The Dangerous Self-Deceptions That Undermine CTO Leadership

The desire of every Chief Technology Officer is to lead his or her organization to success. In this quest, however, most succumb to the convenient illusions that have good sense in theory but end up compromising their performance as leaders. These self-delusions can take different shapes, some of them are internal justifications, and others are underlying strategic errors. The most pernicious thing about these lies is how true they sound. They are psychologically comforting and, at the same time, erode the same results that CTOs are trying to attain.

To the extent that you are only doing what is technical, you are acting as an expensive team head as opposed to an executive leader. Regardless of whether you are competent in the so-called business stuff or think your co-workers would feel better that you remain technical, any kind of limitations that are put upon yourself is a direct limit on the potential effectiveness of your technology organization. In the absence of continuous business-based deliberations, teams lose the context of providing real value and would be absorbed by technology due to its existence. The remedy is boldness: Forcing yourself into business. You should play the position of being upstream in the strategic conversation, and you must learn to convey business effects instead of dominating your counterparts with technical jargon. Technical skills are also exponentially more valuable when used in business.

Although proximity in a team may be healthy, the presence of the family metaphor is a deadly cognitive dissonance. What do you do to underperformance after you have convinced yourself that these were family relationships? This cognition is unhealthy in terms of blurring professional lines. When companies adopt the family-style way of thinking, they tend to:

• Keep bad employees around forever
• Are forced to restructure to suit those who have already gone beyond their job responsibilities
• End up being shocked when good employees decide to change to better jobs naturally

Instead, build high-performing teams: Workplaces do not need emotional coldness but seeing work as work, not as our whole life, helps build healthier relationships and briefer performance expectations.

Annual hackathons are not innovation, it is innovation theater. Majority of hackathons generate stunning photos and social media content without much sustainable value. True innovation requires it to be risk-taken with regularity and experience failures. When creativity is restricted to 36 hours of creativity per year, the teams learn to be machines to complete tasks the rest of the year. True innovation demands a continuous process of experimentation, product intimacy and room to fail to succeed. To produce experiments that shall produce meaningful results, but not necessarily impressive demonstrations, your team must have profound product knowledge.

Adopt sustainable innovation: Have routine periods of innovation so that different groups can test out ideas that have been generated in other parts of the company. Both product mastery and systematic experimentation should be in focus instead of occasional displays.

Groups that continually fulfill their commitments are playing too safe and may not be making an impact. Having completion rates as an obsession without paying attention to the business impact turns teams into feature factories. How many times did you provide all the planned items and find out that the metrics did not change? This narrow-minded way of doing things is the priority given to activity rather than result. By making sprint completion the main metric of your health, you end up with organizations that risk averse and over plan. There is too much caution in perfect certainty and Parkinson law guarantees that teams are going to use every bit of the time assigned to them and this is a negative feedback loop that slows progress over time. Change focus to business impact: Trade delivery policy with impact measurements. Periodically carry out impact retrospectives, so that the team members can feel and observe the significance of their contributions and not merely perform orders.

It is not your task to resist change but rather to create teams that are strong enough to survive in face of uncertainty. There could be rigidity in stable environments, but not in dynamic technology companies. Rigid following of the plans mostly misleads the organizations as the markets turn around them. Instead of resisting change, effective leaders know how to use it. Similar to martial artists, exploiting the force of an opponent, successful technology leaders are able to develop processes that make changes less disruptive and more anticipated.

Establish change-resilient practice: Educate the teams on how to expect changes through the process of disaggregation of work. Substitute prescriptive features requirements with business objectives which permit tactical flexibility without abandoning prior progress.

Waiting to be told something means being a reactor and not a leader. Mature, formalized plans will always make you lag behind the curve in case you are sitting back and waiting to receive them. Leadership demands an injection of self in the strategic conversations so that strategic results are affected. The emphasis on them doing instructions on time instead of being involved in work-shaping discourses places your team in an internal software agency position. Become a business planner: Be responsible to keep on track of organization direction. When it comes too late, analyze how you might have participated sooner than just grumbling over the time of the event.

Your role is to create an effective team and not a comfortable one. Endless comfort does not allow growth to take place. By focusing on happiness and not development, leaders give the message to the team members that they should stay in their comfort zones forever. That is why most CEOs tend to view their technology executives as individuals who are more concerned with feelings of the team rather than business success. Without a successful business, there will be no team to be concerned about. You might only concentrate on the comfort of the team and compose touching posts in social media during the unavoidable layoffs, or you might manage to balance the team building and business requirements before you run out of control. Target coordinated, energized people: Find the people who are intrinsically interested in the challenges the company is facing and have made a commitment to improving it regularly. Assist them to develop by coaching them as opposed to trying to create happiness or motivation.

It is our responsibility to open the gate to the stakeholders and say here is how. There is no such thing as impossible, things can be too costly, or impractical, or dangerous, but these are a matter of a continuum. What is important is your ability to propose viable points on that spectrum that provide business value. Anybody can poke holes through ideas; it does not need engineering skills. Become a negotiator and develop skills in finding ideal solutions and thus avoid being a CT-No. The skill of adroit negotiation with restrictions and the means of finding the just right method is priceless. Learn to think analogically: Exchange yes/no answers with depth of analysis of constraints, trade-offs and risks. Take them as variables that can be manipulated to discover new solutions that can render the difficult demands possible.

Teams that have mediocre technology are leaders in their markets, and startups that have flawless code bases cannot get customers. Technical purity is put in the shade of execution. Giving too much attention to technology and forgetting about the effect on the business distorts a team and encourages work that does not affect significant metrics. Technology is important, however, it is a tool, rather than an end in itself. The more coding is becoming a commodity, the more those whose main focus lies on business effects, even to the point of tolerating some technical debt, will compete better with those who are fixated on technical perfection. Give business justifiable technical work first consideration: There is no technical debt or maintenance work to be prioritized without a business case. Automatically replacing the code with the most recent conventions is a tedious task that takes focus away to real development. By determining and removing these misunderstandings, you can turn around your leadership performance.

The first step to improvement is Honest Leadership Assessment Recognition

All these lies are appealing since they have some truths or they raise valid issues. It is not the underlying issues of which they are representative that are dangerous, but the way in which they have been carrying things out to evade challenging choices in leadership. Good CTOs stand out because they are:

• Business responsible
• Robust team builders
• Impact oriented and not busy
• Have honest views concerning their role and challenges

They realize that leadership involves making people feel out of their comfort zone at times, things never stand still, and that technical excellence cannot exist on its own but is meant to serve the business purpose. The way ahead means being truthful to oneself and bold enough to forego the pleasant error that was believed in to make action effective.