SOUND OFF: Proven Methods for Developing Blended Executives

In this excerpt from The CIO Paradox, Barbra Cooper, former CIO of Toyota Motor Sales NA and Kevin Hart, CTO at Cox Communications, share their approaches to developing blended executives.  Please share your own approach in the comments section.

Build a Rotational Program

About four years ago, Barbra Cooper, who recently retired as CIO of Toyota Motor Sales North America, determined that it was critical to the development of her potential successors that they serve time in non‑IT leadership positions. So, she was frustrated by the fact that Toyota did not have a structured rotational program between the business and IT.

She was finding that getting the business to value the concept of an IT person among their ranks was tough. “The business was still struggling with the definition of the IT leadership role and would ask ‘Why would I take on an IT person? I don’t know what I would do with them.’ ” Cooper says.

So Cooper first selected the managers she felt had the most potential to benefit from a rotational program. She then identified the business areas she believed could benefit from that IT talent, and she approached her business peers. “I actually drafted a written eighteen-month contract between two officers of the company, one on the business side, and me, the CIO, which outlined the terms and conditions of the rotational assignment,” she says. The contract covered questions that included:

• What are the expectations of the role and the manager?
• What will the business’s return on this investment be?
• Who is responsible for performance reviews?
• What happens at the end of eighteen months if the business doesn’t want to give the IT executives back?

Not only was Cooper’s rotational program a success in IT, it became a companywide program that provided rotational opportunities for high-potential employees across the enterprise.

Build a CIO University

Kevin Hart, CTO and CIO of Cox Communications, has developed his share of CTOs and CIOs. “I’ve been in the CIO or CTO role for seven years now,” says Hart, “In that time I’ve been fortunate to have groomed more than ten CIOs. The majority has gone on to greener pastures to fill a CIO role at another company, but I did groom a successor who replaced me when I left a company to pursue a new opportunity.”

Hart’s first CIO role was in 2005 at Level 3 Communications, and he continued there until 2009, when he left to join startup Clearwire as CIO. In April 2011, Hart joined Cox Communications as CTO and CIO.

When Hart became CIO for the first time, at Level 3, he discovered what so many CIOs find during their first few months on the job. “I recognized that the leadership, confidence, and the mental model that we needed in the IT organization needed to be developed,” he says. “The culture was more of IT as an order taker, which was pretty different from the culture I wanted to create, which was a mind-set of leaders, trying to bring technology and the business together.” Hart realized that he needed to teach a whole different set of skills to his team, but he did not have the money to outsource the effort. “We were already strapped for budget to deliver our projects,” he says. “I knew that there wouldn’t be a whole lot of tolerance for spending ten or twenty grand per person to send them to a week-long program.”

So Hart developed plans for what he calls “The CIO University,” a year-long internal leadership development program that became so successful at Level 3 that he brought it to Clearwire and is now launching it at Cox. “We couldn’t just swap out certain people and replace them with leaders overnight,” says Hart. “So I decided to build a program to instill new skills into our leaders in a collaborative experience that we could apply day in and day out.”

Here’s how he did it.

Define the competencies

Kevin Hart’s first move was to identify the areas of competency that he
wanted the program to focus on, and he put together a core curriculum.
The curriculum looked like this:

• DiSC profiles: DiSC is a personal assessment tool used to improve work productivity, teamwork, and communication
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni ( Jossey-Bass, 2002)
• Leadership Pipeline
• Stakeholder Management
• Thomas Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) 
• 7 Survival Skills
• Employee Engagement Improvement
• Managerial Effectiveness
• Communications
• Walking in our Customers’ Shoes
• Organizational Values
• Technology Best Practices
• Leadership Lessons Learned (guest speakers include CEOs, CFOs, COOs, from the company)

Think about the classroom environment

Hart then chose the setting for the program. “We would go to the University
of Denver or Colorado and rent a low-cost classroom every quarter that overlooked the football field,” he says. “I thought it was important to have the participants be back on campus and have a university experience.”

Balance classroom instruction with small group projects

Hart brought in outside experts in each of the competency areas to lead the entire class of thirty people. Those experts would then break the group into teams of five and give them an assignment to complete in the time between the quarterly classroom sessions. This required them to work together to take what they learned in the classroom and apply it in a real-world, workplace context.

“For example, we were good at high-level communication across the IT organization, but we had difficulty with communications between the manager level and individual contributor,” says Hart. “Our managers were not translating projects and plans into specific action items.”

To improve the team’s one‑on‑one communication skills, a CIO University instructor assigned one of the groups the task of creating a manager’s communication checklist. The document that the team produced included reminders, tips, and best practices for conducting one‑on‑one conversations and for using key performance indicators in performance evaluations. “It was a specific homework assignment that the CIO University class used to create a solution and roll it out across the entire organization,” says Hart. “Then we’d come back the next quarter to have another all-day session on a new topic. But we’d also revisit the previous topic by having the team members report on what they put in motion, the results, and areas for improvement.”

This program of full-day sessions coupled with on‑the-job small team projects would continue for an entire calendar year. “Not only were they building on their own individual skills but they were collectively working to improve the entire IT organization,” says Hart. “The CIO University became part of the transformational fabric of the culture of IT.”

And Hart has proof. “When I first got to Clearwire, we had some of the lower satisfaction scores in the company; we were somewhere in the fiftieth percentile,” he says. “A year after our first CIO University, we jumped nineteen percentage points to the highest employee satisfaction score in the company.”

Hart enrolled thirty leaders in the company each year, held a graduation ceremony, and then invited the next thirty to join. “It got to the point where everyone wanted to go through the program,” says Hart. “It became a self-fulfilling prophecy, where people got excited about becoming better leaders.” In the end, Hart sent hundreds of people through the program at Level 3 and at Clearwire.

Keep it cheap

As for budget, Hart found ways to keep expenses down. “We would rent a room at a university, which was relatively low cost. We’d bring lunch in, and then I’d take everybody out to the campus pub,” says Hart. “I got deals on the outside expert presentations by calling in favors from friends who were experts in certain fields. We would also bring in executives from other parts of the company.” Including executives from other parts of the company had additional relationship benefits. “That was the secret sauce of the program,” he says. “I had Jim Crowe, CEO of Level 3, come in and address the class on what he had learned about leadership over the last twenty-five years. Jim is a brilliant orator,” Hart says. “That was probably the best presentation in three or four years.”

Not only would the CEO, CFO, and other executives give great presentations free of charge, “it created a great bond between my team and our major stakeholders,” says Hart. “The senior executives got to see what we were doing and gain a little more respect for what the technology team has to face day in and day out.

Please share your own approach in the comments section.