Top Three IT Leadership Mistakes

Let's imagine a scenario where you are leading a team of very senior IT professionals whether it is Enterprise Architects or even an offshore software development team. Bet you didn't know you repeatedly make the following mistakes...


You Don’t Involve your people in Important Decisions
Sometimes, we forget what it feels like to be an individual contributor and leave the people who have the most to offer out of key decisions. Although making decisions on the fly probably allowed your company to grow large enough to actually hire people, continuing to run the company AROUND your employees instead of WITH them will eventually chase away any talented people you may have managed to attract. When employees don’t feel included in decisions, they will distance themselves not only from your initiatives, but from your company as a whole. If you’re going to hire smart, qualified and motivated people to take your company to the next level, you can’t be afraid to use them.

You Don’t Allow them to Challenge Your Ideas
Companies managed by people who realize they don’t know everything ALWAYS outperform those managed by people who think they know it all. The fact is, great leaders don’t simply allow their employees to question them; they DEMAND to be questioned. Unfortunately, the first instinct of many is to borgify their employees, stifle conversation and to react negatively toward employees who challenge them. Regardless of company size, the courage to stand in front of employees and say “Tell me why my idea won’t work” is something every manager should have, but very few do.

You Add Friends and Relatives to the Payroll
Adding friends and relatives to your company, especially in key positions is the single most damaging thing a manager can do when it comes to their credibility with other employees. Imagine a scenario where all of a sudden, everyone seems to have worked for Accenture in the past (and you haven't). Do you think that employees will feel like they got a shot at getting the same promotions? As I have mentioned dozens of times before, hiring friends and relatives can be a significant demotivator to existing employees who have spent years trying to earn your respect, a decent raise, or a spot on the management team.

Top Ten Mistakes a CIO makes in selecting an Outsourcing Firm

10. Insufficient internal expertise to understand the systems being outsourced in enough detail, and consequent inability to manage the outsourcer effectively.

9. Underestimating the amount of effort it requires within your own company to manage the relationship with the outsourcing firm. It isn't true that you can eliminate one position for every position outsourced. Instead, you need to have staff allocated to negotiate and manage the relationship. You also need staff to quality-control the results of the outsourcing firm. How will you know that they are doing a creditable job otherwise?

8. Allowing price to override quality.

7. Unmatched Culture fit: Granted you can outsource and in order for the relationship with the outsourcing firm to last long-term they have to have similar values and be a culture fit with you organization. In some cultures it is very rude to say No so they may always say Yes but fail to deliver on time. Insufficient understanding of cultural differences can cause huge problems.


6. Selecting the wrong outsourcing model. For example: moving the work to India when the work requires extremely close client supervision. Remember: offshoring and outsourcing are not synonyms. Work that requires very close client supervision may be better handled domestically or near-shore by the outsourcer so that client personnel can easily and inexpensively travel to the work site and where daily communication is cheap.

5. Selecting an outsourcer whose core competencies do not include the one you need. You don't order pizza in a Chinese restaurant, no matter how good the Moo Goo Gai Pan is. Just because an established BPO is well-respected in other spaces does not mean they have any real experience with what you need.

4. Assigning too many people to interface with the outsourcer. If my outsourcer has deployed (per the contract) 7 supervisors, an Operations Manager, a QA/Trainer guy, and an Executive liaison, and I assign 16 people to interface with them... Well, how many meetings per week can my 16 people set up with the 10 management people running the outsource shop? Lots of them! And 16 people can ask for lots of read-outs and create many programs and action plans to boot. How much time will the supervisors have left to coach their people?

3. Not focusing enough attention on downstream cost implications and focusing all of the attention and effort on forcing the outsourcing firm to provide upfront cost relief. Achieving significantly reduced resource rates without putting in place protections against subsequent increases to the resource rates will quickly diminish the value achieved in solely pushing on the resource rates from a total cost perspective.

2. Squeezing every penny out during negotiation, which results in zero flexibility and thus unforeseen costs. It is simply impossible to foresee every possible scenario in a SLA.

2. Impact on morale of the organization - If outsourcing leads to any immediate layoffs, the consequent impact on the morale of the organization and its impact on productivity

1. The first question that a CIO needs to understand is, "Why outsource?" What are the goals of outsourcing, has the cost benefit analysis been done, have the risks been understood, are proper strategies in place to manage risk and maximize productivity? Very often this exercise has not been done properly.

Does your Boss care about your Personal Growth?

During annual review time, employees are passionately thinking about ways to complete the "growth" section of their annual review, but always seem to stop short of asking whether their boss actually cares about their personal growth making any thoughts in this regard futile...



Throughout one's career, one will have some really great bosses and others that leave a lot to be desired. So, as to not publicly point out shortcomings of anyone I worked with in the past or even my current boss for that matter, I will use examples of situations in which I was the boss and others reported to me.

The one thing that you will know about me as a leader is that I deeply care about the personal growth of anyone and everyone reporting to me. If you look at my profile on LinkedIn, there are at least a dozen testimonies to this regard. Without stroking my ego too much, the reason I think I have been successful in this regard is that I have figured out that a precursor to growth is the notion of autonomy.

In order for a person to grow, they can't be too closely controlled and many of my direct reports either consciously or subconsciously view control as the main growht opportunity. This doesn't mean that you can't control those who report to you, but rather acknowledging the simple fact that you cannot control someone completely.

Autonomy isn't something that should be doled out like a reward but rather something that is openly given if you genuinely care about the growth of people reporting to you. Autonomy can come in many forms from allowing a person to choose their work style, work location and even methods for collaboration. Giving people more leeway is the catalyst to enabling hypergrowth amongst members of your team.

It is vital that a person be allowed to make mistakes! If your direct reports have control only to the extent that they make the same choices as you would, then you need to acknowledge that they really didn't have any choices/options at all.



Many of the worst managers I have ever had the privilege of reporting to fail to acknowledge that the question of control comes up primarily in choice of methods to get work done. As designer/architect of the organization which you control, you may believe that it is your responsibility to select how each task should be undertaken. Should the financials, the solution, the deliverable, etc be presented in a simple PowerPoint or better as a combined Word/Excel document.

Ask yourself what you would do, but more importantly ask yourself what happens when team members decide otherwise. Let's face it, your team is it in for growth and the choices you as boss are making don't allow them to grow. That's why they will continue to look to approach work in a different way than you.

In order to keep control, you have to give it up. You have to use your authority so sparingly that no one notices that it's being used. You have to create a real sense that control is not completely centralized in your hands, but spread generously over the whole of your organization...