Warren Hero, recipient of the 2023 High-Performance Team Award and product lead for SARS architecture design, emphasises that a successful leader must cultivate, curate and maintain a thinking environment for both themselves and their teams.
In the build-up to the 2024 CIO Awards, Warren Hero shares his thoughts on what qualities place a nominee in the prime position of being named as a successful CIO. Warren recently joined SARS to holistically transform the way customers are served. This year, he returns to the CIO Awards as one of the judges.
Q: What qualities do you look for in an outstanding CIO, and how do those qualities contribute to their success?
A: A robust, well-considered thinking curriculum can cover many sins – the ability to create, curate and hold a thinking environment for ourselves and our teams. Being an astronaut, exploring internal headspace, and curating spaces for our people creates thinking environments where souls can thrive. Accompanied by psychological safety, this is a prerequisite for high-performing teams.
The impact of this type of environmental managerial leadership creates individual agency and engagement. Finding and facilitating points of connection to a higher purpose confers meaning to the task and the ability to contextualise therein.
Harnessing all aspects of diversity and inclusion – especially intellectual diversity – will likely benefit the decentralisation of sensing, decision-making, and action. In other words, agility!
I would venture that it is the basis for enabling individual, team, and organisational change and moving beyond resilience to antifragility.
Q: How important do you think it is for IT professionals to continue learning and developing their skills?
A: I believe that a digital context demands exponentiality! Learning and finding opportunities to apply newly acquired capabilities early and often embeds the learning and provides the crucial opportunity for synthesis – another asset-leveraging practice
You also need to cultivate your own curiosity, look for opportunities to discover team members’ passions, and facilitate explorations of what type of interventions would develop their potential.
I book two to three focus-time sessions weekly in my diary, pore over provocative reading, and reflect on the content that I have consumed. No problem can stand up to the focused application of my intelligence – psyche, soma and soul consciousness.
In my one-on-ones with reports, we review their diaries to engineer time for focused thinking time and reflection.
Q: What role do you see IT professionals playing in addressing some of the biggest challenges facing society today?
A: They play a pivotal role. We thrive on emptying the cup – going back to being novices. A design and architectural approach starts with unconstrained thinking – what are the aspirational goals for the ecosystem? Then, becoming cognisant of the constraints, we make adjustments to the design iteratively.
Q: What advice would you give to aspiring IT professionals who are just starting their careers, and what qualities do you think are essential for long-term success in this field?
- Being a study of persistence and showing up is half the battle.
- Forethought
- Option thinking
- An internal locus of control. I recommend the Art of War for Managers as a good read.
- Balance using the axe (brain, soul consciousness, awareness, and EQ), and sharpening the axe – learning. Balance exploration and exploitation.
- Purpose should animate EVERYTHING about you.
Q: Why are events like the CIO Awards so significant, and what does it accomplish for the nominee, his or her organisation, and team members?
A community, a network, is an exponential asset! The value of collaboration, investments in each other in the community, and the ability to garner a second opinion from a peer is priceless. Our High-Performance Team acknowledgement in 2023 validated each individual’s focused, concerted effort towards our vision of impact.
Q: What are you most looking forward to at the CIO Awards?
A: I look forward to celebrating IT excellence and having fun with my industry peers!
