Is there one? There are innumerable books, masses of research, and a plethora of answers telling us about the hallmarks of successful leaders. I love Adam Bryant’s 5: passionate curiosity, battle-hardened confidence, team smarts, simple mindset and fearlessness.

Here are some other qualities you will see as you comb the web: honesty, communication, delegation, humor, confidence, commitment, creativity, intuition, inspirational, positive, motivational, persuasive, persistent, patient, organized, flexible, people oriented, IQ, EQ etc. there seems to be no end!

But is there something that underpins all this? Is there a single thing that provides a foundation for all the rest? Here is what I think. AUTHENTICITY.

To be authentic you must have grown as a person, made your own mistakes, had your own successes – and be open and candid with others about who you are. You must understand your own journey and be comfortable with your own strengths and weaknesses.

I am a head hunter and for me, determining if a leader is authentic, is the main thing. Testing for technical capability and particular skill can be relatively straight forward. You have done it, have the education, or work in a company with a reputation for being good at it; we can read it in your resume. But what about how you function – those qualities listed above – is that really you, or are you wearing a mask?

Getting a candidate to take off the mask and show who he or she really is – that is what all good head hunter’s strive to do. And mostly it’s about blood. Blood or scar tissue. I often ask candidates to talk about both successes and failures. Successes are great, but if you have never failed – you probably never took on big challenges where you really needed to step up and learn – not only about the task, but more importantly about yourself. I want someone to reflect on their own growth and development and to have an appreciation of self, such that they can be authentic with others. People get to know if you are genuine or authentic – either very quickly, or over time. And if you want to be able to exercise all those traits mentioned above I believe that you need to be authentic.

Advice: Take on all the challenges you can; stretch assignments, overseas gig’s, management tasks outside your specialty, the stuff others are scared of. Push to see who you are, be self-reflective and humble, and you will develop an authenticity that will set you apart.

There has been so much written on this topic that it’s hard to come up with anything “new”. Well, as far as leadership is concerned, there is not a lot of “new”. It’s about people, and leaders going back to Hannibal have exhibited many of the same traits – here is my view of those traits that set leaders apart. It is based on the search work I have done and leaders I have met, my experience over 10 years as a CEO, and some good stuff I have read. Great CIO’s typically:

• Possess an Integrative mind. A CIO who can see and connect the dots.
• Are Life-long learners. This factor is seen as the strongest predictor of success across any industry. These first two factors often accompany someone who has been successful in many environments and has a globally diverse experience base. The right candidate will understand the requirement of modifying behavior to achieve impact in differing market settings and cultures.
• Create a compelling vision, focus the organization around that vision, and execute on it. Great communication skill goes hand in hand with this.
• Build and motivate teams. Top CIOs are able to attract top talent and challenge them to perform at exceptional levels.  The most successful teams are often cross-functional and multi-cultural, and the leader is able to capture the collective intelligence of the organization in solving business problems. A buzz phrase here would be ‘encourage the heart’.
• Drive a customer focused/game-changing project. Successful CIOs have typically been responsible for a major game changing corporate initiative. Sometimes they are lucky to be in the right place at the right time, but often the CIO has seen an opportunity to add value, and seized it. The Haas School of Business Renaissance CIO project identified a number of transformational CIOs who had enduring impact through key undertakings such as Dawn Lapore – online trading at Schwab; Max Hopper – Sabre online air reservation system; Rob Carter – online shipment tracking at FedEx. For current CIOs, opportunities exist to have big organizational impact with the emergence of technologies such as:

• Cloud (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS).
• Social (e.g., crowdsourcing for helpdesk and product development).
• Mobile. Delivering organizational capability and products in a mobile world.
• Big Data and Small Data (analytics for zero unplanned maintenance, product innovation, business performance improvement).
• Consumerization and BYOD.  (Flexibility, customer satisfaction and cost management).

