Welcome to the tech leader practitioner series! This new blog series will bring you insights from the professionals here at Forrester who have enjoyed careers in roles like yours or spend their days helping tech leaders tackle their thorniest challenges. Here, we will share our lessons learned through countless failures (some of them epic) and successes (some of them amazing). Supported by our research, we aim to give you a practical, real-world slant on challenges both evergreen to your role and those emerging.

This is not AI slop — these blogs are written by us humans here at Forrester here to give you practical advice. Read on to learn more!

Advice That You Need To Hear, Not Advice That You Want To Hear

One of the biggest frustrations in my career as a practitioner was receiving advice from partners that was friendly or favorable to my position. This advice was carefully crafted to ensure that I viewed this partner in as shiny a light as possible in preparation for the next contract renewal or RFP for a piece of new work. Through this blog series, and any engagement you have with us, our advice will be what you need to hear, not what you want to hear — because, often, what you need to hear will give far greater value.

For instance, does your proposed IT strategy as a new CIO set your organization up for true employee buy-in or send them running to the exits? If we think it will send them to the exits, we’ll tell you. In my experience, a good example of this is a reorganization where people move around boxes on an org chart and fail to understand the reasons why. Sound familiar? Is it a problem with your communication strategy and the design is actually sound? Or has your design been flawed from the beginning?

Specificity Matters, Not Generic Advice

This blog is an introductory blog and inherently generic. But the specific topics covered in the series will be anything but generic. For example, does your organization have a “We’ll do this as one team” mentality but then examples of siloed behaviors are so obvious that even the person making sandwiches in the cafeteria can see them? You, as the CIO, do firmly believe in this and expect it from your teams. But what happens when your application delivery leaders ignore guidance from your infrastructure leaders on how best to manage networking resources due to business delivery pressures? Everyone in the company will care when that opens a massive cyber vulnerability in your network. The trust between your leaders, that was already eroded when guidance was ignored, will become far worse after an incident like this.

I hope you enjoy this series of practical insights. What’s the first topic? I’m glad you asked! We’ll first dive into how to navigate workforce reduction scenarios — because, after all, if we are promising to help you with your hardest problems, we might as well start with something near the top of any leaders’ list.