IT Leaders

Good morning everyone, pleasure to be here. We'll start, I want to just, a few points based on what Drew said and some observations on that. I'm a big fan of strength finders too where you understand what your strengths are. It really helped me grow as a manager and Doug talked about weaknesses. I had a different philosophy and it worked well for me was I identified my weakness and instead of trying to improve it I hired someone that was good at it.

I'm terrible at project management, I hired a project manager. So you don't know your strengths and weaknesses and be smart about it. On email communications, agreed a lot with what he said. What I have learned to assume is when you're sending an email to an executive, they will only read the first sentence. So make that critical and important stuff, put the details underneath it, know give them that bullet point, if they want to know the details they can read it, if not they're happy.

A little about me, so I go way back. I got my first computer in 1980 while I was in high school. Got the RAM upgrade so instead of eight ks got 16 ks and it's hard to believe but it's amazing what you can do with that. So I have a love for technology ever since. Then I went on to college and got my degree in computer science in 1984.

The problem was in the South Bend area where I lived, no one had computers. So I had to work in some other jobs for a couple of years until I got my first opportunity. Your first job in IT is your hardest one to get for you guys back there that are just graduating. As soon as you get a little experience it becomes easy. Easier.

Easier. Until you get to my age then it's harder again, know, but that's okay. One of the niches that I fell into was actually helping companies strengthen their IT department to put it in a good position for them to be acquired. So I've helped four companies be successfully acquired, and that kind of goes back to don't just know technology, understand the business. Probably the funnest one that I did was we did remote temperature monitoring for pharmacies.

We would, with vaccines and stuff they had to be kept so cold. We actually designed and built temperature probes that went on freezers, the entire infrastructure, so we were doing like 7,000,000 temperature readings a day and then I don't know if any of you know Digi International, they acquired So that it's a lot of fun. I describe myself as a computer geek with social skills. I I can understand the techie, but I understand the importance to be able

to talk

business talk. My microphone fell off. So yeah, learn and also learn to translate to common sense things. So business intelligence, try and explain that to executives. You've got your data engineer and you have your dashboard builder.

Put it in terms they understand. The way I explained it to them, that dashboard builder is the painter. They make everything look pretty. The data engineer guy is the plumber. It's really important, but it's behind the walls, you don't see it.

To me, your culture is the key. You can't be a leader if you don't have culture. You think of famous leaders like Patton. Well the military has a culture and your leadership and that culture have to go together. The culture I try to build, number one is fun.

We spend way too much time at work to not have fun and if you can build a culture of fun, that's the first foundational step. So have fun at work because we spend way too much time there. And then build collaborative and really we talk about one on ones and I'm guilty of canceling those, but the reason is I've talked to them five times in the week and they'll literally say, hey I already talked to you about what I need to talk collaborate, listen, coach, mentor. And then empower your employees and I'll talk a little bit more about that when we talk of some of the things that are dangerous to culture. And trust, you've got to build trust and you have to be transparent in order to do that.

Sometimes it's tough, you have to give the bad news and the good news. Funny story, hired a guy that was no college degree, brought him on to help at 60 ks had to teach him that no, you don't wear a wrinkled shirt to work, you probably should iron it. That same person now has worked for me three times, His salary is 2.5 times when I originally hired him. Invest in people, have those hard conversations, but build trust. Culture killers, being the hero, and this was a tough one for me is that as you get higher up in management, the less you do.

You're busier, but you have to not try to do that project, even though it looks fun, even though it's something that excites you, you've got to let someone else do it because you will get eaten alive trying to be the hero because you still have all those meetings, all those interruptions and you don't get the focus time you need to do it. So don't be a hero. And it's fun when other people actually get to do it and you see the pride they take in it, and they'll get done faster. Clones, one of the things that I observed early in my career, we acquired a company down in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, I went down there and lived a couple summers as we integrated them. What I realized was over time I watched the leader of customer service, this was a large person, and over time I saw them drive the skinny person out of the department and everybody they hired was bigger than them.

They were hiring to make themselves feel better or kind of clones of themselves. Avoid that trap. Hire diversity, hire people that are smarter than you. Don't be scared. When you hire a person smarter than you, they just make you look better, they don't take your job.

How many people here have fired an employee?

Okay, good.

Negative employees are killers. You will have a group of people that won't buy into the new culture and those are people that will tear down the rest of the department and I've got a couple different cases where I've done it and there's kind of two kind of people. They're the kind that one, they are a negative person, they are not someone that's going to advance the team, they have never been great to the company and those are the ones that you let go just normally. Then there is the other group that are, hey they're good people, they're just not a good cultural fit, they're not quite what that position needs to be and what I've done in the past on that is I've actually told them, hey your position is going to be eliminated in thirty days, we're going to pay you up to then, your first priority job is find a new job, and then your second priority is the other task we assign to you. It shows respect, the rest of department respects it and it also gets your culture right.

