The Monthly “12 CIO Personas” Book Turning: CIOs as “Chief Influence Officer” Jan. 2019

The digital CIOs have to wear different colors of hats and master multiple leadership personas and management roles effortlessly.

This book “12 CIO Personas: The Digital CIO’s Situational Leadership Practices” is the extensive brainstorming and logical content expansion of my book “CIO Master: Unleash the Digital Potential of IT,” to reimagine and reinvent CIO leadership via practicing multitudes of digital influence. The important thing is that CIOs as the top leadership role must have a strong mindset, a unique personality, and a clear idea of what needs to be done, yet creative enough to not hold the company back from growth. Regardless of which personality they have, digital CIOs need to be both transformational and situational, innovative and tactical, business savvy and technology insightful, communication-effective and operation-efficient. Here is a set of blogs to brainstorm CIO as “Chief Influence Officer.”

CIOs as “Chief Influence Officer”

The Digital CIO’s Leadership Magnetism: The digital CIO is the top leadership role, how CIOs provide the appropriate leadership and how they convey to leverage IT for the business value depends on their vision, leadership strength, and style. A highly influential leader has magnetism. More specifically, what’s the CIO’s leadership magnetism to become the “Chief Influence Officer” -to make leadership influence at the scope of the entire business or even the industry?

The CIO as “Chief Influence Officer”: How to Calibrate Your Impact: Organizations of the future are increasingly exhibiting digital characteristics in various shades, colors, extensiveness, and intensity. IT is the linchpin of running a digital business. The modern CIOs play a crucial role in driving changes and leading digitalization. The degree of leadership influence is much more complex than the leader’s title or personality. Highly effective CIOs are independent thinkers, unbiased communicators, flexible managers, and relentless change agents. They need to have the ability to “calibrate their impact,” being able to lead through influence, not by brute forces.

Digital CIOs’ Three Practices to Amplify Leadership Influence? With the exponential growth of information and emerging digital technologies, CIOs will continue to be put on the front line for driving innovation and leading digitalization. They need to ensure their organizations are ready for change, space and time are made to scope, plan and execute. CIO role should be continually reinvented to fit for the new digital paradigm shift. IT leaders have to play multiple personas and leverage multidimensional management disciplines to explore the breadth and depth of the role and go deeper in order to lead forward. Here are CIOs’ three digital practices to amplify their leadership influence.

CIOs as "Chief Influence Officer": Three Views to Enforce CIO Leadership Influence With overwhelming growth of information and fierce competition, now we are approaching the inflection point in which businesses are facing accelerating changes and can be disrupted even overnight. The digital CIO is no longer the tedious management role to keep the lights only now, there are many critical leadership traits in digital CIO; there’re many roles they have to play for leading IT up to the next level of organizational maturity. Here are three views CIOs can provide to enforce leadership influence.

The New Book “12 CIO Personas” Chapter 12 Introduction: The CIO as “Chief Influence Officer”: The Digital Era makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people to process, to technology, both horizontally and vertically. In many forward-looking organizations, IT plays a pivotal role in such a radical transformation. The CIO also becomes a strategic leadership role in conveying the digital vision and co-create business strategy and reinventing IT as a growth and innovation engine of the organization. More specifically, visionary CIOs play the following unique role:

Modern organizations have their own sophistication with silo functions, the sea of information, and the pool of talents. The CIO is an inherently cross-functional role, to bridge the business and IT; the data and insight, the business’s today and tomorrow. The digital CIOs have to wear different personas and master multiple leadership and management roles effortlessly. They need to lead at the strategic level for conducting a complex digital orchestra; they should be handy managers to plumbing information and keep it flow smoothly; they also have to be like the diligent gardeners, to build a unique IT landscape via tuning technology, removing waste, nurturing culture, and empowering people.

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