CIO intangibles: 6 abilities that set effective IT execs apart

What got you here won’t get you there. That advice from executive coach and bestselling author Marshall Goldsmith has never been truer for CIOs than it is today. The technical skills, IT leadership expertise, and ability to keep the network secure and running, and even to deliver innovation aren’t enough to create success for today’s CIOs.

“When we think about where CIOs need to go, we say to them: ‘You need to be an executive first and a functional leader second,’” says Christie Struckman, research vice president at Gartner.

How exactly does a CIO become more of an executive than a functional leader? In part, by strengthening abilities that seem almost intangible because they have nothing to do with specific hard or even soft skills. These aren’t abilities that can be learned in a weekend workshop. Some require that most elusive of qualities, emotional intelligence.

What are the intangible skills CIOs need most? Here are some of the most crucial.

Intangible 1: Conflict management

“I don’t know anybody who just jumps into conflict management with two feet,” Struckman says. “But you know what? If an organization is designed and run well, there will be lots of conflict. You want to have a diversity of opinion and different ways of thinking about how to do things, but you need to have a way to resolve them.”

CIOs, with their view of different departments’ priorities and initiatives are often in the best position to do that, she adds, which is why they need to be skilled at constructive confrontation.

That need came to life recently for Ian Pitt, CIO of Progress Software, when he spent two hours in a team meeting that he says was all about conflict mitigation.

“I find myself having to interject and become quite the hostage negotiator, playing a key role to make sure all the parties are coming together,” he explains. “Engineers want to go build stuff. Salespeople want to go sell it. Marketing people want to craft a good story. The lawyers want to make sure that we’re doing things that are accurate for the company.” Inevitably, he adds, IT will have to manage those solutions or deploy them, while making sure to keep the network secure.

“Sometimes it’s just a case of being a verbal diplomat and finding a path through all of these different requirements to ultimately deliver something that delights customers, keeps the company out of trouble, and keeps the stock price rising,” he says. “So even something that seems as straightforward as conflict management has so many different facets within the CIO world; it’s sometimes hard to keep up.” On the other hand, he says, “It does mean that no day is particularly boring.”

Intangible 2: Change leadership

“Most people are familiar with change management,” Struckman says. “If your organization was trying to get you to use a different technology to do some part of your job, change management is making sure you know about it, have the efficacy to be able to do it, and that you actually make the transition. It’s getting you through the steps in a kind and supportive way.” Most large organizations have a change management team to help users through this process, she adds.

Change leadership is different, and it’s very much a CIO-level skill, she says. “Change leadership is inspiring and motivating you to want to make the change. It’s much more about communication. It’s about navigating the different parts of the organization. It’s co-leading.”

It’s one thing, she says, for an IT leader or a change management team to tell users, “This is what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.” It’s at a whole other level to have a business leader say, “Hey team, we’re next. This is what we’re doing. This is why it’s important and here are my expectations of you.” That’s what effective change leadership can accomplish.

Kelly Held, CIO at channel marketing software company Extu, uses a different term: problem avoidance. “I think I described myself as a problem solver for the longest time in my career,” he says. “And then, as I came into management, it became more about problem avoidance. You have the ability to kind of see where you’re going and see what the problems are and how to avoid them. The problems that you never have to solve are much easier to deal with.”

Case in point: For more than 25 years, Extu was known as Incentive Solutions. It acquired OneAffinitti in 2021, and the combined company rebranded to its present name in 2023. “There was a lot of risk and a lot of moving parts,” he recalls. “You had to figure out, what are the bad things that can happen when we wake up with a new brand? And how are we going to not have those things happen?”

Held got together with some other C-suite executives and brainstormed the potential problems. They wrote down everything they could think of, with possible solutions. Going through that process made a big difference. “The problems that happened were the problems that we expected,” he says. “We knew it was going to be a little bumpy, but it was less bumpy than we expected.”

Intangible 3: Critical thinking

Critical thinking was always an important skill, but it’s doubly so in today’s world, says Teresa Ramos, executive coach and fellow at the Institute of Coaching at Harvard affiliate McLean Hospital. “It was always a good skill to have,” she says. “But now you ask ChatGPT or Copilot any question, and they will give you an answer that looks very logical, very reasonable. And you need to exercise critical thinking to know whether the answer is good, relevant, and truthful, or not.”

