Curt Cooper, Radiology Partners, IT Director and Service Leader, Networking and Physical Deployment
- When IT leaders fail to seek the input and expertise of their staff, they may struggle to adopt best strategies or retain talented employees.
- IT leaders should show their teams how their contributions support organizational goals and continually seek feedback on projects in progress.
“Because we’re moving so fast, our leadership is struggling to articulate strategies that consider the pace and what happens.”
Curt Cooper believes that when IT leaders fail to demonstrate humility, they can inadvertently cause IT failures. “I think that the ego often prevents good strategy from becoming good policy,” he says. IT leaders who want to project confidence and authority may sometimes behave as if they already have all the answers when they don’t. As a result, they may struggle to fully unlock the potential of their IT teams or retain talented employees. IT leaders may also find themselves making costly mistakes at a time when neither IT nor the business can afford them.
In quickly growing companies, the costs of blocking sources of valuable input can be even higher. Cooper has seen the challenges involved with this dynamic firsthand. “We are growing, by mergers and acquisitions, at almost 250 percent annually. So, we’re on a pace that most organizations don’t ever see. Because we’re moving so fast, our leadership is struggling to articulate strategies that consider the pace and what happens,” he says. Meanwhile, the technical staff doing all the heavy lifting have valuable insights that may be overlooked. Eventually, their feelings of disenfranchisement—or simply the perception that leadership doesn’t know where the organization is going—can lead to higher turnover and loss of critical institutional knowledge at a time when the company can least afford it.
This is an excerpt from 9 Experts on How to Align IT’s Work to Company Strategy. The eBook was generously sponsored by Workfront.
