2025 CIO Hall of Famers: 8 tips for building a successful IT leadership career

Amy Brady has neither the academic credentials nor the early-career experiences typical for a CIO. The new inductee into the CIO Hall of Fame holds bachelor’s degrees in psychology and music, and spent the first 15 years of her professional life as a banker.

But when asked by the president of Bank of America, where she was employed in the early aughts, to build an innovation and development team, Brady said yes. The then president wanted to build the bank of the future, and Brady had a reputation as a change agent.

That role, Brady explains, “exposed me to technology and what was going to happen with technology in our industry.”

It also set her on the path to becoming a CIO. After running that R&D department, Brady moved into IT and worked in a series of roles before becoming CIO for enterprise functions technology and operations at Bank of America in 2011. Brady became CIO at KeyBank in 2012 and holds that role today.

Brady’s career progression is unique, but she and the other 2025 CIO Hall of Fame honorees share a willingness to seize opportunities — especially those that push them beyond their comfort zones.

Despite their varying backgrounds and career paths, these inductees share many perspectives on what it takes to become a successful CIO. Here, they offer 10 strategies for excelling as an IT leader today.

1. Be open to possibilities

This year’s CIO Hall of Fame inductees share a willingness to try new professional challenges, even unexpected ones.

Brian Abrahamson, now senior vice president and COO of MITRE, started his career as a consultant working on systems engineering and development. The role suited him well. “I was happy writing code,” he says. So much so that when he was asked to step into a team-lead role a few years into his career “on a fateful Tuesday afternoon,” he thought about saying no.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Abrahamson decided to make the leap anyway. “That changed the course of my career,” he says. He went on to become CIO of Pacific Gas & Electric Co. as well as CIO and chief digital officer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Battelle.

2. Volunteer for tasks that stretch you

These elite CIOs also spent their careers seeking out opportunities to take on stretch goals.

For Shelia Anderson, executive vice president and chief information and digital officer at Unum Group, that meant being the first to raise her hand for challenging tasks and innovative work.

Foundry / CIO.com

Anderson says that’s particularly important to do early in one’s IT career.

“If you think about building your tool kit, that’s the time to do it, and you do it by trying things you know you’re going to love and also trying things that will stretch you, even if you don’t end up loving them,” she says.

Anderson speaks from experience.

“I love managing business applications, but I took a role as an infrastructure leader managing a global network. I didn’t love it, but I ended up needing that skill [as my career progressed] and it enabled me to work successfully developing cloud strategies,” she explains.

3. Build your career by choice, not chance

Although leading tech execs stress the importance of seizing opportunities as they arise, they also attribute their professional progression to strategic career management.

Sastry Durvasula, chief operating, information, and digital officer at TIAA, started as an engineer and spent the majority of his career working with or working for iconic Fortune 100 companies “that have stood for a whole century.”

Foundry / CIO.com

“That started as a chance, and it became a choice,” he says.

Durvasula says he became skilled at leading such companies through disruption, something he first did in the early days of the internet revolution. He also recognized that he found leading transformation exciting and got professional satisfaction out of helping ensure legacy companies will thrive in the digital era.

“You have the opportunity to take something that is a marquee product in these companies and put it in the hands of the next-generation customer at a large scale and completely unleash it in a new way. The satisfaction and fulfillment in doing that is incredible,” he says. “I feel that I’ve been blessed to be given the opportunities I’ve had and also the choices I’ve made.”

4. Embrace the leadership challenge

As an undergraduate at the US Military Academy from 1979 to 1983, Curt Carver had a required class in the programming language Fortran. He went on to earn a bachelor’s in computer science and applied his tech skills to the US Army throughout his lengthy military career.

Nearly from the start Carver set his sights on becoming a leader in the technology space, seeing it as the hardest role in enterprise leadership.

