Every organization was transforming into a technology business even before the pandemic ushered in a new era of remote and hybrid working. Digital technologies were radically rebooting relationships with customers and reconfiguring internal operations. As a result, the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) has evolved from running a support service to becoming the pivotal player in the C-Suite — informing decisions that span the effectiveness of sales to operations and logistics to data management, risk and security. However, executing powerful new software tools and assuring that people know how to use them does not transform companies. It’s leveraging new software tools and technology to actually change the way we work that matters. And this is not the role of the CIO alone. As a former CMO myself, I’ve written much on how the role of the CMO can indeed take upon the leadership as the chief growth officer, but not by accumulating more authority or control, but by playing host and sherpa to those critical players who have responsibility for all the various nodes of the network for growth.
So, in the case of the CIO, for them to coach their C-Suite peers to truly transform their organizations, our recent research in partnership with Nutanix, has explicitly identified core competencies that we need to double down on. We’ve all heard of an IQ, Intelligence and Emotional Quotient (EQ)? CIOs need to coach C-Suite peers to improve their Technology Quotient (TQ) while boosting their own Relationship Quotient (RQ) and (BQ) Business Quotient.
Developing the Technology Quotient (TQ)
Wendy M. Pfeiffer, the CIO and SVP at leading enterprise cloud computing business Nutanix, describes Technology Quotient as “the application of technology to every human problem.” At a recent research roundtable Wendy and I hosted of leading CIOs including Fedex, Abbott, and CVS, she said: “Stereotypically, CIOs and Chief Technology Officers are not known as offering the same kind of social and emotional skills as, say, a Chief Marketing Officer or a CEO. But lately what companies need to develop and what C-suite executives need is TQ: a Technology Quotient. It’s the application of technology to all of the human problems that we have as we’re moving forward. It’s a mix of emotional skills, mental skills, and technical skills and translating those into how we show up as leaders and then lead the path forward.” Other CIOs at the roundtable agreed that coaching on technology and innovation — essentially upskilling their C-Suite peers — was an essential step and major challenge. But to truly transform an organization, TQ needs to be improved business-wide, said Sabina Ewing, Global CIO and Vice President Business & Technology Services at healthcare innovator Abbott. Sabina described the pandemic as having the effect of a “digital defibrillator” — forcing organizations to build their digital acumen. But more needs to be done. As Sabina added: “In large enterprises, you have a lot of folks who believe, ‘Well, that’s IT or I’m not technical’. Don’t get me wrong, we will always need specialists in a networking team working on those things. But I do think that there’s a technical acumen expectation that needs to happen throughout the entire enterprise. So when we’re talking coaching, we are charged with helping to drive that increase in technical acumen. To me, it’s as critical as financial acumen in terms of what people are doing day-to-day.” And, as Roshan Navagamuwa, Chief Information Officer at CVS Health added, one key factor behind this need for organization-wide digital acumen is the rise of the technology-savvy digital consumer and customer. So as a result, at CVS, Roshan’s team hosts regular hackathons that mix technological and business leaders to crack the code on nutty business problems. In these sessions, both business and technological acumen are seen as co-creative partners that drive technology earlier into decision-making and coach technological competence into the organization.
Building the Relationship Quotient (RQ)
But to gain permission to invite our business partners to the table and ask for critical time on the executive team agenda, CIOs need to hone what I call their Relationship Quotient. It means you build the personal relationships in the C-suite that make them want to lean in with you can co-create and bring you in earlier in the discussions of disruptive transformation of the business First this requires a mindset shift of who the CIOs team is. Second, the CIO needs to adopt the mindset of Co-elevation through what we call serve, share and care.
Most of us still think of our teams as the people who report to us — but that’s an outdated way of thinking about work. The real question is who do you need to get your job done? That’s your team. Full stop. I don’t care if these people report to you. I don’t care if they’re inside of your organization. One of my foundational practices is Relationship Action Planning. We all have financial plans. We all have a to do list. But where is your Relationship Action Plan? If you recognized that relationships are critical to your success in any organization, if you saw them as the permission to influence, you would purposefully plan and execute this around each key goal you have. Your networked team is an under-curated entity and you need to identify the most critical relationships to your team’s success and invite them into THEIR TEAM. meaning its not even your team, its a co-creation and they are co-leaders of that. Then take a disciplined, proactive approach to deepening and building those relationships. And just like anything else that’s important, you measure it. The mapping of key relationships for change management is not a new idea, but what I don’t see done is put a metric of your progress in place. I use a negative one to five scale. For each individual you need to succeed in your mission. If it’s a negative one relationship, it’s strained. If it’s a zero, they don’t even know about our mission and don’t care about our work. If we hit five, they are under the tent and with us, serving the team’s mission and acting as proactive advocates for the mission, and we care about each other personally to boot! So, when it comes to organizational transformation, who is your team? What are the critical relationships to building momentum within your organization — and where do you and others working with you need to invest time, effort and energy in building a better collaborative relationship? Build that process, metric and time into your agenda proactively.
