The 3 ways technology leaders make a lasting impact

So you want to be a technology leader?

You excelled as an individual contributor, conquered every technical challenge thrown your way and advanced to the top of your career ladder. The next logical step seems obvious: management.

Be careful what you wish for.

Many of us, me included, have pursued leadership roles after early-career success. The motivations vary, but I tell every aspiring CxO the same thing: if you’re pursuing the role for its compensation, title or prestige, reconsider. Seriously.

The reality rarely resembles the aspiration. Before you’ve settled into your chair, you may be authorizing layoffs, defending budget overruns to a skeptical board or delivering news that ends careers. These aren’t extreme exceptions. They’re part of the job.

Most of us have faced the “what was I thinking?” moment. When it hits, the only anchor is purpose: not the pay, not the title, but the reason you wanted to lead in the first place.

That question inspired me to write The Impactful Technology Leader. I surveyed over 1,600 technology leaders across 60 countries and interviewed CIOs, CTOs and COOs who are known for building innovative teams and shaping our profession. The answer was simpler than I expected: great technology leadership boils down to a single word: impact.

Having an impact as a tech leader is what drives most, and it falls into three distinct but interconnected areas.

• Impacting the firm through technology innovation
• Impacting the team by creating a great workplace
• Impacting the profession by building the future talent pipeline

The CxOs I interviewed see these three impact areas as inseparable. Their primary goal is company impact, and they view technology innovation as one of the most powerful levers to get there. But they also know that sustainable innovation doesn’t happen without a highly engaged, resilient team behind it. And they understand that an engaged team that consistently drives innovation for their firm requires real talent and genuine diversity, which is why so many of them are invested in strengthening the profession’s pipeline.

Impacting the firm through technology innovation

To understand what some of the most innovative technology leaders actually do, I interviewed several whose organizations had earned Foundry’s CIO 100 award, a recognition for companies that create measurable business value through innovative solutions to their hardest problems. The more we spoke, the more apparent it became that these leaders were practicing many of the same principles I had learned from “The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators” by Jeffrey H. Dyer, Hal B. Gregersen and Clayton M. Christensen (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019).

Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen argue that the most disruptive innovators have five habits in common: they question assumptions others accept, observe the world with unusual attention, network across disciplines and industries, experiment relentlessly and, as a result of all four, associate. They connect dots that most people never see as connected.

What struck me was how naturally these tech leaders embodied all five, not as a framework they’d adopted, but as a way of thinking they’d developed, often long before they’d heard of the book. I wanted to know if this held more broadly. So I surveyed more than 700 technology leaders across 47 countries to see which of these skills they actively fostered in their organizations. Among them: a subset of leaders whose organizations had earned the CIO 100 a combined 75 times.

The results were clear. The award-winning tech leaders consistently fostered most, if not all, of the discovery skills and far exceeded their peers’ responses, especially for experimenting and associating.

What those numbers can’t show is what these skills actually look like in practice, but a single afternoon in a home improvement store can. As a leader of teams that received the CIO 100 award several times, I’ve seen all of these skills in action. One example from my personal experience involves the discovery skill of observing. A colleague of mine spent time watching shoppers at a home improvement center. He noticed a woman carrying a bathroom rug through the store, holding it up against paint chip after paint chip until she found a color that matched. It was a small moment, but it revealed a much larger problem: Customers weren’t buying paint in isolation; they were trying to complete a decorating project, and color coordination across different product categories was genuinely hard.

That single observation sparked an idea that became a patented system allowing shoppers to scan any home décor item at an in-store kiosk and instantly see coordinating paint colors and complementary products, a solution that would benefit the retailer, the paint manufacturer and the customer all at once. What began with one woman and a rug ended with a reimagined shopping experience. That’s the power of truly watching the world around you.

Impacting the team by creating a great workplace

What separates a good workplace from an exceptional one? To find out, I surveyed more than 800 leaders across 53 countries. But rather than asking leaders what they thought made their cultures great, I gave them a framework to work with.

That framework was Frederick Herzberg’s two-factor theory of motivation. The central insight of Herzberg’s theory is deceptively simple: the things that make people unhappy at work are not the opposite of the things that make them thrive. They are an entirely different category. Herzberg called the first group hygiene factors, which included compensation, working conditions, company policies, the quality of your supervisor and your relationships with colleagues. Get these right and no one notices. Get them wrong, and nothing else matters. The second group he called motivators: meaningful work, recognition, employee development, career growth and increased responsibility. These are what actually drive engagement and performance, but only once the hygiene factors are handled.

