Forging Good Leaders in Bad Times
Leadership development doesn't stop when the going gets tough. If anything, investing in the next generation matters now more than ever.
CIO — If there was ever a more difficult time to make leadership development a priority, you'd have a hard time convincing most IT executives of it. In the aftermath of the global economic meltdown, CIOs face a long list of challenges—from cost cutting and customer demands to strategic planning and successful innovation—and the resources available to accomplish them continue to contract.
Executives across the board are downgrading their concern about the pipeline of top talent in their organizations. Corporate leaders ranked pressure to cut costs (83 percent) as their toughest business challenge, according to recent research from Personnel Decisions International, an HR consultancy. Talent management fell to dead last, with just five percent of survey respondents citing loss of leaders in key areas or insufficient talent as a concern.
Indeed, it would be easy for CIOs to shift into autopilot when it comes to developing the next generation of IT leaders. Problem is, say management experts, that without a guiding force, leaders will self select—and they may not be qualified for senior roles.
"Leaders are developing whether you want them to or not. The question is: Do we want to be aware of that and guide that in a conscious way?" says Karen Sobel-Lojeski, visiting assistant professor at Stony Brook University's department of technology and society. "We need to pay more, not less, attention to leader development because leaders are coming up anyway."
"The trick," says F. Warren McFarlan, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and author of numerous books on IT management and strategy, "is to be able to identify the remarkable people in the organization while getting the work of the business portfolio done. You've still gotta get the laundry out."
The CIOs who identified, mentored and groomed CIO magazine's 2009 Ones to Watch honorees (Read "Tomorrow's Leaders") are flat-out focused on developing the next generation of leaders (and the generation after that) while still meeting the myriad challenges of the modern-day IT department. And while there's a lot of buzz about how to bring up Gen X or Gen Y (Read "Bringing Up Gen Y"), the IT leaders we spoke to believe that leadership development is leadership development and that focusing on age or any other differentiating factor is not productive.
"It's simply a matter of priority," says Amtrak CIO Ed Trainor, whose staff includes a Ones to Watch honoree. "You must make the investment or else you will lose the good people."
