IT Leaders

Thank you for the applause. Appreciate it. Thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank

you. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. What is it?

I was watching Happy Gilmore two, and I had to go back and watch the first one again for the probably 101 time. And, you know, when he's putting, he's like, come on, let's get the crowd going. So, you guys feel free to be as loud as you need to. Sounds good. Thank you.

Again, Drew McMonagle. I'm the chief technology officer at Lake City Bank, so I got a couple of banker friends here in the room, which is great. Again, I really believe in that collaboration. We're better together. So, thanks for having me.

And I'm a new guy to Fort Wayne. Been here for about nine months at Lake City Bank. I I work in Warsaw and then Fort Wayne one or two times a week. So, if you notice the small little, words in the bottom the intro slide, those are my top five Clifton strengths. I'm not sure if anyone in here, kinda goes through the whole Gallup and Clifton strengths, strengths based culture, but, those are mine.

I'd love to connect with others as well and talk about strengths and how those really come out and how you can use those to also be a better communicator. Alright. So, artificial intelligence. I've been using a product called abacus.ai, and I said, hey, abacus.ai, based on my searches or based on my prompts, hey, what do you think I look like? And describe a picture that describes me.

And this is what it came out with. Not not quite mean, it's a good looking guy. Right? Fair enough. You know, fit and everything else, looks pretty good.

But I'm actually born and raised in Hawaii. And so, that's that's why you have that in the background. Obviously, you know, I've I've been a soccer coach, played soccer, so I've got a soccer field right outside my office, apparently. I work at a bank, I've been in banking, financial services for twenty years, and we'll go over my career journey here in a moment. But, you see where AI is not quite hitting the mark?

There's a vault door on a glass room. So, again, I mean, it's Maybe it's a cool trend to have a vault door in the glass room, but maybe I have other banker friends here, maybe not as secure. And obviously, whatever this is in the monitor, maybe I'm doing vulnerability management scores in my total risk score here or something. I don't know. But, it's not looking good, here on the on the end.

So, anyway, that's what generative AI thinks. Again, I've lived in Hawaii and and, Missouri and Texas, and I've I've been here in Indiana for nine months, I'm really glad. Really great people in the area. So, my career map, I've had an extremely non traditional path, if you want to call this a path, to really IT leadership. And, the one thing that I've always tried to make sure that I have been as a leader first.

That's the one thing, no matter if I'm responsible for the for other folks in the organization or I'm not responsible. Right? If I'm a producer or not, it doesn't matter what role you have in your life or in your organization. I think you can be a leader no matter what. Okay?

So, this is kind of the the blue is the path I have taken. There have been a lot of times where I've not taken the ladder. Right? And I've said, hey, I I need to channel my passions in some other way. I've worked in really small increments of, I would say, two to three years at a time.

Right? Someone says, hey, what's your 10 or 20? What's your what do you want to be when you grow up? I'm like, I have no idea. I don't think I'm still grown up.

Right? I don't know. And I think, you know, I've always challenged myself to figure out what my passions are, what makes it interesting to me, where I can add the most value in an organization, and I've gone to do that. So, I started off in sales as a sales rep in college. I loved that.

But then, I started to get into banking. Right? So, I was a personal banker. I was client facing. And that really I've carried that with me my whole journey of really understanding the accountability that I have as an IT leader now to our employees that deliver and talk to the customer.

That's how money is made. Right? And we'll talk about how important it is for you all to understand that as you as your communicators. So I've gone through branch management, mortgage. I've been in the mortgage business.

I've been a a product manager. I went into product and marketing for a little bit. A lot of this is really tailored how I communicate over the years, and maybe maybe you'll see some parallels. But I kinda got into a strategic role doing a lot of bank M and A. I've been a part of five or six bank acquisitions in my career.

The last one was not good necessarily for me. And But then I got into really the process improvement arena, learned a lot about different business processes and everything else, and that my really strategic IT position. Although, my background in college was electrical engineering, computer science, and management information systems. So, I of had it the time, but it took me a while to actually figure out that this is what I wanted. Alright.

Communicate. Right? It's a verb. To share or exchange information ideas or feelings with others. To speak, right gesture.

