C-Suite Leadership

The CIO and the Future of Work: Being the Most Influential Leader in the Room

The future of work isn’t in the changes we see coming. It is in the CIO who is leading. You must expand your capacity to lead in three critical areas: customer, culture and competition.

Scott Smeester

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March 9, 2021

Photo credit:
John Murzaku

In ancient cultures, wine was poured into skins, not bottles. If the skin was new, it would expand with the gases of the fermenting wine. If the skin was old, having become hardened and brittle, new wine poured into it would expand, only for the skin to burst and both skin and wine be lost.

You have heard it said, “ Do not pour new wine into old wineskins.”

We as people, and especially as leaders, think we are the new wine. We have great ideas, new ways of doing things, and we buck against the brittle wineskin of old systems. If people would listen to us, everything would be fine.

Just one problem. We are the wineskin; you are the wineskin. New is always coming at us: new people, new ideas, new ways, new technologies. It’s a flood.

The leader is the one who has the capacity to expand. Stop expanding, and you are done leading.

Which brings us to the future of work. If you pull up articles on the subject, they will generally cover the same ground:

  • Consumer rebound
  • Supply chain adjustments
  • Remote office, hybrid work
  • Reshored manufacturing
  • IT prominence
  • Security priority
  • Green regulation and social conscientiousness

All of these are great issues to discuss. Each merits their own article. But if you think those are the future of work, you are moving to the peripheral as a leader.

When you enter a room as a leader, you may not be the most powerful or the most accredited or the most known; but you can be the most influential.The future of work isn’t about the wine, the changes, the new stuff; it’s about the CIO possessing the capacity to expand, and leading the organization to expand as well. You set the framework for progress to prosper.

Specifically, the CIO must expand their capacity in three core arenas: Customer-centricity, cultural design, and competitive fierceness. To view it another way, you must master your relationship to mission (customer, user need), community (people you work with) and opposition (the battles you must win).

Customer-centric CIO

In marketing terms, VOC is the voice of the customer. Your Chief Marketing Officer or equivalent is very familiar with this voice. It’s time for the CIO to listen in.

User-centric leadership seeks to understand their audience and their journey. The audience is trying to accomplish something. They have questions to answer, tasks to complete, influences to filter, pain to eliminate and emotions to process.

Your customer is on a journey with you, and their decision to transact with you entails a series of steps and touchpoints. Technology is at every one of them.  

Marketers use a number of resources to clearly hear the customer voice: research, surveys, analysis, interview, and customer journey mapping.

The influential CIO is the one who always puts customer needs first in working with the lines of business and stakeholders. Insight leads to innovation, iteration and implementation.

For too long, the CIO led in a vacuum, accomplishing objectives that were not directly informed by their own understanding. Now, as a business strategist, the CIO must hear the customer voice in order to answer with IT driven solutions.

How is your relationship with the marketing team? How informed are you of their discoveries? Have you spoken with frontline help such as customer service or sales? Do you know how well the technology you oversee is being received?

Knowing the customer expands your capacity as a strategist. Data-driven VOC insights have serious implications: You must be among the first to see; first to see is first to influence.

Cultural-Architect CIO

There is a lot of good information available on creating culture in the workplace. What I don’t often hear taught is the wisdom that the CIO is the primary architect of culture. Yes, you.

Technology is the answer for the three main components of culture:

  • How identity as a company-tribe is communicated and cohesive
  • How change is received and responded to
  • How collaboration is valued and accomplished
  1. Ultimately, at any given point in a company’s history, the story is about the people in the moment. Consider the pandemic: you have stories of innovators, endurance runners and cheerleaders; you have stories of sacrifice, stress and success. People on the outside know you as a company; the inside is a tribe. As CIO, you drive the solutions that keep people focused on the vision, and you drive the solutions that promote belonging, mental health and community in an age of physically-absent/personally engaged.
  2. We have no shortage of insights on change management. The CIO, though, knows in advance what is coming and how that will affect the workforce. The rise of AI will significantly influence workflows, processes, and worker behavior. People will be displaced, and ideally, newly placed. The influential CIO anticipates what is coming and is first to communicate the strategic decisions and responses that will need to be in place. The best management of change is leading the change ahead of its reality.
  3. As the CIO has risen from a technology specialist to a business strategist, (s)he has had to collaborate more with business peers. Consider that to have been undergraduate preparation. The influential CIO creates a whole collaboration ecosystem, both by conviction as well as by the technology needed to accomplish it. Only the CEO compares with you as having a high-elevation understanding of the overall business; the new wineskin CIO must see the whole in order to align the parts. You see so that it can be.

How have you relinquished influence on company culture? How do you need to re-engage?

Competitive CIO

There are forces against you. Market competition, disruptive regulation, political malfeasance, global perpetrators.

The influential CIO is the one who is resolved to win. There are 3 hills you fight to the death on:

  1. Data. Drive the value of data. Your team needs access to the data and tools embedded in their workflows that will expand the capacity of AI and machine learning.
  2. Agility. Agile as a process has its place, and it may not be in every space; but agile as a concept and conviction has come into its own. As CIO, you lead the charge in the company having an iterative mindset.
  3. Security. Have you ever heard a song played so much you can’t bear to listen to it for awhile? This is not that song. Hear it again and again and again...and play it often for others to hear.

I watched an old man with a cane try to get his dog into the back of an old pickup. The dog was too old to jump. The old man tried to coax the dog into a running jump. That didn’t work either. I walked outside and offered to help. I lifted the dog from its rear and helped it climb onto the truck bed.

Old man. Old truck. Old dog. They all lacked capacity. Time caught up to them.

The future of work? You are. Keep expanding.

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