Effective CIOs all have their own style and approach to leadership. One thing they have in common is the ability to communicate well at all levels of their organizations. They understand that communication is a collaborative process, as much about asking questions as answering them; as much about listening as talking. It's a conversation.

Communicating effectively with business colleagues has ranked as one of CIOs' top three critical success factors for as long as I've been tracking these things -- and I've been tracking them for a long time. I've wondered over the years why this issue hasn't gone away. Why is it so damn hard for IT leaders to get their message across?

First of all, this is not just a CIO problem. People in general are terrible at conveying a concept or message intact from their brain to that of their "listener" (a misused term if ever there was one). As Celtics coach Red Auerbach used to say, "it's not what you say, it's what they hear." Influencing what people hear involves a lot more than just forming the right words.

In today's tough economy, many companies find they must lay off some of their most experienced (i.e., expensive) employees in favor of lower cost labor. But research -- and history -- shows that experience has value that can't be achieved any other way.

I'm reading a report just out on "Women CIOs & the Art of Influence" from the CIO Executive Council, in partnership with The Leader's Edge (you can access the report on the Council's website). One of the findings shows that when it comes to effectiveness and the ability to influence outcomes, age and seniority matter. Women with more than 25 years of experience and with senior IT leadership titles were more effective than those with less than 25 years on the job and lower level titles. The ability to influence, deemed "very important" by 92 percent of study participants, manifests itself in various ways, including that "more senior IT leaders consider what's in it for the stakeholder more frequently than do their less experienced counterparts."

If you're anything like me, you hate dealing with large corporate service providers. Phone company, cable company, insurance company -- it doesn't really matter. As soon as I pick up the phone to call, I start to anticipate that a) I'm going to have to battle my way through phone tree hell; b) once I eventually connect with a person, he or she is going to ask me for information I either don't have at my fingertips or don't want to divulge; and c) their first line of inquiry into my problem will inevitably put me into a defensive posture. So a lot of times I put off the call in the first place and suffer (or fume) in silence. Not happy. Not good.

The paradox of tough times is they usually call for dramatic measures, yet it's human nature to keep a low profile and avoid risk, both corporate and personal. This is the dilemma facing CIOs today.

As I wrote in a column a few months ago, incrementalism won't cut it for many businesses in this economy. But according to Paul Gaffney, former CIO and head of supply chain at Staples and current COO of Desktone, that's the path most CIOs will take.

For 21 years, I've been involved with CIO Magazine - for the past 13 as editor in chief. Now that I'm independent, it's time to start my own blog. I can't believe it's taken me this long, but I guess my identity was so tied up with CIO that it just never seemed right. That and the fact that I was already working a gazillion hours a day.