Insurance in any country is a domestic business, so if you work in a traditionally conservative country like Japan you have to walk a tightrope as leader. On one side of the tightrope is the tactical aspect of leadership. On the other is the marketing side.
As an IT leader, think of yourself as a politician. Once you build your strategies and develop your vision, you are off on the campaign trail. Even when you are with staff inside IT, you are marketing your decisions, especially in a country where open source technologies only took off about five years ago. You’ve got to inspire, you’ve got to motivate, and you’ve got to push and pull.
Introverts unite!
If you’re anything like me (and I think my natural state is an introvert), you have to will yourself on a day-to-day basis to be on the IT campaign trail, to be walking around, talking to people, telling your story, explaining your vision. What I find interesting is that when I have meetings with various groups of stakeholders and then talk about some of the things that we’ve done as an IT organization, their response is “This is great, you should be telling people about this. Why don’t you tell people about this?” In my mind I think, “I thought we had!”
That’s why every IT campaign needs campaign managers to help spread the message. These IT champions can exist at every level of the organization. To find mine, I have spent time to meet all 200 people in my IT group at least twice, for at least 30 minutes each. I want to build an affinity in terms of who they are and to give them a sense of who I am. I also want to articulate, on a one-to-one basis, my vision and my thought process.
That’s crucial because in any organization, especially when you’re leading through change, there are going to be those who agree, those who don’t agree, and those who sit in the middle and don’t know which way to go. They need to know that there is a method to what might look like madness, and there is a reason for the kind of moves we need to make.
Then whether people agree or not, they still have an ability or an opportunity to have some kind of voice and a say in what’s happening. That helps enormously. But make no mistake, it’s a heavy load, because as a senior executive you have to manage your peers and you have to work with your peers to help them visualize where you want to go from a business perspective and how technology can help them. You’re constantly on alert, and especially now as the security landscape becomes a lot more threatening, you have to manage to it. And what helps lessen that burden is if you have those champions, those campaign managers, in the organization. I can’t overstate it enough: having strong leaders beneath you building a strong pipeline is essential for success.
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