As we detailed in the first installment in this series (""), different combinations of competencies come to the fore at each stage of the journey, with each combination forming the foundation for the competencies that lie forward and upward across the lines. Because Strategic Orientation is of the highest importance for becoming the Business Strategist CIO, it's tempting to try to shorten the journey by jumping straight to the development of strategic skills. But in the absence of the foundational skills that precede Strategic Orientation, or any of the other higher-level competencies, the result is likely to be an abstract intellectual exercise that has no lasting impact or benefit to the organization.

That watershed between Senior IT Leader and Function Head CIO illustrates the interdependence of specific leadership competencies and the movement from reactive to active to proactive that results in increasingly longer term organizational impact from leadership actions. It is the stage at which the nature of the relevant competencies themselves requires a broader organizational perspective and field of activity.

Successful Senior IT Leaders will of course already have a firm foundation in the Functional Expertise that was important to them in their roles as IT staff members, and in the Results Orientation (usually personal results) they were expected to have as IT managers. As the Competencies Development Journey graph indicates, the most important leadership competencies for Senior IT Leaders are now Team Leadership, Collaborating & Influencing, and People & Organization Development. These competencies, in turn, prepare leaders for the even broader and more far-reaching C-Level competencies on the other side of the vertical line--and the more proactive behaviors that the best practitioners demonstrate:

* first emerges at the managerial level, usually in the reactive mode of simply leading teams, often in command-and-control fashion, to fulfill assigned tasks. At the level of the Senior IT Leader, however, one begins to manage people individually rather than collectively--acknowledging the range of skills on the team and the issues each confronts. The leader collaborates with the team to solve problems, educates team members to understand the objectives of the team from the leader's perspective, and rewards those who act in line with those objectives. At the next level of this competency, the leader moves from collaborating to delegating, handing off responsibility to the team members in a considered way, based on understanding the relative strengths of each person. In moving from leading the team as a group to engaging its members individually and delegating responsibility, the Senior IT Leader has crossed the line from reactive Team Leadership to active Team Leadership.