IT Leaders

All right. So, you know, Doug was just talking about leadership. So how many of you have seen great leadership in action? Yeah. A lot of you.

That's great. How about the flip side? How many of you seen poor leadership in action? Right? Okay, like the whole crowd, right?

And although Doug said that there, you know, there isn't as much leadership conferences and training for, that he's seen, I see a lot of leadership information out there. Right? There are lots of books. There are lots of podcasts. There are lots of social media posts and things like that.

And I always wonder, how come we see so much poor leadership? Right? We know kind of what happens with poor leadership. Right? You see the, you know, lower morale, team dysfunction, and then we're not getting the results.

So poor leadership, there are a lot of ramifications to that. And I'm not here to talk about that today. I, and I'm not here to talk about the why we have the poor leadership. I really want to talk about three key skills that I think we need to become strategic leaders. And when I say strategic leader, I mean someone who's really, focused on the vision and results and getting things done, as opposed to just day to day management and leadership from a title perspective.

So what I want to talk about particularly are three topics. Now, are lots and lots of leadership skills that I could talk about. But these, I believe, are very, very important. First of all, I want to talk about not just decision making, but deliberate decision making. Secondly, to talk about impactful communication, not just standard communication, but really making an impact when you communicate.

And thirdly, this is adaptive capacity means that ability to continually change. All right. So I want to talk a little bit about why this is important to me. It's not like something all of a sudden, you know, had some shabazam moment and went, oh my gosh, leadership's really important. It kind of came along slowly.

And then, all of a sudden, something happened that made me sit back and have to take stock. So when I was growing up, my dad was a retail store manager for a large retail chain. And we would come he'd come home and we'd have family dinners. And he would talk about the things that we all told stories. That was a big thing in our family.

Everybody would take turns telling stories about their day. And dad would too. And he would talk about different things that happened at work, you know, somebody who was a really hard worker or somebody who was really nice, somebody who helped the customer in a certain way and how they handled certain decisions. And and so I remember listening to these stories, being fascinated thinking, you know, when I grow up, I'm going to be a manager. That's what I'm going to do.

Of course, I had no idea that he was really telling us leadership stories that whole time. Now, so I grew up, got my degree accounting and computer information systems. And I remember thinking, I don't want to be an accountant just sitting doing accounting work. I don't want to be a programmer all my life. I want to be, you know, raise up and be in a management type position.

Now, fortunately for me, I got out of school, I got some really good positions, and I had excellent leadership who were my managers. They taught me a lot. I was able to grow quickly, and I was very fortunate in that. And so, in fact, I think it's because of the good leadership that I had as an example that I was able to move up quickly. I became a CIO by the time I was 35.

So I thought that was pretty good. But and that was my vision. Yes, I saw poor leadership here and there. But fortunately, I reported to really great people. Then, I took a position, and here I'd been in the workforce for many, many years, probably over thirty.

And I ended up with someone, you know, I'm in a leadership position, and I had a supervisor who was really tough to work with. A very poor leader. She had done very well in her career, but very hard to work with. I mean, I can tell you an example. We'd be sitting at a leadership team meeting and somebody would be on the hot seat that day, and it was very uncomfortable for them, for us.

It was very hard to work with. Very stressful job. After, I took the first opportunity, really, that came along, which was an interim CIO position, which kind of helped trigger my consulting firm right now. I do a lot of interim and, fractional CIO work along with consulting and some coaching. And so I took this other position and it was great.

I was so happy, so relieved. And then about three, four months into that new position, something really bad happened. The unthinkable, if you think about it. I was diagnosed with stage four primary peritoneal cancer. And I know that, at least I believe, that that cancer came about because of the stress I was under because of poor leadership.

And my body just had no immune system left because I was constantly fighting that stress. Then when I was outside of that and I could relax, you know, then it manifested itself as cancer. So while I was going through treatment, I had a friend who said, Hey, you've got to do a vision board. You need to think about where you want to be after you're better, when you're better. And so, you know, that's when I started thinking about what's going on.

And I thought about that position that I had. And and I realized I have to I have to do something with regard to leadership. You know? So all of my positions, whether they're, you know, in an interim CIO or consulting, I wanna focus on helping other people improve their leadership skills because I think we need it. The other thing too is as I sit back and look at it and I, you know, and you kind of wonder, man, how did certain people get to be where they are without those skills?

I think I need to help people learn those skills. And I don't want anybody else to have to face what I did, you know, going through it because of poor leadership. So the more I can support and share leadership skills, I think the better off we'll all be. So fortunately, today, I can say that I am no evidence of disease. This is, you know, great news for me.