Involve sending and receiving. Right? There's two ways. Right? Communication is both ways.

Right? So, it's with your direct reports, and it's to your direct reports, and your direct reports are communicating to you. Right? There's 306 degree feedback. Receiving messages, confirming intent and understanding.

I I always love the pharmaceutical ads. So there is a good side effect, of being able to communicate, right? Those who have focused on the competency have reported heavy amounts of building trust. Okay? Resolving conflict, maintain great relationships, and have been known to collaborate effectively with others, building teams to success.

Right? See a professional to evaluate if communication if communication is right for you. Right? So, the communication communication is is critical. Critical, and it's They don't teach this stuff, right, in school.

They don't. And I think a lot of times, we're really good at our jobs. Very tactical. Right? We're good at our jobs.

We understand the technology. But how do we manifest that self to the different audiences we might need to communicate to? So, I think that there's four main audiences that you'll have within your organization. You might be more b to b, b to c. Right?

I don't know where you are and what company you work for or with. But I think that there's these four key critical groups. The first one, and not saying this is the most important one, but they do sign the checks, so to speak, or send the wires. I mean, banking probably should do electronic payments, but it's executive leadership. Okay?

The next one, you have your key internal stakeholders. That might be another director in a different department, right, a director of operations, it might be a director of sales, it might be a director of marketing. Right? But you have these key internal stakeholders that you have to make sure that those are your most important clients. We'll talk about that.

You have your users. Right? Your users might be consuming your technology. Right? I talked to a couple of folks who, you know, one is, hey, I'm really focused on the internal infrastructure.

Right? My users are internal. They're employees of the of the organization. And then I talk to another person who owns the external experience and applications. Right?

And so that person's users are external. Right? So they're they're clients of the of the organization, example, a bank. The last one is, and this is the most important, potentially, right, is your own technology team. Right?

If you have a good communication strategy and tactical measurements with your own team, you're not gonna get anywhere as a group. Right? And you're not gonna be able to deliver. So, these are the four areas I think are are critical. And we'll kinda go into each one and and talk about what makes them different.

So, executive Throughout my career journey, I've really learned how the business works. Okay? I've done a lot of different I've had a lot of different jobs and roles and careers in banking, personally. So it's a little bit easier for me to say, hey, I understand how revenue is generated. I understand how money is made.

Right? I understand how value, right, how share holder value is created. I understand how our expenses work. I would encourage you in your roles to do as much as you can to understand your actual business. Right?

If you don't have that longevity in a certain industry, it could be difficult to understand it. So, even if you're, again, an information security officer. Right? Or you're managing infrastructure, if you can understand how value is created, it's key. And discussing that with leadership.

Share what matters the most. Right? And know your executive team. You know, share that strategy, the KPIs. Right?

The time, the dollars. Make it, you know, have it have it be in layman's terms. Right? Make it understandable. The other thing that I really like that our team I really like that our team does is executive summaries.

So, for every decision that you make that's important enough, you determine what that level of importance is. Make sure you have a one to two page executive summary that really serves as like a memorializes kind of the decision you made. Why you made it? What are the key factors? What are the key success criteria?

If you're gonna spend money, or your time, or your resources, you owe it to yourselves and your team to understand, you know, why you're making that choice, why you're investing. And then, be transparent, solution focused. Alright? Own it. Own the root causes.

There's problems. There's gonna be Make sure you're doing RCA analysis. Right? Make sure you're communicating up. Own the narrative with your executive team.

Own those things. And then, when you fix them, when you come up with those remediation plans, let them know you did. Right? Let them know that, hey, this next project we're doing is directly tied to fixing a problem. The next one is your key internal stakeholders.

So, these Again, I talked about it. Kind of maybe your other directors, your peers, things across different departments. Right? You You're essentially serving them. They're your clients.

There's a chief operations officer at my last company, and I was I was sitting down with her at a happy hour, because I was struggling. I'm like, I can't work with this person. This person's just, you know, we're we're not compatible. Right? But but she said, hey, you know, if you're a banker, you're spending your time with your most valuable clients.

Right? And I said, that makes sense. She's like, are spending any time with this other person to really understand them, to foster the relationship? I'm like, you know what? I don't think once a quarter is doing it.

