6 new rules of IT leadership — and what they replace

AI is changing how work gets done and who does it — at all levels of the organization.

That means it’s also changing how executives do their jobs and how they need to lead, as execs are now being asked to use AI to reimagine their organizations and navigate the uncertainties that go with that task.

CIOs are seeing changes in their role as part of this overall trend, as they gain new responsibilities and face new expectations. Such changes follow a years-long evolution among CIOs, one that has moved the position from one of technology steward to strategic enabler to the visionary leader they must be today.

Here, veteran CIOs, researchers, and advisers share six new rules of IT leadership along with the old leadership principles they’ve replaced.

Old Rule: Answer to the CEO
New Rule: Work with the CEO to create a vision

For much of corporate history, the CEO determined the organization’s north star, and other executives — including the CIO — devised the plans that would move everything toward the chief executive’s strategic vision.

“Now the CIO has to be joined at the hip with the CEO to create that vision,” says Sharon Stufflebeme, managing director of CIO solutions at Protiviti.

“It means having the ability to see the future, to understand how that future is likely to impact your current state and how you bring your current state to the future, to see and anticipate and create a line to what’s reasonably going to happen in the future and how the organization will adjust to it,” she adds.

“It has always been important, but it wasn’t the top skill that the CIO had to have,” she says. “Now the CIO is the most well-equipped to understand the value that can be got by leveraging new technology, including AI, as well as the costs and the risks, and to create the vision and how to get there.”

Old rule: Enable business outcomes
New rule: Architect the business of the future

Over the past few years, the C-suite has turned to CIOs to educate them on AI and explain how AI can be used to deliver business outcomes. But Allan Tate, executive chair of the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, says executive leadership teams are now ratcheting up their expectations as they look to their CIOs to rearchitect the organization using artificial intelligence.

“It’s not, ‘What AI can do?’ now. It’s ‘How do we redesign the organization with AI?’” Tate says. “It’s ‘How do we design our organization to use AI responsibly and effectively.’ That’s what CIOs are moving toward. What we’re seeing is CIOs becoming transformation architects.”

This will require CIOs to lead through uncertainty and tension, he adds.

“CIOs need to feel comfortable with uncertainty,” Tate says, noting that CIOs must learn “to frame questions, explore different interpretive lenses for the questions, explore different tensions, and how to blend human and machine intelligence. And CIOs have to help other people get used to uncertainty. They have to understand that there’s not going to be consensus. What they’re faced with is executing better executive judgment under that uncertainty, and they will want to build an environment of trust where employees see that everyone will prosper and not feel threatened.”

He acknowledges the fear that jobs will disappear as AI increasingly automates work, but CIOs should be helping their executive colleagues think about the possibilities — including new roles — that AI-driven transformation will create.

“What’s hard is imagining what new work will be created, which has happened in every single tech revolution,” Tate adds.

Old rule: Fail fast
New rule: Build the conditions for people to feel safe enough to thrive

One of tech’s most repeated and least-delivered promises has been given an upgrade due to its own consistent failure. Instead of just jettisoning unpromising projects quickly, IT leaders must no create an environment where failure feels safe enough for employees to establish learnings for dead ends and apply them to scale for speed.

Brook Colangelo, senior vice president and CIO at Waters Corp., an analytical laboratory instrument and software company, uses a “simple diagnostic” for his global IT organization.

“In any situation where a team is underperforming or resisting change, I ask which of five psychological needs is under threat — status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, or fairness — and address it directly and compassionately,” he says.

He leans on the organization’s culture to accomplish this task. “Waters IT is a team grounded in the neuroscience of motivation and growth. We celebrate our wins, deconstruct our misses, and learn as a team,” Colangelo says.

He sees the ability to diagnose and address those threats as a core leadership competency for today’s CIO, particularly because “IT organizations are naturally threat-rich environments — even more so with AI.”

“It took us a while to build this muscle, but we did so through intentional training, and we equipped our people leaders — through the IT Leadership Forum — to role model and recognize these behaviors,” he explains.

Colangelo credits this investment in team culture for his IT department’s ability to simultaneously lead four high-stakes initiatives: an integration of an acquisition, the onboarding of its global capability center colleagues in India to full-time Waters employees at a 99% acceptance rate, a full transformation of its ERP to S/4HANA, and the secure enablement of its AI transformation across the organization.

