AG: So you need to be backed up and supported by your CEO?
SH: You need to be backed up and supported. But if the CIO has not either had time or has not developed relationships with the other executives, that’s not going to happen. And again, it’s talking about that relationship, promoting people to the level of incompetence, taking that network administrator who likes to sit behind the desk and putting them in a leadership role like that, you're never going to have confidence from the executive team unless the CIO really is doing that.
AG: You talked about two things. You talked challenging people because you need to get them out of their comfort zone. But you also mentioned the fact that you don’t want to have people doing things they're not good at. For example, pulling someone out from behind a computer who is just going to embarrass the IT team by his or her lack of communication skills. Where do you draw the line? How do you do both?
SH: Again, this is where that leadership piece comes in. I have a person on my staff who absolutely is scared to death to speak in front of a group of people. And I will take him with me to meetings, and we’ll basically script it. I will go to the meeting with him, and I will sit right there, and he knows that at any time he can give me a signal and I will bail him out. But I’m not going to bail him out within the first 30 seconds of a meeting. He is going to need to get himself into a bit of a bind, and I’m going to give him a bit of an opportunity to try to get out of it, and then I’ll bail him out. We’ll get past the difficult part, and then I will try to turn that conversation back over to him. Sometimes it’s embarrassing. Sometimes it’s embarrassing when things don’t necessarily go exactly like you would want them to go. But it also depends on the audience. I have a few physicians that sit in on some of these meetings, and I’ll go to them first and say, ‘Okay, here’s the deal. I’m going to have this tech at the meeting, and I’m going to try to get him to run it. I know that you're a hard ass when it comes to asking questions. I’m going to ask you to hold off.’ They're usually pretty cool about it. AG: Could you get to a point where you admit that it’s just not going to work with some individuals, that they’re just not great communicators? SH: Yes. I would probably do that, but only to a certain extent. I’m never going to give somebody carte blanche to say, ‘I don’t do meetings.’ There may be situations where this particular tech doesn’t do well in a meeting of 15 people, but he does fine in a meeting of three. Maybe he doesn’t do well if there is an executive at the table, but he does okay if it’s a table of supervisors. There is going to be something that he is successful at. So I would continue to cultivate that. AG: I would imagine that a lot of CIOs feel they don’t have time to do what you're talking about. Do you think it’s true that many CIOs feel they’re just too busy to focus on staff development?SH: I think that’s true. I also think that there is a lot of micromanagement that goes on, not just in the CIO world, but in all of management. Like I said, a lot of the concepts of leadership have been lost in the last few years as we focused on other management philosophies. One of the very basic things that they teach in any of the military leadership schools — and I think that this is a hugely important thing for people to really understand — is that you cannot delegate responsibility. You only can delegate authority, because how can you expect somebody to truly be responsible for the outcome of anything if you have not given them the authority to determine the outcome.
Why I say there is a lot of micromanagement is CIOs are filling their days — and leaders across the board are filling their days — with micromanaging decisions that others are perfectly capable of making. It’s just that the CIOs either don’t want to relinquish that, or they're not comfortable with it. I have told my staff over and over, I would much rather they make a poor decision than no decision. It’s really important to me to have weekly update meetings as to what is going on with various projects, what is going on in this team, what is going on in that team. I don’t need to know what the underlying thought process was, but I do need to bring my team together and say, ‘Okay, Sue, you're working on the last implementation. Where are you on your project plan? What decisions were made this week? We decided to do X, Y and Z. We decided not to do A and B.” If I need more detail, I can ask for it, but the decision, as long as I have faith that the decision was made with some forethought, I don’t need to be involved in that. You're holding up your projects. You're making things take longer than they really need to take, and you're adding more work to you and your staff that really doesn’t need to done.
AG: And any CIO that’s micromanaging is probably not doing the job they should be doing.
SH: They're probably doing the job they should be doing, but they're probably doing it with a lot more stress than they really need to be having.
AG: Or a lot more hours in the office.
SH: Yes, exactly. I’m a 60-hour-week type guy, but that’s just the way that I am. I enjoy getting to take a helpdesk call every now and then and actually fix something for once, rather than just think about how to fix something.
