CIOs who want to succeed as business partners and strategists can't do it alone. Success requires unshackling the leaders within your IT organization and letting them run.

US Motorola CIO Patty Morrison sleeps well at night. She takes real vacations. She has time to think. It doesn't sound like the typical description of life as a CIO, particularly an IT leader at a $US42 billion company in the midst of a major reorganization in the acutely competitive communications equipment market. Truth be told, there may be a little hyperbole in Morrison's self portrayal. Her plate is full. She determines long-term IT strategy, works closely with executive peers to decide the right direction for the company, and travels the world to communicate the corporate mission to the enterprise and its customers. [[LeftQuote:Morrison knows that the benefits of pushing accountability for IT success further down the organizational chart go beyond personal perks like getting a good eight hours of sleep But when it comes to the day-to-day operation and success of her 2200-person technology department, Morrison's concerns are few. She doesn't get middle-of-the-night calls about network outages. She's not putting out IT fires instead of eating lunch. When Motorola created a new integrated supply chain division that IT had to support, Morrison barely broke a sweat.

Morrison's not lucky. Like most successful CIOs today, the 25-year IT veteran makes a concerted effort to foster leadership at all levels of her IT organization. She knows that the benefits of pushing accountability for IT success further down the organizational chart go beyond personal perks like getting a good eight hours of sleep. And it's not just succession planning we're talking about. CIOs who want to succeed as business partners and strategists can't do it alone.

"A CIO has a lot of priorities. As a general rule, they should spend at least half their time outside the four walls of their own organization," says Susan Cramm, IT leadership expert and founder of US-based leadership coaching firm Valuedance. "You start thinking about how that can happen and you realize: 'Hey, wait a minute. CIOs need to think about how to drive accountability down.' It's a key issue."

Otherwise talented CIOs who don't cultivate, empower and reward leadership in their departments risk creating a rocky relationship between IT and the business and dooming themselves.

"A CIO who is not able to empower other leaders will have a difficult time fulfilling his role," says Steven Agnoli, CIO of US law firm Kirkpatrick & Lockhart. "The CIO is never the successful one. Your success is almost entirely related to the success of the people within your group." Indeed, an employee's leadership failure becomes yours as well.

"There are some IT organizations where the business feels quite comfortable with the CIO and maybe even his or her immediate reports," says US-based Forrester analyst firm vice president Laurie Orlov. "But a level down, they're not. That leads to concerns about the long-term direction of IT."

For Morrison, IT leadership development is just as important as other strategic priorities such as determining long-term IT plans and collaborating with peers on corporate strategy. Maybe more so. "Spending a lot of time on developing talent is the only way to be sure I can execute well," she says.

Cultivation

CIOs who hope to cultivate leaders throughout their organizations must first clearly define the characteristics they're looking for in standouts. For Morrison, it's pretty simple. "One of my favorite characteristics of leadership is courage," she says. "It means being able to take the right risks." ---pb--- What she seeks in her staff is the opposite of what she encountered when she joined US Motorola as CIO in 2005. IT employees in the European division were struggling with an underperforming vendor, and Morrison flew across the pond to assess the situation. "I found they were waiting for someone else to come in and fix it for them," she recalls.

"There should be opportunities for people everywhere in IT to create a difference," says Cramm. "But you have to create a culture that enables people to step up and see leadership as their role." As a CIO herself, Cramm once inherited an IT organization with an excess of "institutional whining" and a seeming scarcity of leadership. "I told them that if they were going to bring a problem up, they had to be willing to take a leadership role in fixing it," she says. "If they could offer some solutions, I would write cheques and arrange for resources." What emerged were employees at every level willing to lead.

US-based BT CIO Al-Noor Ramji values employees who aren't buried in their own work and have a broader view, like his director of customer experience Ian Rosarius. Ramji himself juggles two roles — CIO for BT Global and CEO of BT Exact, the company's research and technology arm. "I sometimes hire people without 100 percent clarity of what role they will do," admits the CIO of the $US34 billion telecom company. "But I know they will bring value."

"Leadership has very little to do with job title," seconds Cramm, "and everything to do with orientation."

So are good leaders sitting in your own IT organization in full bloom just waiting to perform? That's a matter of debate. But at US-based Direct Energy, there's at least as much nurture as nature involved. Kumud Kalia, CIO of the $US7.6 billion energy company, gets great satisfaction from watching his IT leaders outperform expectations but acknowledges other motives are at work. "I have two jobs. I lead the IT function of the company. But as a member of the executive committee, I have a say in how the company is managed," says Kalia. "So I need my employees to step up and do more."

"CIO roles are more and more about delivering business value," agrees Andy Walker, research director for Gartner Executive Programs. "CIOs are assessed by the credibility of their department. They want that breadth of perspective at the level below them and the next level and all the way down."

To that end, Kalia actively broadens the horizons of his 330 IT employees. "I believe in stretching individuals in ways they haven't thought about stretching themselves," he says.

One way to encourage a wider view is through job rotation programs. To that end, Kalia encourages diverse tours of duty. "Developers spend time in the architecture group, project managers rotate through the business transformation group," he says. "It puts them in a context they haven't operated in before, exposes them to new lines of business."

Sometimes cultivating leadership can be as simple as educing a stretch in thinking. "I'll say, 'Hey, that's what you're doing in terms of your IT job. But what about what we're doing as a company?", "That's a stretch if all they think they have to do is develop an application." He pushes his employees to follow through to the logical business end. "Are people using the system? If not, why not? I want them to go that last mile. Then they start to own the business outcomes."

Kalia stretched Hugh Scott, charging him with establishing a new form of IT governance for the company's Texas subsidiary. No technical slouch, Scott started his career as a developer, taking on progressively more senior roles and earning a PhD. But he'd expressed an interest in expanding his business-IT understanding. Scott ultimately created a decision-making forum called the Business Advisory Committee (BAC). It was such a success, the BAC model has been adopted enterprise-wide and Kalia credits Scott with strengthening IT's overall credibility. Kalia was involved throughout, but only as Scott's mentor.

"I talked to him for 30 minutes every week. Sometimes he'd ask for advice and I'd offer it. Other times, I let him make his own mistakes," says Kalia. "I do that with all IT leaders, not just those in management."

But, says Kalia, it's critical to leave space for those "breakthrough moments" burgeoning leaders have to experience firsthand. "They're rites of passage — those transcendental moments when you realize you can stretch yourself," he says. "You just have to keep presenting them with opportunities to get it."