CIO Executive Council —

Outstanding CIOs most resemble outstanding CEOs. That was the eye-opening benchmark established when the CIO Executive Council, as part of its Future-State CIO® initiative, teamed up with Egon Zehnder International (EZI) two years ago to build a leadership competency assessment for CIOs and senior IT leaders.

EZI provided its model of the 10 competencies that leaders typically have, no matter their functional area or role. As depicted in the colored bubble legend across the bottom of the Future-State CIO Leadership Competencies Journey graph, these competencies are based on more than 25,000 evaluations of senior executives, including CEOs, CFOs, COOs and CIOs.

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The model provided a baseline measurement of how leaders evaluated as "outstanding," "good," and "average" scored on a scale of 1-7 for each of the competencies. A 1 indicates purely reactive behaviors with short-term impact, while a 7 represents highly proactive behaviors focused on broad, long-term impact.

The benchmarks for CIOs were impressive, especially for outstanding CIOs. In fact, outstanding CIOs performed comparably to outstanding CEOs in all competencies except Market Knowledge and Customer Focus. To get a basic relative snapshot of your own current strengths in these competencies, try the simplified public version of the Council's c-suite competencies self assessment.

The portrait that emerges of the outstanding CIO is that of a business leader with strategic insight, someone who has both the experience and capability to leverage technology investments to drive measurable and sustainable business improvement or change. This is the "Business Strategist" CIO of the graph, who is almost indistinguishable from outstanding CEOs and presidents. According to the Council, this is also the kind of CIO most businesses will need in the future. The good CIO—or "Transformation CIO" of the graph—is also able to make IT an integral part of the business but lacks the degree of Strategic Orientation in combination with Market Knowledge to be a full-fledged strategist. The average-performing CIOs are represented as the "Function Head CIO," primarily overseeing and delivering IT services.

An Assessment Framework and Development Roadmap

The gaps between these levels of CIO performance are significant, just as they are between senior IT leaders, IT managers and IT staff. In our experience, improving a single competency by a single point in our 1-7 point scale requires six months to a year, depending on ability to grow; improving two requires a year to two years; and so on.

Further, as the graph indicates, the combinations of competencies (shown by the colored bubble clusters) that come to the fore at each IT leadership level differ, with each combination forming the foundation for the competencies of the level above. Although the Future-State CIO will need all 10 of the leadership competencies, each stage of the journey tests different combinations of skills.

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