The Transformational CIO: Leadership and Innovation Strategies for IT Executives in a Rapidly Changing World

Tone Matters

Yuri Aguiar is a senior partner and CIO at Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide. Finding the right leadership tone in the first 30 days, he says, is not an option—it's an imperative. “If you are hired as a CIO, you are hired to lead; hence not establishing a leadership tone is not an option. Building relationships with the business leaders and forging genuine partnerships is mandatory. Building trust will take much longer, and will depend in a large way on execution, delivery and transparency within the partnerships that are forged early on.”

Here is a great story from Yuri illustrating the need to set the right tone from the get-go:

I vividly recollect one situation that started Day 14 on the job and took a few months to play out.

I had a one-on-one meeting with a senior executive. In the midst of my articulating what I thought would be a good way forward, he candidly reminded me that he'd heard it all before and he really needed to see results from the team. I considered this a formidable challenge as he was extremely technology-savvy and could read through any false pretexts.

With the help of a couple of sharp members of the technology team, we identified two serious challenges within his business unit and set out to address them. We kept the effort relatively low key as the team worked through them. Four months later, when all was said and done, we had people from within the business unit present the resolutions at a review meeting.

The conversation after that was very different. ...