New Leaders and the Need for Quick Wins
CIO has a good Harvard Business Review article about people transitioning into leadership roles. The most interesting part is Van Buren’s response to the question of, ‘What is the most common mistake new leaders make?’
Almost universally, we saw the one mistake that seems most pernicious is having an excessive focus on details. It’s important for managers to know the ins and outs of the projects they may be managing, but if it becomes excessive, they lose sight of the bigger picture of what’s going on in the organization, and they lose the ability to prioritize. The urgent often outweighs the important. This is often true of IT leaders; heavy emphasis on details can be their greatest weakness. Given the highly detail-oriented nature of IT work, it’s very hard not to be constantly supervising.
How true. I’m regularly amazed by the inappropriately high level of interest which organizational leaders take in operational details. I think much of this stems from simple distrust: Leaders don’t trust their teams to properly execute the work. Occasionally this distrust might be truly justified, but usually it’s just paranoia and micromanagement.
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