Leadership and IT

This blog grew out of a number of presentations that were made at the ACM SIGUCCS Management Symposium in Spring 2009 , the EDUCAUSE Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference in Winter of l 2010, and SunGard Summit 2011. It is based on the book "Lincoln on Leadership" by Donald T. Phillips. Please add comments on how you feel these principles can be applied to Information Technology.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Leading

Lincoln lead by being led. He was a strong proponent of empowering his generals to make their own decisions. He gave them credit for their successes and took the blame for his generals' failures. He listened to his generals and staff and valued their opinions. He also made sure that his generals got the credit they deserved so they could take pride in their results. Finally, he only used his position of power when it was absolutely necessary. Can you give some examples of making sure credit for the success of IT projects was given to the teams involved. Have you had times that you used the power of your positon to get something done? Do you believe that a good manager has the best job in the world since as Casey Stengle would say "I get credit for watching other people hit home runs"? Do you have examples of you making sure the spotlight of success was on the team implementing the project and on the organization as a whole and not necessarily the CIO or the directors involved. Do you feel that this is a good principle?
Posted by at

2 comments:

  1. allanApril 27, 2009 at 1:16 PM

    a counter example would be Eisenhower, who put forth aggressive nuclear proliferation plans (MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction) via Dulles, and let the latter take credit and the blame for it. Kind of interesting.

    Lincoln also was a bit slow to stop being led. McClellan was terrible, especially if you read Team of Rivals to see just how terrible.

    I try very hard to put the successes of the group upon the group, and try to be just the mouthpiece most of the time. My staff is more comfortable when I do the talking to the school.

    Our university CIO is also fairly hands-off so it's neither here nor there.

    ReplyDelete
  2. TimApril 30, 2009 at 5:39 PM

    I agree that it is important to make sure the group implementing a project getsthe spotlight. It is also important to understand the personalities of your direct reports since there are some as Allan points out that are more comfortable when someone else does the talking while many of my best leaders enjoy and excel when they are in the spotlight.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)