Mastering the chess of IT leadership today

Salumeh Companieh, chief digital and information officer at Cushman & Wakefield, compares modern IT leadership to chess, requiring precision and foresight due to accelerated change. She emphasizes clarity, real-time adjustments, and aligning team work with business outcomes to navigate AI-driven enterprise challenges.

In today’s AI-driven world, every decision a CIO makes is a pivotal move, with outcomes that ripple across the enterprise. Business performance, investor confidence, and the organization’s ability to compete are all influenced by these moves. It’s why Salumeh Companieh, chief digital and information officer at Cushman & Wakefield, says leadership in this environment feels a lot more like chess than checkers. As the margin for error shrinks, expectations are rising, and the role of CIO is evolving https://www.cio.com/article/4178006/state-of-the-cio-2026-cios-set-the-course-for-ai-roi.html , from technology leader to enterprise operator at the highest levels. Across the board, IT leaders are facing hard decisions with no easy answers. It demands clarity of intent, discipline in execution, and the ability to anticipate not just the next move but the downstream impact of every decision. In a recent episode of the Tech Whisperers podcast https://linktr.ee/techwhisperers , we explored how Companieh leads where speed, transparency, and human impact collide. In the Q&A that follows, edited for length and clarity, she builds on that conversation, sharing how her perspective, intentionality, and leadership approach ensure every move counts. Dan Roberts: You’ve compared leadership today to chess, where second-order consequences are real. What has changed in the CIO role that makes that level of precision and foresight so critical now, and how do you help your team keep up? Salumeh Companieh: What’s changed is the pace of change and velocity of delivery. You now have far more opportunities to make missteps at an accelerated pace if you do not understand the broader chessboard. One way we set our teams up to go faster is through clarity. The clearer the outcome, the faster you can go. So that means drawing clear accountability lines and having a really clear vision. And then it’s about real-time recognition, real-time pivots, and the awareness to slow down when needed — making course corrections in the moment and celebrating wins, both small and significant — because then you continue to fuel the flywheel. You fuel this sense of impact. We host a team town hall after every earnings call, and one of the things we do very clearly is translate the earnings call to the work that they’re doing, drawing clear lineage between the amount of hours you’re spending away from your family doing work and the outcome of when your CEO is on an earnings call speaking to enterprise outcomes. The momentum that has built within our organization has been awe-inspiring. Feedback on the employee engagement survey statement ‘I can clearly align my work to the outcomes of the company’ continues to go up, and that’s where your sense of belonging continues to rise. You understand impact, so you can go faster. You played a visible role in Cushman & Wakefield’s recent Investor Day . Not long ago, it would have been unusual to see a CIO in that spotlight. What was your role, and what did you want investors to understand about technology, AI, and the business? The core message was, it’s inseparable from the strategy. There isn’t a separate AI strategy from the business strategy. It’s a cohesive, co-created strategy, and we are at the forefront of the new way of working for a professional services firm. We’re looking to redefine not just commercial real estate but professional services in whole. How do you move knowledge? How do you elevate colleagues? How do you shape different ways of working, with human-first and AI-augmented. So that was the core message. My role in that is also to gain trust. It’s to clearly articulate the integral role that technology and data will continue to play in professional services, and we are making bold moves to shape it. Your leadership style is grounded in consistency, clarity, and generosity, qualities that often come from lived experience. How have your early influences and upbringing shaped the way you lead and make decisions today? My No. 1 and No. 2 role models are my parents. They made incredibly bold decisions when we were younger. They had to pivot multiple times in their lives and re-create from scratch. There was this real grounding of grit that I experienced day in and day out. And I genuinely believe that every single step I’ve taken, regardless of how hard, is not even remotely in the realm of the difficult decisions that they’ve made. For that to be your north star of what difficult looks like, candidly, everything else is benign. They taught me consistently showing up will pay dividends at an outsized return. They taught me that in your darkest days you never lose empathy for others. Most importantly, they taught me to keep myself humble. That’s the true start of where my ‘operating system,’ if you will, was. For their decisions, for their sacrifice, I will always be grateful. And for the lessons in my life. I don’t think I’d be where I am today without that. And not just physically in a different country, but the growth that I’ve both witnessed and experienced wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Whether it’s their decisions or my dad’s constant challenge of, ‘Well, of course you could do it,’ there was never a doubt in the forefront of the discussion. There was always a center of, ‘Why not you?’ And that same kind of leadership in a familial sense is what we hope that we’ve given to our sons. Why not you? You’ve just got to keep opening your mind space of, somebody’s going to crack this code, it might as well be you. You’re known for your ability to see situations through multiple points of view across the business, your teams, and your clients. How does that perspective shape the moves you make, especially in moments of uncertainty? I look at each of those lenses as their own data points, if you will, and depending on both external factors and internal factors, you dial up a particular decision criterion or you dial it down. It’s no different than, historically, we would have done this for risk mitigation. We would have looked at the risk profile of aging technology and tech debt and cybersecurity protocols and made risk-based decisions. It’s almost like mentally pivoting that to rewards-based decisions. What are the biggest rewards you’re going to get, both from a cultural perspective as well as a revenue optimization perspective? Sometimes you might make a move just to start building the culture, and the next move on top of that will be an accelerated business and revenue outcome. But the more informed you are with all the data points, the better investment portfolio manager you are, because that’s really this job, right? Whether it’s your people’s capacity or genuine capital, it’s an investment portfolio. And there are risks and rewards against every investment portfolio. Sometimes you’re going to be in a position to take higher-risk/higher-reward decisions, and sometimes you want to tone it down a little bit. To do that in totality, you need to know all the component parts you can make a decision on. You can’t put a blinder on. You have to provide transparency to the entire canvas. Then you can make really, really good decisions. At enterprise scale, clarity, speed, cost, and people don’t always align. When those forces are pulling in different directions, how do you stay intentional about the moves you make? The thing I lean on the most is to remove the definitive no’s quickly from the table. There might be different forces, some of which you know based on either context, intellect, or gut, that you’re immediately going to say no to. Remove that noise and put it to the side. Then it’s the ability to roll back through the others and draw on the proximity to your team and get their voices in the room and understand context with greater depth. You remove the noise, you draw clarity from those with deep proximity to the opportunity, you balance with enterprise context, and you make bold decisions, always centered on client outcomes. Key to all of this is that you maintain accountability for the entire decision cycle. At this accelerated pace of decision-making, with imperfect data, it’s getting comfortable in that ambiguity but knowing that there’s no one that’s going to try harder to make the best enterprise decision. And that lets me sleep at night. You care deeply about your people, but you also hold a high bar. How do you push your team to take ownership and deliver without stepping in and doing it for them? One, you have to model the leadership and commitment you seek from others. If you’re asking for really high quality, you better be putting in really high quality. Whether it’s from talent management — I’m not going to ask them are you having really hard conversations with your team unless I’m having really hard conversations with them — or it’s curiosity and learning. I have to show and model that behavior. I also think there’s something about this whole concept of teamship https://www.cio.com/article/4120226/rethinking-it-leadership-to-unlock-the-agility-of-teamship.html , and I think Keith Ferrazzi, author and Ferrazzi Greenlight founder does a great job of bringing light to that. We model that every single day. If I am clear on the fact that we will win or lose as a team, and not individuals, and I continue to reiterate that, not in words, but in actions, then what happens is, when I’m not there, they hold each other accountable. And they model that behavior for their team. You start going down this tree of action where everybody is cohesively holding each other accountable for both behavioral and technological outcomes. It’s magical. You’ve created a construct where people have the autonomy and desire to do great work and an accountability construct to ensure best-in-class outcomes. It takes a long time, because if people have not been led in this manner previously, there’s a genuine lack of trust of the process and learning that is required. But I do believe deeply in the way that Keith puts it on this concept of teamship and this cohesive outcome. As Sal Companieh’s chess analogy reveals, the modern CIO’s remit goes beyond running technology to shaping business outcomes, culture, and the future operating model of the enterprise, often without the luxury of slowing down. Her ability to play aggressively without losing sight of the human side of the board proves that, in this environment, the leaders who win aren’t just the fastest movers. They’re the ones thinking several moves ahead while bringing their people with them. For more from Companieh on leading through the tension of today’s environment, tune in to the Tech Whisperers . See also: