Finding you next Digital Technology Leader.

A brief guide for charity chiefs on what to look for and what gets in the way. Laura Dawson, Chair Charity IT Leaders and CEO of Leaderly Consulting Ltd

Understand the role.

You are about to recruit your next Digital Technology Leader, the top of the technical tree. So what do you look for? Very often organisations look for people with proven delivery of 'turning teams round' or service delivery. But there are 5 key objectives of a digital technology leader.

When looking for a new digital technology leader, you need to consider how well they handle these aspects and not just focus on the delivery aspect. Being able to broker introductions across your organisations and convene groups of people to tackle business problems and change is vital. You technology leader is a key part in changing, optimising and improving the way work happens across the organisation. Working with your HR function, these two can and should know more about how your business operates than anyone else.

Understand your context.

Putting a high performing, commercial CIO into a charity where no one on the board has digital technology nous or your business functions are operating in silos will give some benefit but wont be making the most of their capabilities, equally getting someone who is just starting out and again excluding them from the board is not going to deliver the benefit you expect nor will it develop them. Some key things you need to think about to understand what sort of digital technology leader you need includes:

Check your board, how digitally savvy are they really?

Do they focus on

If the focus is on the first column and those are the behaviours you are seeing you may need to consider what skills your new digital technology leader will need to bridge the gap. Pandering to the behaviours above will be really damaging to your organisation in the long run. Looking for coaching skills, engagement and constructive influencing will be a good mitigation for this.

How operational and tactical is your technology?

Do you have lots of versions / types of the same sort of software (e.g. Teams, Zoom, Slack etc or Salesforce and Raisers Edge)? How much of teams time is spent moving data from one system to the next? And do you have lots of conversations about 'trusting the data in front of you'? All of this may indicate a tactical approach to building the technology around you and that will be putting significant waste into how work gets done. So having someone who can lift you to strategic thinking and get rid of that kludge may well be a good move. Look for someone who understands enterprise architecture but can explain it simply and effectively. (The best interview question someone gave me "Explain our enterprise architecture to an 11 year old"). They need to be able to paint a picture of why you need an architecture and how to use it when you have it? But even more importantly they need the architecture to be context aware, not just text book.

How siloed is your organisation?

Clues you have a siloed organisation include:

• Manual handovers of data - passing spreadsheets about.
• Lack of trust at board level of the data being presented, suggestions or direct comment on having duplicate systems to 'check' things are right.
• Talking of checking, lots of approvals within processes and across teams. If more than one person is approving a decision or you have checks on even small transactions, you have a siloed organisation.

For this you need a convenor, someone who can bring people together and help them share ideas and work together. Facilitation skills are a must and even better if they have an understanding of tools like Wardley Mapping or Value Stream Mapping.

Finding the right person

As some of you know I have for a long time, discussed that there are, roughly, three skill groups that we all need in order to be effective leaders.

• Technical Expertise – the digital technology specialism, be it technology equipment, digital development, data, software or business analysis. If you like this is the genesis of the new leader. Where have they come from on their career?
• Business Acumen – skills in being a business person, financial management, HR management, team leadership, risk management, supplier management including legal and licensing, communications.
• Power skills – confidence, engagement, empathy. EQ if you like. Brokering, tact, engagement, politically astute.

Generally speaking most hires I see are focused on the Technical Expertise and, in some cases the power skills. But often those power skills focus on 'fit'. There is a big danger to looking for Digital Technology leaders who 'fit'. Often this is a search for someone who will not rock the boat, let other leaders do what they want to do and act as a service provider, rather than a strategic advisor.

Looking for skills in the business acumen area linked with power skills may be more fruitful.

Consider some innovative ways of getting your candidates to apply. Perhaps instead of a covering note / statement. Give them the lay of the land and ask them how they might tackle this? If you can, invite prospective candidates to an open day to meet you, the c-suite and the team, before the final selection process. Then focus your interviews on what they learnt from the day.

What gets in the way?

There are two key challenges that technology leaders have to contend with when applying for a role:

1. the reporting line and with it, access to the C-Suite and
2. the investment strategy and governance around spend.

C-Suite?

All too often the Technology Leader is at least 1 step away from the exec board room. If there is no digital technology capability in the board room and your top digital technology leader is outside the room, then there will be very little in the way of strategic decisions being made. If you have no digital technology awareness on the board, then having you digital technology leader a few away is not going to help you. They will be helpless and you will be in the dark and potentially making decisions on the whim of other leaders with know real understanding of the flow of work. Most of your choices will end up as short-term gains for long-term pain and inability to manage the data.

It also doesn't help that senior leaders will struggle to know what a good digital technology leader looks like. Especially if the recruitment panel has no one on it to advise both at the advertising stage and the selection process. If you hire someone you don't expect to come into the board room, you wont ever get the strategy.

Investment strategy

What is your investment strategy for digital technology and how do decisions get made? Have a look at what you have bought in the past - where is it being used? If you have a product like Salesforce or MS Dynamics for fundraising, is it being used by all departments involved in handling supporters? Is it siloed? How does data get in and out of the system? You don't need to look into the system itself, just as the users of the system?

Are decisions on digital technology either bottom up or separate from the business change that is needed by the organisation? Who approves that change? Is it just finance?

If you have all these issues you will need someone who has an understanding of the business of charities, to understand direct debit / regular giving / gift aid and the nuances of finance. But they also need to bring in some strong governance and change the way decisions are made. So having a practical approach to processes and governance is also key to test.

Changing the way you recruit

It is really hard to get a digital technology leader that will cover all the bases. Digital Technology covers a multitude of areas (and this is just a snapshot):

Trying to find someone who not only has all these, but has them in the flavours of technology you have is equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack. And the above image is by no means all that they need to know. So don't try to find that. Consider what the problems are that you are trying to solve.

As a rule of thumb, the more technology is actually physical e.g. the network, the more it is a commodity and unlikely to need to be different from any other organisation. So if you ask for experience of projects they have delivered and you get back network or data centre replacement, then chances are they will struggle with data warehousing and data integrations.

If you are looking to improve supporter engagement, increase income or improve online services to beneficiaries, then consider setting them that challenge as part of the recruitment process.

If you have decided that you need someone to influence the board, then run a board session for them, see how they perform.

This is too important an appointment to leave to just one person on your board.

Finally, think about having an advisor on the selection process from the start. Charity IT Leaders will be delighted to assist you in finding a Charity CIO who could help you.

Things to avoid...

Avoid anyone who says "they don't do politics".. if they don't then they are going to be ignored.

Avoid being digital technology specific. You don't need to have someone who knows and has experience of your particular technologies. What you do need is someone who can quickly learn your context and can develop the team they manage and the rest of the organisation to make the best out of the technology you have.

Avoid bad project examples. These days you need to be optimising your business operations with technology or delivering data and services directly to your beneficiaries. Projects that are wholly within the remit of the digital technology sphere e.g. network, server, desktop replacement are unlikely to have relied too heavily on analysis or communications. Look for projects where direct contact with the consumers as well as the customers was a factor and look for evidence of that.

*A technology solution might not always be the right answer, being able to recognise that at board level is essential for strategic thinking.