All Posts in Leadership

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Musings about running an IT organization:

How to rank managers:

1. The worst managers get nothing done.

2. Bad managers bully their staff to do the work, then do it over so it gets done as they think it should.

3. Better managers supervise the work to make sure it gets done.

4. Effective managers oversee processes that orchestrate the work so it gets done, almost automatically.

5. Effective managers who are also excellent leaders build organizations capable of doing whatever work needs to get done, without their intervention.

The challenge facing excellent CIOs:

138 factors determine the effectiveness of an IT organization (we’ve counted). Of these, a CIO can control or influence fewer than 50. And while IT exists to deliver, enhance, maintain and operate working technology that supports the business … and the principle means of doing so is to establish and follow mature, well-designed processes … a CIO controls or influences only 16 factors directly related to processes and technology.

At least that’s true of excellent CIOs. Those prone to micromanagement succumb to temptation and try to use many of the others as well.

The nature of IT strategy:

Many CIOs seem to shy away from developing a formal strategy. Two reasons seem to dominate. The first is that many CIOs, unsure as to what constitutes an “IT Strategy,” are bashful. They have a plan, but are concerned that if they call it a strategy, someone who knows what a strategy really is will ridicule their pathetic attempt at publishing one.

In case you’re among them:

The simplest way of explaining what an IT strategy is … and isn’t … is that it’s the porfolio of everything the CIO is supposed to be personally involved in making sure happens.

The portfolio subdivides into two categories of activity. One faces outward to the business — the small number of high-profile, high-risk, high-payback undertakings that support enterprise-scale business goals. Call these strategic programs and initiatives (business-strategic, that is). The other faces inward to the IT organization, and addresses an equally small number of very important improvements to organizational effectiveness and capability — generally, those critical to IT’s ability to successfully complete its part of the business-strategic programs and initiatives.

Why IT strategy rarely turns into IT action:

The second reason many CIOs shy away from developing an IT strategy is how often and how quickly IT strategic plans seem to turn into dusty three-ring binders.

The way to ensure your IT strategy doesn’t turn into a dusty three-ring binder is to integrate it into your planning process, as was mentioned in this space years ago. Organizations ignore strategies for two reasons. One is that some strategies state intentions without defining a roadmap for their achievement. Without a roadmap, nobody knows what they’re supposed to do, so unsurprisingly they don’t do it.

The other reason is that strategic planning and resource planning are independent of each other. When all IT staff are assigned full-time to projects and day-to-day work, nobody has time left to implement the strategy. And so, unsurprisingly, they don’t implement it.

The solution is self-evident in principle but difficult to achieve in practice. As is true of every course of action, for an IT strategy to be more than good intentions you need a design and a plan. The design describes what you’re trying to accomplish. The plan describes the actions necessary to achieve the design, and the staff and other resources needed to undertake those actions.

Putting it together

Excellent CIOs build IT organizations capable of doing whatever work needs to get done. Defining what’s needed to build their organization is half of the IT strategy — the inward-facing half.

It’s something of an irony that the CIOs most successful at delivering what the company needs from IT — the other half of the IT strategy — spend the least time and energy directly engaged in the delivery itself. They delegate that, confident that if they build a great organization, those to whom they’ve delegated responsibility for delivery will succeed at it.

* * *

If you’re looking for a serious guidebook on the subject of IT strategy, you could do a lot worse … and not much better … than to buy a copy of the second edition of A Practical Guide to Information Systems Strategic Planning by Anita Cassidy. It’s practical (hence the name), and thorough. If you follow it you won’t have to worry — the result will inarguably be a real IT strategy.

Comments

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

An anonymous reader, commenting on last week’s anecdote about Employee Satisfaction Surveys, described how his company achieved high marks year after year.

Employees receive a company-wide performance bonus of between 10 and 15 percent, based on the entire company and individual workgroups meeting preset goals. Still, for quite some time, employees rated their satisfaction poorly.

In response, the company’s executives made better Employee Satisfaction Survey results one of the preset goals. Since then … no surprise … every survey has reported that the company is the best place in the world to work.

I’m pretty sure the folks running this company had no intention of rigging the survey results. It’s more likely they made a series of decisions, each of which made sense by itself, and never stepped back to look at the whole thing.

Company-wide performance bonuses? Great idea. Wanting employees to like and appreciate their working environment? Likewise, and a much better idea than wanting them to hate it. Make their liking it a formal management goal? Absolutely — it won’t happen any other way. Measure their appreciation so you know? Of course, since the only alternative is guessing.

We all know what the road to Hell is made of. If each paving stone is labeled with the good intention that placed it there, there’s an even faster-growing stretch than failing to step back and look at the whole picture like the folks who set up this failed system. It’s deciding “We have to hold employees accountable,” as several readers insisted in response to last week’s column that suggested it’s a poor way to lead.

Opinion: It’s the opposite of leadership. As those who have read Leading IT: The Toughest Job in the World know, a key measure of a leader’s effectiveness is followership — others leading on your behalf. If you have to put ’em in chains and drag them behind you, calling it leadership is something of a stretch.

Holding employees accountable amounts to little more than that. What the phrase usually turns into in practical terms is that you punish them for failure. When you do, you deprive them of their adulthood.

As I explained to one of my daughters once upon a time, the universe imposes consequences for bad choices. It does so automatically, through the operation of various physical, social, and legislated laws. When adults make poor choices, such as smoking several packs of cigarettes a day, they experience the consequences because that’s what happens.

That’s why parents create artificial consequences. By doing so we hope our children will acquire the habit of making good decisions, thereby avoiding the universe’s much harsher consequences. This works when they’re young. But by the time they become teenagers, our ability to teach through the imposition of artificial consequences becomes more and more limited. Real ones take over.

Some managers consider their trade to be similar to parenting, and they apply similar techniques. But management isn’t the same as parenting (also see “Sam Kinison on management,” 4/15/1996), for this simple reason: When you encourage a six-year-old child to display the maturity of an eleven-year-old, you’re moving her forward. But when you do the same with a forty-six-year-old programmer, you have the opposite effect.

To be clear: As I’m using the words, holding an employee accountable means they do what they’re supposed to do because you impose discipline. If they take responsibility, it means they exhibit self-discipline. You can’t teach self-discipline to adults through the imposition of consequences. Mostly, trying to do so achieves the exact opposite — you rewind their lives to adolescence, and in doing so encourage the instinctive rebellion of the adolescent.

Create a culture of adulthood instead. Do it by promoting the people who display the trait. By giving them the bigger bonuses. By praising their successes in staff meetings, and profiling them in the company newsletter.

Establish, in short, the expectation that this is how we do things around here — we take assignments, make them our own, get them done. One of the most fascinating aspects of culture is that people adapt to it and display its characteristics themselves almost instinctively, without thinking consciously about how their behavior and reactions are changing. Take advantage of this very natural tendency.

Sometimes, you do have to “decruit” (now there’s a word!) those who persistently fail to take responsibility. Start with those managers who blame their failure to deliver results on their employees (who, they complain, fail to take responsibility). This might look like you’re holding them accountable. But that isn’t the case. What you’re doing is recognizing a basic principle of culture change:

You either change the people, or you change the people.

Comments