I have one question for CIOs, CTOs, and CDOs as they head into the close of 2024 and budgeting for 2025.

What are your plans for investing in and developing your leadership high potentials and digital transformation leaders –  people I call StarCIO Digital Trailblazers? Are you looking to develop skills, hire people, or develop your leadership team? Perhaps it should be all of the above, but with many C-levels working through tight budgets, one of these investment areas is far more important for delivering digital transformation and innovation.

Hire, close the skill gap, or develop leaders?

I found two recent reports highlighting talent gaps as an issue for CIOs, but I feel they are focussing on the wrong issue.

One article on CIO.com reported, “CIOs will face significant challenges in achieving their goals due to a lack of people with the required skills,” The article recommends that CIOs develop a “scalable talent model” and a “continuous cycle of learning to foster innovation.”

The State of the CIO 2024 report also highlights talent issues, illustrating a significant gap between CIO responsibilities and their ability to execute transformation and innovation initiatives. 88% of CIOs say their role is becoming more digital and innovation-focused. However, 59% reported redirecting their time away from strategic tasks because of staff and skills shortages.

It’s not just CIOs – CTOs, chief data officers, and chief digital officers who must be innovation-focused, but I don’t believe skill shortages are their most significant challenge.

What’s holding back transformation and innovation initiatives?

Hiring, partnering, and lifelong learning have been ongoing topics at the Coffee With Digital Trailblazers event that I host on LinkedIn on Fridays at 11 am ET. Recent topics include cultivating high-performance teams, interviewing Digital Trailblazers, and scheduling fun lifelong learning activities. StarCIO Digital Trailblazer Experts speaking at these sessions include Joanne Friedman, Joe Puglisi, John Patrick, Luethe, Heather May, Martin Davis, and many others.

As a group, we’re passionate about helping organizations do more than close the skills gap – we believe the leadership gap is of greater significance and more challenging to address. You can hire, train, and partner for skills – but recruiting, developing, and retaining transformation leaders is significantly more demanding.

That’s because digital transformation leaders are multi-skilled professionals with extensive experiences backing their confidence to lean and drive to deliver outcomes. They are versed in dev, ops, and data science practices or have product management, design thinking, and market research competencies. They are strong at transformation programs’ full lifecycles in agile planning, delivery, and change management.

Digital Trailblazers have weighty responsibilities in challenging the organization’s thinking, evolving business models, developing new products, and turning detractors into supporters. Now, with gen AI, Digital Trailblazers must participate in AI governance initiatives, redefine employee experiences, and deliver AI-driven business value beyond productivity improvements.

I’ve been working on closing the transformation leadership gap over the last decade through writing on this blog, my videos on the Driving Digital Standup, my two books Driving Digital and Digital Trailblazer, and through StarCIO’s Center of Excellence programs.

I’m ready to start sharing the evolution and next step in this journey. Over the next few months, I will rebrand this blog and launch the StarCIO Digital Trailblazer Community. Tune in to this week’s Coffee Hour to learn more about developing Digital Trailblazers and how to close the leadership gap in leading digital transformation initiatives.