Your Resume Got You the Job. It Won't Keep You There.

Six Months In

A CIO I mentor called me six months into her new county role. She had come from a respected tech company where she'd been a strong IT director. Smart, technical, accomplished. On the call, she sounded genuinely confused. "I'm doing good work, Steve. The projects are on track. The systems are running. So why is the Finance Director frustrated with me? Why did a board member complain about my tone? Why did the County Executive say something about 'alignment'?" She wasn't missing the technical work. She was missing everything else.

The Hard Truth

Nobody tells you this when you move from a private sector IT role or promote up from within local government: being good at IT does not make you a good CIO. It makes you eligible for the job. Once you're in the seat, the technical work is the part everyone assumes you can do. What they're actually evaluating, what determines whether you survive or quietly get pushed out, is something else entirely. It's whether you can read a room of elected officials. It's whether department heads see you as a partner or an obstacle. It's whether the County Executive trusts you to deliver on their priorities, not just yours. When a senior executive says something about "alignment," that's what they mean. They are telling you, as gently as politics allow, that you have not yet shown them you understand what they're actually trying to accomplish. You walked in thinking your credibility came from your resume. It doesn't. Your credibility now comes from relationships you have not yet built. The clock is already running.

Table Stakes

The mistake I see most often is what I call Table Stakes. New CIOs spend their first year obsessing over technical excellence. They tune the network. They modernize a legacy system. They tighten security. They are proud of the work, and they should be. Then the budget review comes, or a controversial initiative needs board approval, and the support they expected isn't there. They're stunned. The work was solid. Why isn't it landing? Because in local government, technical excellence is table stakes. It is the price of admission, not the credential that earns you anything more. Every CIO at the table is technically competent. What separates the ones whose initiatives move forward from the ones who get stuck is political capital. And political capital is not earned by being right. It's a currency. You earn it slowly through delivered work, kept commitments, and conversations that have nothing to do with IT. You spend it when you need to push something difficult. New CIOs often try to spend capital they haven't yet earned, and then they wonder why their best ideas die in committee.

The Shift

Once you accept this, the work changes. You stop defending your technical decisions and start asking better questions. You schedule a monthly coffee with the County Executive that isn't a status update. You ask what's keeping them up at night, what's frustrating them, and then you actually listen. You start showing up at board meetings, not to lobby for your agenda, but to be visible and available. You sit down with each department head and ask what's working and what isn't in your relationship with them. A CIO I know holds monthly one-on-ones with his County Executive that are not status meetings. Real conversations. That single practice changed his standing in the organization more than any project he ever delivered. None of this is selling out. None of it is playing games. It's becoming a CIO. The IT leaders who get this right understand that political savvy isn't corruption. It's professionalism. It's the recognition that every decision in local government involves competing interests, constrained resources, and human beings who need to feel heard. The CIOs who do this build a reserve of trust they can spend when something important and difficult needs to move.

What's Actually at Stake

Think about what your community actually needs from you. Your architectural brilliance doesn't help anyone if your modernization project dies in the boardroom. Your cybersecurity investments don't protect a single resident if you can't get them funded. The people you serve don't see the elegance of your technology stack. They see whether the systems work, whether services are reachable, whether their tax dollars are being spent responsibly. The political work is not a distraction from the real work. In local government, the political work is what makes the real work possible.