“Attract and hold the highest-producing knowledge workers by treating them and their knowledge as the organizations most valuable assets” Peter Drucker -The daily Drucker

In today’s world If we look inside any organization in order to identify who is the leader with the biggest challenge in regarding to talent management we might say that the CIO is the one with the hardest work.

What we know for sure is that, there is a growing shortage of talent in the IT sector, and in this context the major question to which every CIO should be concern about is “Why should anyone be work for me?”, because finding the right answer to this question will help the engagement with this scarcest asset in our sector.

The two main challenges any CIO faces in this subject are: how to capture the right talent to achieve the strategic objectives of the company; And how to retain this talent.

In order to reinforce this idea and being provider of several companies in several different countries and cultures, I can say that the ones that have consistently achieved strategic objectives are those with the highest talent retention rates.

With this in mind and focusing in one solution that helps solving both challenges, I do think that, if we want to have the best talents, we also need to have the best leaders, because the best leaders are the ones with the best followers.

Using the words of a Professor of mine about leadership and as a recommendation to any CIO who wants to be a better leader, I will put it this way: “Be yourself – more – with skill” (by the way thanks Professor Gareth Jones for your wise words).

In my opinion, in this task of managing talent, every CIO, is responsible for:

• Identify the required talent to help him achieve the business objectives from his organization (the talent should be aligned with the business corporate strategy)
• And second and most important, the CIO needs to lead this talent in a way that it creates a high performance environment. For this, every CIO must be a leader who can adapt for every situation, who shows leadership in a nonhierarchical way and the most important thing must be authentically in being himself, because people in IT are not searching for “bosses”, they are searching and looking for references and examples that they can follow.

We need to be clear that in the last decades, IT Talent is maybe the scarcest resource on the market and this problem is growing with the digital transformation that the market is facing.

I will conclude by saying that in the case of IT Talent we are facing a situation where the talent drives the market and not the other way around, so being the best leader will be the only differentiator to the be a winner in this war of getting and retain the best ones.

 Author: Pedro Gomes Santos, CEO  Hundred Perú