Transformational CIOs recognize the importance of IT culture in delivering innovation, accelerating business impacts, and reducing operational and security risks. Without a strong IT culture, inspiring IT teams to extend beyond their “run the business” responsibilities into areas requiring collaboration between business colleagues, data scientists, and partners is challenging.
Research on creating a culture of high-performance teams suggests there’s a disconnect between how leaders perceive their cultures compared to how individual contributors view them. In the study by Dale Carnegie, 73% of leaders felt their culture was very good or better concerning others being accountable, compared to 48% of team members. Additionally, 84% of leaders believed their organizations had strong teamwork compared to 60% of team members.
Cultivating high-performance teams, recruiting leaders, retaining talent, and continuously improving digital KPIs are hallmarks of strong IT cultures — but their metrics lag the CIO’s culture-improving programs. Worse, issues that undermine IT culture may not appear in these KPIs or employee satisfaction surveys for months.
In my experience, CIOs often have the right intentions but sometimes make inadvertent mistakes that can kill their IT cultures. In a recent article on five IT risks CIOs should be paranoid about, I highlighted several IT team culture issues, including team burnout, mounting technical debt, and continuous crisis management cycles. Below are 10 other ways to IT leaders damage their IT culture — and how to avoid it.
Resorting to micromanagement or command-and-control
“Micromanagement is one of the fastest ways to destroy IT culture,” says Jay Ferro, EVP and chief information, technology, and product officer at Clario. “When CIOs don’t trust their teams to make decisions or constantly hover over every detail, it stifles creativity and innovation. High-performing professionals crave autonomy; if they feel suffocated by micromanagement, they’ll either disengage or leave for an environment where they’re empowered to do their best work.”
While experienced CIOs avoid command-and-control behaviors, it can be hard to avoid micromanagement when under pressure to deliver innovations and hit deadlines. Instead of succumbing to the pressure, CIOs should consider collaborative approaches:
- Empower and inspire agile teams by avoiding rigid delivery roadmaps, highlighting what performance improvement areas are worth focusing on, and giving teams time to reset after major releases.
- Measure the impact of software developers by how teams meet release commitments, promote design peer reviews, and demonstrate the impacts of experimentation.
- Facilitate developing self-organizing standards where team leaders, enterprise architects, and product managers promote best practices and establish design principles.
Asking for IT’s opinions and ignoring their feedback
Even when the CIO isn’t micromanaging, IT employees can easily sense when leaders aren’t listening to their feedback and suggestions.
“One of my golden rules is, ‘Your opinion matters,’ but if you want to demotivate and demoralize your team, just ask for input and then consistently ignore it,” says Joe Puglisi, growth strategist and fractional CIO at 10Xnewco. “Before long, you will have a silent and frustrated group of employees.”
CIOs can avoid this culture-killing behavior by responding to opinions and feedback, even if it’s not immediate. Top leaders repeat what they heard and capture feedback in a management tool. This gives leaders time to review options, illustrate when feedback generates changes, and demonstrate that leaders care about people’s opinions.
Crushing hybrid work and work-life balance
One area where CIOs should elicit IT employee feedback is around hybrid work, remote work, and any related policy changes. Conflicts between employees’ work-life balance goals and company policies or a leader’s expression of one-size-fits-all working principles can kill the IT culture.
These conflicts often impact the younger workforce, who consistently state that work-life balance is a key priority. For example, in the Deloitte Global 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, the top three reasons Gen Z’ers chose their organizations were good work-life balance, learning and development opportunities, and positive work culture.
“Leaders must focus on their employees because talent is a key differentiator that gives every organization a competitive edge,” says Anurag Dhingra, SVP and GM of Cisco Collaboration. “You can alienate a talent segment by not being thoughtful about hybrid work or return-to-work policies. People want the ability to come into the office when they want to interact and do creative work with the team, but then there’s also focused work time that they want.”
CIOs should partner with the CHRO and lead efforts to improve employee experiences, especially in organizations where the IT working environment needs to differ from those of other departments.
Lacking a pragmatic vision that inspires change
“All transformation is future state and requires articulating what outcomes you want to achieve as a digital business,” says Joanne Friedman, PhD and CEO of Connektedminds. “CIOs need to look at the big picture, guide their teams on reverse engineering it down to the details, and then communicate it back up as a pragmatic vision that inspires change.”
Friedman highlights a pragmatic vision for several reasons:
- Not having a defined mission and vision is a culture killer, as the IT team doesn’t see how their efforts influence organizational outcomes.
- Communicating a vague vision can leave too much guesswork on the team’s organizational goals and creates inefficiencies when teams must interpret organizational priorities.
- Specifying a detailed vision may box teams into suboptimal implementations and leave teams with little freedom to innovate.
Top CIOs rebrand IT as part of a transformational vision that inspires the IT team, employees, stakeholders, and executives to experiment and drive change. These CIOs also avoid digital transformation’s change management mistakes by guiding IT teams to drive end-user adoption, capture feedback, and iteratively improve solutions.
Overcommitting and leaving teams defenseless
One of the most challenging issues facing transformational CIOs is the overwhelming demand to take on more initiatives, deliver to greater scope, or accept challenging deadlines. Overcommitting to what IT can reasonably accomplish is an issue, but what kills IT culture is when the CIO leaves program leaders defenseless when stakeholders are frustrated or when executive detractors roadblock progress.
