Create your own career destiny

Three CIOs who began at entry level provide some keys to their success.

“I think it’s critically important that you manage your career. No one else is going to do it for you.

Leo agrees. “I came up from the ground floor. It’s one of those things where if you’re hungry, you’ll learn,” he says.

“You always have to have an interest in figuring out the next step. Some people don’t think about it in those terms, but you have to,” Townsend says.

The early years

At the start of his career, Leo took advantage of every opportunity. He moved around a lot during his first year with E.F. Hutton – from the print pool to the tape pool to the control room, eventually landing a supervisory role. “I did this all within a year – they said it was the fastest anyone had ever progressed there,” he says.

He attributes his ability to gain this exposure to a mentor to whom he remained close throughout his career.

Leo continued his upward climb, spending time at Joseph E. Seagram & Sons as assistant supervisor of the data center and at Prudential Financial as director of data center operations and CIO of a business unit.

Morrison, who has been at two companies other than Cox, says the leadership skills he gained in the military helped him start his rise to the top of the IT ranks. “In my eight years in the Army, I became really good at leading. I was able to amplify that characteristic [in the corporate world.]”

As a leader he was able to seek out challenges and gain recognition within each organization he joined. “It was about standing up and raising my hand and looking for different opportunities and challenges. You have to learn to take whatever unique qualities you have and turn them into something that’s going to be noticed,” he says.

Morrison recommends that people just starting out in IT make a list of the experiences they want to have rather than the job title they want. “If you had asked me 20 years ago what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wouldn’t have said CIO. That wasn’t even on my radar screen. Instead, I knew I wanted to do telecommunications and system development, so I went about gaining those experiences,” he says.

Another big part of moving your career forward is making sure that senior staffers are aware of your accomplishments. “[Don’t] assume that senior executives have a clue about what you are doing, how well you’re doing it or what you’d like to do in the future,” he says.

Townsend says there is a unique opportunity these days for IT to be in the spotlight that wasn’t available when he was coming up through the ranks. “There has been a huge change since Y2K, because we now have to report to our executive board quarterly as part of a government mandate,” he says. “From the call center to the chairman of the board, people in the organization have to be aware of what we’re doing, and if we’re doing a good job we get a lot of pats on the back.”

Education and experience

Townsend says that his success has come from constantly learning. He has several degrees, including a bachelor’s degree in economics and an M.B.A., and he returned to school more recently to get a master’s of science in information technology. “Having this under my belt helps me do my job now and would help me if I were to look for something else,” he says.

He encourages his team to seek training and other educational opportunities. While formal education is important, Leo says real-world experiences have helped move him forward. He recommends getting involved in high-profile projects such as disaster-recovery testing. He exercised his financial and budget skills by taking on a project that would prove that replatforming a mainframe was a waste of time and money.

All IT professionals should know how to help business leaders improve their processes, he says. “You have to keep an ear to the ground. If you can pick up on a process that’s manual and you can figure out how to automate it via Web services, service-oriented architecture or any other technology, that’s worth its weight in gold,” he says.

Key to this kind of success is having excellent communication skills. “Business leaders don’t have a lot of time, but they want to hear what you can deliver. You need to be able to clearly say how you can help them,” he says.

Leo helps his team to improve their communication skills through professional courses, sending them to training put on by the American Management Association and other organizations. He also works with them one on one.

“I try to mentor my team as much as possible, having them send their company memos to me first,” he says. He encourages his team to communicate with the company. “Everyone should be provided the face time through e-mail or some other communication to introduce themselves to the entire firm. As a leader, it’s my job to promote my team,” he says.

Gittlen is a freelance writer in Northboro, Mass. She can be reached at sgittlen@charter.net.