7 Transformative IT Leadership Skills

12/7/2021

itleadership-1.jpg7 Transformative IT Leadership Skills
The last two years have reinforced three lessons about technological transformations:
  • Change, indeed, is constant.
  • Change moves at the pace organizations can muster, not the speed companies prefer.
  • Change demands leadership from business executives, not just technologists.
“Successful digital transformations don’t happen without organization-wide effort, mindset and process changes, and the right technologies,” writes columnist Esther Shein for CIO magazine. She continues, “They also don’t happen without guidance” from transformative leadership.
Shein quotes Stephanie Woerner, a research scientist at MIT’s Sloan Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), when explaining that transformative IT leaders “are not just doing what they’ve always been doing. Their skillset is really becoming broad and very business-oriented.’’
What are those skills? Shein offers seven of them that we’ve digested here:
  1. Adaptation Agent – Shifting while in motion with minimal disruption.
  2. Uncertainty Manager – Embracing ambiguity while balancing its risks.
  3. Clear Communicator – Bringing clarity to objectives, strategies and tactics.
  4. Empathy Enabler – Solutions that help people, not just increase efficiency.
  5. Relationship Facilitator – People change minds and transform processes, not the other way around.
  6. Collaboration Cultivator – Solving problems as a team, including customers and colleagues.
  7. Compelling Storyteller – Why must we change? What’s our destination? How will we get there?
Wondering whether you and your team have these skills? Talk to us. We know them when we see them.