“It demoralizes IT when there is a lack of direction, no IT strategy, and the CIO says yes to everything the business asks for regardless of whether the IT team has the capacity,” says Martin Davis, managing partner at Dunelm Associates. “But it totally kills IT culture when the CIO doesn’t shield teams from angry or disappointed business senior management and stakeholders.”
Top digital transformation-leading CIOs force prioritization by driving consensus around the most strategic priorities and communicating their capacity to take on additional initiatives. Every transformation initiative requires digital leadership, and top CIOs recognize that increasing capacity for driving success in more initiatives of greater scope requires growing their bench of digital trailblazers.
CIOs should never leave their transformation leaders and teams on their own to respond to angry stakeholders or disappointed executives. Top CIOs step into the fire to facilitate a retrospective discussion on what changes are needed, then step back to see how to help transformation leaders develop meaningful relationships with business stakeholders.
Promoting agile culture without stakeholder adoption
Retrospectives are an agile ceremony used at the end of a sprint for teams to discuss their performance and opportunities for continuous improvement. When there are disappointed or angry stakeholders, there’s often a disconnect between the stakeholder’s role in agile, the responsibilities of product management, and the agile team’s perceived performance.
While many CIOs have adopted agile methodologies in their technology delivery teams, there can be significant gaps with stakeholders seeking traditional project management promises of “on time, scope, budget, and quality.” In the 17th State of Agile Report, almost half of the survey takers (47%) pointed to a “generalized” resistance to organizational change or “culture clash” as the reason why the business side isn’t adopting agile.
Driving IT’s agile adoption without stakeholder education is a culture killer because the change management responsibility trickles down to teams. Asking agile teams to align stakeholders on agile practices reduces their productivity, especially if they aren’t skilled in addressing organizational change management issues. CIOs should take steps to educate stakeholders on the why and how behind agile practices and other digital transformation competencies.
Failing to communicate pivots and strategic changes
A CIO’s communication issues can become cultural barriers for IT teams.
When executives pivot strategic priorities or announce a major organizational realignment, CIOs must have a forum and rapport with the staff to communicate the changes. IT teams working hard and fast toward their original goals likely have questions about what brought the change and why the organization is resetting priorities.
“CIOs can inadvertently damage IT culture by failing to communicate the ‘why’ behind decisions,” says Ferro of Clario. “When changes are made without transparency or input from the team, it breeds uncertainty and resentment. A culture built on trust and collaboration requires CIOs to foster open dialogue and empower teams to understand and align with the company’s broader vision.”
Top CIOs develop communication strategies and schedule regular dialogs with their teams. They should be active listeners so their teams can share feedback and ideas. However, when there’s an update on the company’s strategic direction, they have a forum for communicating the news and answering questions.
Amplifying technical jargon undermines credibility
CIOs who can’t win over the executive committee and the board to make investments in security improvements, infrastructure upgrades, or technical debt reductions will demoralize IT employees who live through the daily issues in these areas. CIOs must also lead by example by mentoring transformational leaders on preparing for big investment presentations and avoiding technical jargon that confuses executives and fails to educate decision-makers on the business imperatives.
“A common mistake CIOs make is using too much technical language when communicating with the board and other executives,” says Eric Johnson, CIO at PagerDuty. “CIOs must become ‘multilingual’ communicators, translating tech concepts into business outcomes, and avoid isolating the IT and tech team’s important work from the rest of the organization.”
CIOs can make critical mistakes at board meetings, such as providing convoluted answers to board members’ questions or resorting to scare tactics when selling security investments. Poor communication damages their credibility, which can have ripple effects on IT culture.
“This communication gap not only stifles innovation but can lead to misalignment between IT initiatives and broader business goals, undermining the IT culture and missing the opportunity to position technology as a true driver of business transformation,” adds Johnson.
Accepting team and individual underperformance
Davis of Dunelm Associates shared a key culture killer. “Failing to deal with a key team member who is very disruptive,” he says.
Other CIOs shared similar concerns because the disruption and underperformance impact the team, and the CIO damages trust by acting indecisively.
“One of the most damaging ways to kill your IT culture is by holding on to underperformers for too long,” adds Ferro of Clario. “When high performers see that low standards are tolerated, it undermines their motivation and leads to resentment. CIOs need to act decisively, providing the necessary support for improvement but also knowing when it’s time to move on to protect the overall team dynamic.”
Recommendations on handling underperformance include taking action quickly, clarifying what needs to change, defining a measurable improvement plan, and speaking with the full team on performance standards. CIOs should also consult their HR partners on the procedures for managing performance improvement plans.
Finger-pointing mistakes and taking all the credit
“You can easily crush team spirit by taking full credit for all the wins while publicly pointing the finger at the team members responsible for every mistake,” says Puglisi of10Xnewco.
The important lesson here is that CIOs must lead with a team-centered approach. It’s the team that responds to issues, handles end-user requests, improves the organization’s security posture, delivers innovations, and drives digital transformation. CIOs need a dedicated, driven, and continuously improving team behind them, and part of getting IT culture right is creating the enthusiasm to experiment, learn, and deliver results.
Read More from This Article: 10 ways to kill your IT culture
Source: News