Bob Kantor offers leadership development solutions to CIO and IT leaders on the talent crunch.         Talent Ma

Bob Kantor, IT executive coach, former CIOGuest blog by Bob Kantor, IT executive coach and author of Shatter Your Leadership Limits - Better Results in Less Time with Less Stress.

On April 25, in your e-newsletter, The Heller Report and in social media, you asked members of your network of technology executives this question: "If you were to wave a magic wand and solve only one talent-related challenge, what would it be?"

You received, and published on May 9, a large number of responses, most of which fell into one of the following four categories:

  1. People Development
  2. Business Skills and Knowledge
  3. Recruiting Process
  4. Talent Pipeline

I’ve enjoyed reading the broad range of responses and appreciated your grouping them into the four categories. I also had some thoughts about what we could be doing as IT leaders to actually address our “magic wand” ideas.

tweet thisTweet this now > "No Magic Wand Will Solve IT's Talent Challenges #CIO @hellersearch http://bit.ly/15g3LUM"

My overall impression was that most of the ideas identified IT leadership opportunities that we are not adequately addressing. We seemed to be looking to other professionals or business functions to change what they are doing, rather than taking responsibility for progressing these ideas ourselves.

I’ve long believed that we can’t change what other people do, and that we also have unlimited potential to change what we do. In the process of changing what we do, we empower ourselves to change the world around us. In fact, it is only by holding ourselves responsible for the situations around us, that we can fully empower ourselves to change them.

With that premise in mind, I’d like to explore several of the magic wand ideas and invite my colleagues to take a lead in implementing them within our own organizations.

To reinforce some of my assertions that follow, I’d like to first share some of the results from a recent study by the CIO Executive Council on “Talent Management Proficiencies” For senior IT Teams”. The results from their 198 CIO respondents showed:

IT Talent Profiency CIO Poll

Notice the very large gaps in how the responding CIOs rated the importance of each of these talent management proficiencies and the actual proficiency of their team members in each. I read this as a huge leadership development opportunity that we have not yet effectively addressed.

I believe that these gaps also show up in our responses to your magic wand question, in that we are still better at waving our wands than we are at casting successful spells. With that in mind, here are some thoughts on concrete actions we can take right now to address the talent-related challenges. 

[Reader responses to the talent question we posed on April 25 are italicized below].

People Development

"Ensuring that the talented technical people in the organization can get the right opportunities, projects, or stretch assignments to move to the next level especially when that level is Manager/Director. Many have proven themselves technically, managing projects, or even solid consulting/client interaction but when it comes to managing/directing an organization some are just not ready for it or are not that good at it. And as hard as I've tried to develop the level below me I have only been successful once, that a person under me replaced me when I left."

This is an ideal opportunity for leadership development coaching, which is underutilized as a development tool by most IT organizations. Our IT organizations usually invest heavily in classes for both technical and leadership development, but very little if at all in coaching. 

The training approach for tech skills works quite well for two reasons. First, those skills are well understood and highly structured, so developing effective training programs is a fairly straightforward process. Second, it’s pretty easy to immediately apply and practice the newly acquired knowledge back on the job, and to have more experienced colleagues mentor us through our initial efforts.

Contrast this to leadership training… We learn some good techniques, but often find them hard to apply back in our real worlds. When we try them and don’t achieve the results we expect, there is rarely someone available to mentor us. After a couple of frustrating attempts, we revert to the way we dealt with these situations before the training.

Leadership development coaching addresses these issues by customizing the application of best practices to our very specific circumstances. It also incudes the real time mentoring that enables us to practice and improve our skills relatively quickly, and with much less frustration. Let’s be proactive here and use readily available development techniques that yield better results.

"What I see is a gap in management’s ability to communicate with IT. All too often I see managers asking the wrong groups in IT to do something. My wand would create more managers/directors with the capability to understand and correctly assign tasks."

We cannot wait forever for “those people” to learn how to work with us more effectively. Whereas we can fix this problem right now ourselves. First, we can improve our processes for request management and give our business management a clearly marked “front door” via which to walk with their requests. For some organizations this is the PMO function. For others, it is a simple and coordinated ticketing system.

In addition, how about changing the way we communicate with and engage with our business management? Let’s become more pro-active in seeking out their requirements and requests. Let’s go to them and collect their requests rather than wait for them to come to us. For some organizations this is achieved with a formalized account management program. In others it means that our IT managers spend less time managing tasks and technology and more time managing relationships with their stakeholders.

Business Skills and Knowledge

“Too much of IT is still focused on software and transactions when the real agility and benefit is in the information. Unfortunately we do not have those people who can work with the business to listen and develop the ideas working with the technical staff to develop the dashboards, reports, etc., and who can also educate the business on the power of what we possess…”

This one can be readily addressed by the surveyed proficiency (above) in “communicate well with and influence business stakeholders”. Respondents rated that important 69% of the time but with only 18% of their staff proficient. Here a combination of skills training for communication, and leadership coaching on effectives engagement and influence, may be as important, or maybe more important, than technical skills development in analytic techniques.

"As an ex CIO, my answer to Martha's query would be "business insight". Talent, whether technical or otherwise without context is not worth much and the recent increase in specialization has created air tight verticals and horizontals which make technology management extremely difficult. This explains why increasingly CIOs move down in the CXO pecking order."