So, we did, hey, every two weeks until we got to a really good spot. You know, our teams were working a lot of stuff together. We were delivering a lot of things through CRM, call center, and other workflow tools. And that really, really helped us smoothen out our problems because we were able to understand each other. We were communicating.

I understand what her priorities were, and I aligned my road map, so my keys for success were hers. Once I was able to kinda understand that, it didn't matter about me. It matters what our what our teams think, what our what the success levels of our teams are. Right? That really meant something.

Be proactive. So, I try to anticipate concerns. Right? Bring people on early in new products. We don't wanna make sure We wanna make sure that we're actually bringing people in on buying decisions.

Right? We don't wanna buy something and procure that, and then roll it out just to find out that it doesn't work for anybody, or a key business segment. So, make sure that you're working with your internal clients, and spending the most time with them. And then have empathy. Right?

Change is hard. Right? There might be a force to change. Right? There's forced changes in this world.

Things we have to deprecate. Things that are end of life and we have to move on from them. But make sure that you bring them along with you and have empathy for change and the things they're going through. Alright. The next one is your users.

Alright? So the best thing with your users is to make it understandable. Communicate, I would say, like the lowest common denominator. So, if your lowest common denominator, that person who's the most technologically declined, can understand it, then you're doing a good job. Be responsive and empathetic.

Alright? Again, have a sense of urgency. And I talked about this before. I took the empathy that I I was able to get from my first job in banking as a personal banker. I still carry that with me.

Alright? I still understand the accountability that all of our service teams, call centers, bankers, everything have to the success of our organization. And and so never never lose that. Gather feedback. So this is an area where I've been spending a lot of time around artificial intelligence.

Right? It's kind of a thing, apparently. And so, I've been spending a lot of time not just pushing content to people, but doing demos, making it land with them. Right? So, if I'm gonna bankers, I'm gonna show them specific tactics they can do, right, as a banker in that role, make it specific to help them, right, be successful.

We have a credit department. Right? So, hey, what can the credit department do? Maybe that's completing completing research on their write ups. Whatever the case may be, but make it very specific to them and they're gonna adopt it and and be happier for that.

We've also been doing kind of just some overall brainstorming, right, around these key business topics. So, there was recent meeting, we had 80 to a 100 people in the room, got post its, did a ten minute session, and then we we took those post its, we're doing something about it. Right? Users wanna see that, hey, their feedback matters. So, the other last thing I'll say is, when you're you're thinking about technology, it's easy, right, to to roll things out, honestly.

It's easy to roll it out. But do your users think that you're doing technology Is technology happening to them? Right? Are you pushing it? Are you shoving it down their throat?

Or are you bringing it with them? Or are you And are you messaging that in a way, right, through your communication that is being done for them? We're gonna go over an example here in a moment. The last one, and again, I think this is where obviously, this this is my pride and joy in the success that I have, is being able to lead our internal technology team. Alright?

So, being authentic. Being your authentic self. Don't try to be someone you're not. I talked about my CliftonStrengths in the cover slide. If you haven't taken that, I I it's Gallop CliftonStrengths.

I really, really encourage you to do that and then spend some time understanding what your top strengths are. I know Doug talked about working on one weakness. In the world of strengths, you have no weaknesses. Sorry, Doug. Okay?

You only have strengths that are not as good. Again, it's What is the narrative there? Right? The narrative is, I I can work, I can accelerate my own self and make myself better if I work on my top strengths. But you also have to be cognizant of who you are.

Right? And that will shape your ability to communicate and work with others. Alright? And so anyway, I have my email and stuff in last slide. If you want to talk about strengths, I think I saw some head nods in the room of others who are doing this too.

But I I've thought that the rest of these programs that I've had in my career are absolutely bogus. Right? The quadrants, the colors, the a b c d e f g programs, those might be great and you might have found success with those, but this is one that I really love. Now, I'll get off that soapbox. Ensure your priorities are clear.

Are you communicating your priorities to your team? Right? Every single person from my PC technician, right, my level one, those are crucial folks. They need to know what the priorities are of our group. They do.

