And while Bolton isn't convinced that a person needs charisma to be an effective IT leader, he does believe that some introverted technologists with the right qualities can be groomed.
"I know a lot of introverts who have become successful CIOs," said Bolton, who participated in an IT leadership panel discussion last week at a meeting held in Rye Brook, New York, by the Fairfield, Conn., and Westchester, N.Y., chapter of SIM. Potential IT leaders "have to develop a sense of self-awareness of who you are and who you're about that leads to a sense of self-confidence," he said.
To be a leader, "you have to know what your own style is and what works for you. And you have to find people whom you can develop who are able to find their own leadership style," Bolton said.
Effective IT leaders draw upon other qualities, of course, including the ability to set and communicate a vision for the IT organization, a capacity to market and sell that vision to IT staffers and business executives, "and the charisma to motivate," said Tom Pettibone, co-founder and managing partner at Transition Partners Co. in Reston, Va., and a former CIO at Philip Morris USA Inc. and New York Life Insurance Co.
Those types of leadership qualities, said Pettibone, are "something that's in the internal DNA" of a person. "You have to find people with a little bit of that DNA and build on top of that."
A good leader, said Pettibone, is someone who inspires people, demonstrates success, shows the way and advances the careers of the people who work for them, he said.
Still, Pettibone warns that it's not always a good idea to try to groom someone who might be a skilled manager or technologist but who doesn't necessarily want to become a leader. "To try to get them to do that [lead] is like root canal," he said.
The SIM panel, moderated by Peter Schlay of The Advisory Council in Norwalk, Conn., also debated whether and when it makes sense to tap the IT ranks for a CIO or bring in a business executive for the job. There can be risks with the latter approach, said Ron Rose, CIO at Priceline.com Inc. in Norwalk.
"For a lot of companies, the technology has to deliver and deliver quickly," said Rose. Time-to-market pressures have made the margin for technology-related errors smaller and businessmen-turned-CIOs "will have to become more technology-savvy" to keep pace.
There can be challenges with both approaches. If an IT veteran is tapped to become a CIO, he or she has to be able to talk to business executives in business terms, said Bolton. As for business people who transition into CIOs, he said, organizations run the risk of having someone at the executive level who doesn't fully understand all of the technical issues involved.
"You need someone in-between," said Bolton.
For his part, Pettibone believes the ideal CIO candidate is someone who rises up from the IT ranks and hasn't been transferred from another functional area. "I used to joke with the general counsel at New York Life that if they wanted to make him the CIO, they should make me the general counsel," said Pettibone.
Regardless of a CIO's roots, the individual "has to almost be a better business person than the business people because you have so much less time to figure out the challenges for each of those business silos," said Rose.
To engender hope in an IT organization, CIOs need several good qualities, including the ability to build relationships and listen carefully, said Bolton. "Communications is more about listening than it is about speaking," he said.
Rose can relate to the importance of listening. Ten years ago, when Rose was the chief technology officer at Standard & Poor's Retail Markets, an engineer who was experiencing an I/O problem with an operating system informed Rose about a discovery he had made with a then little-known operating system called Linux. "He said, 'You've got to check this thing out, it's amazing,' and I'm thinking, 'Like I have time for this,'" said Rose.
But check it out he did -- and S&P become one of the first financial services firms to adopt the open-source system. "It reflects how some of the best ideas come from the bottom-up," said Rose.