SIM forum coaches CIOs on leadership

By Linda Tucci, Senior News Writer 02 Sep 2008 | SearchCIO.com

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Today on SearchCIO.com, we're talking leadership with Bob Rouse, professor of computer science at Washington University in St. Louis and a program director for the Regional Leadership Forum, a CIO training program launched 15 years ago by the Society for Information Management.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Bob gamely takes on some of the big questions: Are leaders born or made? Are the leadership qualities of the successful CIO different from those required of, say, the captain of a ship or the CFO? Do you have to be young to have this stuff stick? He also weighs in on why we shouldn't be surprised by the gulf between IT and the business.

Some background: The RLF program runs from January to September, meeting six times for intensive two-day sessions. Classes are coached by CIOs and facilitators and include a 30-book reading list. Participants are prodded to discover their inner leaders by presenting topics, leading discussions and persuading classmates that their experiences have relevance for others.

Here is a long version of our conversation, starting with a few logistical details. Go to SIM forum coaches CIOs on leadership for a condensed verrsion.

Where are the RLF meetings held?

Bob Rouse: We use a number of conference centers, like the Q Center in Chicago, the Babson Center for Executive Education in Wellesley [Mass.]. We use a conference center in downtown New York. We use the Ace Center in Philadelphia. We tend to gravitate toward places that are convenient to our population, hence the 'regional' name, and to places that know how to do conferences, not hotels.

And the fee?

Rouse: The fee this year is $8,350. Now if you are a SIM member that can be reduced by $500 or $1,000. In the competitive marketplace, we are probably charging too little.

There are not-for-profit and for-profit outfits that have leadership programs. Are they competitors for you?

Rouse: They are definitely competitors for us and very good competitors. The two that pop to mind are the Center for Creative Leadership in North Carolina and Concours Executive Forum. [Center for Creative Leadership] has been around for probably 30 years. They do an excellent job. Their process involves a lot of testing and feedback on testing, a variety of personality and communication style evaluations and so forth. Jim Cash, who has run the Concours Executive Forum, is another competitor. I think their sweet spot is individuals who are in direct preparation for their CIO position in large companies. So, these people have already been tapped and sent to Concours, I think, to kind of prepare them for almost the behavioral changes they will need [to make] as CIOs. It's almost etiquette training, but that way under-sells it. A lot of it has the feel of an executive MBA [program] -- a lot of strategic planning, accounting, etc.

Some would say there are born leaders and born followers, but it sounds like the Regional Leadership Forum opposes that principle.

Rouse: This is a valid question for any kind of creative role you can think of. People are born with certain talents, and they are nurtured in certain ways that give them capabilities that are different from others. So, I don't argue very much the nature/nurture piece on this. What I do know is it's possible to learn to be a much better leader than you are now.

The way we look at it is that there are certain things a leader has to know how to do. A leader has to know how to do strategic planning. He or she has to know how to do job delegation. There are things about being a leader that you have to learn through experience and education.

I think our strength is that we also realize that there are some things that a person has to be in order to become a really good leader.

What are those?

Rouse: Well, one of them is [for the individuals to] clearly understand where they want to go in their own lives -- their purpose -- and how they want to go about doing that and how to discover their own authentic leadership style. People have dominant communication styles. They have dominant styles with respect to how they interact with their subordinates, with their peers and superiors. The purpose of our program is to allow individuals to discover their authentic leadership style.

The people who graduate from RLF don't match a single set of success criteria. We like to say, and we believe, that the process the RLF represents encourages people to reflect on what they'd like to be in the future, on who they are now and to make those decisions about purpose and mission that give them the confidence to manage whoever they're managing, to lead whoever they are leading so people acknowledge that strength and core of principles.

Of course, there is no magic to what those principles are. Integrity is one of them. Consistency is another. A willingness to shed what has been your purpose in life -- at least in IT -- for 10 or 15 years, which is technical excellence and where you have got your thrill. You have to shed that and get the same kind of feeling of accomplishment when others who are working for you make those accomplishments. That is hard to do.

How does the RLF facilitate that?

Rouse: There are several approaches that we take. One of them is that in the RLF, most of the talking and most of presentation of materials is done by the participants themselves. They are assigned books to discuss. They are assigned topics to lead. And, as a result, they have to bring their own ideas to that topic or book and lead a discussion on those ideas on a regular basis, virtually every other forum. In doing that, what they wind up with is really a sharing of their own work experience and their own life and that resonates in the room. It's not that everybody has had the same experience, but they can identify with that kind of experience.

