Today, someone sent me an email saying that he was leaving his present gig because he was tired of waiting for “sane IT management.” He’s very technically qualified and knows his way around technology. His current employer will be hard pressed to replace him. But, all too often in the world of Information Technology (IT), leadership is hard to come by.
The reason for this lack of strong leadership within the IT field is that Executive leaders make the mistake of hiring IT leaders who appear to know technology. The thing is, most who are in the IT field, especially technicians, engineers, and programmers really aren’t all that good with people. Yet, in my experience, the strongest CIOs are those who are conversant in a wide range of technology fields, but are extremely good with people. While technology leaders have to have an understanding of how technology works (so that they can’t be snowed), it’s more important that they understand people and what motivates them.
Really, IT staff tend to be self-directed and are motivated by using their technical skills to make a difference within an organization. Like any other person, they also want a clear objective to work towards and hope to be trusted to meet those objectives. But someone who administers servers has to be managed differently than a software engineer. A skilled IT leader understands these distinctions and refrains from projecting his own background upon his staff. That is, if a IT leader was once a computer repairman, he shouldn’t think that all of his staff should be managed the way he was managed. But all too often, IT leaders project their own backgrounds on their staff which simply doesn’t work.
Sane IT leadership is hard to come by and I hope that the person who emailed me finds it somewhere. I do all I can to train organizations about how IT leadership should work but applying it can be tough. But I will never stop trying to get organizations to employ sane IT leadership….
