Question: As a technical IT manager, do I really need to take classes on soft skills like active listening and interviewing?  I hate that stuff, aren’t I better off learning something new technically? Ok, I admit it. I was the biggest offender of the advice I am suggesting to you here. As an individual contributor, I never took soft skills classes. I loved training, but if I couldn’t pick up an additional technical tip or two I wasn’t interested. For many years, if I had the choice between Oracle Database Internals, Advanced Techniques in Function Overloading, or Active Listening, guess which two courses I took? Well, I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t Active Listening or other soft skills related classes. I’m really glad I took the hard skills classes, the technical information I learned helped me grow as a technical professional. In retrospect, however, I believe I was less effective in a number of soft skills related areas than I would have been if I understood that, even as a techie, these classes provided great value. That said, I should have also taken the soft skill classes for the following reasons: All techies are smart and good technically so it can be very hard to differentiate yourself from the pack. Quality soft skills can help you make that differentiation. Classes like Negotiation Skills can help you negotiate project scope, delivery dates, resources such as people and software tools, and other things that can make projects more successful, and dare I say, [...]

As an IT individual contributor or Technical Lead, the following three steps will help position you for a future IT Manager role. Begin to think of yourself as a manager. This may sound trite, but it’s true.  As the expression goes, fake it until you make it.  This simple act of thinking like a manager will slowly change your perspective, change your personal conception of yourself from techie to leader, and give yourself permission to take on non-technical tasks without feeling like your skills are not being properly utilized. Ask questions related to managerial tasks, such as “How does our budget work?” and “How do we get permission to hire new people?” These questions have the simultaneous benefits of learning about your future craft and of subtlety informing your manager and others that you are interested in moving into a management type role. Try to learn more about your IT organization in general, including how data moves through the company, how the major internal (and cloud based) systems connect, and other IT-wide processes. This may sound more technical than managerial, it’s actually both.  The reason I’m suggesting this to you is not because of its technical aspects, it’s because it will give you a wider view of what IT does and how it works.  This will be of great value to you when you step into the managerial ranks. When I was an individual contributor, I thought that becoming a manager meant giving up my hard earned technical skills to simply tell [...]

As an IT or Human Resources leader, adding the ITMLP into your IT Manager and IT Director job descriptions help you expand your management bench strength, enhance IT agility, and maximize the value of the approximately 80% of your staff that report to first-line and second-line IT managers and directors. The move from IT individual contributor to IT Manager is one of the most difficult professional transitions in an IT person’s career. The reason is that this transition requires the person to simultaneously grow in two ways at once. The first, and more obvious, is they must learn to lead a team, rather than complete a needed task. Assistance on this transition is generally provided via traditional “new manager” training classes, teaching topics such as delegation, time management, difficult conversations, writing performance reviews, and other related topics. The second competency that soon-to-be, new, and newer IT managers must learn is the “Business of IT”.  This includes a wide variety of topics that span the IT management profession including IT methodologies, internal client service, user experience, vendor management, user/stakeholder influence, cost center management, and other related areas. The ITMLP, designed to be complementary with traditional new manager training classes, teaches these “Business of IT” topics. This training is required because, as IT individual contributors, they are a “mile deep” in their chosen technical area, such as programming, data communications, or IT Help Desk, but they tend to only be an “inch wide” in regard to the other areas of IT.  When a person [...]

This post "How CIOs become IT thought leaders" was first published in my “Developing IT Leaders” column on CIO.com. IT leaders have a unique vantage point. They are the only business function that sees the entire organization at a process, data, and transaction level. This cross-functional and multi-dimensional view provides IT with the opportunity to identify cross-departmental process and technology synergies, use internal technologies designed for one part of the organization in other areas with similar operational needs, and assess newly released software and hardware products for applicability across the business. Because of their cross-functional view, CIOs are well positioned to be thought leaders in the organization, becoming leading internal voices for both discipline-based innovations (i.e., those impacting a single department or job type) and functional-based innovations (i.e., more general process and technology enhancements). This puts CIOs at the intersection of business and technology—what I like to call the Golden Triangle: Understanding IT megatrends Understanding industry-specific business issues Understanding the intersection of the two Understanding IT megatrends It has been a fascinating time to watch the continued and accelerated movement in software and hardware technologies that can be employed by IT for business purpose. This includes advances in machine learning, blockchain, cyber security, cloud computing, virtual/augmented reality, edge computing, facial recognition, chatbot technology, the list goes on and on. You may look at this list and think these innovations are not new, and in truth many of them have been around for years. But as time moves forward, they get more mature, [...]