1. CIO Executive Council
Transformational Leadership in
Information Technology
Vince Kellen
Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium
vkellen@cutter.com
Copyright Vince Kellen, 2008. This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for this material to be shared for
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2. Agenda
Current context: the whipsaw of change
What is transformational leadership?
Why do we need transformational leadership needed?
What are the implications for IT?
How do I develop transformational leaders?
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3. Change
The only thing that seems stable is the
overused truism that change is
permanent
What is also not in dispute is that the
rate of change has accelerated and is
continuing to increase
The effects of the increase in the rate of
change are being felt in all aspects of
life: personal, careers, social structures,
governments, environment
The increase in the rate of change is
without precedent in human history. We
are all pioneers
3
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4. Speed of change today
Human adaptation occurs as fast as information can be spread,
understood and applied
The rate at which information flows is limited by this human cycle of
knowledge creation and adaptation
• With modern IT-enabled communication, this rate is now minutes and
days not years (or millennia)
– Diffusion of inventions (Internet versus the television versus farming)
– Product development lifecycles
– Birth and death of companies (YouTube took a year to get $1.6 billion in value)
– Breadth of market declines
Human organizations will naturally seek faster rates of change as they
attempt to outwit competitors
Widespread availability of information (which IT is providing) ought to
stabilize markets and ecosystems but
• People and firms differ in how fast they can incorporate new information
and change their models that guide their actions
• There will be big differences in how humans apply information
• Synchronized biases may skew change
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5. A tale of two markets
1929* 2008*
• Sep 3: the Dow was 381 • Aug 28: the Dow was 11,715
• Nov 13: the Dow was198 • Nov 20: the Dow was 7,552
• Drop: 48% • Drop: 36%
• Maximum one-day volume: 16,410,000 • Max 1 day volume: 11,456,230,400
Note: after the 1929 crash, the Dow fell to a low of 41 in July, 1932. The Dow did
not return to pre-1929 levels until late 1954, and was lower at its July, 1932 level
than it had been for several decades prior to 1929
Implications
• This drop is not like 1929
• IT enables 1,000X the amount of volume
• Time will tell, but IT may enable much faster adjustments
*Source: Yahoo! Finance
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6. Increased rate of change
Chaos 1
Entropy
Time
Order 0
You can visualize it this way
Rate of change
Or
This way
Time
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7. Implications
Organizational stress
• Organizations are laying off and decimating their workforces
• Employee’s left standing need motivation
• Knowledge worker productivity can degrade significantly
• Team productivity can also degrade
Antidote
• Leaders who can motivate and inspire organizations to new levels
• Transformational leadership!
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8. What is transformational leadership?
Transformational leadership is a leadership style where leaders
and followers engage each other and rise to new levels of
motivation, morality and performance
Transformational leaders offer a purpose that transcends short-
term goals and focuses on higher-order intrinsic needs
Under transformational leadership, the purpose of leaders and
followers, which start out separate, become fused
Transformational leaders help followers grow and develop into
leaders by responding to their individual needs, empowering them,
and aligning individual goals and objectives with the larger
organization
Sources: Transforming Leadership. James MacGregor Burns. Grove Press. 2003 and Transformational Leadership, Second Edition. Bernard M.
Bass & Ronald E. Riggio. Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates, Inc. 2006.
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9. What is transforming?
Is it:
Patterns of Human
Environment
thought behavior
Or is it:
Human Patterns of
Environment
behavior thought
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10. Breaking down change
Proactive
What type of
Quadrant 2 Quadrant 1
Planned, self-generated, Planned, self-generated,
change are we
significant change incremental change seeing today?
-Change in core competencies -Continuation of core
-Fundamental break from old competencies
assumptions -Continued reliance on existing
assumptions
Discontinuous Incremental
Quadrant 4 Quadrant 3
Unplanned, imposed, and Unplanned, imposed,
significant change incremental change
-Market crashes -Competitor product strategy shifts
-Dramatic competitor moves -Smaller changes in customer
-Significant regulatory or needs
environmental change -Regulatory updates/minor changes
Reactive
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11. Reacting to disruptive change
Why do we get stuck in repeatable patterns of reactive, disruptive
change?
• Avoidance of what is challenging and stressful
• “Turfdom” and other facts of organizational life
• Natural human defensiveness to change agents from within
• Too lean. It is more efficient in to short run to not spend the time to
avoid (or plan) disruptive change
• The current workload prevents management from attending to leading
change
IT has a role to play in helping organizations with change
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12. Transformational leadership breeding ground
What values What values
do leaders do followers
profess? Gap see in use?