“Each initiative triggers different responses in different people,” Colangelo says. “Having a shared language for those threat signals means we can diagnose what’s slowing us down and address it directly.”

Old rule: Bring on business experts
New rule: Be an expert on your business

CIOs got the message years ago that they couldn’t succeed in their role if they focused only on technology. So they partnered with business colleagues to glean perspectives on the various pain points and problems that stymied business ambitions, and they collaborated with their executive counterparts to understand the goals and objectives of the various functional business areas.

Now CIOs must make another leap and become more like a COO, where they understand the full scope and scale of operations in their organizations, says Jeff Sturman, managing partner for the IT and digital leadership practice at WittKieffer, a leadership advisory and search firm.

“CIOs are now sitting at the intersection of all activities — strategic, operations, customer experience. It’s a role that touches every single aspect of the business,” Sturman says. “CIOs still have to be the subject matter expert on technology, security, and now AI; they have to be the smartest person in the room on those subjects, but they now have to also know all the aspects of the organization’s operations, just like the COO, because there’s not a part of the business today that the IT leader doesn’t touch.”

CIOs in healthcare, for example, must grasp business operations, regulatory requirements, clinical operations, and more, Sturman says.

He says other members of the C-suite must know the business, too, of course. But with IT leading AI deployments that automate and transform work, CIOs must have a deeper understanding of operations and workflows across the board than many of their executive colleagues.

Sturman says not all CIOs have that level of knowledge but sees more IT leaders gaining what he calls a “panoramic view of the organization’s operations.”

Old rule: Have a good grasp on organizational finance
New rule: Act like a CFO

Like many CIOs, Marco Bill, senior vice president and CIO at Red Hat, is tackling more financial calculations than ever before as he works to ensure that the company’s cloud and AI spending is efficient by knowing what levers to pull to rein in costs without dinging performance.

For example, he and his team are analyzing workloads to determine whether it’s most cost effective to run them in the public cloud, run them in a private cloud, or host them in the company’s own data centers. He has squeezed out upwards of $20 million by moving some workloads back on premises, and he has the financial calculations to prove it.

“And it’s not about doing these calculations just once; it’s doing this continually,” he adds.

Stufflebeme also sees CIOs delving deeper into financial work with AI initiatives, as CEOs and boards clamor for quantifiable returns for their investments.

“IT has to have the vision [for the organization to follow] and also the financial acumen to show which investments are going to have an ROI. So it’s now critical for CIOs to understand where the value is going to be and where the costs are,” she adds. “These are skills that CIOs always had to have, but now they’re more crucial because of the impact of AI.”

Given the challenges of getting an ROI from AI so far — and the growing executive intolerance for failed AI initiatives, Stufflebeme says boards and CEOs want CIOs who “understand how value is being generated, how to quantify that value, and can ensure they achieve that value.”

That then requires CIOs to know how costs are going to change as agents take the place of certain human activities, she adds, “because agents don’t eliminate costs, but it does change the cost structure. So CIOs have to understand how to calculate the total cost of ownership of these new capabilities. That’s true not only for their own businesses but for their partners, because CIOs have to know the value that they get from their partners is more than the cost they’re paying to them.”

Old Rule: Expect employees to respond to your leadership style
New Rule: Adapt your style to the people on your team

Greg Taffet, managing partner and CIO at strategic tech consultancy Taffet Associates, believes he must adapt his leadership style and how he engages with others in his organization, including those on his team.

“I have people all over the world, and managing them now is so much more different than when we could meet around the water cooler,” he says.

Taffet says as a leader he works to understand how and when people want to work — whether they want to be fully remote and work asynchronously, or whether they want to be in the office on a set schedule, or a mix of the two. “Different people have different requirements to be productive, and you cannot have everybody work from home and be productive and you can’t have everyone be as productive as they worked in the office all the time,” he says.

He also strives to understand any cultural or personal traits that could influence their responsiveness to different leadership approaches and recognize how to draw out the best in each person and advocate for what works for them. Just as schools tailor lessons to students based on whether they’re visual, auditory, or hands-on learners, “that’s what we have to lead now,” he says.