Tara Bucchi, CVS Health, IT Executive Director
- IT teams need a certain amount of decision-making authority to quickly accomplish organizational goals.
- With an enterprise view of everything going on in the organization, IT can create and maintain alignment with business priorities.
“If your employees don’t understand what the priorities and goals of your company are, that’s going to inhibit them from making quick or informed decisions.”
In Tara Bucchi’s view, traditional hierarchical styles of leadership and decision making can frequently contribute to IT missteps and hinder business growth. “Often, you have teams that have to navigate through a long chain of approvals or get their bosses’ buy-in (or their bosses’ bosses’ buy-in). In some
cases, that buy-in is necessary; in other cases, it isn’t. As long as the teams are taking calculated risks, leadership has a responsibility to empower them,” she says.
With this point in mind, Bucchi empowers her team with the information it needs to make smart decisions and execute on the right organizational priorities. “My team members are the experts driving a lot of these activities. If the decision involves something that I really do not need to approve or if the risk associated with something is low, I empower my team to go forth and make those decisions,” she says. “If IT experiences a set-back we learn from it, we correct it, and we move on from there. But, if we do not allow teams to make those decisions independently in the first place, then things move a lot more slowly. Once you show empowerment within the team, you build trust and start to see team members become more motivated. You see more engagement on those activities, as well.”
This is an excerpt from 9 Experts on How to Align IT’s Work to Company Strategy. The eBook was generously sponsored by Workfront.
