The role we play.
Today on LinkedIn, I challenged IT leaders to consider their unique, unduplicated role. While I believe we are in the most extraordinary time to work in the tech field, many IT leaders complain they don’t feel valued in their organization.
But frankly, I find that we create the very challenges we want to overcome. The challenge of elevating impact and value is highly correlated to how we manage our personal brand or persona. Framed another way, how do we show up at work?
The most successful leaders are emotionally intelligent. Emotional intelligence requires self-awareness. Therefore, deeply considering your persona is the path to growing your executive potential.
After 30 years in the IT field, I’ve discovered three different role dichotomies that make or break an IT leader. I’ll briefly share them below with a gentle nudge around the preferred persona, if growing your career is important.
1. Hero vs. Guide. Often, IT leaders wrongly believe their stakeholders are looking for someone to save the day … to swoop in and pull the stranded kitten from the tree. They also believe they solely carry the burden of envisioning and implementing new technology.
Stakeholders don’t want this. They want a guide, a sherpa—someone to help them navigate the mountain in the safest, most direct way. As an IT leader, it’s a recipe for disaster if your business stakeholders don’t jointly own the vision and implementation effort required of new technology.
Don’t go it alone or feel as if your stakeholders want you to go it alone. Encourage and nurture their involvement; it’s good for you, and it’s good for them.
2. Problem Admirer vs. Problem Solver. I’ve met too many IT leaders who believe their #1 role is to identify problems and risks. They wield governance and controls as their tools of choice. Unfortunately, they earn a reputation of being the “department of no” because they don’t offer solutions to the problems they identify; they just offer rules and policies.
But IT leaders create the most value when we bring people together and create solutions to complex problems. We should replace words like “governance” with better words like “alignment” and demonstrate we want to be problem solvers and bridge builders.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t mitigate risk. It simply means we add more value when we also identify creative solutions that provide strong security without sacrificing the usefulness and power of technology.
3. Technologist vs. Sociologist. I’m 100% convinced that innovation isn’t a tool. Rather, innovation is a set of behaviors. Those behaviors include how a team gets on the same page about problems worth solving now … and then gets on the same page about the best solution(s) forward. When IT leaders abdicate these activities as something that “the business” needs to figure out, they’re leaving their value in the bowels of a data center.
Developing our understanding of how people behave in a group and being masters of conflict resolution is the fastest path to career growth that I’ve ever seen. The IT business is a people business. Full stop. If you’re uncomfortable facilitating crucial conversations or making stakeholders aware that they’re not aligned, you should invest in growing those skills now.
Whenever you're ready, there are two ways I can help you:
On-Demand Mastermind: Confidently boost your IT leadership and influence skills. Created for senior IT leaders who want to earn their first C-level role, this online course provides all of the strategies & tactics I used to get a seat at the table.
One-to-One Coaching: I work directly with leaders who want to grow their executive potential and value an experienced navigator to help them execute their plan. This includes senior IT leaders who want to earn their first C-level role or a current C-level who wants to land a Board seat.
