Spoiler alert: Technical prowess isn’t chief among them. By Butch Leonardson 
One of the more interesting realities of becoming a leader is discovering that how you think is more important than what you know. While what you know helped you become an executive, how you think will determine how well you flourish in your leadership role. This is particularly true for chief information officers. Technical skills and individual excellence help people get promoted or hired into the CIO role. But there, expectations are much different. Being too focused on the technology in your CU can actually limit your effectiveness as a leader. CIOs that develop the following four habits will be more likely to emerge as successful leaders.
- Start with the end staff or member experience in mind and then work back to the enabling technology. This is called “outside-in” thinking. The use of technology with no compelling vision can cause layers of cost to be built up with no cohesive benefits or purpose. Another way of saying this is: “Try to avoid running to new shiny technology objects.” If you focus instead on the resulting experience, you’ll often find the enabling tool already in your shop.
- Become an expert in all of the “pain points” across your CU. Identifying the places where members and staff have a less-than-delightful experience will help you succeed with the first habit of beginning with the end in mind. To learn about the pain points, take an inventory of all your forms (often artifacts of the past), and try to provide the same function in a digital way. In doing so, you may clear out pieces of old processes that cause blockages in workflow today. For example, look at your processes for onboarding members and staff. Is the process an explosion of paper and forms, or a simpler, Amazon-like digital experience? Similarly, continually look to push functionality out to your members via your digital channels.
- Build your innovation program around specific focus areas. Getting to know all of your credit union’s pain points as described above can help you avoid the ineffective “suggestion box” approach to innovation. Each year let the pain points in a high priority revenue or service area help you transform the related processes into an amazing digital experience.
- Think horizontally. I have always thought the CIO needs to be the leader in thinking across the organization. Indeed, information technologies are the rails on which most initiatives run. Another way to say this is: “Be a student of all the lines of business in your credit union so you can help systems and people work together.” For example, your credit union’s information protection effort will get stronger and more useful to members when not only information technology, but also marketing, human resources and legal get involved. In fact, when information protection is a team effort, it can become part of your CU’s brand promise.
At the executive level, trust and imagination need to be present for new habits to gain traction. Imaginations function best when team members trust each other and feel safe considering new ideas. Combine trust, imagination and the discipline of the four habits above, and your CIO will be poised to help lead the credit union to success. Butch Leonardson is director of IT leadership for CUES Supplier member and strategic provider Cornerstone Advisors, Scottsdale, Ariz. Read a previous post by Leonardson, “Get Past 'Swim Lane' Organizational Structures." Leonardson will co-lead CUES School of IT Leadership, slated for Sept. 27-29 in Charleston, S.C. You may also be interested in attending Strategic Innovation Institute I, slated for Sept. 25-30 at MIT.
