You’re an organizational leader. The demands are on you are high and the pace is fast. You simply must delegate things in order to survive, and for everything to get accomplished.
But one thing you cannot delegate is caring about your technology. Your organization, all the way to the top, has to care. It’s simply not good enough to say “I don’t really get technology, but you guys go ahead and take care of it.”
Why? Because your tuning out causes a ripple effect down through the organization that ultimately drains essential focus and resources from where it needs to be. Maintaining strong and high-quality technology is a detailed, never-ending process that demands constant vigilance and thoughtfulness, not to mention time and resources. If you communicate that you care about other priorities more, your organization will act accordingly.
But your technology has a fundamental, critical impact on your success. It’s what’s going to let your staff work faster and smarter. It’s going to offer you data on what’s working well and where improvements are needed. It’s going to be your arsenal for smart ways to engage your public.
It’s your job to understand the strategy and knowledgeably help guide the possibilities. You need to understand the nature of your platforms enough to know -- at least on a high level -- what’s easy, what’s possible, what’s expensive, and what isn’t really viable right now. You simply have to understand where it stands and where it’s capable of going. You must care about it.
You wouldn’t tune out when it comes to raising money, to strategic planning, to how your program is run, to selecting your board, to developing marketing campaigns, or to revising your branding and messaging. Of course not. Those things are too essential!
If you stop to think about it, hopefully it becomes equally obvious that your technology is too essential to ignore as well.
Organizations take on the character and priorities of their leadership. If you want your organization to care about technology in a detailed, robust enough way to be great at it, that level of caring starts at the top, and cannot be delegated.