I'm here. This is wonderful. So now, that's when I really kicked off my, you know, consulting firm and doing work. And now that's going to get us into where we are today. And like I said before, there are so many leadership skills that we can talk about.

It's hard to just pick a few. But these three are the ones that I think are really critical. And if you have these, you can learn the other ones as well. So let's start with deliberate decision making. As I said before, it's not just your basic decision making, because we make decisions all day long.

Everything from what are we going to eat for breakfast to, you know, how are we going to handle some issue going on at work. And when you think about those decisions, you really want to think about, the consequences. Right? What does it mean to make that decision? What does it mean for the people who are involved, for you?

And I always like to go back to, does it get you where you want to go, or does it take you away? And that's why I believe it's very, very important to have goals, to have plans, you know, strategic plans. Know where you're going to go in the short term, know where you're going to go in the long term. And I look at that not just personally, I mean, not just professionally, but, you know, personally. What are your personal goals?

I'm a big goal setter. I think if you don't know where you're going, how do you know if the decision you make is going to take you there or not? Right? How do you know if it's going to be what you want to do? And that's why I think it's really important to do strategic planning and set those goals.

Excuse me. Whether it's for yourself, or for your team, or for your business, it's important. Now, I'm not into the whole, let's build a strategic plan that's 140 pages and it sits on a shelf somewhere. Right? I'm more into the one page strategic plan, you know, three strategic goals, and usually not more than that, because it's really hard.

How do you prioritize when you have more than three things that It's you have to get very hard. And I've seen a lot of ineffective strategic planning in that process. And I've also seen very poor goal setting, right? Even, you know how every year you go through your performance plan, right? And you go through your and you do that for your staff.

And then there's always that goal setting. And usually HR will send out their information on, you know, how to set goals for people. And I think everybody ignores it, or most people ignore it. They always talk about SMART goals. You know, you've to have SMART goals, specific, measurable, you know, attainable, all that.

And I don't think people know how to do that. When I come in as like an interim or fractional CIO and I'm helping people through that process, it is amazing the number of people who have no idea what a SMART goal is. They have no idea I mean, write goals like, yeah, you should take some training classes. Okay, what, you know, what does that mean? You know, that doesn't mean anything.

How about you should take this class, you know, at this time and, you know, whatever. It's gonna help you grow. So I think it's really important. You know, one time too, helped a president do a strategic plan. And he said, yeah, I've already got this big plan.

I've got, you know, I've got our goals set for the year. And so I'm working with him, and I'm going, oh, okay. And he tells me, I have 111 strategic goals. And like, what? Like, you can't have that many strategic goals.

And he brought me in because the VPs were all frustrated with it, they wanted help, you know, trying to help. How do we understand all this? So I was working with the VPs and, I whittled it down by working with all of them to, like, five. And then I met with the president, and I said, okay, you know, working with your team, this is what we've come up with, these should be your priorities. And he just sat there, I thought, uh-oh, that was career suicide right there.

Because just kind of stopped, and you know, he had written the 01/2007 or whatever it was. It was January something anyway. And I thought, oh my gosh. But we worked together. We got it down to 11, not quite five, but still 11.

And, you know, that at least helped his team be able to focus a little bit. So when they were making decisions, they could say, Is this going to take us where we want to be with these 11 or not? The other thing that's important about decision making is to do the right thing. That's so important to me, and I say that all the time when I'm talking with staff or with people I'm working with. What is the right thing in this situation?

So many people, wanna do the easy thing. Right? Because sometimes the right thing is a hard thing. And they don't wanna do the hard thing. Right?

Because it's uncomfortable. But as leaders, we have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Right? We have to be able to stand up and do the right thing and know that that's important. You know, think about it from a people perspective.

You have staff sometimes that are excellent performers. Right? They're great, but their behavior, on the other hand, is a little bit lacking. Right? People don't want to work with them.

They're negative, whatever it might be. And then you have other people that everybody thinks, oh, they're so nice. They're such a nice guy. But they are not good at doing their job. And how many times have you seen people just take a person, you know, maybe the one who's a great guy and who is not doing very well, and just move him to another position, where again, they're not going to do very well, right?

You're just moving the problem. That doesn't help anything. You really need to say, what is the right thing in this instance? And that right thing might be working with that person to improve their performance or their behavior. I had one, situation where we had a programmer on our staff who was excellent.

I mean, he could code, you know, circles around everybody else. But nobody wanted to work with him. He was very hard to work demeaning to other people, and it created a lot of angst in the department. I worked with a supervisor and I said, you know, we really have to put him on a performance plan. Because I said, it's not right.

