CIOs have a lot on their plates. Not only do they need to make sure an organization keeps functioning, but they also need to stay on top of what’s best next for an organization. It’s not an easy job.
Having a dedicated team of direct reports can help. “Being able to surround yourself with passionate people to fill in the gaps you’re hopefully self-aware enough to understand you have brings you a better, more well-rounded team and the ability to execute better than what you could execute on your own,” said Mike Tweedie, research practice lead at Info-Tech Research Group.
Creating that team means a CIO should know their own weaknesses, look for job candidates with capabilities instead of strictly skills and tap into global talent resources that pandemic-fueled change has made possible.
To assemble the right team, CIOs should know themselves, what they can do — and what they can’t.
“As a leader, you need a certain amount of self-awareness. You need to know your limitations, your blind spots, and maybe in which [areas] you might not be the strongest,” said Tweedie. Picking direct reports means finding “really good people who are really great at what you are not.”
In the same vein, leaders need to let those professionals lean into their strengths, without a CIO getting in the way, which might not be easy. “Letting go is not a natural instinct for leaders, and good leaders do that well,” he said.
CIOs should also be looking at candidates with strong people and interpersonal skills, said Sastry Durvasula, chief information and client services officer at TIAA, especially at global organizations and those with multiple business verticals.
Being able to communicate honestly with each other and the CIO leads to a more effective department — especially when things aren’t going as planned.
Durvasula also looks for candidates who can stick to a goal.
“Some of these [projects], especially technology transformation initiatives, are multi-year journeys,” he said, and don’t always go exactly as planned. “Stamina is so important, and having a level of persistence to see things through.”
Consider capabilities, not just talent
In the past, CIOs were more inclined to pick direct hires based on skills. Now, they’re more likely to look for capabilities, said Tweedie. Technology is evolving so quickly that CIOs should be looking for job candidates who can help steer a company through rapid changes.
The ideal candidate for these jobs might already be working for the organization, even if they’re not working directly under the umbrella of the CIO. Layoffs may have made this necessary, as companies looked inward to fill gaps. Four in 5 CIOs and IT leaders are reskilling workers to execute digital strategies, according to the 2023 Gartner Resilient Workforce Model for the Future Survey.
Executives are also looking within the company to find what Gartner calls “business technologists,” or non-IT employees with IT-related skills, like data scientists working in finance; and “untapped technologists,” who are employees with IT-related skills who don’t use them at work.
In order to capture the right candidates — whether external or in-house — Tweedie said CIOs should work with hiring managers to make sure the language of job listings are inclusive and inviting to people who may not have specific certifications and experiences, but the capabilities the CIO is looking for.
Picking candidates from different talent pools
Finding candidates with different skills, wherever they may be, has gotten easier due to the pandemic, Durvasula said.
“We are in a hybrid, new normal,” he said. “Our willingness to embrace different types of skills and characteristics for individual roles born out of the pandemic has increased quite a bit.”
Focusing on wider capabilities and not strictly skill has also made CIO report teams more diverse, said Durvasula, adding that 55% of his direct reports are women. Globally, women make up less than one-third of the workforce in technology-related fields, according to the World Bank.
While skills are important, especially on technology teams, CIOs who look beyond that are creating better teams all around, said Tweedie.
“The nature of technology is that it’s becoming bigger, and it’s moving faster," Tweedie said. “The onus is on the leader to have an understanding that they’re not going to know everything.”
