Why technical credibility alone won’t make you a great CTO

I’ve worked at OneAdvanced IT Services for eight months now as Chief Technology Officer. In that time, I’ve managed to avoid the marketing team’s efforts to get me to write my first blog. So, as an introduction, I thought I’d write something closer to home, not about technology, but about leadership.

“Being the smartest engineer in the room might earn you respect, but it won’t make you a great CTO”

I’ve spent over 20 years building my career, from my first job on a college helpdesk reimaging laptops and logging support tickets, teaching IT, delivering projects as an engineer, architecting complex multi-million-pound solutions, and now leading large, highly skilled technical teams. It’s been an incredible journey.

In that time, I’ve learnt a lot. My logical brain soaked up new technologies, and I’ve always had a desire to stay hands-on. That’s what’s kept me motivated. In the early days, technical competence was everything. My ability to diagnose issues, understand systems and deliver value directly to customers.

But as I moved into leadership, and especially into the CTO role, the currency of success changed. Your value isn’t just what you can do with your own hands anymore. It’s what you enable others to achieve. It’s about sharing knowledge, enabling brilliance in others and creating the vision and environment where teams can thrive.

The instinct to dive into technical detail and solve problems yourself is a hard habit to break. But effective leadership at the C-suite level requires more than deep technical knowledge. It demands strategic breadth, commercial understanding and a human approach to leadership.

There’s a common stereotype in the tech industry that a great CTO is the ultimate engineer, the one with all the answers, who can architect every solution personally, but that model doesn’t scale. If you’re always in the weeds, you’re not steering the ship.

Technical credibility is essential. It earns trust with your peers, your teams and your customers and the role demands much more. It’s about aligning technology with business outcomes, influencing stakeholders, shaping culture and building momentum around a vision people want to follow.

What makes a modern CTO?

Over the past 15 years in varying leadership roles, I’ve come to believe that the best CTOs develop capabilities far beyond the purely technical, such as: 

Strategic alignment: You need to translate technology into business value, not just for the board, but across the whole organisation. That means understanding the goals, market dynamics and commercial pressures, and ensuring your technology strategy aligns with them.

Commercial awareness: The best CTOs can talk margin, cost models, customer lifetime value and ROI as fluently as they talk infrastructure, security, data or AI. It’s not enough for solutions to be technically sound. They must be commercially viable too.

People leadership: You don’t scale through services alone, you scale through people. Invest in building high-performing teams, boost autonomy and create a culture of shared accountability and innovation.

Influence and communication: A modern CTO must communicate clearly with non-technical stakeholders and listen just as intently. Explaining complex topics without jargon, justifying investment or describing risk in a way that resonates is what earns you influence.

Change management: Every significant tech initiative is, at its core, a change programme. Great CTOs understand organisational inertia and stakeholder resistance. They don’t just drive change, they lead people through it.

Invest in your own growth

I would say the thing that has helped me the most has been finding a good mentor. Someone who’s lived and breathed the role and can challenge your thinking. And don’t stop learning. A few years ago, I took on a Level 6 apprenticeship in Management and Thought Leadership. I wanted to see whether the skills I’d picked up over the years still held up, and whether the way I was leading resonated with others.

It turned out to be an incredible journey. It helped me understand what I was doing well, but more importantly, where I was missing the mark. It grounded me, gave me new perspective and helped me level up my ability to build high-performing teams. That growth only came from recognising the gaps, both in myself and in others and the motivators we have. (Think Johari’s Window and Herzberg's Two-Factor Theory.)

True success 

So where does technical credibility fit into this model? For me, its table stakes, it earns you that initial trust between your peers, teams and customers, but the role demands so much more.

I understand the value of strong thought leadership and the clarity and purpose of an effective strategy, but more importantly how to apply it. My goal is to help others become the best versions of themselves so that together, we can better support our customers, and their customers, through the services we deliver each day.

True success happens when both sides grow together. It can’t be a one-sided win. It must be a partnership grounded in mutual understanding.

Does this resonate with you? And if it doesn’t, why not? Reach out. I’d love to hear your perspective, challenge my own assumptions and see things through a different lens.