IT Leadership - It's Your Responsibility
I just attended The CIO/CTO Workshop, where we discussed one methodology for establishing effective teams, the TEAM framework: Train, Expect, Affirm, and Measure. This conversation made me wonder how much time we as IT leaders invest in growing our staffs when we are constantly pushed to do more, to be more productive. Are we the people who barely leave our offices, are preoccupied when we do, and barely talk to our staffs except when something goes wrong? During this session I was really challenged to think bigger about our role as leaders - we have an obligation to our staff to make the time for them, even if it keeps us from finishing that report that is already overdue. It's actually our jobs to make time for our staffs…and I mean more than the cursory "how was your weekend" conversations.
Along with this, the importance of individualized attention for each staff member is becoming increasingly evident to me. Some of our staff members are cut from the same cloth that we are - the "failing to plan is planning to fail" school of thought. But, think about how the advent of gaming has changed things. Gamers constantly "fail forward" - try, fail, try, fail, try, fail, until they eventually succeed. How can we expect these people to come into our organizations with our rigid planning structures and excel? Their natural inclination is to try something, watch to see how it works, make some tweaks, and watch some more. That is definitely not how we are accustomed to working…but is their way wrong? Are we as leaders going to try to shoehorn these people into our formal processes, when it's clearly not how they think? Instead, what if we encourage them to mentor us? Can we step outside our comfort zones enough to learn from them? I think we can, and quite honestly, should….
What do you all think?
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Comments
I had a very similar thought in the Business Intelligence session by fellow bloggers David Gammel and Wes Trochlil. Their points were well made, but the whole concept of business intelligence imposes a structure on something that may not ALWAYS need it. David did say that sometimes your "outcome" can be to "wait and see what the outcome is", but I think that this should be encouraged a lot more instead of being the exception tot he rule. They posed the question, how often do you make a major business decision in five minutes, without planning, and no-one (including myself) said they did, but I thought about it later and in actual fact we do make snap decisions all the time and decision making is perhaps much less linear than it seems. They also didn't mention beta testing which is huge theme for me, which incorporates all kinds of adjustments (and failures) right into the process of planning.
Posted by: Maddie Grant | February 2, 2008 8:22 AM