The problem I have is that most IT managers are recruited from the technical areas and therefore have already been trained to be process and rational driven.

You’re right Ameel, they can be dangerous and cause people to feel safe that they’ve ticked the right boxes. It’s the reinforcing your world view mentality.

I feel that it’s time these publications begin to move into the real issues affecting our industry.

We’ll have to talk more about your “Leadership” course. I picked all this up from the Mt Eliza Senior Leadership Program I did the other week. It was insanely enlightening and insightful. Certainly not easy though.

There’s definitely scope to change the way our industry works and is viewed. That is what is so exciting for me at the moment! :-)

On the other hand, lists such as these have the potential to be downright dangerous because bad managers look at them, tick their points off one by one, and then lull themselves into a false sense of security and accomplishment of a project well-managed. The results of that are often catastrophic. Decent managers learn from this while the bad ones go buy next year’s edition of “management” books and repeat the process all over again.

Meanwhile, thanks for taking the discussion to the next level. Heifetz is awesome (we read some of this stuff in our ‘Leadership’ course) and those links are really useful.

Adaptive Leadership is particularly important for the IT department, I think, because IT is often seen as a service and support function instead of an enabler and implementer of business strategy. If you manage to move the IT department (of a non-tech company) from the former to the latter category — both in the eyes of the IT department as well as the rest of the company — then you really doing a good job as a leader :)

Haven’t finished the piece yet. Hopefully I’ll get more time on it next week. Next steps are to sand it all back and prepare it for staining or oiling. Not sure which I’ll do yet. Will post again once it’s all finished.