When asked which factors they fostered to create a great workplace, recognition topped the list, followed closely by meaningful work, employee development and compensation. Among the respondents was a notable subset: tech leaders whose organizations had been named to Computerworld’s “Best Places to Work in IT” a combined 103 times. Their priorities told a different story. Compensation ranked first for this group, rated 14 percentage points higher than their counterparts, suggesting that the best workplace leaders understand something others underestimate: hygiene factors aren’t optional.

Also striking was the gap in how Best Places leaders rated supervisor quality and recognition, and the direction of that gap. Supervisor quality ranked third among this group, behind compensation and employee development, and came in 12 percentage points above their peers. Recognition ranked fifth, 16 percentage points below theirs. That inversion is the point. Best Places leaders don’t treat recognition as the goal. They treat it as a result of strong supervisors who help people grow and succeed at work that matters. Get that right, and recognition takes care of itself.

This principle is vividly demonstrated by the story of a CIO who took on the role of leading the IT team at a bank with no prior banking experience, joining just as the institution began its growth journey. She inherited a team that believed it was performing well but didn’t know what good performance looked like. Her first action wasn’t a technology initiative; it was a people-focused one. She removed underperforming supervisors, replaced siloed thinking with shared accountability and linked the team’s daily work to real customer impact. She empowered team members to lead without waiting for permission. When COVID arrived in 2020, it was her team, not executive leadership, that insisted on stress-testing the bank’s remote infrastructure before anyone else saw the need. They were right, and the bank transitioned seamlessly. What started as a fragmented, underperforming department ended as a Computerworld “Best Places to Work in IT” honoree. Her philosophy remained constant: if you focus on the people, the technology will follow.

Impacting the profession by building the future talent pipeline

For the third impact area, Impacting the Profession, I wanted to understand how technology leaders see their own role in building the talent pipeline. I asked more than 660 tech executives across 48 countries: Who should technology leaders focus on to build a deeper, more diverse talent pool for the future of computing? Three-quarters pointed to K-12 and college students, a clear signal that these leaders believe the pipeline problem starts early and needs to be addressed there. Another 60 percent identified experienced professionals, in both computing and non-computing roles, as a priority. And roughly 20 percent flagged groups that rarely make it into this conversation at all: mothers returning to the workforce, military personnel transitioning to civilian careers and others who bring real capability but are too often overlooked. Finally, only 1% of the respondents indicated that this should not be a focus for technology leaders.

Taken together, nearly 80 percent of the tech leaders surveyed chose more than one group, averaging more than two responses each. The message is hard to miss: there is no single solution to this challenge. There are several.

One example comes from a former global CIO who attended a university parents’ night, scanned a crowd of hundreds of incoming computer science students, and could count the women on two hands. She had spent decades as one of the few women in CIO meetings and corporate boardrooms. Still, something about seeing the next generation facing the same imbalance made ignoring the issue impossible.

She co-founded a non-profit focused on women and underrepresented minority students pursuing STEM degrees, most of them first-generation college students with no professional network to lean on, that provides scholarships, mentorships with working professionals and corporate internships. In its first 12 years, more than 1,000 students participated, and every one graduated with a technical degree. The stories behind that number are what drive her. One graduate used his internship earnings to move out of a foster care group home into his own apartment. Another student’s family could only afford one year of college tuition at a time, and her scholarship allowed her and her daughter to attend college. These aren’t side effects of the program. They are the point. It all started with a leader who saw a problem, decided it was her problem to solve and acted.

What this research really means

Strip away the frameworks, the survey data and the award credentials, and this book is about a simple bet: that the best technology leaders are made, not born.

The skills that drive innovation can be practiced. The conditions that make a workplace exceptional can be built. The pipeline that will sustain this profession for the next generation can be deliberately and methodically widened by people who see it as part of their job.

None of this is easy. If it were, every organization would have a culture people fought to join, every team would deliver work that mattered and every person with something to contribute would already be contributing. The gap between where we are and where we could be is real. That’s exactly why it’s worth closing.

The leaders profiled in “The Impactful Technology Leader” closed that gap, not all at once or without failure. But they closed it. They did it by staying anchored to their purpose when the job got hard, by investing in people when it would have been easier not to and by understanding that their reach as a leader extended far beyond their organization’s walls.

That’s what impactful technology leadership looks like. And it’s available to anyone willing to lead that way.

This article is published as part of the Foundry Expert Contributor Network.
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