A Leadership life-cycle in 2019
After 30+ years in IT leadership, either as a practitioner or as a head-hunter, I am wondering if I will ever see a people market that is fully aligned in its understanding of the role of CIO, CTO, and even CDO. Back in the 1980’s the dialogue started to be about, broadly speaking, commercialism above technology. Roll on 30 years and that dialogue is still kicking around with some differences. I get maybe 100 CV’s a week and I am certain that at least 25% of them now do focus on commercial outcomes but 75% still do not. This is hugely better than 30 years ago but is still a surprising ratio. This got me thinking about whether this was due to narrow minded geeks not “getting it” or something else. So I spoke to other head-hunters in other functional disciplines like HR or Marketing, and even Finance. This divergence between what is needed and what the average practitioner in those sectors professes to be a work achievement is often “not defined commercially”. It is some other technical tick mark. HR and Marketing have other measures which are in many cases acts of professional faith – culture positivism, brand re-alignments for example. Not strictly commercially measurable in the short-term at least. This got me thinking again and maybe people effectiveness is about the truly commercial leaders floating to the top (the cream if you will), and others being on lower rungs of learning and experience and thus being more fully in detailed execution mode. The difference is about combining the technical/functional attributes with enhanced people and leadership attributes to help others find the right path.
This isn’t rocket science but it does appear to be a solid truism. If you can accumulate the technical skills to float to the top in your early career phase, then you need to start overlaying those with emotional intelligence and leadership attributes as soon as your role and your organization permits you to do so. You have to be allowed to lead in many if not most cases. There does however need to be either an intuitive grasp of this need or an overt planned career enhancement path to achieve it. The natural leader is an easier path but not necessarily more effective than learned skills.
If this is the case then what we all seek as Head-hunters is one of two things – either a world-class technical acuity if the role demands it OR a strongly developed set of leadership competencies. This should be a personal decision for all of to aim at. The half-way house model is very tricky to recruit to as those who are not yet fully developed in leadership want the full role, its their aim, and those who haven’t yet started stand no chance as they lack the fundamentals. That why deputy roles need to be very carefully though through if taking them to an open market.
Wouldn’t it be good if we could somehow identify latent leadership talent without evidence of experience. Now of course we don’t want everyone to be a leader as we need to also do things very well. We need lots of talented do’ers. We need teams. I suppose the school House Captain or Captain of Rugby or Hockey helps a little in identification there but its a very rough measure. Given that leadership attributes can also be learned and ultimately are needed in every walk of life, would it not be a good thing for schools and universities to overtly develop them? Maybe they do in some cases but I don’t see it as such a strong curriculum entry as it might be. I suppose the need for PC egalitarianism also plays a role here in not attempting to increase differentiation but there is no need why interest in leadership attributes might not be encouraged for all (listening skills for example and people assessment – what sort of person is he/she) It tends to be left to later in life and built over experience gained in more technical roles, which seems a little sad. I would love to see younger leaders emerge sooner and in some cases this is happening in the “digital world” and the start-up scene. Many fail however and it is because they are ill-trained in leadership and understandably over-consumed by detail. A non-threatening mentor with no financial interest could be a very useful tool for Private Equity and VC houses to deploy on some of their investments. People focussed just on leadership attribute development. For a VC or PE firm that could be a very low-cost high-yield investment.
Then maybe we would get to 40% focussed on the right sort of outcomes and that has to be a better place for everybody.