CIOs rethinking leadership styles in the digital era

Three quarters of CIOs believe they will have to adapt their leadership style over the next three years to succeed in digital business, a Gartner survey suggests.

The survey of 2810 CIOs from 87 countries shows that IT leaders recognise that incrementally improving IT performance won’t be enough to truly grasp the digital opportunity.

With the C-suite taking a renewed interest in the digital revolution and despite the rise of roles such as Chief Digital Officer, CIOs are in a position to shape their companies’ digital transformation, Gartner said.

According to the survey, 41% of CIOs are reporting directly to the CEO - one of the highest levels it has ever been - and CEOs expect CIOs to lead their companies’ digital charge.

But a major hurdle to CIOs grasping the digital opportunity is the fact that the IT discipline has developed a set of behaviours and beliefs that are ill-suited to exploiting digital opportunities, according to Gartner vice president Dave Aron.

“Digitalisation is no longer a sideshow - it has moved to centre stage and is changing the whole game. CIOs now have a unique opportunity, but they must ‘flip’ their information, technology, value and people leadership practices to deliver on the digital promise,” he said.

“During the second IT era of industrialisation, people leadership was honed to emphasise precision, discipline and tight control. Therefore, through both nature and nurture, CIOs have evolved into control-style pragmatic leaders. Given the characteristics of the new digital era, this bias is dangerous. CIOs must invert their style to be more vision-led and inspirational.”

According to Gartner, digital leadership means flipping the approach from legacy first to digital first, assuming all solutions will be cloud based, designed for mobile and highly contextualised, and looking to exploit unstructured data, and run data-led experiments.

Besides their own leadership styles, CIOs are also concerned that the risk management discipline is not keeping up with the additional forms of risk the digital economy presents.

Image courtesy of Scott Maxwell under CC