Foundry / CIO.com

Carver says IT leadership requires someone who is visionary, yet attentive to details — as getting small items wrong in technology can have catastrophic consequences. It also requires both deep technology knowledge and broad business knowledge — and the ability to work on and effectively communicate about complex issues to colleagues in both those arenas. Perhaps most consequently, IT leadership impacts a wide swath of work and life.

Carver embraced (and still welcomes) the extensive challenges of being an IT leader.

“I knew that I could excel at leading men and women here, and I thought that this was where I needed to be to be able to lead, innovate, and develop solutions,” says Carver, who is currently vice president and CIO at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

5. Recognize that risks are opportunities

Jim Scholefield has spent his entire career in tech, serving as CTO at The Coca-Cola Company and global CIO at Nike as well as CIDO at both Merck and Marriott. He is now CTO at Legends. He was drawn to tech leadership because he likes to work “on value creation.”

Doing that means being willing to take risks, says Scholefield, who learned the hard way the importance of that trait.

Foundry / CIO.com

Scholefield points to times earlier in his career when he knew his tech team had to make big moves but he didn’t pursue them. “In each case I knew what the answer was, and I didn’t have the courage to push it through,” he admits.

Having seen others stall in their careers because they weren’t willing to take risks, Scholefield cultivated a bolder approach and learned to take risks by default, to be “willing to make little mistakes and make moves rather than worry about what could go wrong. You have to challenge yourself to be on the front edge of that curve to innovate and learn.”

Scholefield explains that the willingness to take risks does not imply recklessness; rather, it’s about taking calculated risks and being able to quickly assess progress and then either pivot toward success or fail fast.

He has had that approach pay off multiple times in his career, citing as a case in point his being an early adopter of cloud.

6. Embrace mistakes and learn from them

Similarly, IT professionals who want to advance their careers need to be OK making mistakes, Brady says. They need to recognize that making a mistake isn’t typically career-ending.

Amy Brady / KeyBank

“You can’t be in business and not make a mistake or two. And if you don’t make mistakes along the way, then you’re not progressing, pushing, or challenging yourself and your teams to be better,” Brady explains. “That’s where you have to be resilient and know when to say you’ve made a mistake and what you’ve learned from it.”

7. Be curious and a constant learner

Members of this year’s CIO Hall of Fame class also have in common a love of learning. They seek both formal and informal learning opportunities, with many noting that they have particularly benefited from the advice and insights they’ve gotten from mentors and prior bosses as well as from observing others in action.

“Technology leaders don’t have a choice to learn; it’s not an option,” Durvasula says. “It’s true for any exec, but it’s particularly true for technology executives.

Brian Shield, CIO of Safe-Guard Products International, has a similar take, pointing out what most IT professionals already know, which is that technology is advancing faster than ever. That, he says, makes the need to be a constant learner more critical today.

Brian Shield

“Maybe in the past CIOs could be successful by being pretty good at what they do, but now they have to be thought leaders. So you want to be able to have connections to other CIOs and industry leaders so you can learn from them,” Shield says.

He also believes in the value of having mentors — more than one, he stresses. “These are people who I can turn to to understand the current state of tech and where it’s going, people who can help with leadership skills and who can help with my team,” he says.

8. Create a community

Creating a community for oneself is another common strategy these CIOs have employed throughout their careers.

Shield landed in Boston in 2013 to become SVP and CTO at the Boston Red Sox, following a stint as CEO of Shield Consulting Group, EVP and CIO at the Weather Channel, and other executive positions.

To extend his network in Massachusetts, Shield in March 2015 founded BostonCIO (now part of the Inspire Leadership Network), gathering CIOs from different industries with different tech strategies who could share information, insights, and camaraderie.

Unum Group’s Anderson took similar action, building a personal network of executives from companies and industries outside her own work history as well as colleagues from prior employers.

She says it’s important to maintain these relationships so that she can tap into their knowledge and experiences when needed.

“Often a CIO has worked through the same problem or opportunity I’m now facing,” she says. “It’s very helpful to learn from others.”