Leadership Practices: Sound Advice

There's an excellent article on leadership practices in this month's CIO Magazine from Susan Cramm, an executive coach and president of the coaching firm, Valuedance.

Cramm lists a number of things that IT leaders can do to practice "safe leadership." It seems like motherhood and apple pie, but it's a good reminder of the basics that we so easily forget. This includes the following (I've paraphrased the descriptions in parenthesis):

Foster good relationships (Learn the business and get around more among your customers.)

Forge a shared IT vision, strategy, and tactical objectives (Co-create this with your customers and other IT leaders. Agree on decision responsibilities. Understand the appropriate technical and business areas involved.)

Deliver on time, on budget (But beware of big, waterfall-style projects. Limit the number of projects. Less is more.)

Develop quality solutions (Have appropriately scaled methodologies, frameworks, policies, and tools, but beware.. It's easy to lose credibility here.)

Realize business value from IT investments (Use operational measures meaningful to the business. Measure during and after the project to insure business value is achieved. Hold business partners accountable for insuring benefits realization.)

Here's the full editorial...

Leadership Under the Influence - Editorial - CIO