5 hard questions every IT leader must answer

Leadership is not something that just happens. Leadership must be measured, managed, and invested in. After all, how IT leaders are selected, trained, evaluated, and compensated materially impacts the future performance of the enterprise.

So, again, when was the last time you had a substantive conversation about leadership with your direct reports? How frequently do you critically examine whether your IT/digital organization is well led? What set of metrics does your organization employ to evaluate IT/digital leaders?

The IT industry is undergoing a crisis of confidence. This is due in no small part to the erroneous presumption that IT and digital organizations have their leadership game in order. Quality leadership is not something that can be taken for granted. It’s time to turn an analytical eye to the state of leadership in our industry — and here are five key questions IT leaders must ask themselves to truly know whether they are successfully leading IT.

Is your focus on point?

Daniel Barchi, Naval Academy grad and award-winning CIO at CommonSpirit Health, explained to me that there are three areas IT leaders can allocate their time: People, process, and technology. Barchi suggests the optimal allocation for IT leaders is 80% people, 15% process, and 5% technology. Unfortunately, many IT leaders — especially those of the order-taker type — invert that triumvirate, placing the lion’s share of their focus on technology.

Are you and your direct reports allocating enough time to leading people?

Are your people primed for success?

In Good to Great, Jim Collins suggests that decisions about people — who is on the bus — have to precede decisions about objectives — i.e., where the bus is going. Several CIOs have shared with me the anecdote regarding how Apple design icon Jonathan Ives typically responds to the question, “What’s the secret to your design success?” Ives reportedly responded, “We fire the A- people.” The point being that a group of passionate high performers is what is necessary to deliver the sought-for end state.