From going on a listening tour to defining success, seasoned IT leaders share the strategies, tips, and skills new leaders should focus on to succeed from day one.
You just landed an IT leadership role. Your team expects you to lead. Other leaders are evaluating whether they can trust you to help them meet their goals. And you know how hard it can be to recover from a bad first impression. No pressure, right?
Whether you got here by design or accident, are leading a team of hundreds of technical experts spread around the globe, or captaining a lean crew focused on a clear goal, this relationship with your team and the organization is fundamentally different from other working relationships you have held.
If you make a strong impression, this could be the role that takes your career where you want it to go. But if people dig in and oppose you, it will be an uphill battle.
To help you stick this landing, I spoke with seasoned leaders about the lessons they have learned from years in leadership. They share the strategies, tips, and skills you should focus on now to make a success of this new leadership role.
1. Go on a listening tour
Aaron Painter, CEO of Nametag and author of Loyal: Listen or You Always Lose: A Leader’s Guide to Winning Customer and Employee Loyalty, says your first act should be to listen. “Go on listening tour,” he says. “Listen to your peers, team members, external customers, and partners. Do this with a sense of curiosity so you hear the perspectives of those you meet.”
Not only does this make an excellent first impression but it builds allies, teaches you where to focus your efforts, garners a wealth of terrific ideas, and helps you understand the complex dynamics of your new organization.
“You don’t want to be the new person who arrives full of ideas, ignoring the complexities of the new environment,” he explains. “When people feel listened to, they sense respect. And when they feel respected, you build a trusting relationship. You will need that trust to get anything done in the company.”
Be careful, though, that you don’t get stuck in listening mode. Go on your tour. Then make a to-do list.
“It’s critical that you get things done,” says Painter. “People can go into analysis paralysis. So, pick some things you’re going to start working on to show that you’ve listened and are leading the way forward.”
2. Don’t forget you are part of a team
Your role in your team may have changed, but you are not working alone. You are part of a team made up of everyone who reports to you in IT as well as all the other business leaders and the people who report to them.
“Everything you do that turns out to be great is done in combination with other people,” says Robert “Bo” Short, co-founder and CEO of Base Molecular Resonance Technologies (BMRT). “As I evolved and grew as a leader, I came to understand that it’s not about you. It’s about the team. I was in John Maxwell’s studio one day and he said, ‘You can climb a hill in your backyard, and nobody cares. But if you summit Mount Everest, they write books about you.’ That’s because you climb the hill by yourself. A team helps you summit Everest. Everything you do that turns out to be great is done in combination with other people.”
Cache Merrill, the CTO of Zibtek, agrees. “Trust your team with responsibilities,” he says. “Delegation not only empowers your team but also frees you to focus on strategic growth and innovation.”
3. Understand the business
“The first thing I do is evaluate the organizational structure,” says Ella Haman, CTO at Kapitus. “Familiarize yourself with the business strategy and the company roadmap. It is critical to understand where you’ve landed.”
You are here not only to oversee the technology but to apply that technology to the success of the business. “When you get to higher-level leadership roles,” she says, “it boils down to, why is technology there? Why should technology be at the table at the highest level of leadership? The reason, of course, is to enable the company to do business, to make money.”
This may seem obvious, she says, but it is often missed by new technology leaders.
“We tend to focus on the specific tools, our approach to technical debt remediation, and similar concerns. When we get to leadership, it becomes critical to speak the business language in a way that resonates with other leaders,” she says.
4. Study the metrics
To get a deeper understanding of the company, the goals, and the people, Haman recommends that you dig deep into whatever metrics you can get your hands on.
“There are all kinds of metrics in a good organization,” she says. “To understand what’s going on in yours, you need data points and to evaluate if those reflect reality. Drill down to see what these metrics are showing. Then do a sanity check with other business leaders.”
Maybe the metrics show that everything is going well, everyone is meeting their goals, the company is thriving. But ask your new team whether they think these metrics are measuring the right things, if they are telling a tale that’s true and accurate. Once you understand what is being measured, explore whether there are other metrics that should be measured.
“Are these measurements applicable to strategic goals or initiatives?” Haman asks. “Or are they just nice-to-have metrics?”
5. Investigate the tech stack
Next, says Haman, study the technology tools the company is using.
“This is important,” she says. “Technology changes constantly. You need to know what’s in your new stack.”
