Management Consulting

Any manager is only as good as his or her team. I'm pretty sure that we've all heard this before. However, that leaves us in a bit of a bind - more often than not we are just handed a team and told the make the most of them. However, it turns out that over time we have the ability to reshape and mold our team based on who we choose to add and remove from it. Learning how to do this the right way is what can determine the ultimate success of a manager.

All too often CIOs can get caught up in all of the technical details of the job: boosting uptime, replacing servers, guarding against cyber criminals, etc. What we tend to forget is that IT exists to serve the rest of the business and they are there (in most cases) to make money. This means that there needs to be a business side to IT and that is one of a CIO's key responsibilities.

At the heart of being a CIO is the responsibility to manage an entire department of technical professionals. It is your job to provide an overall direction for the department to move in and when problems arise, and they always do, you are going to have to work with your staff in order to create solutions.

As an IT manager, one of your most valuable possessions is your career. At your firm, you are the only person who is going to be spending any time worrying about your career: how's it going, what is your next step, what could you be doing better? These are all vital questions for you to be able to answer if you want to advance in your career.

Project Management: Influence and Leadership includes three proven fundamentals to unlock the secrets of leadership, influence, and stakeholder communication management! Imagine that you master the magic of influence and are able to successfully lead and manage stakeholders. Imagine that you have a clear path of how to accomplish it.

Every company wants to grow and become more successful. There is no magic formula to make this happen, but it is generally agreed that in order for this to happen the company cannot stand still. Instead, they always have to be trying new things and growing.

Isn't technology a wonderful thing? As CIO you are in charge of one of the most technologically sophisticated parts of the company. It's very easy to fill your days dealing with issues regarding servers, networks, routers, switches, firewalls, etc. However, it turns out that if you do this, then you'll be overlooking one of the most important tasks that a CIO needs to accomplish: communication. This book has been written in order to show you what you need to be doing in order to get your message out.

Leadership is one of those things that we all think that we know what it is, but we are hard pressed to describe it to someone if they ask us. This makes picking the next generation of leaders that much harder. We want them to have the leadership skills that we know that they need, but how can we make sure that they have them? Some IT managers revert to using the time-tested trial-by-fire approach, but is this really the best way?

En la raíz de los problemas específicos de cualquier empresa subyace la dinámica de la asignación del reconocimiento y la culpa. En muchas oficinas la gente siente que está en medio de un juego de alto riesgo en el que puede "culpar o ser culpado", y en el que tiene que luchar no solo por hacer un buen trabajo, sino por conseguir el crédito que merece por hacerlo. La dificultad radica en que muchas empresas fomentan una cultura de la culpa.

I happen to think that being a product manager is one of the best jobs out there. I find it to be very satisfying because I'm in charge of the success of a product. If I do the right things, then my product will be selected by a large number of customers and it will solve their problems. If I don’t do my job right, my company will probably decide to stop offering my product after a while. Ultimately, my career is in my hands.

As the world has become more and more digital, the importance of the role of a CIO within a firm has increased. No longer can CIOs be content to focus exclusively on technical topics. Instead, we now have to consider what the company's goals are and how technology can be used to help the company achieve those goals.

Nichts ist schmerzlicher als zu beobachten, wie sich Führungs- und Leitungsverantwortliche abmühen und dennoch keine oder nur marginale Gefolgschaft bei den von ihnen Geführten gewinnen. Im Gegenteil, die Geführten verweigern ihre Gefolgschaft. Strategien, Visionen, Ziele und Strukturen werden im Kreise der Führenden aufwendig erarbeitet. Alles ist durchdacht, jetzt müsste es doch funktionieren?! Doch das Ergebnis stellt sich nicht ein. Die Geführten trauen ihren Führern nicht!

Every company wants to grow and become more successful. There is no magic formula to make this happen, but it is generally agreed that in order for this to happen the company cannot stand still. Instead, they always have to be trying new things and growing. In an IT team, in order to make this kind of growth occur, innovation has to be encouraged to happen. All too often the workers on the team can get too involved in their day-to-day tasks to spend any time thinking about innovation. That's where the IT manager has to step in.

In order to be a success, a CIO needs to be able to find and work with partners. These partners have to be committed to the same things that the CIO is: the overall success of his or her company and IT department. However, finding the right partners can be quite a challenge. All too often alliances don't work out. CIOs need to take the time and study why some of these relationships are successful while others are not.

An IT manager's budget controls what he and his team are going to be able to accomplish this year. No, creating a budget may not be the most enjoyable thing that you'll be called on to do, but it just might be the most important. The challenge that a lot of IT managers have when it comes to creating a good budget is that it requires them to master a number of terms and concepts that they may never have encountered in school.

An IT manager is only as good as his or her team is. This means that one of the most critical skills that an IT manager has is the ability to build the perfect team. The better a team that you can build, the better your team is going to make you look!

In order to be successful as an IT manager, you need to be able to show the company that under your leadership your team is able to deliver high quality products on time and under budget. If you want to have any chance of being able to pull this off, then you are going to have to discover ways to build a high performance IT team.

All too often we find ourselves in the position of being an IT manager with little or no training on what it takes to correctly staff a team. This is a critical skill for us to have. Ultimately, the success of an IT manager rests on how his/her team preforms. You might think that staffing is all about hiring the right people to come and join your team. It turns out that there is a lot more to this. Staffing involves attracting and retaining the right people. However, it also deals with knowing when it is time to let the wrong members of your team go.

In today's fast-paced Information Technology (IT) field, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are being asked to do more than ever. No longer is it enough to just make sure that the company's various servers and email systems are up and operating correctly, now CIOs have to play a role in setting the company's overall strategic direction.

In Rethink Everything we walk with Kristi Turner in each season of her career journey through corporate management, as she shares poignant notes to self, illustrating how they influenced her life decisions. As Turner shows, from the slightest whisper to the most dramatic experiences, life’s micro moments’ drive our soft- and hard-coded belief systems, which in turn inform every choice we make in life and define how we lead ourselves and others.