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Everybody yearns for professional growth and promotion. Im sure you as an IT manager also aspire to be in the CIOs role at some point in your career, sooner the better.
In todays agile organisations, experience and knowledge alone do not guarantee a journey to the top of the IT organisation ladder. There are other important factors that distinguish a budding CIO from the rest of IT managers.
Sure, ambition is one of the important factors. Yet, in the course of my long professional career, I have seen many ambitious and technically competent persons who did not succeed in making it to the big club.
Often, I have pondered over the subject and have come to believe that while ambition is important, there is a trait more that is perhaps even more important. Thats attitude or the mindset. It plays a very vital role in developing leadership traits in a person.
What exactly is attitude and how does one get it?
Well, attitude can be defined as a behavioural trait of individuals as which they come to exhibit as they carry out day-to-day affairs at work or at home.
Often these traits are either genetically coded or imbibed early in life, at home and during the school days. These traits mean that faced by the same set of problems, different people react differently. While some take a problem as an opportunity many others tend to see it as a challenge. Now that is what I call an attitude.
How do you get an attitude, or the right attitude? Like I said, part of it is encoded and part of it is imbibed. So go, work on it, if you lack it. Let me illustrate.
The CIOs role has changed dramatically over the past decade or so. No longer is he the technologist who looks after the companys IT infrastructure.
The CIO is now more of a confidante of the CEO, who keeps finding new ways to increase the top-line while working to reduce the expenses. The CIO today is a business leader, who is often a face of the organisation dealing with customers, vendors and employees.
Thus IT managers must not only have sound technology knowledge, they should have good people management skills. They also need to measure actions in terms of financial considerations and scales like RoI and TCO.
So, how will you know that you are ready?
Actually, its not very difficult. Keep weighing yourself on the ASK scaleattitude, skill and knowledge. While knowledge and skill can be gained over a period of time, one needs to consciously work to acquire the right attitude.
Just like a good mentor can help you pick up skills fast, a mentor can give you tips to develop the right attitude too. And most often, an indulgent boss is a good mentor too. So if you have such a boss, maybe you have already got what you need.
Once you have imbued the right attitude too, it is often a matter of time that you step into the CIOs shoes. Remember that to be a CIO, you have to think like one.
The author, GMIT at Bank of India, has over three decades of experience and prefers to be known more as a banker than a technologist
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