Back in 2009 George Westerman and Richard Hunter introduced the idea of the CIO Plus in their book The Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value.
Westerman says what he and Hunter noticed at the time was that the CIO role was expanding in both its responsibilities and its ability to make an impact.
Now, 15 years later, Westerman says the CIO role continues to expand. It’s still in charge of infrastructure, and it often owns transformation. It should have strategy, too. It should become more visionary, too, looking around corners to learn about emerging technology and figuring out how their organizations will be impacted by it.
More than ever, the C-suite is counting on the CIO to deliver. Indeed, 94% of CIOs are now expected to regularly report to the board on technology investments and their ROIs, according to the 2025 Global CIO Report from IT services and solutions provider Logicalis. Some 85% of surveyed CIOs also said they face growing pressure for technology to demonstrate tangible business impact within their organizations.
To deliver on such expectations and ensure career longevity, CIOs and executive advisers cite these five strategies for future-proofing IT leaders’ careers.
1. Lead strategy, don’t just contribute
The need for CIOs to be strategic advisers to their C-suite colleagues is not new.
“There has been a steady progression for years for CIOs to become more strategic leaders,” says Westerman, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, founder of the Global Opportunity Forum, and co-chair of the MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award.
But as the world heads into a future where artificial intelligence will reshape nearly every job and process, many will expect the CIO to lead strategy, not merely contribute.
Westerman acknowledges that many CIOs are already doing that, but he also says many are not.
“There are a lot of IT leaders who don’t get it yet, and they now have to become the strategy leader they should have been all along,” he says, adding that this dynamic persists because most IT talent still rises to top IT positions because of their technical skills and not their management and leadership capabilities.
For CIOs who aren’t yet engaged in strategy, Westerman and others say the key is to understand in depth the organization’s goals and how technology can help them.
The next step — and the one to take for CIOs already contributing to strategy — is to identify where and how technology provides measurable value and revenue to the organization and lead those initiatives.
“As a CIO you still have to keep things running, secure, help drive transformation, but you’ve also got to help people be aware of what’s possible with technology,” Westerman says. “Help them understand how IT helps the business. Focus on how you communicate the value of technology.”
Troy Rydman, CIO and CISO of Packsize, has been attentive to this dynamic, saying he focuses on understanding business processes, as well as how and where technology can “grow the company more quickly.”
“It’s about having a strategy for growth, understanding the market, where your competitors are at, and what technology they’re using. As a CIO that falls upon me,” he adds.
2. Embrace the technologist persona
In recent years some questioned whether IT chiefs really needed a technology background, but experts now say it’s clear that modern CIOs do indeed need to be well versed in technology. The role, they say, needs the triad: deep technology skills, business acumen, and strategic vision.
“The CIO needs a vision of what IT needs to be and the ability to execute,” says Keri Pearlson, senior lecturer and principal research scientist at MIT Sloan School as well as founding president of the Austin Society for Information Management (SIM).
Matt Richard, CIO of Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA), says the AI revolution demonstrates just how valuable the CIO’s technical capabilities are, as it has been up to CIOs to dig into AI’s potential, limits, and risks then devise the strategies for their organizations on how to use it most effectively.
“We’re figuring out how AI will change how we live and work, but AI is just the latest revolution in technology. There was the internet, then the move to cloud, now AI. There will always be new tools, and we [CIOs] need to know how these things work, so we can inform others on how to use the tools,” Richard says.
To do that, Richard commits to learning about emerging technologies and “what they can do, how they’ll impact jobs, how they’re going to change how teams do work, how to implement them, how to find partners, how to manage expectations, and how to make sure we have security and guardrails.”
He takes sales calls from vendors and schedules demos, admitting he does so specifically to learn, not to buy.
And he still plays around with tech, breaking it and putting it back together, so to speak, to test its limits — a pastime many CIOs share.
“That’s important to do now and in the future. CIOs should be getting into the sandbox and trying to build things as the technology comes out,” Richard adds, noting that many did as much when generative AI appeared on the scene with the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT.
Beth Clark, CIO at Harvard Business School, also embraces this part of CIO work.
“I think really deep understanding of AI, machine learning, and generative AI are so critical. I need an understanding of the benefits, the dangers, how they sit in our environment,” she says. “I’m doing deep dives into technologies, and it’s fascinating to me. The space is always evolving, and I’m always learning.”
3. Drive change with agility, speed, and empathy
Many CIOs have embraced the change agent aspects of their jobs. That, though, is not enough in an age where new technologies evolve at an ever-increasing pace, where change is constant, the impacts of that are significant, and fears of job loss and displacement are high.