• Develop a deep knowledge of the business.  This often drives candidate selection toward industry insiders.  However, there are notable successes where candidates from different industries have had enormous and enduring impact. I placed Phil Fasano at Kaiser Permanente. He came from Financial Services and brought organizational change skills and forward-thinking capability that have made him a standout leader. He has now been at Kaiser for six years, and not only has he revolutionized the way KP does business, but he is also having impact on a global scale. Phil recently published a book entitled “Transforming Healthcare, the Financial Impact of Technology, Electronic Tools and Data Mining”. Not bad for a guy who used to worry about your credit card balances!
• Have strong influencing capability.   Top quality CIOs understand that they need to deliver a functional operating platform, but as important is their ability to work with business unit heads to help drive value.  A CIO must understand operational goals, and explain how technology can either enable or improve business outcomes. He or she can then push to the front of the bus and help with revenue generation activity.
• Are trusting and trustworthy.  A capable CIO must develop strong relationships across the business.  We have found that leaders who have a strong EQ (emotional intelligence), and are principled in approach, have enduring impact.

Tying into my “No Better Time” Blog (posted 5/14/13) addressing the top line, this Blog will focus on the bottom line.

How IT leaders drive the bottom line:

Another way to say this is how does the CIO get leverage from what he or she does? There is leverage from scale, and from being more efficient in the way the business is done (process harmonization).

Here are some thoughts on what to focus on as you leverage IT for bottom line management:

• Keep the lights on. Sorry to start with this, but if you don’t offer a great service to the organization you won’t be taken seriously at the top. Your stuff has to work – all the time.
• Get sourcing right. Negotiate effectively with vendors. I have seen a lot of contracts go wrong because CIOs were too hard on vendors. Vendors can really help. Let them make a fair buck.
• Analyze IT demand and build a plan that delivers the capacity you need without getting trapped in technology dead ends. Cloud now offers amazing opportunities to manage this equation and deal with spike demand.
• Get your IT standards in place. This is often about architecture and balancing control with innovation.
• BYOD. May not save you as much as you expect, but the plain truth is that Consumerization is an opportunity that CIOs need to embrace. And let’s face it; the consumer-oriented products are way cooler than what the enterprise offers!
• Harmonize process. There are great opportunities when a new platform is installed to harmonize business process and reap organizational efficiency. The CIO can be a major player in getting this right.
• Embrace the Cloud. Cloud offerings in applications, infrastructure and platforms can have an enormous impact on an organization. Figure out what is suitable and make it happen; you can free up $ in base cost and offer some really cool stuff.
• IT Governance. It is important, and will catch you out if not done right. Get the right level of business participation, have decent portfolio management – so the IT spend is understood and committed to, and then execute well.
• Security. Increasingly important with Cloud, Consumerization, Social and Mobile. There are just so many more ways the bad guys can infiltrate. This keeps the CEO up at night, and if you get it wrong, you are out of a job!

There is, however, a balancing act that the CIO needs to understand that hinges around centralization vs. decentralization. Some IT shops want everything centralized for maximum security, cost management and control, but business users typically want IT decentralized for increased speed and flexibility. What’s a CIO to do? Sorry, there is no simple answer here. It all depends.

Randy Spratt at McKesson has a great perspective on this and here is what he is doing:

For the top line stuff – growing revenue – he has adopted a more decentralized strategy. So the new products and new markets initiatives that I referred to are very decentralized, then as those new products are adopted into the organization there is more control. This ensures that customer satisfaction and experience standards are met. When the products become more mainstream, they are standardized for process and operational efficiency and finally, when the products are commodities, the focus moves toward bottom line cost management. It’s a great way to think about lifecycles.

You probably don’t have Randy’s scale and scope so his example may not fit, but the positioning of your IT department on the continuum of “total control” to “anything goes” needs to be thought through carefully. The lesson to take from Randy is this – the centralization versus decentralization challenge is not uniform across an organization, its products and processes. You need to decide what approach makes the most strategic sense for your company right now.

Kim Stephenson of Intel has a really interesting quote around this – she says “there are no IT projects – only business projects”. This is a great mantra, and key to understanding your role as CIO. You are there to add business value.