Thursday, February 13, 2014

Is your board room just an echo chamber?

Are CIOs (and other executives) simply listening to their own voices echoing off the boardroom walls?

You may want to weigh in on an excellent posting from Jim Anderson on "The Accidental CIO", an occasional (sort-of biweekly) blog that usually has something insightful to say.   This week's edition is about how a CIO can engage in effective listening, and how to tell whether that is working.

I think if the CIO has gotten to that step, the organization is already in the top quartile.  Two-way conversations are important. But a workplace is going to be dysfunctional if it can't even handle one-way communication.

As a consultant for most of my career, and a government manager for the rest of it, my perspective is probably skewed; people don't often hire consultants to help improve things that are working well.  They hire consultants to fix things that are broken.  Very often, the executives want help with better oversight mechanisms (governance!) because from their perspective it appears that the organization is simply backsliding on carrying out their instructions, policies and strategies.  And more often than not once you start poking around you find that the rest of the floundering organization is frustrated that nobody seems to be in charge of it (or there is a little cabal doing back-room deals, which in practice amounts to the same thing).

I've always been astonished at the results of a simple test.  In any open meeting, have people fill out a blank 3x5 card (no hints) with what they think the CIO's top 3 priorities are (this works for any leader, really) .  Then have the CIO reveal what he/she thinks they are.  Then reveal what the people thought.  The revealed gaps - if any - tell you all about whether there is any open communications channel at all.

I suppose one could vary this to test for upward communication too.  How do you do that?

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