My leadership journey

How you divide your time will change depending on the position you hold in an organization. Effective leaders know how to balance their time between Leader, Manager, and Staff.

For example, line staff need to focus on "Staff" activities like collecting data for a report, providing help of a routine nature, developing basic business processes,  and dealing with day-to-day email or phone calls. And CIOs put most of their focus on "Leader" skills like anticipating future needs, developing vision and strategies to achieve goals, and engaging others.

To demonstrate how focus changes at each level in an organization, I’d like to share examples using "Leader, Manager, or Staff" throughout these milestone roles from earlier in my career:

1.  Systems Administrator
2.  Working Manager
3.  Manager
4.  Senior Manager
5.  Chief Information Officer

This is a good way to demonstrate how focus shifts at different levels in an IT organization. People must divide their time differently, focused into specific areas, depending on what is important for their role in the organization. Here is my journey:

Systems Administrator

In my first job, I worked for a small geographic information company. A major portion of our business was printing custom maps for very specific uses; banks might use us to create a visual representation of their lending practices to demonstrate equal lending, or insurance underwriters might ask us to map out certain insurance risks in a particular area.

As systems administrator, I managed about forty Unix servers and workstations in the engineering department, and I helped support over ninety Windows desktops throughout the company. My focus was almost entirely the "Staff" of systems administration.

Working Manager

Later in my career, I joined a small data management company owned by a law firm. We provided computer-based document management for lawyers.

My title was Manager of IT, and I was responsible for a small team of IT staff. In addition to managing the team, I also acted as systems administrator for twenty Unix servers. As a working manager, I had to balance "Manager" with "Staff."

Manager

The law firm eventually closed its doors, so I moved into higher education in a growing enterprise technology unit. I was still a working manager, although less so than at the law firm.

Most of my time was spent managing my team’s day-to-day systems administration work. But because we were a small support unit at the time, I sometimes assisted in supporting the Unix servers. I divided my attention between "Manager" and "Staff," although most of my focus was now on management.

Senior Manager

Several years later, I became Senior Manager for the university’s enterprise IT operations and infrastructure. I managed all systems administration teams, as well as databases, enterprise storage, backup, data center, automation, disaster recovery planning, and desktop support.

In this role, I provided much more leadership: tracking trends, anticipating future needs, developing vision and strategies to achieve goals, and engaging others. By this time, I consciously tried to exercise "Leader" and "Manager" so I could effectively divide my time to achieve my goals.

Chief Information Officer

After serving in higher ed for over five years, I transitioned to local government as the Chief Information Officer. Here, my role truly was "Leader-Manager," but mostly "Leader." There was only a small portion of "Staff" work such as collecting data for a report, developing basic business processes, or dealing with day-to-day email and phone calls.

Most of my focus was understanding trends within local government, developing a vision to align technology to government goals, and implementing strategies within the department to achieve those goals.