So a lot of wisdom is passed around. And, I'll tell you, the facilitators also add to that pool of wisdom. We're not passive in facilitating, but we're not dominant. We don't lecture. So people learn a lot from each other. And the time length of the program is long enough so they can actually reflect on what they're hearing. We encourage them to think deeply about how they need to change, what other behaviors and rewards they need to leave behind if they are going to be leaders.

We read 30 books in nine months, across a wide variety of topics. Twenty percent of the books on the list change each year.

Are there special leadership qualities that CIOs need that are different from the leadership qualities that a captain of a ship or a CFO or CEO or others would need?

Rouse: That's a great question because there is an assumption that leadership and technology is different from leadership in other parts of the organization. In fact, I think that presumption has made it more difficult for CIOs to move into more general business management, which, as you know, doesn't happen very often.

I don't think the qualities of successful CIOs and successful CFOs and CEOs are that much different. To me, knowing who you are and being able to lead -- to make decisions and bring people with you -- is a measure of your own personal, and what appears to others as authentic, way to lead. In other words, you're not leading because someone told you 'Here are the three things you need to do to lead.' You're leading because 'Here are the strengths I have. When I lead I am going to use these strengths and people will come to expect that and depend on it.' I think that kind of reliability and consistency is the hallmark of leaders of any sort. Having said that, every leader brings specific knowledge and experience to that job. So you can't, as a CIO, be totally technology-free, just as the CFO can't be totally accounting principle-free. That combination is important.

The other thing is, you have to be a very good communicator. [We hit] two communication skills the hardest: listening, really being there and listening to others; and being able to focus clearly on your message. We think that IT people and technical people tend to have ideas in their brains, but successful leaders typically have three overarching ideas that they never let anyone forget. So, I think that commitment to purpose and great listening skills are crucial.

Do you harp on the notion that these ideas have to be communicated in universal rather than technical language?

Rouse: Absolutely. In fact, one of the books we read is called "Crucial Conversations," by [Kerry] Patterson. That book stresses two things: When it is time to have a hard conversation, you have to have that hard conversation, as opposed to dinking around it. And, the second point is that the message has to be consistent with the broader goals of the organization, not just about Friday's accomplishments. People have a hard time leading when they are talking about what they have to get done by Friday, as opposed to, 'Here is what we're really trying to do -- now we have some stuff we've got to get done by Friday.'

One of our facilitators has a list of the 180 skills or capacities that leaders need. That's a little daunting. I am of the school that says there are 10 things you need as a leader to get straight in order to lead. The list is different for me than for other people who come through the forum, and it may be eight, not 10 things. But you've got to get that list straight.

That's really the discovering of your leadership style that happens in RLF. We have new testimonials from recent graduates and testimonials from people who have been out of the program for 10 years. They all come back to that point: What RLF prepared me to do was to be that authentic leader.

We think RLF teaches people how to be leaders, not how to do leadership.

The "do" piece -- the things you have to do as a CIO or any other senior leader -- is to know what your business is about. You have to know how the financial and planning mechanism works. You've got to know something about your customers. You've got to know something about marketing. You've got to understand the governance of the organization. These are just things you have to know. You might be the most charismatic and most brilliant leader, but if you don't know the details....

You know, Brett Favre just went from the Packers to the Jets. In his second meeting with the team, the coach asked him, 'What are the goals of our team?' And Brett Favre was able to stand in front of his teammates and tell them what that was.

That is pretty impressive.

Rouse: Now, was it planned? It could have been. If it was planned, then the coach is a genius. If it wasn't, then Brett Favre is a genius. But the point is, it became clear to everybody that here is an individual who is going to lead our team on the field, who knows what we are about. It is that kind of instinct that a leader has to have -- that being a leader, knowing the plays, knowing where the locker room is, understanding the defense, all are things that he has to know in order to be successful.

Q: Can you train leadership in someone who is middle age, or do you have to be young to have this stuff stick?

Rouse: [Laughs.] The best leaders discover their own leadership strengths. I think RLF is the best course of action a rising leader can use to discover his or her own authentic leadership characteristics. And I think that can happen at age 30. I think that can happen at age 50. And I have seen it happen in both cases. We've had people sent to the RLF probably five years before they were completely right for it, but they caught on and they have been very successful.

