CIOs: How-to Move Forward

Each quarter CIO.com puts out their Guide and Tips for the season (State of CIO). It is worth the time to explore but here are my highlights below for how CIOs can keep moving forward. 

Top 3 Takeaways  

  • Scaling: continuously validate and broadcast success, learn to test cheaply and quickly, and accept that it’s okay to kill an idea.
  •  Dealing with IT project pushback – see it coming, foster feedback culture, consider context, reevaluate the plan, have productive discourse, build trust, respect the learning curve, and abandon your ego.
  •  Importance of making the employee experience a CIO priority.

 When expectations meet reality with technology it can be confusing for companies to understand that doing things fast doesn’t always mean that it is right. Going from micro to a macro project can be a challenge but providing better communication and more realistic expectations are keys to success when scaling. 

Here are three steps to help improve communication and scale innovative solutions: 

  1. Continuously validate and broadcast success
  2. Learn to test cheaply and quickly
  3. Accept that it’s okay to kill an idea. 

IT project pushback is real–keep your project moving forward: see it coming, foster feedback culture, consider context, reevaluate the plan, have productive discourse, build trust, respect the learning curve, and abandon your ego. 

Increase Internal Communications

Pushback is to be expected as it plays a critical role in the ability to collaborate with others.  Airing out issues and clearing up misunderstandings helps to reduce friction and provides a place that team members feel safe and empowered to express their concerns, allowing leaders to put the situation to rest in a respectful way. 

Pushback isn’t always related to the initiative itself but could be showing problems elsewhere in the organization, make certain to ensure that all team members understand the plan and project and how it fits into the bigger picture.  Abandoning your ego and understanding you don’t have all of the answers, allows you to build trust and empower your employees, leading to greater collective strength on the project.

Taking care of employees is good for the whole organization

As the pressure mounts for CIOs to cut costs, produce innovative new products and services, hire top talent and even transform the organization’s business models, employee experience is a crucial factor in success. Understanding how to better take care of employees is simple; engage and measure progress regularly, commit to taking action, and lead in technology use.  In order to have happy, productive employees they must have a good experience, make sure to care enough to spend time doing something about it.