More secret qualities of a Chief Delivery Officer

Beyond communication and advocacy, there's several skills, characteristics and capabilities that a CDO will need.

Let's look at each in turn.

12 min read

So, we've established that communication is the key skill for a delivery principal. Beyond that, though, what other traits or abilities are important to lead customer delivery?

Here's a list of seven CDO super-powers, and we'll look at each below.

A hand holding a folder of Top Secret files
A hand holding a folder of Top Secret files. Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.

Building relationships

The CDO needs to be a master at relationship building.

Most obviously, projects get done because people do them, and the better those people are connected to the focus and purpose of the task, the higher quality the outcomes. Consequently, fostering personal connection is a vital component of delivering stuff.

There's a wider view, though.

The CDO will need the support of peers in the C-suite to achieve the delivery strategy vision. You will need the help of others in the wider business to execute the delivery strategy effectively: the technical and/or design specialists who engage directly with customer needs; the business's support and success services for ongoing health of what's built for clients; sales and marketing for landing the right kind of customers, and for a coherent persona and customer experience from beginning to end; and so on.

Rapport is essential to nurture long and healthy relationships with customers, of course. You need to connect in order to see the world from their perspective, to understand their needs and the goals their aiming to achieve, and for the client to trust that you're focused on the right outcomes for them.

Occasionally, the CDO will need to go toe-to-toe with colleagues to advocate for things that are important or to achieve certain necessary ends. But the most effective results will be achieved through building strong and healthy interpersonal connections.

The power of cake

It's astonishingly important to spend social time with people.

Women eating cakes and looking at a cellphone
Women eating cakes and looking at a cellphone. Photo by Edmond Dantès on Pexels.

Taking time out to share a piece of cake, to have a coffee with a colleague, or breakfast, or if food's not your thing then going for a walk together — it's powerful.

Informal settings put everyone at ease, and vital to take time to talk informally, about wider topics — hopes and dreams, frustrations and challenges, personal stories of how we got here, what matters to us, what keeps us awake at night, and so on — to help build strong bonds.

It helps to understand what motivates people. It creates safety to talk about struggles or difficulties. It opens up new insights into ways that you can help.

Cake is powerful.

Building trust

Clients and people in your own organisation, at all levels, alike will need to trust you. At times, they will need to have faith in you to make judgement calls.

Trust is especially important when taking on big or risky challenges with lots at stake.

Trust doesn't come from nowhere. It's not a switch to be just turned on.

It derives from consistency, honesty, and reliability, from behaving with empathy and consideration, and it requires transparency in actions and decisions.

In other words, the trust that a Chief Delivery Officer has to rely on means they must be a person of integrity.

Building respect

Respect is reciprocal.

As you give respect — to your customer and the specialists in their team, and to your colleagues and peers in your own company, the experts you have around you — and both display and act with empathy and understanding to their situation and context, so you will be given respect in return.

In particular, this is about recognising expertise in other people.

As a CDO or a delivery lead of any kind, you do not need to be the fount of all knowledge, and it's not your job to determine what needs to be done.

Instead, your role is to facilitate a collaborative effort. You convene a group of capable and experienced people to pool their wisdom and their efforts together in order to reach a particular, shared outcome.

The heart of that is respect — the effectiveness of that collaborative venture is determined in large part by the high regard a team of people with great expertise show to each other.

Build respect, then, and you lay the ground to achieve great things.

Strategic vision, tactical view

As with many aspects of the CDO role, being able to hold a creative tension between strategy and execution is a distinctive quality.

Hiker exploring in Torres del Paine, Chile
Hiker exploring in Torres del Paine, Chile. Photo by Marek Piwnicki.

The role requires you to do both — to see far ahead, and determine how to get where you're going; and, to take one step at a time on the path you've set, without getting distracted or discouraged.

Or, to put it differently, it's about altitudes of thinking — taking the time to stand on higher ground to get the long view, whilst knowing that things are put into action back at ground level.

Strategy: Walk up the hill to see the horizon

You'll be familiar, from your long experience of running customer projects, how important it is to start with a focus on the outcomes and to keep that focus all the way through. The same is true when working out how the business should be interacting with customers and delivering on its promises.

At ground level, things can appear quite suddenly and erratically, almost as if out of nowhere. That'll cause you big problems, as if you're always putting in effort just to stand still. And it's because your view is too short — the horizon is very close, where things can hit you without much warning.

You need to get to higher ground where the horizon is further out and your view is both longer and broader, taking in the landscape all around you.

From higher ground you'll have a clearer view of your objective, and of the lay of the land in between, the immovable objects that have to be dealt with, the rivers, forests, canyons, and so on. From this loftier view, you'll be able to work out the best path to get to your goal.

You'll also have a better perspective on things that are moving, the weather, the challenges or opposition that may impede you on your way, etc.

This drawn-out metaphor is what strategy is all about.

You can only do all this if you take yourself off up the hill first.

Tactics: Ground work at ground level

Lovely though the views are, you're static on the mountain top. The journey doesn't happen here.

To get stuff done you have to come back down to ground level.

If you've put in good planning time, then you'll have a clear step-by-step directions to follow. You'll definitely know the landmarks and way-points. But should know a lot more than that, something close to a turn-by-turn guide to follow.

One of the things you should have identified is the challenges and risks to your big venture. In your thorough planning, you'll have worked out how you're going to tackle particular obstacles, the bigger challenges you know are on your path ahead.

This is the definition of tactics, pretty much — how you're going to address specific things that are part of the larger plan, the distinct things you need to achieve or overcome in order to get where you're going.

Your tactics are the hard work you do at ground level, in the day to day. And your tactics are the reason why you've drawn together this specific the team and these particular tools — so that you can handle what you know is coming at you.

Note:

Strategy should always come first.

Tactics (i.e. coordinated action taken in a specific situation) will be fairly impotent, or worse, a potential liability without reference to a larger context that gives them meaning.

Tactics need to be directed toward a goal or outcome in order to have focus and purpose.

Tactics depend on strategy.

Beware of too much improvisation, too often

Often the term 'tactics' is used as a synonym of 'improvise', but that's not really right. Yes, occasionally you will have to react, to be spontaneous. But if you're doing that too often then it's a strong clue that you didn't spend long enough at high altitude, that you were impatient.

If that's the case, you probably have a fundamental flaw to deal with.

Pause.

And go back up the hill.

Master for solving problems

That said, problem-solving is a core constituent of delivery leadership, and excellent CDOs will be exceptional in this area. The skill is equally important when analysing your challenges and planning out how you'll address them as it is when needing to adapt to an obstruction on the fly.

Part of your credibility (discussed below in more depth) is your own pre-existing expertise in the organisation's industry, sector, and core business. You may also have important experience from a distinct specialism, data or design or engineering, say. You will undoubtedly lean on that history and long experience when tackling difficult problems — the pattern of thinking about problems that you've acquired over your career to date are transferable skills and will remain vital.

The problems you'll experience when building your delivery strategy and executing on it will be approached in the same way:

You know how it goes.

Catalyst for change

If you're the first CDO the organisation has taken on, it's inevitable that you'll be the author of substantial change in the business. If you're a successor to a previous incumbent, change is still probably your watchword as you evaluate and revise — to whatever degree — the way the organisation delivers for its customers.

Enabling change depends on all of the dimensions discussed here.

In particular, it requires you to have strong and healthy working relationships with colleagues across the business — not only will they be a vital support for what you're aiming to do, but in certain areas you'll need direct help as you transform the things that need transforming.

It also leans heavily on your potent skills of communication, which we've already discussed at length — you'll need to be painting pictures about what you're changing, why you're changing it, how things will change, what that means for everyone, what difference it'll make and how it'll help, and so on, all the way through. Don't underestimate the need to communicate, and to keep on communicating, as you embed the transformation you're aiming for.

Of course, it won't all be plain sailing, and we'll talk about the quality of resilience below.

Think slow, act fast

This is one of the key heuristics for delivery leadership that you'll already know well, but when doing stuff it's vital to take time up front to think things through thoroughly before you get on with implementing things.

You can boil all that down into a single phrase, coined by Bent Flyvbjerg, the project management guru and Professor of Major Program Management:

Think slow, act fast

See Flyberg's book, How Big Things Get Done for all the deep thinking behind this pithy phrase.

It's cheaper and quicker to find problems and see things fail when you're still planning your work. Reduce uncertainty with low-cost research, testing, prototyping, and then roll those insights into better planning.

Then, move quickly and deliver rapidly based on the thoroughgoing plans you've made. The longer you spend in the execution and the slower you move at this stage, the more space it gives for things being adapted — either needing to, or being forced to.

If change is foreseen or forced on you, then Agile methodologies are extremely helpful.

Structured thinking

Credibility

People-centric

Calm under pressure

Lucky!

The Chief Delivery Officer's Handbook

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