And, they need to know I need to communicate to them how what they're doing ties into the strategic objectives of the technology team and the organization. If they don't, they're disconnected. Right? If people are disconnected, they don't know how they tie into the organization from a success measurement perspective, they're not gonna say. Right?

So, anyway, it's very important. Make sure you're having your one on ones. It's very easy to move one on ones. It's just you and one other person. So, when that other meeting comes up, it's really easy to click that, what, cancel button.

Right? And say, hey, we got nothing. We got nothing. We'll just connect next week. That happens three or four times in a row.

Now, you're feeling very disconnected with your direct reports. But you think you have nothing, but you have something. Right? You've lost conversation with your team. I do weekly leadership meetings with my direct reports.

We we really do kind of a EOS style entrepreneurial operating system. If you haven't haven't heard of EOS, I would suggest you you look that up. We don't deploy EOS in our organization, holistically, but I do, incorporate a lot of the EOS techniques in terms of meeting agendas, making sure things are on track, and managing our ninety day priorities. Crisis with class. This is another area that is just really important to make sure that, you know, we have, just a cool communicating with our team when there's a crisis, we're not pointing fingers at people.

Right? I'm not saying, hey, Doug. Great job on that problem. Now, we have all these issues. Thanks, Doug.

Appreciate it. Right? There's there's no blame. There's no a no blame culture. And you that's part of your communication.

And demonstrate and communicate the right behaviors. Right? That servant leadership is really critical. Alright? Servant leadership, in my opinion, is non verbal communication that tells your team that you're in it, that you're fully committed.

If there's a piece of trash on the floor, pick it up. If there's If you get up from a chair, I didn't do this right now, but if you get from a chair, make sure before you leave the room, the chair is pushed in. I noticed mine's not right now. Before I leave this room, I will push that chair in. Alright?

Alright. So, quick review. User rollout. This is the communication that you could send to your users. Right?

That's a segment that we just talked about. Implementing a new software platform, the change can affect how you access and manage your daily tasks. Please note the current systems do decommission on Friday. All users required to transition to the new platform by Monday. Further instructions and details are provided follow-up email.

If you any issues, just, you know, give us a call. Anyone anyone tell me about this communication right here? Any Is this good? There's a red question mark on the top. So, can probably guess it's not good.

It's lean. It's pretty lean. Well, is lean. For the purposes of this presentation, this is a lean message. Yes.

Yeah. Why are we doing this? Decommissioned. Alright? So, okay.

Does it sound like you're doing the technology for them or to them? To them. Right. Alright. Let's move on to maybe a green check mark version of the message.

Hint. We're thrilled. Right? We're thrilled. There's energy.

Right? People like energy. Maybe not in this room, but people like No, I'm kidding. People like energy. Right?

We're thrilled to announce the roll out of our new software platform this week. Upgrades designed with you in mind. That should be the first thing. That should be the first thing. Who are you Who do you work for?

Not a company. Yeah, you work for a company, they send you money every two weeks, hopefully. You work for the people using the technology. Tell them. And actually do it though.

You know? You actually have to do that though too. You actually have to make those decisions with your different users and personas in mind. Right? Practice what you preach.

I'll put my chair in the table when I leave. So, we're thrilled to announce it. This upgrade to you in mind, making your daily tasks better, easier, more efficient. K? With the new platform, you'll enjoy streamlined interface.

So, we're giving the benefits. Right? We've told them, hey, we think this this is what it's gonna do for you. Design it with you. This is how it's gonna help you.

These are the benefits. Hey. And, we're committed to a seamless transition. Okay? We know change is hard.

This communication shows empathy. Right? And excitement and provides really great benefit statements. Okay? Any other feedback on that?

Not all at once. It's okay. Alright. This next one is a very short snippet from an executive summary. This is a mouthful right here.

Yeah. We're migrating to a cloud based SD WAN architecture. It enables dynamic application aware routing across multiple transport types. We're already really far off, I think, leveraging centralized orchestration, real time analytics for optimal network performance. Doesn't that sound amazing?

Well, might to you in this room. Right? You might be like, that's just oh my gosh. I can't think of anything else better than that. Security protocols, blah blah blah blah.

