Leaders can be made

When Jeff Geltz was chosen by his boss to attend an IT leadership development class, he wasn't thrilled by the idea.

"It smacked of a remedial program," he says about the Society for Information Management's Regional Leadership Forums (SIM RLF). "I thought it was going to be 'Let's sit around a room and talk about warm and fuzzy concepts.' I was more interested in the next project."

RLF did include what Geltz thought of as warm, fuzzy topics, such as how to establish a healthy balance between work and the rest of life. "I threw it into the bucket that work-life balance is for wimps," says Geltz, now CIO of eLoyalty in Lake Forest, Ill. "After a while I realized there was validity to the conversation. . . . [Finding a balance] is still challenging to me, because I really love what I do."

SIM launched its RLF leadership development program in 1992 and has about 1,200 graduates. Each class has about 20 students, many of whom start out skeptical like Geltz but learn the value of sharing personal and professional experiences with what quickly becomes a close group of colleagues.

Graduates say the program helps them see themselves more clearly so they can decide which IT career path is right for them. Participants are generally in the 30s, and their employers invest in the $6,000 program ($6,500 for non-SIM members) to groom future IT leaders.

"I prided myself as being a fairly technical person," says Paul Amorello, vice president of IT for Pepperidge Farms/Godiva Chocolates in Norwalk, Conn., who attended an RLF in 1996. But he came to realize that even though he was good at solving day-to-day technology issues, he had other non-technical abilities such as humor and perseverance. He chose to use these soft skills as a leader, although it wasn't an easy decision.

"I still want to drill down on stuff," says Amorello, who landed his current job 10 months after taking the SIM course. "It's always difficult to let go, but it comes down to how do you feel comfortable bringing value to an organization? Writing lines of code? Managing programs? Managing people who manage programs?" For him, it's about using personal skills and organizing people. "I pride myself on my ability to pull together a complementary group of folks and build a high-performance team," he says.

RLF is set up to help make this type of decision easier and to develop managers into leaders, says Madeline Weiss, a facilitator who runs classes on the East Coast. The classes run through a checklist of skills that leaders need, including how to motivate people, work well in teams, develop a global perspective, negotiate, build peer networks, set strategic priorities and manage alliances.