Reassess your leadership style

It’s hardly earth-shattering to hear that CIO people leadership must flip from control-led to vision-led.

Gartner’s survey says “75% of CIOs plan to change their leadership style over the next three years, most commonly by amplifying their vision (47%) while reducing their command and control (65%).”

“Digital leadership is almost always about vision and inspiration, not command and control. CIOs determined to be digital leaders must focus on education and inspiration.”

So how do you make it happen? To be innovative, organisations have to inspire, and allow mistakes to be made within a controlled environment.

Where do you start? It can be hard if CIOs don’t themselves understand the risks, opportunities and capabilities of the new technologies they want to enable in their organisations. If a CIO isn’t familiar with social media such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, how can they enable something they don’t use? Especially with social media, it isn’t enough to read journals and articles about the rationale and theory — you have to engage with it. CIOs who aren’t personally familiar tend to overreact to whatever they read.

Is your CIO social-media ready? Help your CIO.

This isn’t only about driving new innovation in your organisation — it might also help you engage better with your Gen X and Gen Y social media generation.