Some people think that trust is something that can only happen organically or accidentally or chemically. No, it can be engineered purposefully. It must be authentic, but part of Ferrazzi Greenlight’s magic over 20 years has been opening teams that have been broken between each other, that have had resentments between each other, and move them from there to a deep commitment. You solve breakdowns between professional trust built on reputation, personal trust built on values, and structural trust built on organizations, positions, and hierarchies. The critical components are openness and empathy, and the bridge is vulnerability and sharing. Once we have done that, we’ve unleashed the collaboration, we’ve unleashed the candor, we’ve unleashed the peer-to-peer accountability. In a short matter of months of deploying a suite of High Return Practices designed around the core attributes of high performing teams, we’ve tracked a three-to-four-fold lift in the key indicators of performance.
Most of us still think of our teams as the people who report to us — but that’s an outdated way of thinking about work. The real question is who do you need to get your job done? That’s your team. Full stop. I don’t care if these people report to you. I don’t care if they’re inside of your organization. One of my foundational practices is Relationship Action Planning. We all have financial plans. We all have a to do list. But where is your Relationship Action Plan? If you recognized that relationships are critical to your success in any organization, if you saw them as the permission to influence, you would purposefully plan and execute this around each key goal you have. Your networked team is an under-curated entity and you need to identify the most critical relationships to your team’s success and invite them into THEIR TEAM. meaning its not even your team, its a co-creation and they are co-leaders of that. Then take a disciplined, proactive approach to deepening and building those relationships. And just like anything else that’s important, you measure it. The mapping of key relationships for change management is not a new idea, but what I don’t see done is put a metric of your progress in place. I use a negative one to five scale. For each individual you need to succeed in your mission. If it’s a negative one relationship, it’s strained. If it’s a zero, they don’t even know about our mission and don’t care about our work. If we hit five, they are under the tent and with us, serving the team’s mission and acting as proactive advocates for the mission, and we care about each other personally to boot! So, when it comes to organizational transformation, who is your team? What are the critical relationships to building momentum within your organization — and where do you and others working with you need to invest time, effort and energy in building a better collaborative relationship? Build that process, metric and time into your agenda proactively.
Some people think that trust is something that can only happen organically or accidentally or chemically. No, it can be engineered purposefully. It must be authentic, but part of Ferrazzi Greenlight’s magic over 20 years has been opening teams that have been broken between each other, that have had resentments between each other, and move them from there to a deep commitment. You solve breakdowns between professional trust built on reputation, personal trust built on values, and structural trust built on organizations, positions, and hierarchies. The critical components are openness and empathy, and the bridge is vulnerability and sharing. Once we have done that, we’ve unleashed the collaboration, we’ve unleashed the candor, we’ve unleashed the peer-to-peer accountability. In a short matter of months of deploying a suite of High Return Practices designed around the core attributes of high performing teams, we’ve tracked a three-to-four-fold lift in the key indicators of performance.
Becoming a Co-Elevating Team Coach
To become your organization’s transformation coach, you need to go beyond cooperation that slips into collaboration when necessary. The benchmark for the optimal relational dynamics for high performance is the Co-Elevating team. Co-Elevation is a pattern of highly collaborative behaviors. For high-performing teams, the objective is to create a dynamic of constant and unbounded co-creation, one in which interdependent team members share responsibility for crossing the finish line together. They must share accountability for each other’s results, and pick each other up when they need help. Co-Elevation emerged from the work of the Ferrazzi Greenlight Research Institute. The institute is dedicated to applied science: designing interventions and High-Return Practices that draw together primary research from the likes of Oxford, MIT, and Harvard Business School, and real world observations from our 20 years’ experience of coaching the world’s top teams.
Applying TQ and RQ to generate business value
Rich Gilbert, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Aflac, said at the CIO virtual roundtable: “The CIO is really about being able to use digital to drive business — it’s all about business outcomes, whether it’s revenue, cost optimization, or customer experience. All of those things now are on the digital agenda and it’s really up to us to be able to come up with ways to be able to achieve those business outcomes. We are reinventing the way we sell, the way we work, and the way we service our customers, all through the lens of digital.” So whether CIOs are working to develop their peers’ technology acumen, building their own relationship quotient, or becoming the C-Suite’s Co-Elevation coach, the prize remains the same: business transformation.
