10 Communication Mistakes CIOs Still Make

CIO — For years, CIOs have been fighting the stereotype that they're weak communicators, unable to speak the language of business or relate to anyone outside of IT. But by using practiced communication skills, many CIOs are proving how convincing, credible and captivating they can be—in the boardroom and on the Web. (For evidence, check out blogs by British Telecom's (BT) JP Rangaswami, Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center CIO John Halamka and Mike Schaffner, the director of IT for Cameron International's valves and measurement group.)

Indeed, CIOs' communication skills—their ability to negotiate, build consensus, engage stakeholders and make business cases—have improved dramatically since the days they were in charge of data processing. Yet they still slip up occasionally, lapsing into acronym soup or erring on the side of hyperbole to sell an IT investment.

Such communication mistakes can impede CIOs' effectiveness on the job or hinder their relationships with staff and other functional executives. Craig Blad, a former SVP and CIO of North Star Financial who's currently seeking a new CIO role, says poor or jargon-filled communication creates misunderstandings between CIOs and fellow executives. If a CIO can't speak to the business value of a project, he says, it will never get approval.

CIO — For years, CIOs have been fighting the stereotype that they're weak communicators, unable to speak the language of business or relate to anyone outside of IT. But by using practiced communication skills, many CIOs are proving how convincing, credible and captivating they can be—in the boardroom and on the Web. (For evidence, check out blogs by British Telecom's (BT) JP Rangaswami, Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center CIO John Halamka and Mike Schaffner, the director of IT for Cameron International's valves and measurement group.)

Indeed, CIOs' communication skills—their ability to negotiate, build consensus, engage stakeholders and make business cases—have improved dramatically since the days they were in charge of data processing. Yet they still slip up occasionally, lapsing into acronym soup or erring on the side of hyperbole to sell an IT investment.

Such communication mistakes can impede CIOs' effectiveness on the job or hinder their relationships with staff and other functional executives. Craig Blad, a former SVP and CIO of North Star Financial who's currently seeking a new CIO role, says poor or jargon-filled communication creates misunderstandings between CIOs and fellow executives. If a CIO can't speak to the business value of a project, he says, it will never get approval.

In some cases, communication blunders can do serious damage to a CIO's reputation and career, since they reinforce those negative, geeky stereotypes about CIOs.

"Every time you screw up, you come off as less polished and less prepared," says Peter Kretzman, an IT consultant and former CIO and CTO. "When you descend into jargon or 'the-sky-is-falling,' you come across as not as capable, and that does damage to your career and to your department. It makes management think, 'We need to get someone in here who can talk to us and let us know what's really going on.'"

Here are 10 communication mistakes common among CIOs. Be aware of them so that you can avoid making them.

1. They speak in jargon.

Using technical jargon when speaking to coworkers outside of IT is the most obvious and most common mistake IT professionals at all levels make. The use of jargon is an example of a broader communication mistake IT leaders make: not being aware of where their knowledge ends and where the knowledge of the person they're trying to communicate with begins, says Abbie Lundberg, president of communications consultancy Lundberg Media and former editor-in-chief of CIO magazine.

"It's easy for people with specialized knowledge, like technologists, to communicate in a way that assumes an insider's understanding," she says. "Technologists in particular need to be very, very conscious of this."

2. They complain about technical problems.

Stephen Laster, CIO of Harvard Business School, remembers a talking-to he got from one of his bosses early on in his leadership career. He had just come from a meeting where he carried on before his peers about the technical problems his team was having inside a data center and how they were working so diligently to resolve them.

"All my peers were hearing was some foreign language," says Laster. "I was bringing them too deeply inside my organization. What they gleaned [from the meeting] was 'Stephen's really got a lot of problems.' The best I could do in that conversation was make them nervous."