The 7 new Cs of IT leadership for the AI era

AI is accelerating the pace of change, shortening the shelf life of expertise, reshaping operating models, and compressing the time IT leaders have to learn, decide, and act. As a result, IT leaders are increasingly forced to make consequential decisions faster, often with less information, greater ambiguity, and higher stakes.

Formore than four decades, I’ve worked with hundreds of CIOs, building trusted relationships with many of the world’s most accomplished technology executives. Through my Tech Whisperers podcast, CIO Whisperers interviews, the CIO100 Leadership Masterclass, and other conversations, these leaders have candidly shared what they’re wrestling with, where they’re struggling, and what they’re doing differently as the world around them changes.

For years, I’ve shared my “7 Cs of Great Leaders,” which are rooted in the brilliance of these practitioners. Customer Centricity, Courage, Change, Cultivate, Communication, Collaboration, and Culture — every one of these facets of leadership matters to this day. But the conditions under which we’re being asked to lead are changing. And through my conversations of late, new signals have been growing louder, and a new set of 7 Cs is emerging to help guide leaders through the challenges they face today.

AI transformation requires developing new mindsets and muscles, in ourselves, our teams, and ultimately our organizations. Those muscles — Coherence, Communication, Currency, Confidence, Conviction, Courage, and Change — are being demonstrated by leading technology executives as they accelerate business impact in environment marked by Compression.

BNY CIO Leigh-Ann Russell has made Coherence a defining leadership discipline for this era. Johnson & Johnson CIO Jim Swanson’s emphasis on continuous learning and remaining future ready captures the essence of Currency. Liberty Mutual CIO Monica Caldas is demonstrating what it means to build Confidence in people so they’re equipped to adopt new ways of working. Cox Automotive Chief Product and Technology Officer Marianne Johnson’s willingness to move where there is no established playbook embodies Courage. And GSK CTDO Shobie Ramakrishnan’s emphasis on assertive, high-velocity decision-making captures the reality of Compression surrounding all of them.

These capabilities build on, reinforce, and compound one another. It starts with making sense of a world that increasingly doesn’t and then giving people something coherent to move toward.

Coherence: Making the pieces make sense

Confused minds don’t act. And in today’s environment, overwhelmed minds don’t transform. Before we accelerate, everyone must know where we’re going and how the pieces connect. Otherwise, speed creates chaos faster.

The easiest way to understand coherence is to consider its opposite. Between AI initiatives, transformation programs, business priorities, technology investments, talent strategies, and new operating models, very few organizations today suffer from a shortage of activity. Instead, they suffer from incoherence: too many disconnected activities. Everyone can move quickly, work hard, do good work, but still be moving in different directions.

Coherence answers a deceptively simple question: How does everything fit together? It turns disconnected activity into aligned movement, creating the foundation for everything that follows.

Great leaders create coherence by connecting strategy to execution, ambition to capability, and today’s decisions to tomorrow’s destination. They help people understand what they’re doing and why, as well as how it connects to the collective mission and how their work helps get us there.

In a pressure-cooker environment where workloads are growing, roles are changing, and people are wondering what AI means for their futures, that connection between work and impact may be the most important thing a leader can provide. People can handle demanding work when they know why it matters and can see they are making a difference. Nothing drains energy faster than working incredibly hard without knowing whether any of it matters.

Coherence energizes people by creating focus, prioritization, and meaning. Great leaders connect the dots so their people can see the impact they’re having, whether that’s showing how their work changed an outcome, helped a customer or colleague, improved a decision, or created value for the business.

Communication: Creating shared understanding and movement

The best leaders consistently differentiate themselves through their ability to communicate — not simply to convey information, but to take people on a journey. They help people see the next hill, understand why it’s worth climbing, and believe they can get there together, even when the path is uncertain and the risks are real.

Master communicators start with their audience, recognizing that different stakeholders have different motivations, concerns, and hot buttons. They ask: What matters to these people? What do they need to understand, believe, or feel before they’re ready to move?

Many leaders, however, start instead with what they want to say. They organize the facts, build the deck, and deliver the message. Great communicators reverse that lens, starting not with “What do I want to tell them?” but “What do they need to hear from me?”

