What Skills Should A CTO Still Practice and Hone?

The CTO is a leader who seamlessly interacts with C-level executives, team leaders and other stakeholders. Consequently, a CTO must possess skills such as time management and have a very strong vision and ethics.

A Chief Technology Officer must also possess strong technical expertise, and be able to share it with the company to make sure everyone is up to date. Moreover, they need to have a strategic vision in order to apply their technical knowledge throughout the company, and to be ready to implement changes.

A Chief Technical Officer (CTO) collaborates closely with C-level executives, including the CEO and the CFO, and is also sometimes called upon in matters relating to the customer base.

However, we shouldn’t forget that a CTO is a technician at the core, so it’s essential that they maintain a complete overview of the domain in which they operate: a CTO constantly studies to make sure they keep up to date on developments in their sphere.

As a leader, they must stay motivated while motivating others, set and pursue goals (relevant to the goals of the business), evaluate alternative options and come up with the best technology strategy before supervising the subsequent technical process. A CTO has to be ready to handle crises and face failure at any time.

Finally, a CTO should always think outside the box.

Here’s a list of the most important skills for a CTO, according to the CEOs and CTOs in our community.

Domain knowledge: contextualize all processes

The focus of a Chief Technology Officer’s job is a productor service, and process engineering. There is no universal solution, but a range of good solutions available to choose from. Being able to choose the best fit for the company is a key skill.

The engineering process requires trade-off strategies to be applied and sometimes formalized. The goal is a solution that works as well as possible in the time available within the context of the specific product/service, inside the domain of activity.

That’s why the starting point of this job is domain knowledge: by mapping this knowledge, it’s possible to contextualize all processes, make decisions and prioritize steps for your project management.

Having a deep knowledge of the domain they’re navigating in allows a CTO to apply the appropriate relevance to tasks within the overall plan. Your team needs to work fast, but not always as fast as possible, without regard for anything else.

Look at the downstream impact; does this decision or action affect other projects currently underway, the future direction of the company, or possible bottlenecks these processes could face in the short or long term?

The next turning point for your future as a better CTO is approaching. Technical skills and long-term vision are the main activities to master and stay up to date on if you want to have a strong knowledge of your product/service domain.

Technical CTO skills: build a solid technical foundation

Having a solid technical foundation will always be a critical factor in your performance. Software is here to stay, and as a CTO, your sub-goal is more important than many others: leave the code better than you found it.

Achieving this is a matter of making the most of your personal and team experience. You improve your code by evaluating alternatives, making mistakes, and listening to the collective experience of communities.

Updating your code is often referred to as “refactoring”. Working on existing code has at least three simultaneous advantages: improving domain knowledge, educating the people in charge, and strengthening your “refactoring muscle”, in the words of Sihui Huang.

A solid technical foundation requires a long march towards completion. It doesn’t matter how many good coders you have in your teams – in the world outside your company many experienced communities have already worked out solutions to nearly all possible problems.

Your teams can drink from that water only if they bring their own contribution: participate in communities, allow your team members to do the same, contribute free code via Github, or as free APIs.

A good CTO could also be the at the forefront of what’s going on inside their own company. Once considered geeks, today the best CTOs are seen as visionaries. That’s why sharing their thoughts and results on the main social networks, such as Medium, LinkedIn, or an expert/guru blog is a good idea.

If you publish a blog under your own name and make reference to you job, it’s essential to follow some broad directives. Never indulge yourself by sharing proprietary code, nor any detail of implementation; be optimistic and inspired.

Talk about your projects, focus on the big picture, ask for suggestions about long-term productivity. Engage with your preferred professionals: don’t wait for them to come to visit you, be the first mover! Follow their online presence, comment on their posts, engage with their followers.

Blogging is a time-consuming activity, using valuable resources not only for making direct posts, but also for reading and commenting on others’ posts. Nonetheless, this sort of engagement can put your career in just the right spot for your present and future jobs. You can come to be known for both your work and for your hub position.

Improving technical skills makes us good implementers. Gaining domain knowledge plus technical abilities makes you a problem solver. A CTO is always a problem solver, but a good one is a problem finder. Honing a long-term vision gives you the necessary key skills to be a problem finder.

Long-term vision: include all disruptions

Having a long-term vision means understanding the future you are moving towards. The definition of “vision” itself has always changed over time, and has now accelerated wildly. Considering all possible changes in your company while developing a certain number of versions of your product/service in advance was the correct form of long term vision until a few years ago.

