"CIO, How Does Your Garden Grow?"

That is the question posed in an article by CIO Magazine's senior editor Megan Santosus. The answer, believe it or not, is to tend to the soil. Not that Santosus is suggesting a healthy dose of farm fertilizer mind you. She does have a point. Currently in the IT industry, "low morale [is] as ubiquitous and insidious as spam." Over the years, the business has pushed CIOs to do more with less -- and when the heroes of IT delivered, they now face the thanks of being outsourced. To paraphrase Santosus, "What can CIOs do to improve morale?" Or to bring it down a few levels, "What can IT Management do to improve morale?" Don't give your staff bullshit -- no matter how appealing tending to the soil may sound. Give your staff your time. Spend time with them to understand what bothers the hell out of them. Chances are there are things you can do something about -- even while there are others way out of your control. Everybody is realistic -- they know you can't take away all the uncertainties, and you can't solve all the problems -- by trying will go a long way. If you care, you would try. If you don't, you'll stand on a pedestal and fertilize the problem -- which will do nothing.

One suggestion that the article makes, via the words of Paul Glen, author of Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead the People Who Deliver Technology, is, "A leader's job in creating an environment in which motivation thrives, involves helping employees make sense of the work they do and the contribution they make to the organization." Great advice when you think about it. We all deliver value everyday in our jobs -- actually, I hope most of us do. If the value we delivered could be quantified, we'd all be able to see how much we really mean to the bottom line. At the end of the day it's not money or job security that makes people feel good -- those are nice things, don't get me wrong -- but at the end of the day, knowing that you did something worthwhile -- that is what's most fulfilling.

Either that, or I'm fertilizing the problem.

Other articles of interest from this issue of CIO Magazine:

Flex/Time -- how to innovate while managing costs; lessons from CIOs.

A New Way to Manage Vendors -- with all of the outsourcing and buying packaged applications rather than building, you've suddenly got quite a few vendors to deal with. How do you do it?