|
The Need to Delegate
Some CIOs are surprised when asked to name a potential successor because they don't think they need one. After spending most of their careers depending mostly on themselves, they are still learning how to delegate.
Michael Lehman, the CIO at Batteries Plus, a battery maker based in Hartland, Wis., remembers feeling this way. "I used to be much more in tune" with the daily details of the job, he says. He remembers being "too tactical, too involved. I couldn't take a vacation."
He's been with Batteries Plus for six years, during which time he's worked his way up from director -- the top IT position at the time -- to vice president to CIO. For the first several years, when the IT department had just a handful of people, everyone had to pitch in. Even as the leader, Lehman had a finger in almost every task, right down to installing PCs and performing application support. "There were so many moving parts and so many new people that, invariably, I had to get involved," he says.
Back then, the department had a flat structure. He had 11 people on staff, and about half a dozen reported to him.
Now that the company is larger, Lehman has reshuffled staff into more of a hierarchy. Today the department has three managers, including Lehman. The other two are the potential successors whom he hired from a consultancy. Each has a distinct set of responsibilities. "We've gotten some standards in place," he says.
"You have to have the right reporting structure to even have anybody you consider to be a successor," Lehman says, "and we've only done that as of this year. It's taken six years. If I'm hit by a bus now, the world won't end here. For the last five years, I couldn't say that."
What to Look For
The next problem is predicting how, or if, promising junior executives might evolve into the kind of people who could run an IT organization. When making this assessment, many CIOs fall into the trap of looking for younger versions of themselves.
But as it turns out, managerial skills evolve over time. The skills that make a good junior manager are totally different from the skills that work well in the upper ranks. For instance, successful junior managers can make quick decisions based on minimal information, according to "The Seasoned Executive's Decision-Making Style," a Korn/Ferry report published in Harvard Business Review this year. But successful senior managers are the opposite, the report finds. They take time to absorb and analyze more information and more input from others before reaching their decision.
Korn/Ferry concluded that managers must evolve their thinking if they want to move up.
They must be the kind of person who can move from "having to do everything themselves and manage on a minute-by-minute basis to somebody who's very good at setting the big picture of what needs to be done and then stepping back and letting the work get done by other people," Rubenstrunk says.
Zanavich emphasizes so-called soft skills when identifying potential successors. "It's about being comfortable making presentations to senior executives. It's knowledge in how to play politics at the senior-executive level," she says. And so, as she did with the candidate working on the contract, she pushes her candidates -- they know who they are because she's had frank discussions with them -- into uncomfortable situations that will challenge them.
|
