[/caption]
Everybody has difficult years, but a lot of times the difficult years end up being the greatest years of your life, if you survive them. — Brittany Murphy
Tick tock.
A recent Forrester study, CIO Job Tenure Rises – Long-term Trend or Fleeting Phase?, has shown the average job term for a CIO is on the rise. I believe there are reasons for this that indicate this is a fleeting phase. Going with the assumption that both employer and employee need to realize equitable value in what they receive in exchange for what they give (see Why People Work For You) there is an implied balance and harmony required for a strong and long-lasting working relationship.
The environment the CIO lives in has not been made easier over the last few years. What has changed is the external environment. At dinner with executives of a recent client, we discussed the challenges this environment presents. People looking to either leave or land in CIO positions generally feel geographically constrained by a housing market which makes it difficult to selling their homes. This has the effect of turning a national search into a regional search. Further, with a challenging economy a candidates and incumbents are increasingly conscious to move to a new location. This greatly reduces the pool of qualified candidates for CIO positions, and CIOs looking to move to other opportunities. On top of this, employers are looking at an unclear future, and with this an unclear role that they are looking to fill.
Martha Heller in CIO.com wrote a terrific article (What Are the Built-in Challenges that Set the CIO Up For Failure) on the contradictions which conspire to support the CIO as a short-term role. Examples that Martha present include the CIO being hired to be strategic, but forced to spend all their time on operational issues; the CIO being intimately involved in every facet of the business, but considered separate and removed from it; and technology being a long-term investment, but the company thinking in quarters.
Unfortunately, as Shamus McGillicuddy describes in CIO Tenures Paralyze IT (Computer Weekly.com) this tends to paralyze IT organizations. These contradictions have been ever-present. The needed changes typically require long-term energy and attention. The band-aids which are put in place for the short-term rarely stand the test of time and with each passing year the IT hole deepens.
I believe that the increase in job tenure for CIO’s is a mirage. As the economy turns we will see a market correction in job tenure. The odds of long-term success are stacked against the role and it can be argued that with the changing demographics of the workforce the odds are getting longer. The challenge for CIOs and the executive team is to move the ball far enough down the field on the big issues while paving the way for the next CIO to tackle all the other issues.
Tick tock.
There seem to be 2 kinds of CIOs:
1. Those who have figured out how to and enjoy build teams to effectively transition through the corporate transformation cycles – strategy, execute, stead-state, repeat
2. Those who focus their energies on only one of the stages.
I believe that the short tenure data is a result of a lot of the second kind of CIO that are out there and either leave when their phase is over, or who don’t realize that they are the second kind and come in during the wrong enterprise stage and don’t work out.
I know great CIOs in both camps and either can be very successful.
-Chris
More on building teams: http://www.ciodashboard.com/leadership/cio-by-committee/
More on CIO fit: http://www.ciodashboard.com/cio-careers/cio-tenure-what-is-wrong-if-anything/
More on
Great point Chris. I whole heartedly agree and would build on this with there being two kinds of CIOs, those who are brought in to build and manage the IT organization (generalists), and those who are brought in for a specific purpose – often a turnaround situation (specialists). The specialists seem to draw a great deal of energy in doing what they specialize in, and are very good at it. Once they have declared the mission accomplished, they seem to get bored and look for their next mission. The generalists on the other hand revel in the build and management what they have built. Their secret to success seem to lie in managing the role contradictions and setting expectations with executive peers on how these contradictions are being managed.