By Tony Velleca, Joint CIO and Vice-President (Services and Solutions)
You're only as good as your team.
We've talked about the endless possibilities for CIOs, and how
disruptive innovation is the key to realizing those possibilities.
But at the core of everything is your team. Are you – and the
people working with you – able to support and advance your
efforts to be disruptive?
In my article The New Normal,
I talk about building a team of change leaders. If you're the
team leader – whether as CIO or in another role – it's up to you
to set the example. It's up to you to recognize and cultivate
the skills that are required in today's New Normal.
Set an example as the leader.
Teams need to see their leaders making tough,
risky, strategic decisions. Nothing will empower
someone to pursue their most disruptive ideas more
than seeing their boss do it first. If your idea
flies, great. If it crashes and burns, then your
employees get to see you walk away from the wreckage
intact. They see you learn, change course, move on.
Either way, your team learns that innovative ideas
will be pursued, and they don't have to be paralyzed
by fear of failure.
Assess technical skills according to the New Normal.
To thrive within the New Normal, you need a new set of
skills – for yourself and for your team members.
On the technical side, you need a team of people comfortable
abandoning the waterfall development process for the agile
iterative approach.
We are in an era characterized by speed, which in turn forces
constant change and a willingness to learn as we go. The
agile approach enables us to maintain a swift pace of progress
while retaining the flexibility to make adjustments as needed.
Assess "human" skills according to the New Normal.
Find a balance between technical and human capital.
Discover what people want as users of technology.
To do that, you need a team that understands
Human 1.0.
In their book, "The Hyper-Social Organization,"
Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran make a case for
shifting focus back to human nature. Read about
Human 1.0 here.
We can take cues from consumer-based technologies like Facebook, Google
and mobile phones. Their user experiences are dramatically better than
the apps we're running behind firewalls today.
Those consumer experiences are changing people's expectations of what
they should be able to do.
It's no longer good enough to know back-end technology. To move from
ordinary to extraordinary in the New Normal, we must have teams of people
who understand how humans want to live – and how technology can facilitate
those possibilities.
When you assess yourself or your team members, what do you most want
to improve? Share with me your thoughts. Let's start a conversation.
How can I better guide you through this endless possibility?
