If you want to succeed as a CIO, shut off the computer, toss aside the code and bone up on your corporate-executive skills. According to "The State of the CIO" survey, the single most pivotal skill for success as a CIO is the ability to communicate effectively.

Of 500 CIOs who participated in the survey, 70 percent picked communication as one of their three most important skills, 58 percent chose understanding the business process and operations, and 46 percent put strategic thinking and planning in the top three. In interviews, CIOs who took the survey say it’s tough to exercise any one of these skills without relying on the other two.

That these three skills top the list sends a resounding message that CIOs think they should play a major role in shaping and driving broad company goals. The skills most important to them are also valuable to every well-rounded business executive. Meanwhile, CIOs view hard-core techy skills as largely irrelevant. Only 10 percent of the survey pool identified technical proficiency as a critical skill, which is a big change, says Paul Ayoub, CIO of PMA Reinsurance Management in Philadelphia. "In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the CIO position was much more tactical than strategic, and the CIO was definitely more technical," he says. "[The executive committee would] tell you, ’Don’t worry?we’ll figure out the strategic direction and you just make it run.’" (For more about the CIO role today, see "Responsibilities," Page 50.)

The task for CIOs is to develop and refine these skills. Read on for advice about how to do it.

How to Learn to Communicate

"You can have the most wonderful ideas in the world, but if you can’t communicate them, it won’t make a difference," says Margaret Myers, former acting deputy CIO and now principal director to the deputy CIO with the U.S. Department of Defense. Ron Margolis, CIO of the University of New Mexico Hospital System in Albuquerque, adds that a big part of the CIO job is salesmanship. If CIOs can’t communicate, their projects will die?either at the approval stage when the executive committee rejects them or at the implementation stage when users resist them, he says. Meanwhile, CIOs who can’t explain the limitations of technology will constantly face unrealistic expectations from end users and fellow executives, says Rob Paterson, CIO of Salem State College in Salem, Mass.

One way to develop communication skills is by listening and observing. Marion Mullauer, vice president and CIO of medical publisher Lippincott Williams & Wilkins headquartered in Philadelphia, says she spends a lot of time in meetings observing how people interact with each other, making note of what works and what doesn’t. For example, in a previous job, she attended a meeting during which the discussion stopped being productive. The two business sponsors of the project abruptly excused themselves and left the room. The rest of the group got so nervous about what the executives were talking about that they put the meeting back on track. Now, whenever Mullauer notices people in a group can’t reach agreement about a point, she’ll quietly ask someone to step outside with her. It distracts the rest of the group and helps break the tension, more easily than if she stays in the room, Mullauer says.