We always advise a new CIO to “take their time” before deciding. This is the surest way to miss your first weeks, those where, in reality, all your legitimacy is at stake.
Imagine an airline pilot who is placed at the controls without a flight plan or instruments. He knows his job. He has thousands of flight hours. But he is asked to take off blindly. This is more or less what a person experiences CIO on the day he took up his post.
And this situation is not exceptional. In France, 78% of CIOs of large companies and administrations have less than five years of seniority in their position. Taking up a position is therefore not a special case in a CIO career: it is almost the permanent state of the function. At any given time, many of those driving the country’s digital transformation are proving themselves.
But to each of them, we give the same advice: take the time. Listen, observe, map, don’t decide anything until you understand everything. The advice seems wise. He is trapped. Because while the incoming CIO patiently reconstructs an exhaustive vision of his scope, the organization does not wait. From the first Codir, sometimes from the first week, he is expected to speak with authority. Let him reassure. Let him referee.
This paradox is not specific to IT departments. Any leader who takes a new position knows this. But the CIO experiences it in its most radical form, because his function is both one of the most transversal in the organization and the least well understood among his peers. He is the only one who must report simultaneously to the CEO on strategy, to the DAF on budgets, to the Business Lines on service, and to his team on course.
Five moments where everything is at stake
In the first few weeks, there are five seemingly ordinary situations that become, without warning, tests of legitimacy.
- The first Codir. We participate without a consolidated vision, but the organization expects us to speak about IS with authority. Without reliable data, we talk about impressions, and it shows. The perception that is formed that day can last for months.
- The first budget. We inherit figures that we have not constructed, on a scope that we are still discovering. The DAF knows its ratios. If the CIO does not control the structure of his budget, this relationship, which can become one of the most valuable, starts on an unequal footing that is difficult to recover.
- The first project arbitration. Without a structured portfolio, without explicit criteria, decisions resemble subjective judgments, and therefore questionable. It is a test of leadership as well as method.
- The first incident. It always happens, and rarely at the right time. The question is not whether it was anticipated but how it is managed: is the CIO in control of the situation, or do we have the impression that the situation is in control of him?
- The first conflicting business request. Management wants what we cannot give it. How to position yourself? Partner who explains and offers alternatives, or service provider who suffers? It is here that the foundations of the relationship with the professions are built, or failed.
Trust cannot be negotiated. It is earned on coins.
What is striking, when we observe the CIOs who go through these five tests without stumbling, is that they do not seek to convince. They show. Very quickly, they produced a first consolidated reading of their scope – certainly imperfect but accepted as such. And straight away, this changes the nature of their conversations. When we arrive with data, even approximate, we no longer endure questions: we direct them. We no longer defend a territory: we pilot.
It’s a seemingly simple seesaw. It is actually deeply political. In an organization, what is not made visible does not exist. A poorly structured budget is a CFO who fills in the gaps in his own way. An opaque project portfolio is a Business Director who escalates his priorities without filter. A silent IT department is one that allows itself to be defined by others.
Perfection is the enemy of legitimacy
This is where the advice of caution shows its true face. Waiting until you have understood everything before showing yourself is confusing two things that have nothing to do with each other: the rigor of the analysis and the moment of speaking out. We can – and we must – continue digging for months. But we cannot wait months to exist in the eyes of the Codir.
And wait-and-see has an even more insidious twin sister: settling. Because the IS that we discover has its logic, its habits, its emergencies which demand their due every morning. The Run never leaves a respite, the demands do not stop, and it is easy, very easy, to let yourself be absorbed, to become, in a few months, another cog in the system that you came to evolve. However, a CIO is not recruited to maintain the existing system. He is there to transform. The window for asking uncomfortable questions, those that no one in the house allows themselves anymore, is narrow: it closes as habits become their own.
The CIO therefore has neither the luxury of waiting nor the luxury of falling asleep. He decides before having seen everything, he reassures before having understood everything, he arbitrates before having consolidated everything. This is not a weakness of the function: it is what makes it valuable. Where others need certainty to move forward, he knows how to move forward with what he has, and make it understandable for everyone else. Few leaders possess this ability to transform a fog into a shared direction.
So the real advice to give to a CIO who takes up his position is not “take the time to understand everything”. It’s the opposite: quickly show what you already see, and use these first weeks – those where your perspective is still new – to initiate what you came to do. A partial reading placed on the table from the second week is better than a perfect vision kept to yourself until the sixth month. Because legitimacy does not reward the one who has understood everything, nor the one who runs the house without disrupting anything. It rewards the one who is the first to clarify the decisions of others and chart a direction.
