This post identifies the attributes that are the most highly correlated with success in the CTO position. We define success in this context as a CTO “seen” (reported by our clients) as performing well by his/her peers, subordinates and superiors. The information supporting this post is taken from over 17 years of working with clients large and small to improve engineering and product organizations.
Intended Audience:
For CEOs: This post highlights valuable attributes of a CTO to help CEOs grow and nurture their CTOs.
For CTOs: This post identifies attributes against which the CTO, his/her coach, manager or mentor may perform an evaluation to determine where he/she should improve.
For aspiring CTOs: This post serves as a guidepost for your learning and growth plans.
CTO Demand
The demand for CTOs in all industries is very high, owing to very little supply globally. In the US, the low demand is consistent with the low supply of the primary source of CTOs: engineering disciplines within universities. The US is a net importer of engineering talent, having seen dwindling per-capital graduation of engineering talent as the US population has grown since World War II.
CTO Tenure and Reasons for Churn
CTO tenure averages between 3 and 5.5 years depending upon the industry in question within the US. Regretted (CTO-initiated) and Non-regretted (termination for performance or cause) churn within CTO positions is high. Voluntary departures are common, as with high demand, CTOs find that they can often find better CTO jobs in short order. Terminations are also high, with the most common reason for termination being a failure to build trust with the remainder of the executive team.
The first step for any CTO is to ensure they eliminate the weaknesses that keep many CTOs from being successful and that tend to result in terminations.
Eliminating Roadblock Weaknesses that Destroy Trust
Trust is the foundation upon which any successful relationship is built. As we indicate in our post on Why CTOs Fail, there are 5 CTO failures that are most commonly indicated by our clients as reasons why they did not trust their CTO and felt they needed to fire him/her. These are:
- Lack of Business Acumen leads to poor business communication and a perception of doing the wrong things.
The CTO must be able to read and understand all the financial statements and reports within the company. Further, she must be able to speak the language of business and explain how investments in technology affect and relate to the financial statements. She must also be able to engage in business conversations with her peers using simple (non-technical) business language often focused on explaining the financial return or implications of different courses of action. - Failure to lead and inspire the engineering organization and the remainder of the company.
If you want to maximize your leadership potential, you must have high emotional intelligence (aka a high emotional quotient or EQ). In fact, you have a better chance of being an effective leader if you have an average IQ and high EQ than if you have an average EQ and high IQ.
Emotional intelligence imbues us with the ability to recognize, manage and control our own feelings and emotions while also recognizing and helping to manage the emotions of others. Both leadership and management are ultimately about “leverage” – the ability to maximize the value of human capital within a firm. Intelligence, while valuable, can only go so far in helping our own productivity and output. Empathy, on the other hand, helps us build loyalty and trust and helps us turn average performers into superior stars. - Failure to manage and execute critical projects and initiatives.
This attribute is equal parts building a culture of excellence in execution and building the muscle and process to help guide execution.
Ensuring that the entire team values excellence, dates, budgets and quality helps to address the culture aspect. When such a culture exists, retrospectives are respectful but vigorous. Such cultures are more focused on driving out all opportunity for failure than discussing their past successes.
Muscle and process includes ensuring the existence and strict adoption of quality-of-service reviews, operational reviews, project portfolio reviews and quality reviews. Metrics, measurements and KPIs are focused on customer and business outcomes with real time reporting helping to identify customer product trouble spots in real time. - Failure to plan for tomorrow – or a perception that the CTO is “trapped in today” and incapable of seeing the needs for tomorrow.
Great CTOs spend a fair amount of their time thinking about trends in technology, architecture, process and organization structure to identify opportunities to improve the capabilities of their products, services and delivery capabilities. These CTOs help inform executives on emerging capabilities and how those capabilities may help improve customer product experiences or help to create a short term defensible technology moat around the company. - Lack of technical knowledge enabling the CTO to communicate effectively with the engineering team.
The CTO does not need to be the most technically gifted person in the engineering team. In fact, we argue that doing so is impossible to achieve as the CTO role is about so much more than just day-to-day technical decision making.
But the CTO MUST be able to speak the language of the engineers with whom she works. She must be able to communicate effectively, understand the high order details of the technology employed in building the products that generate the company’s revenue, and be able to identify when architectural decisions are implemented with anti-patterns that can destroy product value.
The ideal CTO, based on the above, can lead, execute, speak the language of business, develop trust in her organization and with her peers and speak the language of technology.
Other useful links you may find valuable when considering mentoring your existing CTO or hiring a new CTO:
CEO Guide to Managing a CTO: https://akfpartners.com/growth-blog/ceo-guide-to-managing-a-cto
CEO Guide to Hiring an Interim CTO: https://akfpartners.com/growth-blog/ceo-guide-to-hiring-an-interim-cto
CTO Hiring Checklist: https://akfpartners.com/growth-blog/cto-hiring-checklist
Need More Help? Contact AKF to help mentor your exisitng CTO, interview new CTOs or for help with interim CTO work.