Master communicators also don’t stop at the “what.” The what may be a new AI capability, transformation program, operating model, or organizational change. It’s also rarely what causes people to move. Great communicators translate the what into the “so what”: Why does this matter? What opportunity does it create? How will it make the business, team, or my work better? Because different audiences care about different outcomes, the so what must be translated through their lens, not ours.

Then the best communicators go one step further, providing the “what’s next.” They help people see where we’re going, what will be expected of them, and what they can expect from their leaders. In an environment filled with uncertainty, people need leaders who can help them anticipate — not predict — the future and give them enough confidence to take the next step.

RS Group Global CIO Janet Robertson offers this simple question for any communicator: “What’s it like to be on the receiving end of you?”

Rather than how polished your presentation is, the real test is what the person on the receiving end heard, understood, and felt, and whether they’ve been given reason to be excited about the path forward.

Currency: Keep earning your relevance

Experience without continuous learning can become an anchor. J&J’s Jim Swanson has talked about the extraordinarily short half-life of an IT professional’s skillset and the need to remain continually future ready. That’s what is meant by currency.

The CIOs I see thriving invest more time in learning. They read, study, take classes, experiment, put hands on keyboards, spend time understanding how AI-native companies operate. They observe what’s changing outside their industries, spend time with people who know things they don’t, and get close enough to emerging technologies to distinguish reality from hype. The higher they rise, the more intentional they become about remaining a “leader as learner.” They know that relevance must be continually earned.

But currency isn’t just learning more about technology. Great CIOs get closer to the business and the work itself. They spend time in the field, sit with customers and frontline employees, observe workflows, ask questions, and see firsthand where friction, work-arounds, opportunities, and unmet needs exist. That proximity creates context you can’t get from a PowerPoint or conference room.

One of the reasons Afshean Talasaz, my Practitioners for Practitioners colleague, was so effective as a data scientist and as a CIO was that he went into the field. He put on the steel-toed boots and hard hat, rode in trucks, talked with the people doing the work, and watched them do it. He experienced the realities technology was supposed to improve, and that gave him something enormously valuable: context. He wasn’t learning about the business; he was learning the business.

Context matters even more in the AI era. To redesign workflows, automate processes, and fundamentally change how work gets done, we need to understand the work and the people doing the work before we try to reinvent it. You can’t transform what you understand only from a distance.

Currency is a function of curiosity plus proximity. Keep experimenting, questioning, observing, and learning while staying close to the technology, business, customer, and people doing the work.

Confidence: Building the muscles to move despite uncertainty

Currency produces earned confidence. Not swagger, but what comes from experience, experimentation, and enough repetitions to trust yourself when the answer isn’t obvious.

Resistance to change is certainly an issue, but one of the greatest obstacles to transformation is fear of incompetence. Accomplished people are accustomed to being good at what they do. AI suddenly puts us into beginner mode. Asking someone to change how they work without helping them develop confidence in their ability to succeed is a recipe for hesitation, avoidance, and stalled adoption.

The best CxOs I know building confidence, not just in themselves but in others as well. They give their teams the tools, context, permission, and opportunities to develop new muscles, and then room to use them as they move into unfamiliar territory.

Confidence can’t be mandated or taught in a classroom. It has to be developed through real-world “reps” — experimenting, learning, making mistakes, and trying again. Every successful rep creates more competence, and with it more confidence.

This is something Liberty Mutual’s Caldas reinforces in how she thinks about leadership and transformation. Great leaders don’t eliminate uncertainty for their people, she says; they equip them to operate successfully within it. They create environments where people can experiment safely, ask questions without embarrassment, challenge old assumptions, and stretch beyond their comfort zones. In the process, they give their people the confidence that, together, they can figure this out.

Conviction: Shortening the distance from signal to decision

Confidence gives us the conviction to make critical judgment calls, because seeing signals isn’t enough. In a quickly moving environment, leaders must determine which signals matter, which problems are worth solving, which opportunities deserve action. This is a vital source of competitive advantage, one Deluxe CDTO Yogs Jayaprakasam calls “speed to conviction.”

