What’s holding CTOs back?

Anurag Dhingra is no stranger to the challenges CTOs face today.

With 43% of CTOs reporting up to another IT leader or LOB executive, according to the 2024 State of the CIO survey, and just 38% having a budget separate from IT, as change agents they can find themselves in a difficult spot.

Among the toughest hurdles Dhingra faced in a prior CTO position were not having execution responsibilities and having to “work extra hard selling ideas and getting buy-in from people who have budgets and execution responsibilities,” he recalls.

Proving or making the case to innovate is a challenge when you have to put your weight behind a technology, says Dhingra, who is now senior vice president of engineering and CTO at Webex. “I’m on the hook to deliver value,” he says. “Where CTOs have execution responsibility and not just vision makes [the job] easier.”

A January survey by Gartner found that CTOs face several diverse challenges as they work to digitally transform their organizations, including culture, lack of authority, demonstrating the value of innovation, and funding. Moreover, CTOs who have been in their position for less than five years are more likely to cite internal politics as an inhibitor compared to CTOs with six to 10 years of tenure, according to the survey, suggesting it takes CTOs more time to pave the way for smooth technical change at most organizations than today’s pace of technological change requires.

One surprise finding was the lack of direction from the CEO or board, observes Nick Jones, distinguished vice president analyst at Gartner, and author of the report, “How CTOs Can Overcome Internal Roadblocks.”

“Obviously, technology strategy and business strategy have to be ultimately driven by the vision of the organization,’’ Jones says, “but it was surprising that over a third of CTOs we surveyed felt they weren’t getting clear vision and guidance.”

The CTO role also means different things in different organizations. “The CTO role is so diverse and spans everything from a CTO who works for the CIO and is making the organization more efficient, all the way to creating visibility for the future and transformations,’’ Jones says.

Here is a look at a range of factors holding CTOs back from delivering on change agendas — and how some CTOs are addressing them.

Demonstrating the value of innovation

All strategic innovation initiatives should be focused on delivering business value, says Alan McIntosh, CTO of Plexus Worldwide, a $500 million global health and wellness company.

“Despite the challenges CTOs face in proving the value of innovation, aligning these initiatives with tangible business outcomes is essential for driving success and sustainability in today’s competitive landscape,’’ McIntosh says. “By ensuring that innovation efforts directly contribute to business value, we can effectively demonstrate the impact and relevance of our initiatives to stakeholders.” 

Articulating the value of innovation is not a new challenge, Dhingra points out. It’s getting more attention now because of the pace of AI, so change is happening much faster, he explains. “The CTO role is always hard because you’re balancing the needs of the current business with looking out for the next opportunity.”

Sometimes it’s easier to show the value of innovation incrementally. For example, “If you came up with a new way of reducing costs by being more efficient with your software, it’s not easy to measure that,’’ Dhingra says. Instead, demonstrating that with incremental steps may make it easier to articulate the value proposition, he suggests.  

Coping with culture and internal politics

Timothy Bates, who held CTO positions at General Motors and Lenovo, knows firsthand the issues organizational culture can have in stifling the CTO’s agenda.

As a CTO at a legacy company, he found that departments were siloed “and they’re all in competition with each other.’’ This culture made it difficult not just to innovate, but even to get people to work together and obtain funding, says Bates, who is now a professor at the University of Michigan-Flint College of Innovation and Technology.

It’s important for any C-suite executive to understand the culture of an organization before they put in new processes, and that takes time, he says.

Plexus Worldwide’s McIntosh says internal politics and some level of bureaucracy are unavoidable for CTOs seeking to push forward technology initiatives. “Navigating and managing this within an organization requires a balance of experience and influence to lessen any potential negative impact,’’ he says.

Experienced leaders who have been with a company a long time “are often skilled at understanding the intricate web of relationships, power dynamics, and competing interests that shape internal politics and bureaucratic hurdles,’’ McIntosh says. “The ability to leverage your influence, build alliances, and establish trust cross-functionally can help avoid political drama and foster collaboration.”

While at GM, Bates did just that in an effort to leverage the potential of digital twins. His approach was to go to every business leader, explain his mission, and then begin knocking down silos by asking for one person from each business unit, whom he could assign to “synergistic teams.”

“We took off different labels to break down silos,’’ he says. “We were focused on digital transformation and making it an innovative solution within GM.”

Here, Gartner’s Jones emphasizes the importance of soft skills, especially for building relationships with heads of business units.

“Great CTOs are great communicators and they have a lot of hard and soft influences, which lubricates the process across a lot of what the CTO has to do,” he says.

At the heart of this is being able to explain why they are doing what they are doing, Jones says.

“This issue of aligning responsibility and authority is a key one — if you’re responsible for things but don’t have hands-on levers and buttons … that’s a nightmare situation” that can only be resolved by going up the leadership hierarchy, he says. 

Who weighs in from the C-suite

That begs the question of who CTOs should turn to for help when they need it. There are differing opinions on whether it is the responsibility of the CIO or another leader to mitigate some of these issues.

“The most important support that CTOs need is really from the CEO, or in my case, the general manager of the business,’’ Webex’s Dhingra says. “You cultivate that senior leadership team with a high degree of transparency and trust. Only when you have that can you actually debate some of the thorny issues of balancing investment and culture. Without that, CTOs will find it hard to make headway.”

Even with that support, he adds, you have to work extra hard because you need to get buy-in from more people. “You have to do more alignment across teams that don’t report directly to you,” he says, which is where developing influence skills and learning to lead without authority come in.

Here, Bhawna Singh, CTO of Okta, says building relationships authentically with a genuine desire to better understand the business, their teams, and their peers can help. Moreover, taking the time to learn about other leaders’ priorities enables you to make better decisions, she says.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re the smartest or most experienced person in the room. If you haven’t built a relationship with the people you need to work with, then you’re not going to be an effective leader, and you’re not going to drive effective outcomes,” she says.

When CTOs set clear goals, provide the necessary resources and support, and establish a culture of accountability and continuous improvement, “we play a key role in fostering a high-performance culture,’’ McIntosh says.

Still, even with all the challenges, given how intrinsic technology is to nearly every organization today, CTOs can’t lose sight of the value they bring.

McIntosh stresses the importance of not getting “hyperfocused on squelching political drama to achieve tasks, projects, and short-term goals.”

“Don’t get bogged down in the bureaucracy,’’ he says. “Never lose sight of the strategic role you play, and the value IT adds to contributing to the overarching long-term business objectives.”