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At your next IT leadership team meeting, set aside 90 minutes for the following leadership challenge. At the beginning of the meeting, send each leader out on a mission to interview three different people. The people they interview should be part of your IT organization, but shouldn’t report to the person doing the interview (you want to create a safe space to get as honest of an answer as possible). Their task: Ask the three questions below in each one-on-one conversation and bring back unfiltered answers:
- What’s our IT organization’s vision, mission, and current goals/strategies?
- How do you think about our consumers in that framework?
- Tell me about how your current work directly impacts our consumers.
- Tell me how your current work indirectly impacts our consumers.
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Your strategic plan guides every decision you make. A thoughtful examination can help you learn the truth about where you might be investing your organization’s time. Here’s how:
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Pull out your strategic plans, spend an hour with them answering the following questions for each item:
- If we stopped this, would it matter to consumers within the next year?
- In the past three months, what have our consumers needed? Is it on the roadmap? If not, why?
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You pass this test if you identify real, tangible initiatives that consumers would be upset to discover you cancelled. If your examination yields responses that expose your lack of consumer focus, you probably need to re-think your strategic investment choices and redirect your organization.
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As a leader, dozens of things nag at you for more attention. Some have louder voices than others, and without fail, three to four initiatives seem to get the majority of your attention. You can identify those initiatives by looking at your calendar for the last month. Which initiatives demanded the most of your time? Look closely at those initiatives.
- In what direct manner do your top initiatives focus on the consumer?
- In what indirect manner do they focus on the consumer?