The Management Vacuum

When it comes to People and Organizational Development, from the CEO on down, C-level executives are relatively poor performers. Rajinder "Raj" Gupta, adjunct professor and executive director of the CEO Perspective Program at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, has interviewed more than a dozen CEOs from companies including Walgreen's, AON and Northern Trust about the competencies data. "In general, I found that the premium for CEOs as they rise through the ranks is a deep understanding of the business and customers, not necessarily on how they manage their people. The CEOs I spoke with are definitely aware of the need to focus more of their attention on people development," says Gupta.

There's opportunity here if CIOs can rise to the challenge. Michael Pilkington, managing director of corporate technology at Euroclear SA in Belgium, believes CIOs, like CEOs, have not focused enough on this area. "As executives, we are tasked with spending a lot of our time focusing on how to serve our clients; I think we should spend just as much time thinking about ways to motivate and develop our people," he says.

When Pilkington took over IT at Euroclear, he made it a priority to respond to the general corporate feeling that the IT department was insensitive to users. He believed his team needed to work on its awareness of its internal customers' needs, and not just those in customer-facing positions. Each member of his non-customer-facing team went through a half-day customer-focus training session (customer-facing staff went for a full day) to drive home the importance of customer awareness. Pilkington also ran a number of sessions to educate business users about IT.