For critical thinking, CIOs need another intangible skill: the ability to ask the right questions.

“It’s the whole idea of being more curious,” says Mike Shaklik, partner and global head of CIO advisory at Infosys Consulting. “The folks who can listen well, and synthesize while they listen, ask better questions. They learn to expect better answers from their own people. If you add intentionality to it, that’s a game-changer.”

Shaklik was once working with a large cruise line where the CIO learned by asking the right questions that the first 48 hours passengers are on a cruise ship are typically the time they spend the least. To build revenue during that time, the cruise line used technology to first streamline the lengthy boarding process, and then offer targeted incentives such as an extra spa treatment for passengers who visited the spa on the first days of the cruise. It all began, he says, with asking the right questions.

Intangible 4: Strategic thinking

“Most organizations believe strategic thinking happens one time a year in the fall, at a retreat,” Struckman says. “Strategic thinking can happen all through the organization, throughout the year, and based on different conversations.” That means CIOs and other IT leaders have countless opportunities to support their organizations through strategic thinking.

“An example might be, instead of just at the retreat in the fall, you reach out to your finance department on a regular basis,” she says. “You might find they are trying to respond to new legislation that requires them to report things a different way. They’re not just figuring out mechanically how to do that. They also have to think about how this will impact the bottom line. How will it influence where we might make investments or disinvestments? Does it impact our mergers and acquisitions strategy? This one thing becomes an opportunity to help them through that strategic thinking, and ideally in some way, technology can support them.”

Intangible 5: Influence

“In today’s environment, a lot of technology work does not happen inside of the IT organization,” Struckman says. “Yet leadership expects the CIO to understand how it all makes sense together.”

Because CIOs often lack authority over technology outside of IT, they need to build relationships and exert influence instead. “Trust is this elusive yet incredibly powerful element of a relationship that can really open doors,” she says.

“I think the generation of very successful CIOs that we see today are the first generation that was purpose-built to be a modern CIO,” Shaklik says.

Years ago, he recalls, the CIO would simply be the smartest technologist in the organization. Then there was a time when companies tapped business leaders as CIOs even though they had little technical knowledge. Today’s best CIOs have spent time training for the role, he says. “They’ve done rotations in business, they’ve done rotations in IT. And probably, the biggest skill you see differently now is that they’re incredibly charming and curious.”

Both charm and curiosity are very valuable intangibles, he adds. “What gets these folks a seat at the table now is their ability to have a relationship with the business that is based on the needs of the business,” he says. It takes time and energy and access to build those relationships. “It requires them to be curious, and to take what they’ve learned and then go be charming. So those business leaders will want to meet with them again.”

Intangible 6: Personal branding

Smart CIOs pay close attention to IT’s reputation within the organization. “It doesn’t have to be absolute, blatant selling yourself every single moment,” Pitt says. “It’s focusing on the bits that are important to the audience at the time. Why should you trust this person as a CIO?”

Not enough CIOs work at this, he says.

“There are so many IT teams that have grown up old school. They’re happy to sit in a corner and fix things. If things break, they know they’re going to get shouted at, but they don’t try and do any course correct,” he says, adding they could make their own lives easier if they used an approach marketers call “rolling thunder”: “Constantly deliver snippets of good news. ‘You may not have realized that we changed the telephony system.’ ‘We rolled out new security.’ ‘We helped these product teams get stuff to market.’”

A strategy like this is the only way to get IT’s accomplishments “into people’s psyches,” he says. “So when you do need all that political capital because something horrible has gone wrong, people actually understand all the good stuff that the team has been doing.”

And it’s just as important to build a reputation outside the organization, he says. “People who never network, never talk to their peers, never go to conferences, and never go out for dinner with a bunch of their CIO colleagues — that cohort is probably never going to get above the IT manager viewpoint.”

CIOs should also build their external brand by doing things like appearing on panels or taking part in discussions with other IT leaders, he says. Some may enjoy that kind of thing while others seek to avoid it, he acknowledges. “But it’s certainly beneficial to get your name out there, and you never know when you might need it.”