Closing the Leadership Development Gap in IT

IT has a bad systemic habit: promoting unprepared leaders. Tony Qualls, Regional CIO, argues that CIOs have to break that pattern – starting by modeling personal development.

Most organizations invest heavily in leadership development for business executives through executive coaching, MBA-style leadership cohorts, and structured leadership institutes.  Yet IT leaders are often promoted without the same intentional focus on development.  As technology has now become the backbone of every industry and fulfilled former Gartner VP Peter Sondergaard’s mantra from 2013 “every company will be a technology company,” this gap creates a dangerous leadership deficit that most organizations don’t even see happening.

I know this gap personally because I have lived it.

The cost of ignoring the gap is not abstract. I have watched underdeveloped IT leaders produce disengaged teams, create toxic cultures, and submit subpar performances. Projects run long. Outages become frequent. Ownership disappears. The damage is real and measurable, and it compounds quietly until it becomes a crisis.

The solution is not complicated, but it demands consistency. It requires CIOs to be intentional about their own personal growth first, and then about growing the next generation of leaders. Without that commitment, we are setting our organizations up for failure in an AI-driven world that will demand more from IT leadership than in any previous era. I know this commitment works; I have watched it transform the leaders who came up through my team and carried those habits into organizations long after they left.

Let me take you back to where my journey began.

Congratulations, You’re a Leader Now

When I was first asked to step into an IT Manager role  in 1999, it wasn’t because someone identified my leadership potential and invested in developing it. The previous manager had been let go and I was tapped to fill the seat.  There was no leadership onboarding, no coaching, no leadership curriculum. I was handed responsibility and expected to figure out the rest. Many IT leaders will recognize this challenge.

What saved me initially wasn’t my organization; it was the United States Navy. I had served active duty for six years before entering the private sector, and my Navy Petty Officer training had given me the very basics of leading people. I understood the importance of accountability, mission, structure, and goals.

But I quickly discovered that leading effectively in a corporate IT environment demands something more. While the military operates on a strict chain of command, corporate leadership requires influence.

I watched the manager before me lead with a heavy hand, and I knew instinctively that was not the leader that I wanted to become. What I needed, and what no one provided, was training in empathetic, persuasive leadership. How do I bring people with me when I have no formal authority over their motivation? How do I build trust with peers, executives and team members simultaneously?  These are not the technical skills I knew. These are deeply human ones that do not come automatically with a promotion.

So, I did what too many IT leaders are forced to do: I taught myself and sought out mentors. One of the first books I picked up was The One Minute Manager. I would seek out learning because no one was going to bring it to me. That self-directed learning journey eventually led me to John C. Maxwell’s writing, to structured coaching certifications, and to a personal philosophy built around continuous growth. But the critical point is this: I initiated the development and growth.

Across my career I have watched the same story play out again and again. Technical professionals were promoted into leadership roles based on their technical qualities. They were exceptional engineers, architects and analysts! And they were then handed teams, budgets, and organizational complexity with no preparation for the human side of the work.

This isn’t a personal failing of those individuals. It is a systemic organizational habit, and it is quietly undermining businesses everywhere. When your most technically gifted people struggle to lead, the cost isn’t just morale, it’s retention, innovation, team culture, speed to delivery, and ultimately business outcomes.

Over the course of my career I made a deliberate choice to do something different for the people who worked for me. I’ve invested in developing multiple team members that have gone on to become Supervisors, Managers, Senior Managers and Directors and the approach wasn’t complicated. It was consistent.

I had focused development conversations — not performance reviews dressed up as coaching, but real conversations about where someone wanted to go and what was getting in their way. I made leadership development a standing agenda item in every management meeting. “Tony’s Leadership Thoughts.” It wasn’t a quarterly event, not even an offsite. It was a recurring intentional presence in how we operated as a team. At times we discussed specific chapters of leadership books – I’m a believer in the expression “leaders are readers” – while other weeks we covered skills ranging from strategic and critical thinking to delegation, time management, and finance and budgeting.

Perhaps most importantly, I approached it with humility. We were going to learn together. I wasn’t positioning myself as the expert dispensing wisdom from on high. I was modeling the personal work needed to be a growing leader myself, and inviting my team into that same journey.

The results rarely looked dramatic in the moment. Leadership development is less like flipping a light switch and more like planting seeds. Growth appears over time, which is exactly why you have to start small and stay intentional. The proof came later, sometimes years later, after team members moved on to other roles and sometimes other organizations. Many of them later told me that they had not fully appreciated what we were building together until they found themselves working for leaders who were not doing any of it. The absence revealed the value!

That delayed gratitude is actually the most honest measure of impact. Real development doesn’t announce itself. It compounds quietly, and then one day someone realizes they’re a different leader than they would have been.

IT Needs Strategic Leaders More Than Ever

Here is what concerns me most as I look across the IT landscape today. We are at an inflection point. Technology is no longer a support function. Technology is the strategic engine of every industry. Healthcare, finance, manufacturing, retail. Every sector is now dependent on technology leadership to drive transformation, manage risk, and create competitive advantage.

This means the quality of IT leadership (in reality, business leadership) has never mattered more. And yet the development gap remains largely unaddressed. We are sending undertrained leaders into the most strategically critical roles in organizations and hoping technical competence will carry them through.

It won’t. Not anymore.

The next generation of IT leaders must be thought leaders, not just technology operators. They must be able to grow their teams, influence across the enterprise without formal authority, and translate technology capability into business value.  That is a fundamentally different leadership profile than the one most IT professionals were hired and promoted for.

What To Do

Here is my call to action for CIOs and senior IT leaders. And the sequence you follow truly matters.

Start with yourself. Before you can develop others, you have to be actively developing yourself. Pick up Maxwell’s book, The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth, and work through it seriously. (“Growth thrives in conducive surroundings” is one of the lessons.) Leadership development is not a destination you reach but it is a practice you sustain. Model it visibly for your team.

Then make leadership development a non-negotiable standing agenda item for your leadership team. Not a “nice to have".” Not something you get to when the project load is lighter. A standing commitment that signals week after week and month after month that growing as a leader is part of how this team operates.

Finally, shift your promotion criteria. When you are identifying your next managers and directors, weigh leadership qualities alongside technical skills. Ask who is already influencing, developing and bringing people along. Not just who is delivering the best technical output.

We have spent decades fixated on delivering tools, products, and applications. The next era of IT leadership demands something more. It demands leaders who grow themselves, grow their teams, and create lasting business value in the process.

The gap is real. The cost is increasing. And the solution is simpler than most organizations want to admit. It just requires that you start.