That’s not the leader he wants to be. So Rossmiller has been focusing on being authentic, transparent, and intentional.
“It’s hard because there are things I can share with my staff and other things I have to dance around, but I want my team to know when I speak with them, they know what I’m saying is true,” he says.
He also wants them to know he’s got their interests in mind, that “they’re not just a body in a seat. I want to grow people, invest in them, celebrate victories,” he says.
Rossmiller points to an annual review with one of his employees. During the review, the employee shared some struggles. Rossmiller in turn talked about some of his struggles and how he coped with them. He then pledged to make sure he’d get the resources the worker needed to succeed.
“It wasn’t about me saying, ‘Suck it up’; it’s more we’re in it together,” Rossmiller says.
In terms of being more intentional, Rossmiller is working to: change leadership styles to meet the needs of the moment; be more present; clearly communicate to his team and the university community what’s going on within IT; empower each individual worker; and actively listen to staffers so he can truly understand their points.
He says he’s also trying to slow down and solicit feedback as part of his leadership improvement efforts.
“I want to be known as someone who truly cares about my staff and fights the good fight and is in the trenches with them,” Rossmiller adds.
10. Strengthening ties to executive peers
One of the leadership objectives for Ankur Anand, CIO at Nash Squared, is to build up relationships with other executives by doing more to meet them on their level.
“We need to build more business partnerships, as this is no longer a role focused on technology. And CIOs have to build those relationships with stakeholders to be change leaders,” he says.
As part of his effort to strengthen rapport, Anand is spending time with the CFO to deepen his knowledge of financials — a step he says will help him be more fluent about the business value IT brings to each executive.
“The only way to gain the skill is to spend time with the CFO and the business,” he says.
11. Act like a CEO
Another way CIOs can boost their leadership skills is to act more like a CEO whose success is judged on meeting customer needs, says former CIO Diane Carco, now president of management consulting company Swingtide.
“One of the leadership skills that CIOs need to grow is learning to run their department as a business. They have to think like the CEO and focus on marketing to their customers, on product definitions, and growing their IT business instead of being a firefighter or order-taker,” she says. “To me, it means you’re the technology leader for the company. You’re not allowing [department heads] to displace your delivery of tech services because they outsourced it to someone else or brought in a SaaS solution because you’re hard to work with. You’re not the department of ‘no.’ Instead, you have customer relationship managers assigned to sit within each unit to understand their goals and needs so you can meet them, and you’re measuring delivery to ensure you’re fast.”
She says CIOs who don’t learn to act like a CEO risk being shut out of enterprise-level transformation work and risk being displaced by another executive.
12. Serve on a board
Pegasystems CIO David Vidoni wants to expand his leadership experience by becoming a member of a board of directors.
He’s working toward that goal: He currently serves on a board of a nonprofit and is actively seeking opportunities to serve on a board at a public company.
“It’s something new, and it’s an avenue for me to learn from others and to take those learnings and apply them to what I do daily,” he says.
Year Up’s Flowers is on a similar path for similar reasons. He is taking a board preparedness course offered by the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD), seeing board work as a way to contribute his knowledge to others but also as a way “to make me a better executive and leader for my own organization, to help me deliver as an IT executive what my board needs.”
