Plain old leadership

Since the age of vacuum tubes, dot matrix printers and green screen monitors, Information Technology (IT) leaders have been obsessed with the concept of alignment, meaning now closely an organisations IT strategy is interwoven with its overall business strategy.

Effective IT leadership can steer IT into the business mainstream, to confront and overcome the traditional issues confronting many IT groups that they are not seen as a core function within the business, and hence how to enable this perception shift to achieve this much sort after alignment. This is becoming critical because we are in an era in which technology has become a key strategic tool, an hence effective working relationship between the business senior managers and those of the IT group is vital to a businesses success or failure.

Leadership is an influence process; therefore leaders are people who, by their actions, encourage a group of people to move toward a common or shared goal.

A leader is an individual; leadership is the function that the individual performs. Or as Harvard’s John Kotter (1990) said “… leaders establish direction by developing a vision, then communicate this vision to people and inspire them to overcome obstacles”.

Situational leadership styles are given as Telling, Selling, Consulting and Delegating (Fiedler, 1967 & Hersey & Blanchard, 1996) and are viewed as being most to least authoritarian. Fiedler proposes that effective group performance depends on the proper match between the leaders style and the degree to which the situation is conducive to control and influence by the leader.

For any alignment to be successful IT direction and decisions have to reflect the goals of the business and engage the attention of the business, often without the participation or even interest of the business.

The CIO to be a creative effective leader must create something better, something that will allow IT decisions that benefit the entire organisation and not just part of it. What most companies need is a leader that will keep IT and the business jointly accountable and responsible for linking technology to the most important company strategies. The CIO must lead, develop and nurture a governance structure that promotes IT goals as a whole, both at the functional and business unit levels of the organisation.

What commonly becomes apparent is that in order to do this, our IT leaders must as proposed by Fiedler, match their leadership style with the situation and people at the time, or in other words adopt a situational leadership approach, as Harvard’s John Kotter (1990) said “… leaders establish direction by developing a vision, then communicate this vision to people and inspire them to overcome obstacles”.

you can’t solve everything with this one approach, you have to figure out the most practical way to inter relate with people on issues and be prepared to change the way you deal with it. Situational leadership in action.