IT leaders have never been more essential to the success of any organisation – or had more demands heaped upon their shoulders. So how is the role changing? And what are the skills required to step up to the challenge?

*Originally published in December 2018. Updated for 2020.

Henry Ford is credited as once saying: “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.” Now, we’re not suggesting that ongoing training and development is some kind of elixir for youth, but it is true that you should never stop learning: professional development should be an ongoing process throughout your career.

Here at Cranfield Executive Development, we work hard to ensure that our leadership development programmes consistently deliver the value that businesses both need and expect. We get great feedback from course participants, many of whom are only too happy to tell us about the difference attending Cranfield has made within their business and to their personal outlook and career development.

In an article in HR Magazine, I talk about how many clichés surround how we discuss the impact of technology on the world of work and on HR.

As a society, we increasingly talk about the importance of striking a work-life balance. Here at Cranfield Executive Development, we devise programmes that enable people to fit career development around their day-to-day work. But what if you want all three – a career, a life outside of work and to develop your professional capabilities? Can you have it all? And, if you can, how do you avoid burnout?

The dynamic of the global business context is often termed volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA).

This context means that the nature of leadership has changed requiring more adaptive and collaborative practices plus the collective action of multiple stakeholders working across hierarchies, boundaries and borders.

In a recent article in Developing Leaders, my colleagues Susan Vinnicombe, Hilary Harris and I discuss how organisations can successfully become more inclusive when it comes to promoting talented women into senior roles.

A generation ago when successful people reached the top of their business they were eyeing retirement. Golf and spa retreats. Now we’re working longer and reaching senior positions earlier in our lives, that’s not looking very attractive.

Standard leadership development programmes stay above the shoulders, and that’s the problem. They’re often focused primarily on the cognitive and a hard set of frameworks and matrices. People are loaded up with content and sent back into the boardroom, groggy from the weight of it.