Andy Foster learnt the ultimate lesson about leadership towards the end of his career as an officer in the British Army in the late 1990s.
A regimental sergeant major in his battalion once said to him: “Sir, if I hadn’t joined the army, I’d be in prison now with my father and my brother.”
“It really struck me that…if you’re in an environment of leadership, where leadership is valued, mistakes are tolerated and learnt from, there is actually a leader in all of us. That really set me on my journey to do what I do. Without sounding too trite, he [the sergeant] is helping people find the leader that’s already there.”
Staying with the military theme, Foster references a quote attributed to Prussian field marshal, Helmuth von Moltke, which resonated with his experience: “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”
Foster says this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a plan, rather you go into situation knowing that when your plan collides with an external environment and a context you don’t fully understand, things are going to change.
“That really is a template for the way execs need to be thinking, particularly tech execs where what got them to where they are is generally mastering ambiguity, creating structure and creating certainty,” he tells ADAPT.
Today, Foster is the founder and principal at Clarity Partners, a leadership consultancy working with CIOs and other tech leaders in the C-suite. He notes that many of the conversations he had with executives 20 years ago remain much the same.
“I sometimes wonder why it [the conversation] hasn’t moved on; maybe it’s just a different flavour of the same perennial issues,” he says.
These include the ongoing challenge for senior tech execs to earn a seat at the boardroom table and to build a service culture that delivers for the business.
“If we don’t deliver, we can come up with the greatest innovations and clever suggestions about how technology can…execute a strategy but if people aren’t getting their email or internet speeds are slow, we don’t get there. So, execution is essential, things are moving faster now; IT is increasingly becoming the business and in years to come, it will be seamless.”
Understand tech risks, don’t just be a ‘steering committee’
Foster says young execs, the ‘digital natives’ understand that potential of AI. But decision-makers on executive boards “who probably think they know a bit about AI” are wanting to go faster without grasping the associated risks or what’s required to make it work.
“I was talking to one of the top CIOs in government…and he was [saying], ‘Everyone thinks they get AI because they use ChatGPT and therefore, they’ve got an opinion. They want to know why we are not going faster without understanding the risks and governance [requirements],” he says.
Meanwhile, one of Foster’s ‘hobby horse’ issues is the need for technology leadership teams to “step up more as execs.”
“There’s a tendency for tech teams to be, if you like…and I’m going to be contentious here…closer to being a steering committee than being at the top of a pyramid and managing a series of projects.”
In contrast, he says tech leaders need to see themselves as creators of value for their organisations.
“When you see the exec role like that, your raison d’être is your stakeholders, and the only place value comes from is the value you co-create with them.
“Many of the IT leadership teams that I work with, there is the CIO who almost always gets it, there’s a couple of high potentials in the team who get it. Then there are quite often people who are there because of dead person’s shoes [after someone retires or dies] or because tech excellence is valued and so people are rewarded.”
He says those CIOs often find themselves in the executive suite, but not always operating at the level required.
“I think there’s a lot of work to do around building capability in the exec space, particularly as we move into this space where there’s no division between IT and the business.”