ways your it team makes you look like a hero

No one likes to be criticized, but IT leaders need to manage and grow their team. If you, as an IT leader, can comfortably describe areas where team members need to improve to meet your expectations, in a way that is constructive and honest, without a hint of malice, then what you are giving them is the gift of growth, advised Thom Langford (@ThomLangford), CISO, Publicis Groupe. Their personal growth is something they will always respect you for. Do this badly, and they will continue to do what they want, despite the impacts on the team and you.

IT teams create heroes through effective project planning, said Steve Prentice (@stevenprentice), senior writer, CloudTweaks. Proactive planning is not simply about managing a schedule; it is about giving peace of mind to end users, who in turn will be less prone to demanding instant action. People who feel comfortable tend to be easier to work with.

I surround myself with people who have strengths different than me, said Kirk Herath, VP, chief privacy officer, associate general counsel, Nationwide Insurance. I try to choose people who have strengths different from each other. We all have pot holes. My team fills in my pot holes and always provides me with all of the information and solutions necessary to make me look brilliant. Vik Patel (@fhsales), president and CEO, Future Hosting, agreed with Herath: Always have people on your team who are smarter than you. If youre the smartest one in the room, you have failed.

The best way you can have your team make you look like a hero is to make them look like heroes; then you can bask in their reflected glory, said Marcus Ranum (@mjranum), senior strategist, Tenable Network Security. Ensure that they are given the room to grow and to prove themselves, and the results will stand for themselves, added Quentyn Taylor (@quentynblog), director of information security, Canon Europe. If your team members look like heroes, so will you as the leader of heroes. Its like Nick Fury from the Avengers. He manages his staff well giving them the room to achieve their goals, and by definition he is the hero. Ive always felt that management/leadership positions are ultimately service roles: your job is to help organize people so they can accomplish stuff. You belong in the background, concluded Ranum.

Tell your team that you want to start measuring things so you can tell where/when they are making things better, or more efficient, or faster, or cheaper, said Tenables Ranum. With metrics youll be able to clearly demonstrate your teams hero status. The goal, explained Ranum is to be able to say something to the effect of "Since we started this, the team is now doing twice as much as they did before, with an improvement in their overall quality of life and an improvement in overall outcomes."

In a culture of continuous improvement failure is an option, said Theo Beack (@theobeack), CTO, Vertafore. We view our mistakes as opportunities to learn how to improve our products. This requires a fearless level of transparency and accountability to ourselves, internal stakeholders, and our customers. My team instruments everything, from our core software engineering process, product UI, core product, and production infrastructure. The ability to get live telemetry into every aspect of our development process, operations, product behavior, and user experience enabled us to identify critical areas of improvement, which we attacked iteration after iteration. This was the roadmap Beacks team followed when handling an incredibly complicated merger. The teams efforts have earned us recognition by Best in Biz and the Puget Sound Business Journal, who named me CTO of the Year in 2014. I give 100 percent credit to my team for their role in transforming technology operations in a $400 million dollar corporation, added Beack.

When trying to make my CIO clients look like heroes, the key is making everything look really simple, so that people feel empowered to solve business problems, said Ty Rollin (@tyrollin), CTO, Mobiquity. In the same vein, my team makes complicated mobile worlds simple. They simplify all of this so I can present it to the next level. To me, this is the essence of making a hero: enabling me to easily use this condensed information to make bigger decisions.

My staff continues to demonstrate that no single member of our organization is as powerful as when our combined expertise, talent, and teamwork have us all moving in the same direction, said Steven Russo (@Certainsafe), EVP, Certainsafe. They continue to make upper management look like heroes or stars.

My colleagues are committed to the concept that we act, every day, like a top one percent firm (the Harvard Business School of IT services) and that we make a positive impact, said Ken Brindamour (@kenbrindamour), SVP for service delivery, Atrion. They are phenomenal at detailed execution (I often gloss over the details); they are super attuned to whats going on with the team (I might be overly focused on clients or numbers); and they get stuff done (I set a direction and they make it happen).

They allow me to keep the promises I make, boasted Cortney Thompson (@CortneyThompson), CTO, Green House Data, while reaffirming many of the aforementioned qualities IT leaders appreciate in their staff: They are heroes themselves and breed that culture into the company. They anticipate problems and bring me into the loop before Im asked what we are doing to resolve it. Our team continually trains and pumps the latest research and techniques into streamlining our processes. The team also holds down the frontline defenses allowing me to focus on the bigger picture. Anytime a gap presents itself the team makes sure its filled.