TechRepublic – Highest paid CIOs spend more time relationship building than team management

Takeaway: According to a recent survey, the highest paid CIOs value building relationships with top executives over managing their teams. What does this mean?

Regular readers know that on Fridays I often part from my regular semi-practical advice format and just talk about something in the news that just catches my fancy. This week it’s a poll from SearchCIO (conducted among 875 senior and mid-level IT executives across all markets) that bears out the following:

CIOs who earn the highest salaries make building relationships with top executives more of a priority than managing projects the IT team is doing.

TechTarget’s senior news writer, Linda Tucci, wrote a piece about this part of the survey.

She said,

“High earners appear to enjoy better relationships with their bosses and the business than do those who make less. They get strong support from executive management, and their IT teams are praised by the business. Despite the good opinion they say the business has of IT, however, these earners tend to judge their own IT teams more harshly than do their counterparts earning less.”

I have to admit that, upon first reading, the phrase “enjoy better relationships with their bosses” stuck out and not with a positive connotation. I think we’ve all seen our share of superficial managers who make more of an effort to look good for their boss and their boss’s bosses than they do making their own team an efficient and workable unit. God knows I’ve heard enough from disgruntled IT pros who are stuck doing impossible projects because their managers have signed them on in order to look good to the CEO.

More of the TechRepublic article from Toni Bowers

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.