What got you here won’t get you there. That advice from executive coach and bestselling author Marshall Goldsmith has never been truer for CIOs than it is today. The technical skills, IT leadership expertise, and ability to keep the network secure and running, and even to deliver innovation aren’t enough to create success for today’s CIOs.
“When we think about where CIOs need to go, we say to them: ‘You need to be an executive first and a functional leader second,’” says Christie Struckman, research vice president at Gartner.
How exactly does a CIO become more of an executive than a functional leader? In part, by strengthening abilities that seem almost intangible because they have nothing to do with specific hard or even soft skills. These aren’t abilities that can be learned in a weekend workshop. Some require that most elusive of qualities, emotional intelligence.
What are the intangible skills CIOs need most? Here are some of the most crucial.
Intangible 1: Conflict management
“I don’t know anybody who just jumps into conflict management with two feet,” Struckman says. “But you know what? If an organization is designed and run well, there will be lots of conflict. You want to have a diversity of opinion and different ways of thinking about how to do things, but you need to have a way to resolve them.”
CIOs, with their view of different departments’ priorities and initiatives are often in the best position to do that, she adds, which is why they need to be skilled at constructive confrontation.
That need came to life recently for Ian Pitt, CIO of software maker Progress, when he spent two hours in a team meeting that he says was all about conflict mitigation.
“I find myself having to interject and become quite the hostage negotiator, playing a key role to make sure all the parties are coming together,” he explains. “Engineers want to go build stuff. Salespeople want to go sell it. Marketing people want to craft a good story. The lawyers want to make sure that we’re doing things that are accurate for the company.” Inevitably, he adds, IT will have to manage those solutions or deploy them, while making sure to keep the network secure.
“Sometimes it’s just a case of being a verbal diplomat and finding a path through all of these different requirements to ultimately deliver something that delights customers, keeps the company out of trouble, and keeps the stock price rising,” he says. “So even something that seems as straightforward as conflict management has so many different facets within the CIO world; it’s sometimes hard to keep up.” On the other hand, he says, “It does mean that no day is particularly boring.”
