IT leadership: 5 ways for CIOs to embrace a coaching role

Change is difficult. There is comfort in inertia. If you think about your morning routine, it’s probably consistent and allows you to get it done on autopilot. Changing your routine forces you to think, which is hard.

Scaling that individual change within a large organization only increases the difficulty and complexity. To make rapid, impactful, and lasting change, people, processes, and technology must work together to generate compelling outcomes or solutions. This creates a “dopamine” effect, rewarding the effort that is required to deliver and sustain the change.

Focusing only on one of those facets would be myopic, as innovation doesn’t happen in a silo; it grows and propagates through collaboration and experimentation within an ecosystem of clients, technology companies, and financial system stakeholders.

CIOs in a coaching role are necessary to see their organizations through the complexity of digital transformation. Here are five ways I embrace this role.

To create an effective strategy, a coach must understand the goals and potential outcomes, which teams need to execute the strategy, and most importantly, the shared culture that defines their reason for existence. In the last year, our team has worked hard to create an infrastructure and ecosystem that powers digital transformation. Past lessons have taught me, first and foremost, that everything we do must align with our overall business strategy and by extension, the vision of the company, which is focused on improving the lives of our clients through inclusion, innovation, and investing.

If the platforms we create don’t align with the immediate and future needs of the company in a way that is quantitative, tracked, and most importantly, “felt” within the organization, it will never receive the support needed to be sustainable and grow.

To ensure this happens, I meet regularly with all stakeholders throughout the organization and across all regions to understand their challenges and needs and to ensure that my initiatives are connected to, and support, theirs.

A coach must always change and build strategy in an agile way, and not just in agile ceremonies but in an intrinsic philosophy and ideology. As we think about technology, we want to model our implementation as any startup would, but with the added benefit of the reliability and resilience that a 236-year-old organization brings. We need to experiment quickly and learn fast.

Using product design techniques and visual requirements management tools, our team conducts discovery workshops to understand and frame problem statements. Once these are defined, the team builds potential solutions, including high-fidelity wireframes and MVPs, and tests and validates the results of their implementation.

Whether through many iterations or just one, the idea is to constantly learn and remodel for new use cases throughout the organization.