Top 10 CIO Hacks with Elaine Cheng

As CIO’s the most important task we have is to communicate. But sometimes this action is pushed to the last thing on our list. My hack is to put it first. Once a month, I block time on an early morning – from about 8:00am to 10:00am and I use that time to craft my monthly communications. These communications include a full IT team update on goals, progress, shout outs, etc. It includes important peer communications (successes, risks, etc.), and one to the executive team highlighting how IT is contributing to organizational successes.

Select one morning per week (or more if there is a lot going on) and start work at 7:00am but don’t sit down at your desk. Instead, go outside and walk. This is time for your mind to wander about work. The trick is to let it go wherever it wants… but stay focused on work only. If you do this for an hour, you’ll be surprised at what you innovate, the problems you’ll solve, and the plans you’ll create.

A good, quick and easy way to assess how to improve your team and their happiness at work is to use the Start/Stop/Continue survey. Simply ask the team to tell you ONE thing that you should stop doing, ONE thing you should start doing, and ONE thing you should continue doing. This format forces answers and will make the team tell you things that are working or not working. It's way more effective than just asking "what can we do better?".

One hack for easy and cheap leadership training is to have a Leadership Book Club. Once per quarter or every six months, select a leadership book you want your leaders to read. Then, have a lunch meeting to discuss the topics. They will learn from the book, each other, and you. It not only helps your team learn or reinforce leadership skills, but it helps them align on how you specifically think about that skill. Note: If a book is too much, you can always find a good video or TedTalk.

Create one running note for your whole team. Use this to keep track of what was discussed in each one on one, so you can follow up each week. You can also use this to track ideas you have during the week that you want to discuss with them at your 1:1 so you don't forget. It's a quick and easy way to track your discussions. You can also always go back to remind yourself of discussions.

Our team has a standing Friday morning meeting with our architects, senior developers, information security team, and senior product leaders to discuss design ideas. These are generally initial ideas for upcoming features or more formal designs. The purpose of this session is to get all eyes on a design for input, to brainstorm ways to get something done, and to make sure information security is early in the design of a solution. The session not only creates the best solution, it helps grow the team’s knowledge and understanding of all our systems and solutions.

The team at Shentel utilizes a key to quickly highlight the importance of an email. They use the 911, 611 and 411 numbers in the subject line of an email. Anything that is urgent and needs immediate attention gets a 911 at the beginning of the subject line. If it needs attention but isn’t urgent, it gets a 611 in the subject line. And something that is just informational is a 411. It’s a really quick and an easy way to make sense of emails coming through.

We’ve tried to keep our IT goals very simple each year. While there is a temptation to focus on improving multiple things, teams can get lost in the many metrics and things to focus on. Rather, we pick one or two key metrics we want to vastly improve and set the whole team on it. For example, in the past we’ve focused on metrics like improving our internal NPS score with business teams, decreasing vulnerability scores, increasing story points we can accomplish in a sprint, etc. This type of focus becomes a rally cry for the team for the year or six months that we focus.

Two ideas you can steal for easy team building.

1. Bowling. Yep, you heard me. Bowling. Turns out, it’s the perfect team builder. It’s interactive, but not too overwhelming. Everyone knows what to do, no one cares if you are great. Teams can relax and you can move in between each group playing.
2. Human Bingo. Another fun and non-stressful way for teams to interact and have fun is to create a human bingo card. These are easy to make online (lots of sites, just Google it). You can put in all types of human activities (e.g. knows a foreign language, been to Paris, climbed a 14K mountain, broken a bone, went to a Halloween party this year, etc.). Once the cards are created, let everyone roam to find a bingo! Everyone enjoys it and they will definitely learn something about each other.

Who’s Jane? Jane’s your CEO or maybe COO? She’s the leader, innovator or person pushing the business forward and making decisions. If you want to be a business leader or significantly change how you show up, then I challenge you to do things like Jane. What this means, is that before you act or decide, think to yourself, what would Jane do? Then do that (or at least consider it). For this exercise to work, Jane must be a real person for you. Someone you admire, look up to, or just recognize as an incredible thinker. This could be someone at your organization in a role you aspire to or could be in another organization. Once you start acting like that person, you’ll see the change.