MPLS circuit, blah blah blah blah. Right? Intelligent path selection. AI wrote that, I'll be honest. Okay.

There's a red question mark. So, do you think any executive outside of maybe the CIO, if you're lucky, is gonna understand that one?

I don't think I would wanna

read that even if I was a CIO. That's what I'm saying, right? And if you are a CIO and you're giving that to your leadership team, what do you think is gonna happen? I'm not gonna read it. Yep.

Right. You lost me at hello. So I hired a translator. Exactly. Alright.

So now we've transitioned that to a benefit focused same project. We've reduced the jargon. And if there are acronyms in there, we've defined, you know, what those are. Empowers our organization for greater agility. K?

Who doesn't want agility? It just sounds amazing. Right? We want improved user experience. What are we talking about?

Right? We want things to run smooth. We want reliability, right, with our network. We want connectivity, high quality. Right?

We know that there's maybe some remote work going on. We want people to be able to work wherever, whenever, high quality. Right? We wanna deliver service. Maybe we've had issues with cloud based applications routing through our data center.

Right? And and congesting, clogging up the firewall with traffic. We want to open those things up. Right? Zoom and Teams and all those other really, you know, really bandwidth intensive applications in the cloud.

Right? So now, we've got something that executives can kind of understand. Shoot. Everybody can understand this. Right?

And so that's the difference. Do you see the difference? I know that that prior one is, you know, a little bit much. So does this sound like something that you're doing today or that's a good idea?

Great idea. Focus on the end users, focus on them, not you. Yep. And what your team is doing.

Right. It's not about us. We're just enabling. So, tactical suggestions and then I'll kind of wrap up. So, begin to communicate the business impact at all levels.

We just went through that. Right? Don't talk about, hey, I'm implementing microservices. It's great. Talk about, hey, what is the actual result?

We're reducing x by 15%. Okay? Get in front of your users and act on feedback. I just talked about, right, my my journey with artificial intelligence, getting in front of different personas. Persona is a group of people that you try to plan around.

It's more of a product management term or a marketing term, persona. But hey, I talked to my credit team. I talked to my operations team. I talked to my frontline bankers serving the customer. Get in to those manager level meetings and with users and figure out what's important to them and make it relevant.

Showcase your transformation abilities. And you'll start to really bring people along with you. And when you roll things out, they're gonna be like, I actually gave feedback on that three months ago. This is great. Now I see it.

Okay? Measure what matters and communicate results. Alright? If you're not doing anything today to measure any metrics and communicate up, then you're not doing it right because most of the communication then occurs when things are going wrong. Right?

You have to promote what you're doing right. Right? That creates trust. Right? And you can use that trust.

Right? That trust bucket if something doesn't go right. Educate your leadership team on emerging technology, again, focusing on what it can do to generate revenue or reduce expense. Get into a communication rhythm with your team and don't hit the easy button and say, send cancellation in Outlook. Again, you may not think that that's hurting you, but it is and it's hurting your team.

So one on ones with direct reports. We manage our roadmap in ninety day increments. That's part that EOS model that I talked about. We call them rocks. You know, if it's every week, every week, everyone gets their top rocks.

We communicate every week on what's on track, what's off track, where the issues are. Discuss the issues. I don't care about a status update if it's going on track. Right? There's no reason to talk about something that's on track.

Don't waste your time. Talk about the stuff that's off track and stuff that that are issues for your leadership team and your own organization. If it's on track, it be on track. Right? I guarantee if you manage them in ninety day increments, doing weekly leadership meetings, really quick statuses, don't waste people's time, you will drive more results, and you'll fix your problems earlier in your project processes.

We do an all an IT all hands every quarter. And what do you think we talk about during those? Our ninety day priorities. Alright. We talk about what we accomplished the last ninety days.

We celebrate any certifications. Certifications. Right? We we celebrate our people. We communicate that to everyone, encouraging others to do the same.

And then we talk about our next ninety days. And how are we aligning to the bank's strategic objectives? Pretty simple. Ensure change management contains the right audience. Make sure that you have those cross functional influential individuals.

Right? On your We have a cab. Right? Some people call it change control or whatever. We have a cab.

