the strategic nature of the Boardroom and the tactical nature of the War Room.

It is often good enough to be a great strategist and help the senior leadership of your company push towards and capture their goals. It is often good enough, in a specific type of organization, to be the default hands on tactician that keeps the lights on and the systems churning. Different companies need different outputs from their CIOs and CTOs.

My experiences indicate it is easier to find one or the other. It is much more difficult to find someone who can do both. Furthermore, it is often not even a consideration to put someone in the position of Chief Information Officer and expect both. However, it is clearly an emerging trend to expect senior IT strategists and leaders to be capable of interfacing and bringing value across the spectrum. Perhaps it is the increasing technical sophistication of the emerging work force or maybe the increasing complexity of the systems and platforms that support business objectives and it is possibly nothing more complicated than every day we do this thing – bring technology to bear on complicated problems – we are simply expected to be better through experience. Regardless, I have one simple piece of advice for everyone who desires to make the greatest impact possible on their organization by being the bridge between the Boardroom and the War Room: start each day out as the Chief Problem Solver not the Chief Information Officer.

The Chief Problem Solver is a mental state where the challenges of the organization become your personal challenges. The struggles of your peers become your struggles. The tools and skills you command are used purely in the interest of the people who derive value from your organizations outputs. It is an apolitical state of mind that fuels trust and generates momentum out of the Board Room and into the War Room.

Let’s break it down into two parts.

Part 1 – Who else has as much capacity to affect change the moment they leave the Board Room? Most of your peers in finance, marketing, operations and sales have diminutive staff and budget allocations compared to you. Few have the tools and expertise to make – yes “make” – solutions out of what appears to be thin air. Consequently, you the CIO turned Chief Problem Solver have enormous collateral to walk out of the Board Room and make the strategy jump to life in the War Room.

Part 2 – Who else has the process, infrastructure, nomenclature and training to instantly support strategy turned into tactics in the form of a service? ITIL is an excellent example of how we can shrink wrap and manage change like a commodity. I am not suggesting it is easy and if you have a basic foundation in ITIL concepts you can appreciate the enormous amount of rigor and commitment it takes to run IT as a service, but we have the tools and knowledge to support the tactics that realize the strategy and this is an advantage to creating a sustainable problem solving organization.

Put these two things together and you get the idea pretty quickly that one of the best outcomes of pushing yourself towards an equal presence in the Board Room and the War Room is this: the organization can rely on you to make strategy come to life and problems go away. This is a unique and valuable role for Chief Information Officer, SVP or IT Director and not easily replaced or duplicated. Being in the space of Chief Problem Solver makes you relevant when the strategy is created and critical when the tactics come to life.