IT Leadership academy recently conducted a survey of 300-plus first-level IT executives (those who report to the CIO), second-level executives (who report to the first level) and third-level executives with the following two questions:

What percentage of your IT career would you say you were well led?

How do you spend your time? If you could change where you spend your time, what would you spend more time on? Less time on?

Results were astonishing!

For question 1 - 20% said they were never well led, 5% said they were well led for more than half of their career, 10% said they were well led about a third of their career and 65% said they were well led less than 20% of their career.

Corroborating the responses to the first question is what I consider a mind-blowing statistic derived from the second question: 75% of the first-level executives said they wanted to spend less time with their bosses. A significant percentage wanted to spend a lot less time, with some going to the extreme of wanting to spend no time at all, with the CIO. Some context has to be considered: Just about everyone surveyed wanted to spend more time with customers, whether that meant line-of-business executives or real cash-money customers. Assuming that people were rational in their responses -- that is, they wanted to spend more time on higher-value activities -- the question becomes, Why don't IT workers find time spent with their bosses a higher-value activity?

Source: 1

Prashanth Rai