Business insight can be acquired by IT people with strong interpersonal skills, and a strong desire to do so. As previously discussed, interpersonal skills can be strengthened by leadership development programs. The desire to then apply them in improving business insight can be enhanced with our reward and recognitions systems. If the bulk of our performance management criteria measure and stress tech and task management, then our staff will focus on tech and task management. If measure and truly weight business insight, engagement and partnering, then our more capable IT staff will demonstrate those behaviors as well.

“I believe we have good people doing their best but often without the realistic understanding of how the entire organization is operating.  They solve their individual problem or cover a localized concern without seeing how that decision will affect the broader whole."

Same as above. Let’s offer more skills development related to understanding our businesses, and then recognize and reward our IT staff for doing that. How do we expect them to develop these skills without such support?

"Finding talent that can think beyond their silo and understand the entire business process."

"Finding IT talent with strong business acumen to match technology/process/practice discipline skills."

Similar to the above, with the added realization that there are very few of these people out there to be found. It’s much more cost and time effective to develop them ourselves. Those few companies that are doing this today with effective leadership development programs and investments are not only creating the important talent that they need, they are also making it less likely that those talented people will leave them and come to us.

"If I could solve one talent-related challenge it would be how to find/develop technically competent folks who understand the customer’s point of view…  Technically brilliant, but tone deaf staff and management are a menace."

I hope you already know the answer to address this challenge. The theme we’re establishing here is that more and more of our key IT effectiveness challenges come down to core leadership skills. Effective leadership development programs build high fidelity tone recognition. This skill in particular lends itself to the coaching approach we discussed above, even more so than training.

Recruiting Process

"I would want my hiring managers to quit looking for "point specific" skills and adopt a "best available athlete" strategy.  In our line of work, if you have technical aptitude and learning agility, and a good dose of leadership, that is far more important than specific technical skills."

Most of our hiring managers attribute their success and current position to their own tech skills. As long as they continue to focus on those tech skills and succeed because of them, they will continue to seek out candidates who are more like themselves. Let’s improve the leadership competencies of our own hiring managers, and then hold them accountable for doing the same within their own organizations.  I.e., are we doing any better here than we are expecting them to do?

"Recruiting takes too long – how do we make it easier to hook the hiring pools up with the open position?"

In talking with internal and external recruiters, I hear that their biggest challenge is getting IT managers to devote the necessary time to the recruiting process. Most of the delays, and resultant lost candidates, are the result of hiring managers not making and communicating decisions in a timely manner.

This too is a leadership issue, in that too many of our IT managers routinely choose to address today’s emergency over hiring tomorrow’s solution to it.  This is partly their lack of effective prioritization, and also large doses of inadequate delegation, team leadership and development of their people. (Go back to that CIO Survey table above.)

Talent Supply

“The talent which is always in short supply is the person who a. Technical people want to work & deliver for ; b. Customers respect and want to hire away from you; and c. Senior managers want to have or to keep as their right hand. They have great problem solving skills, are bright / quick on their feet, have human being communication skills, has to have enough technical moxie to hold his/her own with the technical team, has to be able to translate business problem to business process / data / people requirements, and has to be able to deliver on time, on budget, on quality, on scope, on value."

All 100 of these people are happily employed and were recently recognized at the CIO100 Symposium. They are almost impossible to find, and if found, to hire away from their current jobs.

As stated above, the first actionable approach to resolve this is to invest real money, time and energy in building these skill sets in our own IT leaders; the ones who already have the strong tech skills, and have demonstrated to us over the years that they are committed to delivering high-value results.

The second actionable approach is to rely less on these few super heroes, and learn how to leverage the strengths of diverse teams of strong individuals. This also means closing the talent management proficiency gaps that we highlighted as the beginning of this note. It also means developing competent team leaders and recognizing and rewarding team performance.

"If I could solve only one talent problem, the top of my list would be project/program managers. So much of what we do for the organization revolves around effectively implementing projects. While the nature of the project is changing, effectively deploying projects is a constant."

I strongly believe that the ongoing project management gap that allows about 75% of our large projects to fall short of business expectations is not about improving our project management techniques. We don’t need more and higher PMI certifications.

What we do need are better leaders of people, and of diverse groups of people. We need leaders who can engage these diverse groups and facilitate their building of shared understanding of what they are striving to achieve, why they are doing it, and how to make it happen quickly and simply.  

The Bottom Line

To recap the above, let’s look at our own performance as IT leaders. Let’s face the fact that there are no magic wands, and hold ourselves accountable for making real progress on the real challenges that can best be addressed by our being more effective leaders.

Let’s lead by example and tackle the important gaps in the effectiveness of our IT organizations today. And if we’re not quite sure how to do that, then let’s own the challenges anyway and seek out the resources that can enable us to cast the spells that have been proven to work.

 

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Bob Kantor is an IT executive with over 25 years of leadership experience at companies like KPMG, Lotus and Ciba-Geigy. He is currently an IT executive coach serving Fortune 1000 clients and members of the CIO Executive Council. He can be reached at Bob.Kantor@KantorConsultingGroup.com

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