As AI makes technical capability more accessible, knowing how to build something becomes less differentiating. The premium shifts to knowing what is worth building and how quickly you can reach a well-founded decision to act. Jayaprakasam notes that startups don’t necessarily have better technology or smarter people; they’re often able to reach conviction and act while larger organizations are still studying the question. Every unnecessary layer between a signal and a decision adds latency. That’s a leadership challenge, not a technology problem.

This isn’t just “move fast and break things” while sacrificing judgment. Great leaders know which risks must be understood, whose perspective needs to be in the room, and when they have enough information to move. They resist impulsiveness on one side and analysis paralysis on the other.

In a fast-paced, uncertain world, waiting for 100% confidence can become a costly decision. The advantage going forward belongs not to the leader who knows everything but the one who knows when they know enough to move.

Leadership today demands making consequential decisions with incomplete information, stopping work that no longer matters, confronting legacy assumptions and deeply embedded ways of operating, and asking people, including ourselves, to leave comfortable territory. With conviction, leaders become willing to venture into territory where there may not yet be a playbook. And that’s when courage comes into play.

Courage: Choosing to take the shot

Courage isn’t the absence of fear; it’s what we choose to do in fear’s presence. That’s particularly relevant right now, because the fears are real — fear of getting it wrong, making a career-limiting decision, not knowing as much as we think we should. Fear can be paralyzing, and in an era of unprecedented uncertainty, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to hesitate.

Cardinal Health CIO Michelle Greene reminds us, “The land of comfort has no growth.” For leaders and the organizations we’re asking to transform, growth only happens once we venture beyond what we already know and feels safe.

But we can’t ask our organizations to experiment, reinvent work, and embrace AI while creating an environment where people are afraid to mess up. If we want more shots made, we have to create permission for more shots to be taken. That means creating intelligent guardrails, making thoughtful bets, learning quickly from the misses, and getting back in the game.

Cox Auto’s Johnson talks about leading when there is no map or established playbook. Great leaders can’t promise people certainty but they can provide a North Star, the right fundamentals, and the courage to take the next step. Sometimes that means taking the shot themselves. Increasingly, it means creating an environment where thousands of other people believe they have permission to take theirs.

Change: Turning movement into outcomes

This is where the preceding Cs lead us, because AI transformation ultimately comes down to the organization’s ability to change how work gets done. Leaders must be able to take people on that journey, while every individual has to strengthen their capacity to adapt, learn new skills, redefine what they contribute, and continually reinvent themselves.

The importance of IQ (intelligence quotient) and EQ (emotional quotient) remain essential. But legendary CIO Rob Carter makes the case that what will increasingly differentiate leaders and organizations going forward is AQ (adaptive quotient), the ability to adapt as the world around us changes.

Skills, jobs, operating models, and entire industries are being reinvented at extraordinary speed. As a result, adaptability is a prerequisite for relevance as a leader. AI’s value is unlocked when people adopt it, work changes, and decisions improve. Our ability to adapt determines how quickly and successfully we can make that happen.

Change creates new information, capabilities, and complexity, which means we have to find coherence all over again.

There’s one more C that belongs in this conversation, and it describes the environment the other seven operate in: compression. Technology cycles, strategy cycles, transformation cycles, and decision cycles are all compressing. The 7 Cs are how great leaders respond to this environment.

The compounding leadership flywheel

I see these new 7 Cs as a flywheel: Coherence creates clarity. Clarity enables communication. Communication creates the shared context for currency. Currency builds confidence. Confidence fuels courage. Courage enables change. Change creates new learning that requires a new level of coherence, and the flywheel turns again.

With every turn, those capabilities strengthen. The more we learn, the more confidently we can move. The more confidently we move, the more willing we become to act courageously. The more courageously we act, the more change we create. Every cycle produces learning that allows us to move through the next one faster and stronger. That’s compounding leadership.

My original 7 Cs described enduring attributes of great leaders, and I still believe deeply in every one of them. The new 7 Cs are an evolution of these fundamentals. They describe the mindsets and muscles great leaders need to continually strengthen when disruption isn’t an event but the reality we’re leading in.

We know the world around us will continue to change. The question is: Are our leadership muscles compounding fast enough to change with it?