We have to he has to know that there are two pieces to a job. Right? There's the performance piece, how well you do the tasks. And then there's the behavior, how well do you, you know, work with the rest of the team? Because we all have to work with teams.

I think he thought, oh, nothing's going to happen to me. I can do whatever I want. And he never changed. We worked with him for how long? Finally, we let him go.

It was hard, but we had to do it. But I was really worried about the production, right, because he was so good, and we had projects that he was working on. I thought, oh, are we going to be able to get these done on time? And he, and I was worried about it, but we let him go anyway. And what I realized is the relief from the rest of the team was just immense.

Right? So they stepped up, and we got things done. Productivity didn't slip as much as I expected it to because everybody was so relieved there was a pressure gone. And then when you think about it, the rest of the team looks at you and says, oh, thank you. You know, you did the right thing for all of us.

And that's that's really, really important. So, you know, at the end of the day, when it comes to decision making, you really want to think about what are the consequences of this, and am I doing the right thing, even if it's the hard thing? Which now leads into the second skill set that I think is very, very critical for strategic leaders, and that's impactful communication. As I said, we communicate all the time. We're talking to people.

We're listening to people. But as IT people, I can tell you that we're not always the best communicators. Right? We love to use techy language. We love to tell people what cool thing we did.

And the reality is, most of the time, they really don't care. They don't care. All they want to know is, what does it mean to me? Right? How is it going to change my job?

What do I have to know, you know, to do something different or whatever? And we don't often think about that. I've been in situations where, you know, I haven't had a good communications person on my team. So gone out, I'll have to write something and know that, okay, I don't think this is very good. I've got to have somebody read it for me before I send it out because I'm afraid it's, you know, it's not adequate.

And so I'm always open to having people help me with that communication. And as leaders, we have to be willing, willing to do that, to recognize the fact that we're not always the best communicators. One time I remember I went in, well, I tell people too early and often, right? You've got to communicate early and often, especially when we're making a change or we have a big project going on. Remember one time I walked in, was the interim CIO.

First week I was there, sat down with one of the directors, and he's like, I'm so excited. We're changing out the whole print management system. And this is for a university. And I'm going, oh, great. So, you know, when and what's going on?

He goes, next week. And I'm like, great. I go, so what's the communication plan? He just sat there and looked at me, you know, deer in the headlights. And I'm like, you haven't told anyone yet, have you?

And he's like, no. I'm like, okay, well now we got to back pedal and get this communication out because everybody's printers were going to be changed out in the next week. And not only that, this this is at a university. And there are certain times of the university where it's very, very busy, and that's usually right before the semester starts and the first week of classes. This was the week before students were coming back on campus.

And this is the time people probably need their printers the most because they're printing stuff for all the new students and everything. So I'm like, oh, man. That was a nightmare having to go through that. Then right after that, they were gonna start a new project where they were upgrading some servers and was gonna take down systems that people were using. And I'm like, okay.

You have to build the communication plan right along with the project plan because we've got to have somebody, or we've got to have a communication message out there, we have to know what we're doing because we need to make sure that people are aware of it. You know, think about the value of communication, right? It improves your visibility and your credibility, right? It helps you build trust with your employees, with your other stakeholders. You know, it provides clarity.

And I think it really makes, adoption of IT, especially when we're implementing something new, go faster because, you know, you're trying to take away that fear factor of the new technology. And one of the things that I always did when, like, I was at Marquette for sixteen years. And when I was there, one of the things that I did, I didn't have a communications person on my team. So I remember way back when I first started, we were doing a huge upgrade to our student information system, which if you know think about academics, that's that's the thing that everybody registers with. That's where all the courses are.

That's faculty use it. Students use it. Administrators use it. It's a big deal. And that was going be the largest technology project in the history of the university at that time.

And I knew that one of the critical success factors was to have a communications plan. And I knew that we didn't have the skill sets on the team to do it. So I went to the VP of marketing and I said, I need someone. We're doing this big project. I explained what it was.

And I said, I need someone from your team, if possible, to come help us write our communication plan for this project. And I was able to get someone. She sat down. We built out the whole plan. And it was so great.

I mean, I was so grateful. It worked out really, really well. So when I talk about a communication plan, you have to think about all the components of that plan, right? Everything from who needs to know and what do they need to know, when do they need to know it, how do we tell them, or, you know, is it going be an email, is it going to be, do I go to a meeting, is it going to be, you know, a road show kind of thing, is it a message to leadership? You know, do I have to go to, you know, different meetings all over camp?