Today, you must be able to project in advance not only changes to the company, or product, but the evolution of stakeholders, technology, and the environment. The potential number of interactions and possibilities is very high.

Good knowledge can be found within your own team. Knowing the history of the team‘s members, and the company‘s projects will help you in evaluating which scenarios will deliver the the best performance.

Decisions are part of a CTO’s relevant skills: move towards objectives

A good manager makes multiple decisions to solve problems. This kind of approach is often evaluated as negative by the sorts of gurus who preach that most problems solve themselves without any intervention.

There are indeed some differences between solving and resolving: we don’t need a problem to disappear eventually, irrespective of how long that takes. Instead, we want to have our happy ending in the time we have available to spend on making it come true. The problem is not one of making snap decisions, but of making timely, decisive, and good decisions.

A CTO’s long-term vision is always constrained by time. All possible steps in all viable scenarios must take into account each of the subsequent steps that lead to the final result in a strict and consistent time frame.

A CTO must include time in all his or her plan variations. Time cannot be something only occasionally considered – time constraints have to be a day-to-day concern.

Regulatory issues: pursue strong ethics

Ethics and legislation are always changing. What is different today is that the various macro-regions -Europe, China, Russia, North America to name the most important – follow different approaches that come into close contact through globalization.

Today, most technological companies are multi-national bodies that can’t avoid conflict between different regulatory systems. Companies may have their registered office in one country, their production plants or agreements in another, sales offices in many countries and different macro-regions, and post-sale assistance in one or more countries.

This is true not only for large companies but in many cases also for smaller entities: just think of software publishers for apps or app add-ons. And all of them have their own map of regional interests to make their business.

Managing a company in this scattered environment is another challenge a CEO must face. The best approach is to have a strong overall ethical framework. A clear map of what’s right and wrong for your customers, employees, and the underlying communities will keep you on track while you work out how to follow regional legislation.

Every regulatory framework allows a certain degree of freedom, and the person in charge has to decide when to save, when to sell, when to buy, and when to share, bearing in mind that the company they represent wants to stay on the global market for a long time.

This is only possible when the global technological vision is balanced by a global ethical vision. In this respect, the CTO plays a role as a go-between for other C-level executives and the company’s teams. During difficult times the CTO has to balance their role and their vision, far beyond the strictly technical field.

Thinking outside the box is crucial to CTOs

Most technical problems require ingenuity to be solved. Ingenuity means finding uncommon, unboxed solutions. A catchphrase that best decsribes ingenuity is “to think outside the box”, finding a solution outside the common set of rules.

The phrase comes from the famous “nine dots puzzle”, where you are required to connect all the points in a 3×3 matrix using only four lines while never lifting the pen.

This approach is good for technology infrastructure, but also for legal, or bureaucratic aspects of the job.

The role of a CTO includes a quality of strength: a CTO has to be able to think outside the box, and to identify when it’s best to end or shut something down. Comfortable with the unfamiliar, a good CTO continuously seeks to challenge their limits, juggling priorities and a tricky schedule.

Challenging conventional wisdom is a good point of reference for all projects. We are all biased by our limited set of experiences, so we normally take refuge in conventional wisdom. The good CTO never stops challenging this, or their own biases and comfort zones: it’s the only way to see the big picture.

Flexibility: followability, crisis management, fallibility

Flexibility is a great CTO skill to have and improve over time. Tech people often know about this using a different synonym: agility, coming from the scrum methodology and the agile approach.

Followability is an uncommon word for an important quality for leadership. A good point to start from is the ability to follow others. Great leaders must be great listeners and must pay attention to everything happening in their teams. In a word, they have to be great followers.

A good leader is capable of delegating to their teams and helping the individuals within them to grow. It’s only by paying attention to their team that a Chief Technical Officer can know who is most able to manage a sub-task, what their behaviour will be, and their likely response to success or failure.

Crisis management is a critical issue. The need for leadership is stronger during crisis time. When there’s somebody to make decisions, anxiety is lower, and this helps the team to continue with everyday work. Crisis management is maybe the single most important capability of a long-term successful leader.

Fortunately, technical people are already experienced in considering contingency plans and disaster recovery for all ICT-related activities.

Your plans need to span from a data breach to an industry-wide downturn, from a natural disaster to an epidemic, so that you are prepared to provide direction and respond in a timely and organized manner.

Fallibility is a philosophical problem. Making mistakes helps you to become successful later. When you are in charge of technologies you often work as a trial and error partner, in a process of continuous improvement completely based upon mistakes and failures. A leader is not a manager who is always right, but a person who has the right leadership skills.