Ashish Agarwal is EVP, Technology at OMNIA Partners, a leading group purchasing org. in the U.S. serving public and private sectors.
For years, technology leaders and their teams have been stuck in the same cycle: The business prescribes the solution, and IT simply builds it. It sounds like a reasonable sequence on paper, but in reality, it’s often costly and stagnates innovation.
Further, when technology sits apart from the business as a siloed, stand-alone unit, it often creates unintended friction, misalignment and inefficiency.
While addressing these gaps sounds simple, it’s not as quick and straightforward. Tech leaders must adopt behavioral changes to reframe their organization’s perception of them as strategists and partners. Business peers share this responsibility too: They need to recognize that what got the organization to where it is now won’t necessarily get it to where it’s going next. They must also give technology leaders room to develop innovative solutions for meaningful business problems.
Regardless, the greater burden falls on tech leaders themselves, who must actively break their organization’s inertia and old habits.
Communicating Thoughtfully And Proactively
Communication is the single biggest driver of trust between technology and the business. True communication is more than a series of status reports. It’s more active and intentional. It starts with putting the right measurements in place, then using those metrics to drive real-time visibility into what’s in motion, and to continually pressure-test alignment with goals, key performance indicators and what’s next.
I often encourage technology leaders to ask themselves, and, critically, business leaders, questions such as:
• Have we taken the time to fully define the business problem, or just implement what’s asked? Or, has the business problem we’ve been trying to solve evolved?
• Are we solving the root cause of the issue, or agreeing to proceed with a surface-level fix, without being honest about future costs?
• Will this solution create additional value? How will we know?
• Are we still tracking toward what the business actually needs?
Such candid conversations open the door to better solutions and can help teams avoid misunderstandings.
When a team goes head-down into build mode for weeks, resurfaces with a potential solution and the business response is, “that’s not what we had in mind,” it’s often the result of miscommunication or a lack of communication altogether. Seeking regular feedback yields progress, while silence often yields mutual frustration.
Understanding organizational dynamics matters too, not just as a soft skill but as a strategic capability in its own right. Knowing how decisions move on the business side, and who influences what and why, is what lets a technology leader anticipate challenges instead of discovering them after the fact.
Making Retrospection Part Of The Process
Executional excellence is not only about efficiency but also doing your absolute best work. This requires reflecting on your progress and, when you’re done, the project’s outcomes.
To prevent repeating the same mistakes or running into the same issues, I have found it particularly helpful to build retrospective conversations into project timelines, both for internal teams and with business stakeholders. It allows us to take stock of what we’ve learned as a team and as an organization, and to improve upon what worked well while troubleshooting what didn’t. Tech leaders that make this a standard part of their process help their teams get sharper with every cycle.
Flexibility also matters. What may have worked once may not be the right action to take again. It’s helpful to keep this in mind during retrospective conversations, as the goal isn’t to replicate everything in the future, but rather to continuously improve.
Fostering Trust
I recently wrote about the importance of leading with trust as a modern CTO. Fostering trust is essential to building and maintaining loyalty. Your customers and prospects need to know you have their best interests in mind and that the products you build feel made for them, that you follow through on what you say you will do, and that you are honest when you can’t.
Your team deserves transparency and respect. The instinct to treat constraints as obstacles to work around is often the wrong one. When something changes, leaders must be realistic about how it affects that outcome, and resourceful about what might still get them there. For example, if a project’s budget shrinks, leaders should explore what alternative approach could still deliver the outcome and communicate clearly if the outcome itself must shift. This conversation, not the original ask and answer, is what ultimately builds credibility.
The same principle applies to how technology teams evaluate new tools and platforms. Every year brings a new wave of technology promising to solve everything at once, and the pressure to chase it is real. However, adopting something because it’s generating buzz, rather than because it solves a defined business problem, is its own kind of trust violation. It tells leaders that your priorities are being set by the market rather than by the business. Discernment, and being selective about which investments earn their place on the road map, is one of the clearest ways a technology leader signals that the interests of the business and its end users come first.
Setting The Standard For What Comes Next
Becoming a strategic CTO means being central to strategy and decision making. You can start by changing how you show up and interact with the rest of the business. This means being communicative, proactive and disciplined in the engagement. Today’s leaders and the next generation should focus on selling a vision with confidence, executing it with discipline, and overcoming organizational resistance with emotional intelligence and resilience.
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