We get 50-year-olds who come to the Forum and they are typically there for an opportunity to improve their prospects over the next 10 to 15 years. But it is kind of in the fix mode, as opposed to in the discover mode. Their sponsors think, 'He is a good guy, has done good work. He or she has never stepped up to the plate on leadership. Let's send them and see if we can make a difference for their last 15 years.' And I have seen that happen. I have seen people become genuinely re-energized and reinvigorated.

One of the paybacks to the sponsor is that he or she finds out whether or not the individual is willing and ready to step up to the CIO role. If a manager, if a CIO, could look across his organization of 500 or 5,000 people [and see] five people who could be leaders and want to be leaders -- that would be a huge benefit for the CIO. Some people in the Forum recommit and reawaken to the possibility of being a CIO. Other people say, 'I really want to be a leader at the individual contributor level. I want to be the person that leads our initiatives -- you name the technology, or the business planning area -- but I really don't want to take on the burden of a senior leader, a CIO. And that by itself -- if you could buy that for $10,000 -- most CIOs would do that in an instant. It's important that not just the CIO learns that secret, but that the person learns that secret.

Do you ever do this at a company?

A: Yes we do. We've done that about five times in the past three or four years. The basic result is the same. I think the in-house Forums tend to concentrate a little more on that environment in terms of examples, as you would expect. And, you don't get quite the richness of having multiple companies in the same room that can say, 'We don't do it that way at all; you guys must be idiots.'

But it still retains one of the key features of the Forum: At each two-day session, we will have two or three people in senior leadership positions come and speak to the group. The presentation is not, 'Here is my job today or here is how my career led me to this position.' The presentation is a personal presentation: 'How did I get here on a personal basis.' And the stories are never Horatio Alger stories. They are stories about a young person who had a knack for one thing or another, who did it real well, and then someone asked them to take on more responsibility and, eventually, without even planning for it, the person became a CIO. That is much more the story than anyone who says, 'You know, I was 25 and I wanted to be a CIO, and I knew what steps I had to follow to get there.' Those people exist. There's just not a lot of them who make it.

I think the story is that there are many different successful leadership styles. You get there by a path you probably can't plan very much. There is a certain amount of luck involved. But all of the individuals who speak to us, you can tell, are genuinely who they say they are. It is not an act. This is true and authentic. And that is the big shocker. I think this is the big lesson that the participants learn from the external speakers.

I just want to ask one other question. Because you know the brain of the CIO so well, is there anything about people who go into information technology that gives them a unique perspective as a leader, a common thread that you see in all of your up-and-coming CIOs that has to do with their passion for information technology?

Rouse: This is a personal and biased statement: I do believe that because of history, most people who are moving up the ranks of IT to CIO probably have a much greater capacity to identify business opportunities where technology will pay off than leaders who have grown up in other business disciplines. People in other disciplines can look at things they need done, but they can't translate that into the technical possibilities. So an IT leader who learns early what the business is about and understands the potential of current and future IT, can have significant impact if he or she can be trusted to be a player in the business, as opposed to being a leader in the technology.

You know the statistics on this. Most CIOs don't last very long. They last for two or three years. These are good people. They are honest, hardworking and very capable. They are hired to do a technical job. They come in and they install SAP, or they install a customer resource management system or they clean up legacy systems. That is what they have done and that is what is expected of them. They are kind of like a high-level database administrator, a person who does the job. And unless there is another challenge of that sort on the table, it is really time to move on, because your contribution in the eyes of the senior management of the firm has been made. I think there is a mutual recognition that 'We hired you to do this, you did a good job, we love you to pieces, our next big job is this and you've never done that before, so let's hire somebody who has.

That makes it harder for a CIO to gain the business confidence that he or she has this other capacity I talked about -- to cast the business problems in technical solutions. That gets missed a lot.

Of course you've been able to see the whole picture by being at Washington University for 30 years.

Rouse: And I'll throw out one other thing to think about. You may not want to use it. IT has been around for 40 or 50 years as a discipline. It took engineers 250 or 300 years to get the point where they could reliably build a bridge. We kind of look at bridges and say, 'OK, they all stand up.' And then, of course, we've got Minneapolis, so even 400 years may not be enough. But, clearly, 50 years is not enough to develop the organizational knowledge about using IT and the technical knowledge to make IT work smoothly, quickly and reliably. A lot of the developments we're seeing now will be quite different in 60 or 70 years, [but] probably not in 20 years.

When I was stupid and young I predicted in the late '70s that by 2000, the gap between IT and the business would be gone, because CIOs by that time would have a gut-level feel [like] they have for marketing and accounting and manufacturing and so forth. I think I missed it by 100 years! [Laughs.]

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