What do we need to do? And then who's going to tell them? Is it something I as a CIO does? Is it something the project manager does? Is it something we have, you know, somebody else do?

Is it marketing doing it? You know, if it affects the customers, maybe we have, a marketing campaign around it. So that's really important to think about all those components. This is a sample matrix. I'm sure you probably can't read it from where you're sitting.

But this is what I've always used in talking about communications, whether it's a project plan or just general. This is kind of a general one for IT, talking about filling out a matrix of what's the message, you know, what do we need to tell them, who, when, how are going to tell them, you know, who's going to do it, who's going to send the message, and then down the left hand column is your what, right? You know, is it a weekly status report, is it the outage message? Whatever it may be. And you build out a plan for that.

This is more of a generic one. But then you build out a specific one for a particular project. That way you can monitor it and run it just like your regular project plan, making sure that the communication is happening, because that is critical to any of those projects. So, which now leads in to the third one, which is adaptive capacity. And when I talk about adaptive capacity, I want to talk about, you know, change.

This is really the change thing. And we're in IT, and we're changing all the time. There's something changing. There's always a lot of stuff going on. We're constantly, you know, upgrading or adding new things, and we're probably never getting rid of things.

Right? We all know that. It's just more and more and more. And so adaptive capacity is not just the ability to change, but it's the ability to handle wave after wave after wave of change because it's constant. And you know what they say, right?

The only constant is change. I remember one time we were I was we just finished a huge, financial system upgrade, and we were starting a new CRM, implementing a new CRM. And we weren't even halfway through that project. And the marketing department started decided they were going to put up a whole new website. And of course, we had to get involved with that.

And I remember a director coming to me saying, you know, can we just tell him no? Can we just tell him, no, we don't have time right now. We can't do it. You have to wait. And I said, no, we really can't do that.

I said, why are we here? We're not here just, you know, for the fun of it for us. We're here to support the rest of organization to meet those business needs. So we have to do it. Now our job as leaders is to think about that though and say, okay, you know, how do we fit this in?

What do we do? Maybe the timing has to change a little bit. We have to collaborate with these various functional areas so that we can all work together and, you know, and get things done. But, you know, come negotiate a little bit, whatever, but agree to how we're going to get it done. Because we can't just keep piling on, you know, more and more and more on the staff.

We're going to burn them out. So you have to learn how to manage and adapt to all those coming changes. So what what I like to, do every time I do a new project or something, I bring up this chart, and I talk about the emotional cycles of change. And the goal, whenever you're doing anything, especially in IT, is you're starting at that bottom dash line. Right?

That's your current level of business performance. You're implementing something, or improving something, or adding some new service because they wanna go up to a future level of performance. Right? We want to improve. We're not doing it just, you know, because we think it's cool.

Well, sometimes that happens too. Right? Oh, it's cool. Let's add it. No.

But you really the goal is to do something better or more. So you have to think about what are those stages that people go through when there's a change. Right? Because you get to that point where you've got that dip down there in the bottom, that despair and skepticism, and everybody's like, I don't want to do this. And they're freaking out.

So what is our job as a leader? Right? Our job is to really think about how do we move that line over? Right? How do we get through those stages of change change faster so that we can get to the future performance of, you know, the business without, you know, spending too much time in those negative change cycles?

Right? And how many of you are familiar with the hype cycle from Gartner? Right? The Gartner hype cycle? Yeah.

If you lay the hype cycle on top of this, it's a very similar curve. Only they call the dip the trough of disillusionment. Right? Where people are like, I don't want to do this. And, you know.

But eventually, you do get up to an increased level of performance. So learning how to handle that change really, really critical. So imagine if you were using these skills, these strategic leadership skills. Just imagine the results that you could get, the amazing results, right? The team results, morale results, even, you know, the results of your department meeting the goals, achieving them, it'd feel great, right?

So that's what I try and do in all my work as a leader. So, and, I think my time is about up here. So what I want to do, I'd love to talk a lot more. There's a lot more stories I could share and all that kind of stuff. But, I just want to leave you with one thing.

What I want to do is, provide a free gift to you. And I can't give it to everybody, so I'm going to ask you if you're interested in a strategic call with me, a strategy call, where I can talk to you about maybe the challenges that you have in your organization, your position, and maybe give you some suggestions as to how you can approach things and, you know, what you might want to consider. So I'm asking if you would to fill out an application if you're interested. Let me know if you are. I'll be around until the very end.

I'm happy to talk with you about it. And then I'll select three of you. And we'll go forward with the call. So thank you very much.