The Effective CIO

The BASICs Of Leadership July 17, 2009

I took my own advice and got out of the office for a few days. While I’m away, I’m republishing some posts from the early days of this blog that most readers have never seen. This post was first published in January, 2008 and has been freshened a bit. This is a life lesson I’ve carried with me for a long time…

I first touched a computer in 1975, when I was a student at West Windsor Plainsboro High School. We punched BASIC programs into a TeleType and watched the results chunk-chunk-chunk out on rolls of yellow paper. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen, and I was hooked for the rest of my life.

I was so enamored of computer programming that my math teacher, Mrs. Horvath, let me teach BASIC programming to the rest of the class. I took on this task with a vengeance, particularly on the grading of tests and programming assignments, where I ruled with an iron fist. I thought things were going along really well until two of my “students” (Jeanne Haws and Carol Ryan) shared this sample program with me:

10 READ 20, N$
20 DATA "CHUCK MUSCIANO"
30 END

RUN

LINE 20: OUT OF FRIENDS

Ouch! Clearly there was more to this teaching stuff than I had first thought.

I’ve since learned that teaching and coaching is an art. One of the most important aspects of leadership, it also one of the most satisfying. I long ago left the predictable world of programming computers for the unpredictable world of managing and leading people. There are few things more innately satisfying than helping someone learn, seeing them absorb something new, and watching them apply it to their world.

Leaders are teachers.  While we explicitly try to teach our vision to our teams and ask them to help us achieve our goals, we are implicitly teaching our team how to lead, how to communicate, how to behave, how to respond, how to speak, how to everything. We are in a bubble, being watched for each and every outward sign of how we do what we do. Think about it: do you watch your boss to better understand them?  All the people below you are applying that same level of scrutiny to you as well.

My early efforts at teaching were ham-fisted and counter-productive.  I never went in to teaching, but I am hopeful that my ability to teach has improved over the years.  That said, teaching is a skill that can always be improved.  Figuring out how to reach someone, implicitly or explicitly, is a challenge.  Each new person we encounter requires a unique approach to be most effectively led and taught.

I hope we all work at being better teachers and thus, better leaders.  I’d love to hear your stories of teaching, good and bad.  And I’m thankful you didn’t have to suffer through my computing classes.  Jeanne and Carol, thanks for teaching me far more than I was able to teach you!

The original version of this post can be found here.