Oh and then there's a new one that I learned in my current role is what do you think person? So what person I realized over time, whenever asked a question about what we should do, would always say, well what do you think? He was a yes man and he was afraid to say what he thought because he was wrong most of the time. Watch out for those. And what I've learned in my career, so I'm 61 years old, so I've been in this industry a long time.

I actually, back to talking about banking, I started as a software developer under DOS writing mortgage banking software. Not firing a person has been my biggest mistake and most detrimental to my success. It took me six months and I probably should have done it the first or second month. Don't like firing, but understand when you fire someone, you are protecting the rest of the company. It's not just about you.

So don't be afraid to do it, don't enjoy doing it. Culture builders, Number one thing is smile. If you smile, you'll get a smile back and you can't not smile and not feel a little better. So number one, active listening, eye contact, look for visual cues, are they lost, head nods. One of the advice I was given in my career is when you're on a one on one when do you look the smartest, it's when your mouth is closed, you're listening and nodding your head yes.

Build that. Respect, you have to have respect for your employees and they have to respect you. And you do that with honesty and frankness and love. And you also do that by not

admitting what you don't know, admitting when you were wrong. And once you can get to that level of honesty, boy, you'd be amazed at what people will come in and tell you and not be afraid to share. Humor. You gotta have fun. So we are very active users of teams, and the amount of funny gifts that we share among each other as part of comments and poke fun at each other, it is huge, but it also builds that culture of caring, fun, and they'll do things.

They've got my back. I know that. And I have theirs. Creative rewards. We all have limited budgets.

So how do you reward people for good work? Couple things. One is on the job vacation. Couple things like that that we do. Done that I I found is just a lot of fun and really rewarding is so I've got eight in house developers that develop our system or basically our ERP.

Projects and we have a hand in board. And what we've learned is we we've all had, like, good ideas from end users, but they never would reach a priority. So when do you ever do them? They sit on the board, they're there, and it it just over could be overwhelming. So we decided to throw a backlog party.

So what we do is with all the developers, it's a party day. We bring in donuts, we order pizza, and what we do is we spend the day taking all those little low priority projects to provide value, and we blast through as many as we can. The way we use the Kanban, we actually have Post it notes with the project so they actually have get the joy of moving it to the Duncom, here's something you got for them in a day. You're excited about it. Side effect is we actually got some emails from our users and actually even a customer saying, oh, funnest stories that I feel like I'm most proud of it with I talked about the one person who's worked for me three times.

Another one who's worked for me twice. She originally came on office as a graduation party. So we set we sent her off with love, with respect, and excited for her and for new opportunity. Four years later, I was able to hire her as a project manager, and she loved coming to work with me again. We would be getting emails more like how soon can we do the new software.

There's an old saying in in project management about if you throw throw a frog in blowing water, they jump Good morning walks. So this is another thing that I found so useful. So you might notice I my shoes might be a little noticeable. You wouldn't be surprised if every morning I do try to do a walk through the office and the warehouse. These shoes have gotten me open communication with warehouse employees that normally wouldn't talk to you.

You know, hey, nice shoes. Oh, hey, you know, tell me about what you're doing. How's this working? And smile when you do it. And you wanna judge your culture.

It's kind of a fun experiment. As you walk around saying good morning, you'll probably get one of two responses. People like smiles. People are happier when you smile. It's a

simple thing. Just do it.

Some tools and wisdoms from the years that I've learned. Oh, before that, I did wanna share a story I remember. So this goes way back to DOS. We wrote mortgage banking software and we had a spot in our where we had to print a report and so up on screen, you know, it said press any key to continue. Things that are gonna come down the road.

His philosophy was no one likes that, but if you tell a CFO right away, they can plan for it. If you wait till the last minute, you're not building a business partnership. It's very hard for the business to adapt. CFOs won't like you. Tell them early.

Tell them often. And the biggest concept of it is managing your WIP, which is work in progress. The theory behind it is we, as human beings, can probably work on three projects at one time. If we have any more than that, we're unconsciously not working on one. So the idea is you limit your WIP to three.

So any new project, you can say to the business, okay. I'm working on these three. Is it more important? Yes or no? If it's yes, then the next question is, well, this one will be done in three days.

Can it wait till then? Yes or no? So what you've actually kinda flipped it around to is you're not ever saying, no. We can't do it. You're letting the business decide their priorities.

So you're not the bad guy. They understand more what you're doing. And so we we use this with our team. We've got two giant whiteboards. Each developer has their own column.

We do biweekly stand ups whole team. Take a class in sales. It's huge.

When you get into management,

I joke 60% of my job is sales. I'm either selling my team on ideas, I'm selling management on the ideas and focus on are things that have had a visible impact on the business and the executives. Get that win under your belt first. They see the value better, and then do the infrastructure second because they don't care about the infrastructure unless it's not working. And and