Any advice for a new IT leader/CIO looking to ID blind spots about their organization?
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Absolutely — when I stepped into a new leadership role, my best move was listening before acting. I started by shadowing frontline teams, reviewing incident logs and ticket trends, and mapping technical debt against strategic initiatives. This helped me uncover blind spots and align IT priorities with real operational needs.
Great question, I'll look forward to reading any additional responses. My suggestion is to; 1). Focus on building relationships with your counterparts, fellow directors etc, and interview them or their leadership teams, 2). Create a survey that you can send out broadly to gather direct feedback and use this as a baseline to measure improvement, 3). Talk to the COO and CFO, what are they hearing from a leadership and financial perspective about IT? 4). Last, if you have a strategic plan you've inherited make sure it aligns with the organizations goals and needs. If you don't have one that's a perfect place to start having conversations as well. Good luck!
Active communciation - which means asking a lot of questions, and then listening to the answers. You don't need to try and solve the problems you hear at that moment, you just need to be aware of them.
Let them do most of the talking as well/