Tech leaders face ever-increasing expectations and pressures. They should have strong leadership and managerial skills and extensive tech knowledge and expertise to excel. Gone are the days when IT leaders relied solely on strong hard skills and did not worry so much about soft skills.
In the highly competitive and rapidly-changing tech world, leaders need an increasingly diverse skill set to ensure that their teams and organization are successful. Successful leaders will adapt to industry challenges and ensure that their team stays ahead of trends. With that in mind, here are a few skills strong leaders exhibit.
Communication
While communication skills are necessary for all leaders, they are vital for IT leaders in the current environment. Leaders need to effectively explain projects to IT teams and the rest of the organization. Doing so ensures everyone understands objectives and their individual roles and helps avoid miscommunication, delays, and cross-team frustrations.
It is necessary that leaders communicate timely and effectively with all employees they manage–sharing organizational updates, visions, and news. Effective communication comes in all shapes and sizes, including active listening, empathy, reading the room, meaningful follow-up, good question asking, and offering space for all team members to share thoughts or concerns.
Each leader must develop a communication style and system that work for them. Regardless of style, leaders who communicate effectively within and across teams see improved efficiency, higher employee retention, and better organizational outcomes.
An Ability to Motivate and Inspire
The best tech leaders are visionaries. They understand their industry and can anticipate its future. Equally important, they can share that vision and get others invested in it. Before consumers can get excited about a company, the leaders and employees of the organization need to be excited about it too.
Successful leaders build the excitement that inspires their teams to make the necessary changes to become industry leaders. Apple’s Tim Cook notes that “work takes on new meaning when you feel you are pointed in the right direction. Otherwise, it’s just a job, and life is too short for that.” Great tech leaders anticipate the right direction and inspire their teams to work towards it.
Strategic Risk-Taking
A requirement for being a visionary is taking risks. Given how quickly the tech world is changing, leaders must take risks to stay at the forefront. Mark Zuckerburg described this requirement well by asserting that “the biggest risk is not taking any risk.” He argues that “in a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”
Building a culture that takes risks can be difficult and uncomfortable. That said, the best leaders are willing to take risks and build teams eager to do the same. Strong leaders are not afraid to shy away from innovation or new ideas because of the risks. Instead, they take these challenges head-on naming for their team the reality of the risks involved. Good leaders model this type of behavior, celebrate it when they see it, and remind their team that some failures are okay in the name of innovation and out-of-the-box thinking.
Agility and Adaptability
More often than leaders in other industries, tech leaders must address new challenges, changes, and disruptions. When faced with these challenges, the best leaders stay flexible and adaptable, ready to make changes and adjustments quickly. They can timely analyze a situation and be decisive about how their team should adapt to it.
Interestingly, a recent Right Management report found that 91% of HR decision-makers believe people are hired based on their ability to adapt. This surprisingly high number highlights the importance of agile leaders willing to respond to change as needed. The best way to be prepared is to practice responding to challenges in the moment and build muscle memory around staying calm, gathering information, analyzing information, and before making a decision.
Problem-Solving Skills
Good leaders are great managers and effective problem solvers. Leaders understand the problems their team faces, ask the right questions, listen to colleagues, think through potential solutions, come up with creative solutions, be decisive, track progress, and make adjustments as needed.
It is hard to build good problem-solving skills in stressful moments. Instead, the best leaders have built muscle memory around this and have the necessary industry knowledge and consumer expectations to carry out those skills effectively.
Constantly Growing
Perhaps the biggest takeaway for tech leaders right now should be the need to be constantly growing and developing all skills. Tech leaders face increasing pressure to be good managers, to possess the hard skills necessary to understand and lead their teams, and to have the soft skills needed to lead organization-wide growth and transformation. No matter a leader’s current skill level, they should be consistently developing leadership skills through professional development, reading, mentoring, networking, and reflection.
