Certification Magazine - February 2008 - (Page 36) Upward Mobility Advice From a “Serial CIO” No variant of IT professional knows more about upward mobility than the CIO. But the rap against the CIO position is that it stands for “career is over.” Once an IT pro reaches that office, the conventional wisdom holds that there’s nowhere else to go, which is, perhaps, a little depressing. The career experience of John Stevenson disproves this, however. Stevenson refers to himself as a “serial CIO,” though self-deprecatingly. “I say that with tongue in cheek,” Stevenson said. Stevenson is currently an industry consultant and president of his own company. Previously, he served as CIO at a number of organizations — most recently at Sharp Electronics. Stevenson outlined how his career path might prove similar to others’. “Every organization or every job I’ve been in, whether it was my early days in the military or my civilian career focused on IT, you’ve got the new-kid-in-the-new-job-itis, where there’s a period of time [in which] you’ve got to learn and grow what you’re doing,” he said. “Then, there’s a second era in your life when you’re trying to enhance, to the best of your ability, that job you inherited. Often I’ve gone in to fix things because the incumbent was tired or wrong and needed to be moved into another assignment. Once you think you’ve got things humming as smoothly as you can, then you can grow the assignment within the company, and you give the company back more capability.” Stevenson then outlined how a high-level IT pro such as a CIO might know it’s time to move on: “You begin to get stale, perhaps, and it may be [the case that] a different personality could add further success to your position. In a number of cases, I’ve left great successors behind; they were ready to take my chair in the organization and it was an exciting double move. It’s when that second era of redundancy or claustrophobia catches up with you, that’s when I’ve seen a lot of people with glazed looks in their eyes saying, ‘I’ve got to go do something different to generate excitement.’” Moving to another company can prove to be a complicated decision. Managing this transition well, however, can ensure it’s not an acrimonious split. One way to do this is to strictly avoid poaching the old company’s best employees. “Having the gift of a number of great people reporting to you can be thrilling, and often, in my case, I would get to the point where I had great people reporting to me and move on,” Stevenson said. “Sometimes that was as big an agony as anything, as I was pretty careful in my career not to raid an organization I left when I went to a new company. I’ve resigned positions and had some of the greatest parties given to me by my boss.” Not all of Stevenson’s departures have been this festive, but most were still civil. “In one or two cases I got into a war with management,” he said. “At that point, it’s time to put a peacemaker who doesn’t carry strategic luggage in the job. But you’re still wished well by the people who are leading the organization who know what you did and how you did it.” 8 – Daniel Margolis, dmargolis@certmag.com understanding of in-demand skills will help technical and specialized employees prepare to take on responsibilities that require a broader business mindset. So, if this cross-functional skill set is the ideal, what do technically based and specialized professionals need to learn? Six focus areas are essential to this complex transition. 1: Establishing a Business Mindset Every organization has an overall set of objectives, practices and protocols. Technical professionals must understand how to align individual responsibilities with these rules and strategies if they hope to meet (or exceed) expectations. This general “business mindset” is crucial to accomplishing almost any activity or task. One needs to consider myriad perspectives for all of the work regularly performed, including strategic and operational, as well as interpersonal and personal — in order to reduce political and cultural barriers and truly find organizational success. Understanding common business practices and rules is also important to maneuvering initiatives through the political maze in most business environments. In order to take an idea from conception and manage it through to an end product, employees need extremely honed business skills, along with the ability to align team goals with overall business goals. Without an established underpinning of business fundamentals, rules and practices, the work performed will contribute less to the organization as a whole. 2: High-Impact Communication Put simply, communication in the workplace gets business done. Many communications, however, often fall flat and do not achieve the desired results or impact — causing misunderstandings and misinterpreted expectations and results, as well as unnecessary conflict. Technical experts must know how to translate technical and specialized language into general business terms. Additionally, today’s economic landscape demands that professionals have other key interpersonal skills required to facilitate brainstorming or data-gathering sessions, run high-profile meetings, and speak to nontechnical and management audiences. Interpersonal style, along with communication, customer-service and relationship-building skills, by 2010. And according to the Society for Information Management’s IT Workforce Executive Summary 2006, business skills account for half of the top 10 attributes IT managers say they will need from inhouse staffers over the next three years. Technical and specialized professionals need relevant, practical skills they can use to align their projects with broader organizational objectives. An 36 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE February 2008
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