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 COLUMN
Tips on becoming a CTO I HAVE BEEN receiving a lot of e-mails recently from aspiring CTOs asking me what they need to do to become a CTO. Because CTO is still a very new title, there is no tried-and-true path to the job. Although, when you really get down to it, CEO is an established title, there is no defined path to that role either -- those who think a nice smile and an MBA are an automatic ticket to the corner office are misguided.
Love your sales team The first piece of advice I'd offer to aspiring CTOs is very simple, yet widely disregarded: If you're going out to lunch with your colleagues and the talk consistently turns to disparaging remarks about your sales team, you either need to change your attitude or find another job at a company with a sales team you can respect. All too often rank-and-file technology staff regard their sales team with indifference, outright hostility, or as a distraction from the pure joy of writing code. If you aspire to the CTO position, having this attitude toward the sales team is a quick road to a dead-end career. By establishing a good relationship with the sales staff in your company, you will help them serve your customers better and you will build better products. Your company always needs more revenue -- if you don't see sales as your ally, you better be happy writing code in a cube for the rest of your career. Trust others to do the tech-heavy lifting To advance into the CTO role, you have to change your perspective on your work and realize that the CTO job is about motivating and coaching others to do their best technical work and resisting the temptation to do it yourself. If you feel stunted in your career and are wondering why you're being passed over for the CTO job or other senior technology positions, ask yourself: When people come to me for direction on a technical problem, do I take the work and write the code myself? Or do I offer hints, advice, and encouragement, perhaps a small piece of code to nudge the developer in the right direction? If you don't trust your colleagues to take on difficult technical problems, forget about being a CTO. Success in the CTO role means providing your staff with the tools and resources they need to do their jobs, as well as giving them opportunities for personal career growth. You will need to coach your team with passion and knowledge, but allow them to do the work, make mistakes, and learn from them. Stay close to the technology After that last point about letting others try their skills, the next bit of advice might seem slightly contradictory: Keep doing things such as writing code and running a network in your "spare" time (most CTOs don't have true spare time). My first few columns focused largely on aspects of "managing up," such as articulating business justifications for your technology vision and budgeting strategically. To manage your staff more effectively, you'll need their respect and that means knowing how things really work. My own experience setting up a wireless network at home (I finally got everything working -- see my last column) taught me a lot about how to leverage the technology for InfoWorld. What do you think it takes to become a CTO? Let me know. Chad Dickerson is InfoWorld's CTO. Contact him at chad_dickerson@infoworld.com. MORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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