Discussion on:

Five management tenets for every CIO

I spend a lot of effort trying to get people to understand that perceptions matter. If you have rubbish service as an individual in a shop or a restaurant then it's the organisation who suffers, not the invidual who served you - unless they were so bad you complained. So it is for most IT functions. What people perceive about you is generally far more important than most other metrics. Encourage your teams then to seek out and actively respond at all feedback, especially the stuff where if you are honest, you stuffed up. Show that you care, set about fixing it and let folks know that's what you do. This is by far the quickest way to isolate the whingers, whiners and politcal players. You see, most people come to work to do a good job too, they just need to know that their IT colleagues are on the same page.