Written by Adeoluwa Akomolafe, Chief Information Officer of Wema Bank.
It’s impossible to miss that, in any boardroom gathering, technology has outgrown its support role, slipping onto the very stage where corporate melodrama now unfolds. As a result, CIOs are forced to pick up a script they never rehearsed, learning to navigate the drama to stay afloat.
In today’s world, a company’s growth, exposure to risk, reputation and resilience all flow through its technology stack. Yet, few feel comfortable addressing the subject of organizational politics that tech leaders now have to navigate.
Technology leadership gets stuck in frameworks, strategies and maturity models. Yet beneath the slide decks, a messier, more human element surfaces: politics. The politics of influence, the pursuit of alignment, the fragile currency of trust and, at times, the stark battle for survival.
These are my reflections on contemporary leadership forged by watching the entanglement of technology and power inside organizations. If you’ve ever been the one forced to articulate, justify or haggle over the worth of tech in a boardroom, you’ve lived those politics in the flesh.
The Hidden Political Currents Underlying Technology
Technology now feels like the system pulsing through every organization. The ones that steer information streams decide the routes and hold the keys to access, wielding a striking amount of influence. That influence, as expected, inevitably draws both attention and friction.
The chief information officer (CIO) today is perched at a crossroads where ambition and anxiety are locked in a dance. Every business unit is shouting for a transformation, each insisting on its own idiosyncratic terms. The CFO is insistent on spending that can be forecasted with confidence. The COO is after stability. The CEO, in classic executive fashion, wants all that packaged and ready by the next quarter. Caught in the middle, the CIO is charged with alchemizing the chaos into a strategy.
The CIO As An Actor
It may sound cynical, but the plain truth is this: The most effective CIOs end up as political actors in the most positive sense of the term. We function as translators mediating between tribes, perpetually balancing the pull of innovation against the need for control, the rush for speed against the demand for safety and the flash of short‑term gains against the steadiness of long‑term resilience.
The CIO’s real power doesn’t spring from the blueprint, but from the story they construct. It’s the knack for weaving a narrative that ties digital initiatives directly to business value. It’s the art of turning what sounds like IT spend into a business investment.
Technical brilliance alone no longer suffices; a modern tech leader must also wield influence like a second language.
Technology, at its core, is power.
Data holds power. The act of accessing it also has power. The insight that emerges from it likewise holds power.
Any tech decision—whether it’s sorting out who owns the data, deciding who can approve a platform or settling on what counts as truth in analytics—is steeped in politics.
When a company proclaims itself data‑driven, it’s often shorthand for nudging decision‑making into a compact, sometimes hidden, center. A sleek dashboard can flip the organization’s priorities in an instant. The numbers on those screens can break a career. In today’s world, technology functions as a kind of governance. And the CIOs have become its stewards.
This is where many technology leaders trip. They tend to see systems as right versus wrong, secure versus insecure, while the broader organization moves through subtle gradients of perception, persuasion and payoff. To navigate the politics of technology, there must be comfort with ambiguity.
The Political Chessboard Of Fear And Trust
Fear is a potent currency traded in corporate politics. For CIOs, that currency often takes the form of a cold lingering dread, outages that could cripple operations, budgets that swell beyond control or transformation initiatives that never quite land. CIOs walk a tightrope, constantly negotiating the push and pull between imposing control and fostering enablement.
Trust becomes the fulcrum. A CIO who has earned trust can deliberately slow the pace of change when circumstances demand it.
But trust isn’t born from policies or frameworks; it grows out of clear communication, consistency and plain‑old courage. When a crisis hits, people don’t cling to your PowerPoint; they cling to the way you carry yourself.
The Subtle Art Of Influence
Within the theatre of technology, influence has emerged as the freshest kind of intellect. Possessing the platform, a cutting‑edge architecture or an airtight security program means little without genuine influence. Without it, you become a cost center that spouts opinions.
Influence rests on three levers:
• Knowledge
• The narratives you craft
• The network you cultivate
If your mind brims with knowledge, you’ll be more credible. When you lace your case with a narrative, it instantly gains dimension, turning abstract arguments into something people can relate to. And a solid network lets your ideas reach beyond the limits of your title.
CIOs who pour resources into those three elements and start treating technology as a catalyst for ambition, not a hindrance, end up seated at the strategy table rather than stuck at the service desk.
The Political Capital Tech Leaders Will Command In The Future
The convergence of AI, automation and regulation is sharpening the politics of technology like never before. No strategic conversation will escape an ethical undercurrent. Boards are increasingly counting on CIOs to serve as translators of complexity, rendering the technical comprehensible and the strategic practical.
The leaders who truly thrive aren’t the ones with the tech knowledge but the ones who understand how power operates in the business world. They can read the room instinctively as they follow a roadmap. They question the status quo, rather than merely going along with it.
Ultimately, technology leadership isn’t a quest to dominate machines, but to seize and sustain momentum toward change. The political dynamics aren’t a distraction from the work—they are the work itself.
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