Follow the Leader

Barbara A White, the CIO and associate provost at the University of Georgia, is addressing the potential leadership gap in her IT department using a variety of strategies, such as a mentoring program. The program includes a mentorship committee, handbook and identified mentors' to assist middle managers. White calls the program a powerful tool to improve performance, retention, morale, and career progression.

Another tactic that is in the planning stages is the creation of a shadow program, where IT staff can follow White and other senior IT managers to get a sense of what it's like to be in a leadership role. She got the idea when she was CIO at the University of Utah, where the school's president had a shadow program. "A lot of people on my staff don't know what a CIO does," she says. In the shadow program, potential leaders will get to follow her for a day or two, perhaps once a month, to see what her job is really like. They'll also follow her senior managers. Thus, they'll see different parts of the IT puzzle. "It goes back to this whole issue of building the staff, the level of expertise, of keeping good people. We have quite a few people who want to move on to the next level, and we need to help them better understand the organization," White says.

"Shadowing is an absolutely valid approach" to developing a new type of leader, says Forrester's Phil Murphy.

Create A Fast Track

Procter & Gamble has a corporate culture that promotes from within. But it saw that good technical talent was getting harder to keep, and it also understood that Gen Y employees expect to change companies frequently. To combat both challenges, it blazed a new, faster IT career path for its younger workers.

IT leadership adopted an accelerated development program, as a part of the career path, says Scott. It would place a new set of top performers in a Career Executive Development Program, designed to provide them exposure to high-level IT executives and assignments to help accelerate their growth. It comes with one caveat: if you don't perform, you'll be looking for another employer. It's a modified version of what's in place in the company's fabled brand management department.

"We wanted to signal that we were very serious about growing people, and were willing to invest extra time and energy" in them, he says. The program is only two years old and is too new to have clear results (no one, for instance, has been asked to leave yet).

P&G also created what it calls "The CIO Circle," which rewards long-time IT people who have mastered an area of technical expertise. This "master's" designation allows P&G to acknowledge their status as knowledge leaders even if they are not on the management track.

Rewards programs encourage employee loyalty, says Laurie Orlov, a consultant and principal of LMO Insight. Fast track development in particular should help companies cultivate Gen Y leaders. And with so much training and management exposure, they have every reason to stay, she says.