IT Management Slideshow:
Connecting in the C-Suite: 10 Tips for CIOs

We're betting that you encourage collaboration within your teams. You may even require your IT staff to get outside their comfy, cubicle confines and learn about the needs of internal users in other departments. But, how effective are you when it comes to collaborating with your fellow C-suite leaders and other senior executives? The best way to establish an organizational culture of collaboration is to practice what you preach. In the book Connecting Top Managers: Developing Executive Teams for Business Success(FT Press/available now), authors Jim Taylor and Lisa Haneberg provide a detailed gameplan on how to network in the upper reaches of your organization. They explain how differences in backgrounds and management approaches among leaders can be best exploited to deliver results for your company, as opposed to creating bottleneck-producing clashes. The book also presents a blueprint for running an efficient, effective meeting with your C-suite peers. Ultimately, in establishing a working leadership collaboration model, the authors contend that every interaction is important—from random hallway encounters to formal strategy sessions.