Deeds Not Words

A friend at AOL once told me “the numbers are the numbers.” His point was that you can’t try to explain away the basic facts of how a person or system is performing. As leaders, we have to remember that is the quantitative improvements to an IT organization that really tell our story.

Our biggest claim to fame can’t be that we produced “guiding principles”  that nobody read, or was instrumental in getting bagels delivered on Thursdays, or was a good guy who could talk sports. It has to be that you measured where you were when you took the job and you have quantifiable measurements of how through your leadership, things got better.

Like my buddy said to me about ten years ago,  “the numbers are the numbers.”

Mission statements and other platitudes

I remember working at a company when a new CIO started. He had great ideas and was very scholarly. He had just come from one of those Gartner type companies that had a wonderful theoretical grasp of IT. After about nine months, he was shuttled out and replaced by a new CIO. His only claim to fame was that he created a document called the “ten guiding principles of IT”. The organization was the same dysfunctional IT that he inherited when he started.

Strategy is critical to helping show an organization where “true north” is so you can align the team around the goal. But after nine months, if all you have to show for yourself is a document, a theme,  or something other than tangible, measurable IT metrics, your vision is nothing more than a wish. As in “I wish they would follow me.”