The CEO Blindside, The CIO Block

Lack of cohesion in the company is the reason many CIOs lack a solid tech strategy. You don’t have to change the world overnight, but you can change your environment right away. 

In a recent poll, I asked CIOs what the primary reason is for their lack of a clear tech strategy. Two main reasons emerged: strategy is not a priority in their organization, and current operations are overwhelming. 

Those two reasons feed each other. Lack of strategy leads to lack of filtered and focused projects. Overwhelm absorbs the time and energy needed for strategic development.

If your organization doesn’t prioritize strategy, it’s because they too are overwhelmed with operations (and short-term, short-sighted reporting benchmarks).

Strategy-deficit is a disease. 

I recently read articles addressing the reasons employees are leaving. On the one hand, it’s the same reason it’s been for fourteen consecutive years: lack of professional and personal development.

But more specific behaviors showed up. Employees most often leave due to negative experiences. Specifically, they feel worn out by how they are managed, burned out by unrealistic performance expectations, invalidated in the work they do accomplish, and held back from the work they really want to do.

Let’s see the pieces together:

1. Lack of strategy
2. Overwhelming operations
3. Poor development
4. Management in a void
5. Performance metrics not tied to purpose or meaningful objectives
6. Lack of recognition or sense of actual accomplishment
7. Stuck

The CEO Blindspot

Put the pieces together and you end up with?

No cohesion.

I’ve seen this so often - no, too often - with CEOs I consult and with CIOs who suffer the consequences.

Your noble, north star, never-changing purpose is lost in the space of profitability. Vision is disconnected. Values are not audited, objectives are not evaluated, key results are not measured, and people are not developed with corporate and personal ends in mind.

You are doing business but you are not building a future. This is why half of business’ don’t make it over five years, and why less than a third of business’ only last over a decade. 

We blame a number of factors: siloed work, poor communication, budget restraints, competitive pragmatism, rapidly changing circumstances. Our bookshelves are lined with answers for the symptoms.

Your boss is basically keeping people as happy as can be expected.

That’s part of the blind side.

CEOs who fail to provide a cohesive work experience feed a longer term dissatisfaction than the happiness that comes from short term rewards.

You are not working at your company because they make you happy. You are working for a deeper reason.

Your marketing department knows this. They understand that customers come looking for solutions because they have a “job to do.” They want to accomplish something, so they buy or hire a what or who.

You are no different. You work where you do because they provide you (for now) with a way to get your own personal job-to-do done. 

When companies lack cohesion, they create friction. The user pathway requires more work than you are willing to journey through. You will only work so long under so many conditions. Same with your employees.

CIO Rescue

Your mission is cohesion.

You start with your span of influence. You expand your influence by how you work with the C-Suite. You interview them about their business objectives. You ask enlightening questions, such as how their objective is tied to the larger company objectives (which they likely cannot articulate). You set up processes for IT that educates others on how to work within the cohesive environment you have established.

You model before you market.

You build cohesion by telling the future in advance. If the company’s purpose, vision, values, mission, objectives and key results are not established for you, establish them yourself as the backdrop against which your team operates.

Close enough counts. Your goal is to create an environment in which you can work more effectively, more cohesively.

In football, the blind side is the part of the field a player cannot see. As a CIO, you are blocking for your CEO quarterback. Building cohesion despite the lack of it in the greater organization is a defensive move on your part so that the team can make the play they need.