The gap between principles (values professed)
and practice (values in use) gives rise to
tension. Transformational leaders close the gap.
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13. Breaking transformational leadership down
Idealized influence (II)
• Leaders behave as role models that followers wish to emulate
• Leaders are admired, respected, trusted with high moral/ethical conduct, are consistent rather than arbitrary
• Followers believe leaders to have persistence, determination, extraordinary abilities
• Leaders are willing to take risks
Inspirational motivation (IM)
• Leaders behave in ways that motivate and inspire those around them
• Leaders arouse team spirit
• Leaders get followers involved in envisioning attractive future states
• Leaders demonstrate commitment to goals
Intellectual stimulation (IS)
• Leaders stimulate followers efforts to be innovative and creative by questioning assumptions and reframing problems
and looking at old situations in new ways
• No public criticism of individual member’s mistakes
• Leaders solicit new ideas and creative solutions from followers, who are included in the process
Individual Consideration (IC)
• Leaders pay special attention to each individual follower’s needs for achievement and growth
• Leaders act as coaches or mentors
• Followers and peers are developed to successively higher levels of potential
• Individual consideration is practiced when new learning opportunities are created
• Leader’s behavior demonstrates acceptance of individual differences in followers
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14. Other leadership styles
Contingent reward (CR)
• Leader assigns or obtains follower agreement on what needs to be done with promised
or actual rewards offered in exchange
• Rewards can be transactional (e.g., bonus) or transformational (recognition, praise)
Management by exception (MBE)
• Can be active (MBE-A) or passive (MBE-P)
• In active MBE, leader arranges to monitor potential deviances from standards, mistakes
or errors in follower assignments and takes corrective action (e.g., action in anticipation
of deviances)
• MBE-P implies leaders waiting passively for deviances or errors first and then taking
action (e.g., only action after a complaint)
Laissez-faire (LF)
• LF is the avoidance or absence of leadership
• Necessary decisions are not made
• Leadership responsibilities are ignored
• Authority remains unused
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15. Full range of leadership styles
Effective
The 4 I’s
(II, IM, IS, IC)
CR
Passive MBE-A Active
MBE-P
LF
Ineffective
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16. Implications for IT
We need to leverage transformational leadership practices to increase performance levels
• Type 1 improvements: Get IT to find new price/performance levels in its own work
• Type 2 improvements: Help the business in configuring and using IT to achieve firm-wide
performance improvements
We need to help stop the cycle of avoidable, large-scale disruptive change
• Planning periodic change, enterprise architecture life-cycle planning
• Challenging current architectures and assumptions at proactive and perhaps predefined intervals,
even ahead of retirement
• Continued assessment of the capabilities and skills of our staffs
• Monitor the perceived gap between principles and practice as followers see them
• Embracing “irritants of change”
We need to avoid impediments
• Leadership development takes time. Investments in leadership development need to be sustaining
• Examine and address IT organization and firm-wide cultural problems
• Senior IT leaders need to be visible and actively supporting/driving leadership
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17. Desired Outcomes
Team
++ Expertise Team Expertise =
Benefit
Superior ++ IC, IS, IM, II
Solution ++ Passion/role alignment
++ Team/passion ensemble
++ Team self-assessment
Can individuals and teams accept
being average?
0 ++
Cost
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18. How do I develop transformational leaders?
Develop required skills in staff
• Critical evaluation, assessment and problem detection skills
• Envisioning the future, brainstorming, creativity skills
• Communication (speaking, writing, interpersonal) skills for conveying a vision
• How and when to empower others
• Impression management (getting others to see demonstrated the leadership behaviors)
• Motivational speaking skills, empathy skills
Offer leadership development programs to staff
• In-house and via third parties (SIM, CIO Executive Council, other organizations)
Critically examine your own and others leadership skills
• Use mentors/coaches to provide brutal feedback
• Survey instruments can be useful
• Assess your strengths (e.g., Gallup’s Strengths Finder)
• Reflect on your own successes and failures
Remember leadership development is a long-term proposition
• It is an investment in the future
• You will develop additional leadership capacity over time
• You will achieve improved outcomes
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19. Summary
Current conditions will continue to stress IT leaders
Focusing on applying transformational leadership concepts can
improve IT performance and motivate IT workers
Long-term, transformational leadership within IT can provide
benefits to the whole organization, especially in IT-related process
improvements, or IT intensive organizational restructuring
Organizations need transformational leadership everywhere!
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20. Questions and hopefully answers
Questions?
I am available for questions and follow up at:
• Email: vkellen@cutter.com
• Phone: +1 (630) 715-6017
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