“It can be an exciting time or a fearful time, but the CIOs who future-proof their careers are working on how they communicate around that, and how they show up and lead,” says executive coach Lacey Leone McLaughlin, president and founder of LLM Consulting Group and host of the podcast “Unfolding Leadership.”
To be effective leaders now and tomorrow, Leone McLaughlin explains that CIOs must “communicate it in a way that excites versus elicits fear. They need to say, ‘We’ve gone through changes before; it just has to happen more often and faster, and [this new technology] will help us get smarter, help us do jobs better, help you spend time on tasks that really matter.’”
IT leaders must embody that mindset, too, she says. They need to have — or develop — agility. They must also embrace new technologies, adjust as technologies and markets change, and pivot without fear.
“They need to adapt and adjust to the changes coming, which are coming faster,” she adds. “A larger amount of adaptability is required today, and CIOs should be asking, ‘Am I adaptable enough?’”
Harvard Business School’s Clark sees technology reshaping jobs throughout the organization and believes CIOs will help shape the workforce of the future as a result.
“It’s change or die — at a really rapid pace,” she says.
Clark draws on the skills she gained as a social worker early in her career to lead through change now.
“I never stopped using those skills, those human behavior skills, and I need them for the future,” she says.
“Change is hard, and it’s harder now because we’re changing at warp speed, so I find those are skills I use every day,” Clark adds, explaining that such skills help her “ease people’s anxieties about things that are new, very fast, and threatening in many ways.”
4. Use curiosity and constant learning to shape your vision of what’s ahead
Quantum computing is on the horizon, and there’s the possibility that artificial general intelligence will become reality in the future. As such, CIOs say it’s critical that they don’t become complacent or wedded to the technologies they embrace today, because they will all be obsolete someday.
“CIOs can’t afford to be stuck in what worked in the past,” Leone McLaughlin says. “So CIOs have to be curious, ask the right questions, listen, learn, and hire people smarter than they are.”
Savio Lobo, CIO of IT services provider Ensono, agrees.
Although he has leveraged the transformative power of AI, he knows the arrival of other disruptive technologies is inevitable. “Today it’s AI; tomorrow it’s something else,” he says.
He’s focusing on learning what that “something else” will be by leaning into briefings, partner engagements, and public forums where people are speculating about what’s next.
“You have to continue to learn; you have to keep up to date,” he says, contending that the CIO is best positioned to create a vision of tomorrow for the executive team. “The CIO should be visionary.”
He expects his direct reports and others on his IT team to do the same, and he works to cultivate a “really good culture of learners” through formal training and development programs with names such as Summit 2025, Aspire, Ignite, and Ascend.
5. Improve your leadership abilities
The amount of change is impacting all jobs, including those in IT — up to and including the CIO role, Pearlson says. So CIOs need to be on top of emerging technology and all the implications that go with them. Otherwise, she says, they could be blindsided and see transformative work move from their office to another. That already happens, she notes, as evidenced by the creation of the chief digital officer, chief transformation officer, and chief AI officer positions.
CIOs who want to work on the opportunities that, for example, quantum computing will present — and not lose that work to a new chief quantum officer — need to demonstrate exemplary leadership capabilities now.
“We are at another inflection point for the skill set and role of a CIO today,” Pearlson adds.
Westerman says many CIOs have work to do here, as they to date have advanced their careers due to their tech talent and not for their management and executive skills. As a result, CIOs often have more work to do to sharpen those skills than others in the C-suite.
CIOs have plenty of opportunities to improve — they just have to be intentional, Westerman says, noting that tried-and-true leadership development strategies continue to work.
Develop relationships, deliver on promised expectations, seek feedback on how to do better, and then find ways to improve. “CIOs should be asking themselves, ‘Am I getting enough feedback? Am I effective in my environment?’” he adds.
Clark sees improving her leadership talents as an ongoing task that takes commitment.
“I’m always looking at my own leadership skills. I make sure I get feedback, so I know I’m effective in what I’m trying to achieve. I’m evaluating if I’m an effective peer for my peers. I’m asking, ‘Am I an effective leader? Am I an effective communicator? Am I getting my message out clearly? I’m doing 360s and really taking in the results, because you can’t become a more effective leader if you don’t know what you need to work on,” Clark says. “It’s a journey, and you do it for the rest of your life.”
Read More from This Article: 5 tips for future-proofing your IT leadership career
Source: News