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Good Things Come in Threes
If finding someone with those characteristics seems tough, consider that you should probably find several. Two potential successors are certainly better than none or one. But for CIOs who have bigger staffs, Gartner's McDonald recommends picking three candidates. "Always build them in threes. Chances are, one will get hit by a bus, one of them will quit and you'll still have one left," he says.
At UIL, Zanavich has taken her HR department's advice not only to pick three but also to pick candidates at different career points. One could take over now, another could take over in another year and a third candidate might be ready in five years.
Of course, Zanavich has a lot of raw material to choose from: With just less than $1 billion in annual revenue, UIL requires an IT department of about 100, plus 25 contractors.
CIOs at smaller midsized companies have a much harder time finding candidates. For every CIO like Lehman, who managed to find two potential successors among a staff of 11, there's a CIO like Fernando Gonzalez, who has had difficulty finding even one among his staff of 30 at Byer California, a privately held garment maker based in San Francisco with about $300 million in annual sales.
Gonzalez explained to his top lieutenants that he needs to find someone who can take over when he retires, which he figures might be five or six years from now. "I've been very open. I've explained to them that I have to do succession planning. And no one's raising their hand."
Gonzalez approached one candidate head-on, asking, "Do you want to be groomed to be in my position?" She declined but left open the possibility that she might change her mind.
Gonzalez figures that parts of the job are unappealing. "The more you expose people to the CIO leadership role, the more they realize it's a position where you are about problems," he says. "Every day is about problems. Most of your decisions are gray ones. Some people are going to be happy with your decisions, and some people are not. It's not a position where you're going to be loved, cared for and admired."
His job contrasts sharply with the lower ranks partly because he has pushed the concept of service, which means his managers have been taught to please and appease. For them, the customer is always right.
"But at the C level, the customer isn't always right," Gonzalez says. As CIO, he finds himself occasionally telling internal customers things like, "You may think it's critical to the company, but it's not. I don't want to get into an argument or debate. That's the decision. I have the other C's supporting me. That's the way it is."
When Gonzalez looks below, he doesn't see many managers who could take that stand if they had to.
In his hunt, Gonzalez is also grappling with a generation gap. He's been a CIO for 25 years. When he was starting his career, his passion and hobby were the same: computers. So it went for others his age. "We didn't have other hobbies," he says. Yes, he laughs, he is a nerd.
Now, he sees a generation of IT workers who chose the field because it's a good way to earn a living. When he asks job candidates about their hobbies, they say they ski. In a way, that's good, he says, because it makes them more well rounded than his generation. Still, he laments what has been lost. "In interviews, you don't hear the word 'passion' anymore," he says.
Maybe the way Gonzalez executes his job intimidates his staff, we suggest. This prompts a major pause. Gonzalez begins thinking aloud. "Maybe I'm presenting myself as a finished product" who never makes mistakes, he says. "I'm not even close to being a finished product." But his staff does not know that, he says, because he's sheltered them.
What's more, since Gonzalez himself logged more than two decades as CIO before taking the job at Byer 2 1/2 years ago, he wonders if he has been expecting his much younger candidates to have the same level of experience. "I'm at the end of my career. I'm going to retire in five to six years. But the person who steps into my job doesn't have to be at the end of [his] career," he says. "Maybe I've been looking for me."
There is one easier method. CIOs who are having trouble identifying successors can hire search firms to do it for them. These firms use interviews and questionnaires to assess the leadership skills of executives, as well as how well these executives fit into a corporate culture. Such assessments can cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars to more than $50,000. Companies can start their assessments years in advance or on an immediate, emergency basis.
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