The reality of decision-making is that it isn’t based solely on the facts. Sure, decision-makers will ask for all the data they can get their hands on, will weigh the pros and cons, and they will look at the trade-offs, but when it comes down to call-time, other non-rational reasons come into play. And that makes persuading people more an art than a science.
No other member of the business class is possibly more aware of this than the CIO. That’s thanks to the nature of IT and IT projects. IT projects bring significant—and often frequent—changes to large swathes of the enterprise, making change management among the most important skills for IT leaders.
Also, in many organizations, especially those in which IT is seen as an enabler, the CIO needs to dip into the budgets of other departments to build a CRM, for example—but has to convince business owners to spend their money in a way that IT wants. And even in companies where IT departments do have sizable budgets of their own, it needs to be spent—and justified to the top brass—on projects that are hard to sell like security, consolidation, or IT staff training.
CIOs also have possibly the most number of audiences to convince, compared to their peer group—often with the least authority. “There are at least five categories of people that IT leaders have to convince,” says Anuragi Raman, associate director, BPEX deployment leader and head-IT at Motilal Oswal Securities.
They could, for instance, be a business peer who proposes a less-than-visionary way of getting business intelligence, but whose budget a CIO needs to spend. (It might be their money and their project, but it’s your IT architecture.) Or a chief executive who doesn’t want to release funds to fight off a security threat he doesn’t think is serious. Or it could be the hundreds of staffers who refuse to use a new ERP; a vendor who won’t budge; a business partner, like a dealer, who won’t align his systems to yours.
To coax the crowd, CIOs have picked up tricks you won’t find in business manuals. Sometimes their advice can seem completely counter-intuitive. Take this for example: To sell your ideas you need to avoid a decision and the decision-maker. Or you mustn’t be passionate about your ideas. Or how it’s okay to be politically incorrect, because if you want to watch your ideas spin into shape, like a jar on a potter’s wheel, you need to get your hands in the clay.
Here are seven little-known win-over ideas you won’t find in management books, lessons that aren’t celebrated in public forums, but rather exchanged in hushed whispers from one CIO to another.
Don’t Present
Skip the Decision Maker
Fear Isn’t the Key. Envy Is
Remember, Politics is Part of the Game
Tame Your Passion
Don’t Seek a Decision
Don’t Give Everyone the Same Story
