
As an IT leader in 2025, you face intense pressure to deliver results. You’re tasked with driving innovation while managing daily operations—all with limited resources. The leaders who thrive under this pressure are those who master three high-impact practices: strategic thinking, a coaching mindset, and operational agility.
Here’s how these practices can help you reduce the daily overwhelm, empower your team, and stay ahead in an increasingly fast-paced environment.
1. Strategic Thinking: Prioritising the Big Rocks
Strategic thinking means focusing on what truly moves the needle—high-impact initiatives that align with long-term business goals. However, many IT leaders get bogged down by urgent, low-priority tasks, leaving little time for strategic work.
There’s a reason why you should focus on the big things first—think of your workday like a jar. The big, strategic tasks are the rocks. The smaller but necessary tasks are the pebbles, and the minor, routine activities are the sand. If you fill the jar with sand first, there’s no room for the rocks. But if you put the rocks in first, the pebbles and sand can fill the remaining space.
By prioritising the big rocks, you ensure that your time is spent on the tasks that have the greatest long-term impact.
“Strategy isn’t a task—it’s a way of thinking that separates reactive managers from proactive leaders.”
Putting This Practice into Action:
- Schedule time for high-priority, strategic work before other tasks fill your day.
- Regularly review your priorities to ensure alignment with broader business goals.
- Seek external perspectives—trusted advisors can offer valuable insights and help refine your strategy.
2. A Coaching Mindset: Reducing Bottlenecks and Empowering Your Team
One of the biggest challenges IT leaders face is becoming a bottleneck. When every decision or issue flows through you, it creates delays and prevents your team from moving forward independently. This bottleneck effect happens because many leaders fall into the trap of always providing solutions instead of empowering their teams to solve problems.
Adopting a coaching mindset can break this cycle. Instead of offering immediate answers, ask thoughtful questions that help your team think critically and develop their own solutions. Inspired by Michael Bungay Stanier’s “The Coaching Habit”, this approach helps your team become more capable while freeing you up to focus on higher-value work.
By reducing dependency on you, your team becomes more autonomous, and you avoid being stuck in a cycle of constant interruptions—what we earlier described as “sand.” Empowering teams and decentralising decision-making are key drivers of leadership success in today’s fast-paced environment.
Putting This Practice into Action:
- Ask open-ended questions that encourage problem-solving rather than providing immediate answers.
- Empower your team by delegating decision-making authority where appropriate.
- Create a culture of learning and feedback to continuously develop your team’s capabilities.
3. Operational Agility: Staying Flexible in a Fast-Changing World
Operational agility is essential for IT leaders who need to respond quickly to changes in business demands or technology disruptions. While many IT leaders believe they already practice agility, it often remains constrained by traditional approaches to project funding, planning, and approvals. True agility requires rethinking how initiatives are launched, funded, and scaled.
One practical way to drive agility is by adopting flexible funding models. Instead of locking in large, multi-year budgets for big projects, successful IT leaders allocate smaller pools of funding for Proof of Concepts (POCs) and pilots. These cycles allow for quicker experimentation, faster feedback, and faster go/no-go decisions. Projects that demonstrate value early should then have easier access to additional funding, enabling faster scaling.
Agile leaders also avoid over-planning by adopting lean governance models, where decisions are made in real-time by empowered teams rather than waiting on lengthy approval processes.
According to Gartner, agile organisations are 30% more likely to succeed in large-scale digital transformations. This aligns with what I’ve seen firsthand—leaders who encourage rapid iteration and learning consistently deliver faster, more effective results.
Putting This Practice into Action:
- Shift from rigid annual budgets to flexible, rolling funding models that allow high-performing pilots to scale quickly.
- Establish quick cycles for launching POCs and gathering feedback, ensuring faster learning and iteration.
- Adopt lean governance by empowering teams to make real-time decisions, reducing delays in approvals.
Getting More Done in 2025
The reality of IT leadership today is that you can’t do everything on your own. To truly get more done, you need to prioritise your time, empower your team, and have access to the right support when you need it.
Prioritising means focusing on the big rocks—those high-impact initiatives that align with your organisation’s long-term goals. Empowering your team involves adopting a coaching mindset that reduces bottlenecks and builds internal capability. And having access to on-tap guidance and on-demand expertise ensures you can make smarter, faster decisions without being stuck in the weeds.
That’s where services like evince Consulting’s Technology Advisory Services and Technical Expert Services come in. Whether it’s providing on-demand advisory support to help you prioritise and execute your strategy, or offering expert resources for critical technology projects, evince Consulting exists to help ambitious IT leaders like you get more done and lead with confidence.
By mastering these three high-impact practices and leveraging the right support, you’ll not only meet the demands of 2025—you’ll exceed them.
Are you ready to step up and become a high-impact IT leader?
Reach out to explore how we can help you put high-impact practices into action in your team