Career moves that turn IT managers into business leaders

IT managers eyeing the CIO seat or another executive-level role face plenty of competition, and not just from their technical peers.

"What we're seeing is increasingly over the past 15 years, almost a third of folks getting into the CIO role -- actually probably a little more than a third -- don't come from IT," said Daniel Saroff, group vice president of research and consulting at IDC.

IT leaders who want to become business leaders must step outside their back-office roles and build a portfolio that demonstrates their ability to support strategic enterprise goals. They must be able to communicate with the C-suite and board and learn from their inevitable mistakes as they work their way up.

Two CIOs and a chief people officer with roots in IT spoke to TechTarget about how they built their careers and what IT managers can do today to become business leaders.

Pathways to the top: Rotations, big bets and portfolio wins 

Aspiring CIOs must gain exposure to different parts of the business to break into leadership. CIOs Julie Irish and Megan Hall got that exposure early on in their careers.

Irish, now the CIO of data and analytics company Alteryx, landed her first job at Rolls-Royce, where she participated in a rotation program that put her in a different business unit every six months. As her career progressed, she took on roles focused on implementing business systems, such as Oracle and Salesforce. She said "yes" to taking the lead on more challenging projects that came with more responsibility and oversight of more teams.

Hall's first job out of college was as a bank examiner working for the federal government. She shifted to an internal audit role at a publicly traded company. She started out getting to know the business side before deciding to pursue an IT career.

"I realized that to be able to effectively audit and weigh in on risks and controls, you really have to understand technology," she said.

Hall used her business and IT knowledge to become a leader in the banking industry. She is now the CIO of First National Bank of Paragould, which has branches in Arkansas and Tennessee.

Alternatively, Sakaar Anand started his career as a programmer and engineering leader. He made it a point throughout his career to ask questions and challenge himself.

"I was always comfortable not being in my comfort zone," he said. "If an opportunity came my way, which was a bigger role, a challenging role, I first accepted it and then thought, 'Okay, how will I do it?'"  

That approach led him to his current role: senior vice president and chief people officer at BMC Helix, an enterprise services and operations management company.

Climbing the ladder to leadership roles requires IT leaders to take chances on projects that demonstrate more than just technical expertise. For example, jumping on a project that drives revenue can be a big bet that's worth making.

A new business unit that necessitates an integration project, a line of business that needs technology support to enter a new market or a struggling line of business that needs technology support are all opportunities for IT leaders to find those big-bet, transformational projects, Saroff said.

The people side: Finding mentors and human connection  

As IT leaders build portfolios of successful, transformational projects, they will likely be tasked with overseeing other people. An IT manager's leadership skills can be the stepping stone they need to reach the C-suite level.

"Getting into a manager role is probably one of the biggest transitions for people's careers," Irish said.

Between trying to innovate and handling day-to-day operations, the road to business leadership can stretch IT workers thin. They need to know how to delegate and manage people, a prerequisite to turning IT managers into enterprise leadership.

"We should still own accountability for our function, but we should have really a strong layer of leaders under us who can run their areas very well, who can collaborate with each other so that we as leaders don't have to get into the weeds every day," Anand said.

Mentorship is a very personal matter, Anand said. He likened the mentee-mentor relationship to the kind of connection one has with a lawyer or doctor.

"You're always comfortable being vulnerable with that person," he said.

There isn't a blueprint for building that kind of relationship. IT leaders might find it through formal mentorship programs at their companies. They might build that relationship with a leader in their company by setting meetings, going to lunch and asking questions. They might find it through conferences or industry groups. A mentor relationship might also develop organically with former colleagues or bosses.

Ultimately, most paths to find a mentor require IT leaders to be proactive.

"Don't wait to be given something. Go out and get it if you want it," Irish said.

Mentors and peers on the same path as IT leaders form the foundation of a personal network. That network can then serve as a sounding board and resource for developing the business fluency and IT management skills necessary to fill the CIO role or any other enterprise leadership role.

Business fluency: Translating technology to revenue, risk and growth

Business fluency is central to transitioning to an enterprise leadership role. Any enterprise leader, CFO or otherwise, should be able to read a P&L (profit and loss statement) and know the company's products, market and customers. Learn the metrics that matter to the business: revenue, cash flow and customer acquisition.

"Understand what these business metrics mean to the company, how these numbers are arrived at and then what your contribution is to either driving them up or driving them down," Anand said. 

IT leaders have a natural entry point to learning those business metrics and how IT supports them: business continuity planning. They can grow their knowledge of the business by learning about the people and process elements of business continuity planning, in addition to the technology piece.

"By getting involved in the business continuity planning process, you get to learn a lot more about the different functions and their needs and the dependencies," Hall said.

Gaining business fluency is invaluable, but IT leaders also need to figure out how to be the person who uses this fluency to translate the technical into a message that lands with the rest of the C-suite and the board.

That personal network of mentors and peers can be a good place to test leadership qualities. The first time she served as a CIO, Irish reached out to a peer to ask, "Can I have the slide deck and see what you presented last time?"

Over time, she honed that skill by asking questions and practicing with people who regularly present to boards.

"I've learned over my career to present options," Irish said.

For example, she might talk about leaving a system in place, replacing parts of that system or committing to a complete upgrade. With each option, she'd describe the costs and risks to the business.

Learning from missteps on the road from IT to business leadership 

Stepping outside of the traditional IT sphere and taking on more responsibility has inherent risks.

"But you're not going to be typically successful moving outside your traditional role if you don't take those risks," Saroff said.

Sooner or later, one of those big swings will be a miss. A project will fail to meet its milestones. A transformative initiative won't deliver on the ROI it promised. Irish, Hall and Anand built their careers in different ways, but they offer similar advice for IT leaders looking to follow in their footsteps into enterprise leadership: Know when a project is failing and speak up.

Ego and fear of failure can drive leaders to push a project forward despite signs that it is failing. Recognizing those signs and knowing when to pull the plug is a skill developed over time, Anand said.

"Not all projects will be successful," he said. "We should be able to develop that instinct on when to say no or when to stop it."

When that failure happens, the age-old advice of being honest and taking accountability applies. Without pointing fingers, enterprise leaders should be able to say, "Here's what happened. Here are the parts that I own," Irish said.

Accountability is a big part of leadership, but so is what comes next. Business leaders need to manage expectations around that failure and demonstrate that those mistakes won't be repeated. This part of the job will be familiar to people who have worked their way up in the world of IT.

"One of the things I love about the IT world in general is that there is often a big focus on lessons learned and root cause analysis when things do happen," Hall said.

The lessons learned aren't always black and white. Business leaders need to learn how to thrive in ambiguous territory -- especially given how quickly AI is changing and what it demands of them.

"Know that you will be dealing with problems that you will not have solutions to. Solve what you can solve and manage what you cannot solve," Anand said.

Carrie Pallardy is a freelance journalist with experience writing in cybersecurity, technology and healthcare. She currently covers a wide range of issues relevant to today's CIOs and IT leaders.