And organizations’ expectations of these IT teams have skyrocketed. IT teams must adapt quickly to these heightened expectations. IT is no longer simply about keeping the lights on; a highly effective and motivated IT team is now critical for organizational success. To add to this pressure, most seasoned CEOs and senior executives have not-too-distant memories of IT programmes gone bad, and of IT providing slow, siloed, inward-looking, bureaucratic, ineffective and lacklustre IT services and projects.
Many CIOs running legacy IT teams have a big job to do to turn these perceptions around. They know that genuine trust in IT must be built to enable ongoing investment in IT. These CIOs want to be viewed as customer-focused, highly effective, trusted partners with the wider organization and its senior leaders. They also recognise that this requires structured, intentional IT transformation turnaround efforts.
These efforts start with the actions of the CIO and the senior leaders of IT teams – those wholly responsible for shaping and leading the environment, behaviors and capabilities of IT teams to operate at their best. This requires engaging with the difficult people stuff — clarifying purpose, seeking feedback, building skills, resolving conflicts and refocusing the ways of working across the organization. Addressing these people-related challenges is, in some cases, not the natural forte of IT leaders. Many CIOs are technologists at heart, having built their careers on technical skills and not necessarily on people leadership skills. But technical credibility mixed with strong people leadership capability creates a powerful combination.