Is there anything in there you haven’t touched in years or have never used? No matter how much experience you have, you probably don’t know everything about every tool in every stack. Spend some time boosting your skills around anything unfamiliar.
“It’s not that you need to code in every language,” she says, “But you need to understand what your full technology stack looks like.” Without that, you will be relying on others to help you form opinions about your team, about what other teams are using and need, and to evaluate whether the people around you know what they are doing.
“If you don’t understand everything in that stack, you are only as good as the people you’re surrounded by,” she says. “You need to have enough detail to tell if these people know what they’re talking about.”
6. Make decisions
“Most young executives are wary and afraid to make decisions because they’re afraid they will make the wrong one,” says BMRT’s Short. “They hesitate too long. That hesitation costs results.”
There is no real formula for how long you can spend gathering information and opinions, given that each decision is different. But not deciding is a decision — usually a bad one.
“You want to be thoughtful,” Short says. “You don’t want to consistently make the wrong decision because you’ll find yourself consistently out of the next job. That’s why people hesitate. They’re afraid that’s what will happen. But inaction causes the same problems, the same dilemma.”
If you make a decision that does turn out to be wrong. Or if you hesitate too long, Zibtek’s Merrill suggests learning from it, rather than let that experience make you more hesitant.
“Every setback is a learning opportunity,” he says. “Encourage an environment where mistakes are openly discussed, and lessons are drawn.”
7. Frame discussions around the problems you solve
When you come from a technical background, you may be good at understanding specs and making the leap from details to what problems a technology or tool can solve. But if you want to be understood outside of IT, don’t use technical specs to explain things. Use real-world examples and tell people the problem the technology is solving.
“Someone who lives in the technology space has a tendency to get lost in a general staff meeting because not everybody lives in their world,” explains Short. “In the context of my company, I could explain the science and the technology behind it at length. But we live in a world of quantum physics. That will confuse most people. But when I say that we have a technology that, through molecular resonance, can detect cancer at its earliest stages or an IED in a roadway, people understand it. That raises their curiosity.”
Feel free to talk tech, speak in acronyms, and discuss specs and speeds with your IT team but develop your ability to discuss technology without resorting to jargon with everyone else.
8. Future-proof your team and technology
When you land in a new leadership role, you should perform a quick assessment of your team and the technology the company is using to make sure it serves the current customer needs but is also future-proof, suggests Prem Balasubramanian, CTO at Hitachi Digital Services.
The biggest challenge right now, he says, is moving data and tools to the cloud. “How does the team manage and run a cloud infrastructure?” he asks. “Your teams have to understand that cloud is code and, hence, the level to which automation is possible on the cloud. How do they harvest that automation to make it optimal for other teams to use? Which applications should go to the cloud? Which should not go to the cloud?”
Evaluate how prepared your people are for the future, whether it’s the cloud, AI, machine learning, or anything else that’s on the horizon. Do you have the technology you need? Does your team have the skills you need to manage this complexity? Do you need to upskill or hire?
Everything comes into play around this. Is your security future-ready? How about your budget and tools?
9. Balance technical expertise with people skills
“Being a great CIO or IT professional means you need to walk two paths at once: deepening your technical expertise and sharpening your people skills,” explains John Buccola, CTO of E78 Partners. “There is a dual nature to the role. You need to stay abreast of technological progress while enhancing your professional networks and relationships.”
To be an effective leader in IT, you need master this balance. You need to apply your intelligence and innovation to people problems as well as technical ones.
“This blend fosters a culture where innovation thrives not just on technical brilliance but on collaborative genius and understanding,” he says. “For me, that’s the ultimate goal: leading in a way that champions both cutting-edge technology and the human connections that make it all worthwhile.”
10. Define success
“Get clarity on the definition of success,” says Tony Fernandes, CEO and CAIO of UserExperience.AI at UEGroup. You can’t succeed in this role if you don’t know how success will be measured.
“Getting a leadership goal happens because your boss cannot put the focus needed on a portion of their organization,” he explains. “Your job is to apply that focus. It is critical to press your new boss to define what success looks like in their minds.”
Are you here to accomplish a specific goal? Is there a timeline? Is it enough for your team to be productive without rocking the ship?
“It is important to take the time to think about things logically and see yourself six to eight months down the line.”
Do you know what you need to do now to get there?
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