IT staff are often promoted because they are the most
technically-competent people available, but when they
reachboard level, they can
struggle.
Ben Booth, global CTO at opinion pollsters and market
researchers Ipsos, says that success at board level is about
stepping outside your IT specialism. "You have to put yourself in
the mindset that, while you have a responsibility to deliver on IT
and if you fall down on that basic task you will be in trouble, you
do have to make a broader contribution and not feel inhibited just
because you wear an IT hat".
Roger Scholes, IT and finance manager at automotive supplier ZF
Trading, who sits on the company's UK board, says, "You are a
general manager first, and you have to take responsibility for
every area and make sure the business is moving forward'.
Moreover, even if you have spent your entire career in IT, you
can still be as well placed as those from other business
disciplines to bring a broad understanding of the business to the
board. For example, Scholes joined one of the two companies that
merged in 2004 to form ZF Trading as an IT graduate, and then
worked his way up on the IT side to his current board level
position. Along the way, he spent several years "looking at
processes in all areas, from the back office to the sales side, and
implementing systems that allow staff to spend more time on
activities that add value to the business".
Booth's background, by contrast, included spells with
responsibility not only for managing IT services but also
overseeing delivery of services to customers and data gathering. If
you have not got this kind of operational experience,
Jonathan Perks, managing director of leadership development at HR
consultancy Penna, suggests going on secondment to get your
hands dirty on the front line.
Of course, CIOs do need to pick up some general management
skills along the way. Scholes took some short
management courses at Ashridge and Cranfield - but has also
benefited from coaching and mentoring. "The acting MD who came into
lead the merger that created ZF Trading mentored many of the
managers in the company, including myself," he says.
Booth confirms the boost that coaching and mentoring can provide
to those aiming for the board. "At a couple of points in my career,
I have found coaching to be very useful, and I have had
opportunities to be mentored by those around me. I think it is
important to take those opportunities when they come along, or to
actively seek them out if they are not being offered," he says.
However, earning the respect of others on the board so they will
listen to you on matters outside your specialism - and even
actively seek out your opinion - is about more than picking up
management techniques, or even the value of your interventions
during board meetings.
"People get promoted for high IT skills but get fired for having
low
EQ - emotional intelligence. High EQ means they know themselves
well, know others well, are able to manage stress, are adaptable
enough to handle change, and have a good general mood: no one wants
to work with a mood hoover or have
Dementors
drifting round the building," says Perks.
The good news, Perks says, is that all of these are learned
skills and you can develop and increase your EQ.
Booth agrees. "It is about how you relate to people on a daily
basis. You need to get out of your comfort zone and spend time with
other board members, so you are really seen as part of the top team
and not just the IT person who turns up once a month to meetings
and then goes back to being buried in technology. You need to
nurture that informal aspect of having regular discussions about
specific issues," he says.
Scholes says that it is also vital to not become too remote a
figure when you join the board. "Many good ideas come from casual
conversation. If you are not approachable, you will miss out on
those nuggets and lose touch with understanding what is really
going on at the coal face," he says.
Perks says that this can be a particular danger for IT people
who are used to "coming up with the answer" themselves when
presented with a problem. Once you reach board level, he says,
having all the answers yourself is less important than being able
to draw the answers out of the people around you.
And those conversations need to take place in English, not
technobabble, says Ian Cohen, CIO at Associated Newspapers, which
publishes the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Metro series, as well
as many local and regional papers. "You need to understand the
language people use to describe their operations and use that to
talk to them. You also need to talk about how you can advance their
agenda through the opportunities and capabilities IT can deliver,
not about what the technology is," he says.
Selling pure infrastructure projects where there is no
immediately obvious payback can be a little more difficult, but
Cohen says you still need to explain the reasons in clear English.
However, Booth says, "You have to recognise that there will be some
periods when the business does not want to invest unless it is
imperative, and use your judgement as to when to put those kinds of
projects forward."
Both Scholes and Cohen also stress the importance of running a
tight IT ship with robust, stable services. "You are only as good
as your last major incident. If services are poor, you will get
dragged into conversations about technical details," Cohen
says.
He says that CIOs also need to put in place management tools -
Associated Newspapers uses CA's Clarity - that provide data that
allows the CIO to move beyond debating anecdotal and superficial
views of system performance to having more meaningful conversations
about the impact of IT on business operations, allowing them to
hold discussions about how to make changes to IT operations that
will deliver tangible improvements to the performance of the
business.