Right? And we wanna make sure that the right people from the right departments are on there to make sure that we assess and communicate our changes properly. Hey, probably shouldn't pull the GL system down the day after the end of quarter. Right? Let's make sure we don't do that.

Right? Let's make sure we don't do that. But if you have to have a finance person in there to make sure that You know, we understand the importance of that. So, don't discount people like marketing, finance, you know, audit, depending on what your company has, make sure those people are on your change advisory board. Stay calm under pressure.

Your team will inherit your energy. Your team will inherit your energy. If your energy is nervous, nervous and frantic, your team is going to be nervous and frantic. And that does no one any good. That's just a waste of time and energy.

Channel your energy into being solution focused. Get tool kits if you need to. Prepare yourself to communicate problems with your executive team, with your end users. Right? With all those four personas, talk about how do I communicate problems and resolutions to all of those four groups.

Write it down. Make sure your team knows. So, is any of this worth doing? Well, that's all for you to decide. Okay?

Statistics are easy to bring up. So I would say, yes, it's all worth doing. Higher engagement and satisfaction with your employees. Improve job and employee satisfaction and profitability. Clear communication improves project success by 19% according to the PMI Institute.

CIOs who communicate effectively are two and a half times more likely to be seen as business leaders, not just technology leaders. So, if you wanna be a business leader, I would say do some of the stuff I talked about or not. Right? It depends on what you want. And then lastly, faster adoption rates with your users.

Talked about it. If the users If you bring the technology, you're making it for them, and you're harvesting the feedback from them all the time. These feedback loops are not one and done, folks. They're all the time. Right?

So communication is consistency. Right? You get to build that trust. It never ends. Always take your daily communicate pill.

Okay? Alright. So, thanks for your time. I appreciate it. QR code goes to my LinkedIn, if you wanna connect with me, and then I put my email on there.

So, thank you for your attention.

Andrew, are you good with a couple of comments?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. If we have

yeah. I wanted to just emphasize some things that you said I thought were extremely important. You started off with communication. And, obviously, it was a theme throughout your whole presentation. I think off from an IT perspective and start out, we were talking about the Phoenix project over here.

The how much IT people underrate the need to communicate well. Also, need to understand that every those four groups are four different groups. The way you talk to leadership is different from the way you're gonna talk to your users, different from the way you're gonna talk to your team, and it's up to you as a leader to understand that and be able to manage and and make those those different adjustments. And then the other thing that I thought was implied throughout your presentation, but I'm a emphasize it too, is go. Go to those people.

Right? We we finally made it. We got that that that gated community.

We got the

office door or whatever, maybe, you know, and we just stay there. No. As leaders, we have to get out. We have to leave that. We have to go see the leadership team.

We have to go see your users. We have to go, you know, with your team members. If you're having a one on one and you feel it's getting all stalled out, then then maybe the one on one needs to be at their spot. Mhmm. Pop in and see how they're doing, what you're working on, how's it going, where can I help?

So I just wanted to emphasize those two points.

Thank you. Those are those wonderful are points. Thank you.

Thanks, Drew. One other thing. Do you have any advice on helping your team get more business savvy about the operational side of your organization?

Yeah. So, I I would say spend time. You have to make the time to go and sit with those other groups. Right? Go So, for instance, in banking, have retail branches.

Go go there for the day. That's an investment, right, to to take someone off of their normal job. But I think you have to invest in your people. Right? They're gonna get some insight.

They're gonna take some insight away from their time sitting with different personas, different roles in the bank. Right? And so, think outside of that, we also our company, we have something called Lake City University, Lake City Bank University. And so, we actually have our business leaders set up different training groups and seminars to actually bring people who don't do those jobs in to learn about what that department does. Alright?

They're like two or three hours and, you know, that's part of people's onboarding and curriculum. So, I'd say our organization does spend a lot of time and resource on making sure that people understand what the other departments do and what makes them tick and why it matters. So, I think that's another great thing that I would say, you know, if your company is of that size where you can do that, great. If not, take it to the micro level. Right?

You own it. Own that development of your people and help them understand the business. Cool. Well, I apologize. I have an audit committee meeting that got kinda put on, so I have to go find a quiet place to talk.

So, thanks again. Alright.