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A Short Honeymoon
Sometimes, a boss will ask a new CIO to make big staffing changes right away. In those cases, the CIO needs to assess his resources quickly. Kahle remembers one of his jobs as a senior IT executive where his bosses asked him to immediately lay off a remote group in Texas. "Why isn't it performing?" Kahle asked. "I got blank looks."
Kahle couldn't endorse terminating the group because he didn't have enough information. In the end, he was given more time. It turns out that of six groups reporting to Kahle, "they were the highest-performing group I had," Kahle says. The group remained. (He believes the team had been singled out for termination because of its location in Texas.)
At the same time, Kahle learned that another remote group, a 300-person team in California, had the unfortunate distinction of having spent $20 million on an application with nothing to show for it. The group's director couldn't explain why. "I told him, 'You're a director. That's clearly not performing at a director level,'" Kahle recalls.
Although the director promised to do better, Kahle figured this was a case that required immediate action. "I had to shut them down," he says, at the end of his second month on the job. "Very seldom do you have something that's that crystalline clear."
Clemson University's Bottum says CIOs should start talking about organizational changes early in their tenure, as long as they've received prior input from staff and customers. If changes have to be made but the CIO waffles or even avoids mentioning these pending changes, "then the staff are all waiting for the hammer to fall," says Bottum. "How productive are people while they're doing that?"
Bottum joined Clemson in July 2006, and within a month believed he knew enough to "lay my prejudices out on the line" to his 300 staffers. With input from them and others, he is now trying to put the right people in the right place.
Instead of making big staff changes, Kahle recommends that CIOs take the small step of ensuring that one or two top lieutenants understand how to drive the change the CIO wants to make. If the staff doesn't include these people, they should be recruited, he says. A CIO should address these staffing issues near the end of his first 100 days and not more than five months into the job, he says.
Without these people, the CIO won't get far. "If you can bring in one or two people who already get it, they can model the behavior" for the rest of the staff.
Although it is hugely important for CIOs to learn how their company works during the first 100 days, they should also make clear that, going forward, some things will change.
Hermens, for one, makes a point of telling her staff, "I never, never want to hear anyone in my organization say a sentence that starts with 'The business.' We are all on the same team here. We have different roles, but we're all on the same team.
"I had a very different management style than my predecessor," she adds, explaining that the former CIO managed by process, while she focuses more on people. "I needed to move people quickly through the notion that we were going to do things differently."
Joan Indiana Rigdon was a contributing writer for CIO Decisions. To comment on this story, email editor@ciodecisions.com.
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