Before IT leaders can play a strong strategic role in a business, they must have in place a strong team of managers who can make decisions without a lot of guidance from above. Without a team that can handle the nuts and bolts of IT on their own, CIOs remain stuck spending too much time on day-to-day IT execution, writes Larry Tieman, former vice president at FedEx.  

Senior IT executives tend to spend too little time and energy developing management talent within their teams, Tieman writes in a post at InformationWeek. While the annual performance review and goal-setting exercise may be important, they aren't particularly helpful in developing leadership skills. Instead, every interaction with a potential up-and-coming leader should be used to develop the talent. "Particularly when it comes to high-potential individuals, developing IT leaders is a continuous process of mostly small exchanges," Tieman writes.

Tieman presents five core competencies that need to be developed in senior IT leaders--People, Project, Financial, Executive and Contract Management--and offers scenarios for cultivating each one. To cultivate greater people management skills among a promising employee, Tieman sometimes transfers him or her to a different unit and observing how the change is managed under new supervision.

Successful financial management requires knowing how to build a relationship with the finance department and knowing how to cooperate in developing business cases, he writes. 

"I learned the perils of a poorly thought out business case when I was a new director, tagging along to a meeting with the legendary tough boss at American Airlines, Robert Crandall. I don't remember what the business case was for, but the bottom line was that if Crandall approved this purchase, it would save 50 IT heads. With great flourish he pulled out his pen, and just as he prepared to sign the purchase order, he said: 'Bring me their ID cards,'" Tieman writes. "Of course, the business case was based on cost avoidance, and there was a lot of yelling before everyone left with the unsigned purchase order. I have never tried to build a business case based on head count avoidance."

For more:
- see Larry Tieman's post at InformationWeek

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