Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Gartner survey

A professional acquaintance of mine asked me via twitter if I had taken the new Gartner CIO Self Assessment questionairre.

I had not, so I went over and took a look.  It asks some very good questions.  I have not read the book upon which it was based.  However, I think it will be a good choice for my up and coming trip to San Francisco to meet everyone at my new company.  However, the same professional acquaintance is also reading The 4 Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive.  I wonder if I can borrow that when he is done.  Maybe I can trade him my two Jack Welch books for it (here and here - I believe they really must be read together).

So, I started going through the questionnaire and realized even more that I am no longer in a management role.  I am a developer.  This is a completely different skill set.  However, it is doing for me a couple things that are very important.

1.  It is providing an income and opportunity.  (Most important!!)
2.  It is giving me the opportunity of being ”nothing but a technologist” but with the very recent memory and experience of being a manager/director. 
3.  It is giving me the opportunity to put my philosophies to the test - such as leading from behind, making my boss successful makes me successful, practicing candor, seeing and experiencing differentiation, providing an intelligent voice, etc.  Certainly these can be done and were done by me as a manager.  Also, as a manager, I never forgot I was also an employee.  However, now the situation is different.  First, I am not a manager.  Second there are more of us.  My previous position I was basically top technology dog.  It was both exciting and people filled and lonely both at the same time.

I do miss many of the management aspects of things.  I enjoy business and business challenges.  I enjoy working out ways to develop others and make them better professionals.  I enjoy thinking about business and translating it into IT (I also enjoy thinking about processes in general and translating them into code), I enjoy creating vision and then turning it into reality, I enjoy philosophically determining risks and then coming up with concrete ways of mitigating them, I enjoy educating executives on the use of IT and helping them figure out what real-time metrics they need so that they can ensure they are getting their jobs done or that others are getting their jobs done and that things are progressing as it should, I enjoy (to go along with the last one) shaping and informing expectations.

What will be interesting is to see how I get evaluated being at a new company.  I think that, particularly early on, I’ll be interested to see how I get evaluated on communication, time management, and understanding and meeting expectations. 

Going back to that Gartner questionnaire, on the first page it has the following quote (from the book I am sure): 

Leadership and management are different but complementary. Management is about execution. Leadership is about change, specifically influencing others to change. Leading through influence is critical for New CIO Leaders. They must lead their business colleagues by influencing their view of IT but without a formal base of authority or power. CIOs can’t TELL their business colleagues what to do, but they can influence the decisions they make.

I would agree.  I think that a first line manager is a manager.  A second line manager is a leader.  So, non-managers begin to be managers and then get placed in such positions.  Managers begin to become leaders and then get placed in such positions.  I wonder how much I am a manager and how much I am a leader.  I wonder how much I am attracted to management and how much I am attracted to leadership. 

Well, the attraction part I can answer confidently.  I am very much attracted to leadership.  Management is what I do.  I am not so much attracted to it, but it is the end result for me.  I don’t know if that makes sense or not.  It does to me.

This is one of those times where you wish that those who have worked for you could magically “age” 20-30 years in wisdom and experience and then provide you with wise feedback based on real experience and give you an assessment on your management and leadership abilities.