A leader isn’t born in a day but in a lifetime. A leader needs to grow and refine their craft and their influence day in and day out. So let’s take a deep look at everything it takes to make sure a leader is maximizing their potential and developing in the right way. What kind of qualities do we see on display? How do they build their reputation and respect among their team over time? How does a great leader keep that process from breaking down?

Contributor

• • Jon Walton, Chief Information Officer, County of San Mateo, CA

Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:00]:
Very good morning, and welcome to CIO Talk Radio. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com and as always, we invite you to join the discussion on Twitter #ctrlive and look for this show as #leadership. Today’s topic is A Day In The Life Of A Leader and our guest for today’s show is Jon Walton, who’s the CIO with the county of San Mateo, California. Good morning. Jon, How are you doing?

Jon Walton [00:00:25]:
I’m doing fine. Thank you very much for having me on the show today.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:28]:
Great. the honors, all ours. So are you ready for your Christmas shopping?

Jon Walton [00:00:32]:
I’m all done, actually. I’m patting myself on the back for actually being ahead of the curve for once.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:39]:
Great, now, so we all lead very hectic lives, as you all know, and we all practice some routines that help us get through the day but for the purpose of this topic today, we wanted to look at those who handle themselves and others really well and ask what a leader does each day to make him or herself, himself or herself successful. Jon, the first question is that we as leaders, need to, of course, do something new, something different, maybe make a new set of mistakes every day, and perhaps expect that we will ourselves grow taller and also we will take everybody else along. Do you think you actually plan or you have to plan as a leader every day, or do you think you should improvise and just bank on your core traits, what you were born with or what you nurtured yourself into?

Jon Walton [00:01:30]:
For me, at least and I think it’s different for everyone. It’s a little bit of both, to be honest with you. I’ve experimented a lot and been inspired a lot by other people and what I consider key later leadership traits and for me to be successful day to day, what I find in my day is I try to have a part of my day to be very structured. There are certain things I need to make sure moving forward or being accomplished organizationally and I try to set aside a portion of my day to focus on those things in a very structured format but then I do try to leave a large portion of my day unstructured to reach out to other people, to be open to things that perhaps I hadn’t planned for during the day so that it doesn’t set what I consider to be a normal routine or give myself an opportunity to grow and experiment with other things during the day.

Jon Walton [00:02:19]:
So I try to do a little bit of both day to day. To be honest with you, granted, it’s always balanced. We’re one 1 or 100% the other but I think both things are very important. Some structure and some openness to a freestyle to things.

Sanjog Aul [00:02:33]:
Now, as leader, of course there are a lot of people must be looking up to you and we always look at people with awe that how on earth they accomplish so many things on a regular basis, maybe on a daily basis or over a short period of time. Do you think that requires us to think any differently or it is just some people get lucky with the way things come their way or what’s that secret sauce which makes you what you are and other leaders who are successful in what they do, what they whatever they’re doing on a given basis, given day.

Jon Walton [00:03:04]:
I think it’s for me at least and what I see in others is a couple different things. One is I think people like to see tangible results. I think a lot of us sometimes don’t anticipate how much it means to the people we work with that they actually see things happen even in small increments. People like closure and people like to see things move forward and sometimes we create goals for ourselves as individuals or organizations that are so large and so lofty and take so long to reach them. People can get frustrated with a leader, with an organization that we’re not making progress, that we’re not accomplishing things fast enough and even though we agree on the bigger picture and on the master plan, I think it’s important to break things down into steps where people can see progress along the way and really see that we’re taking depth and making incremental progress

Jon Walton [00:03:53]:
and then along with that, along with what I would call leadership journey to accomplish things as an individual or to lead an organization. It really does always go back to that human element for me of the personal relationship and making connections with people and the thing I probably failed at early in my career that I’ve had to really focus on and take into account as I worked with what I consider some really inspirational leaders over the years, I noticed how much time they spent going out, spending time with the people that work for them, and then spending time accidental to the organization with their customers or with people outside the organization altogether and building those relationships, not just from a purely relationship building standpoint, but it gave them a different perspective. It let them really see from an external viewpoint all the different facets of the organization and what the organization as a whole is trying to accomplish and how they tied into that. So I think that relationship building, the communication skills and the breaking things into small depths that people can relate to and feel like they’re making progress towards a larger goal is very important to an organization because it really inspires people to want to work, work together and work with the leaders to make progress.

Sanjog Aul [00:05:08]:
So number of things that you mentioned in here would very well also apply to a manager. So if we are trying to work as leaders, but somehow subconsciously we start thinking like a manager, that’s basically undermining a leader’s role where we are trying to structure way too many things and try to go way towards the plan because we have got people for that. If we are also getting sucked into that management taskmaster’s mentality, then it’s gonna undermine what a leader could have otherwise accomplished.

Jon Walton [00:05:40]:
It is a change. I mean, with some of the people that report to me as I coach them and as I mentor them, one of the things I have to remind them is a lot of us in the technology field came up through the ring and our initial successes were based on what we did personally day to day and so it was the task we did and then later on the next step in our career is we became supervisors or managers where our jobs were really focused on managing other people’s work and really focusing on, did you create so many widgets, did you show up on time and really focus on the day to day management of the people and the project and their talents? That’s, it’s definitely a change. I think when you move into a leadership role and for many of us it’s a really transformative experience because you have to go from, I think the day to day incremental management of people and things into becoming an inspirational leader that people want to follow instead of always driving them. Maybe some of us, those were some of the things we were known for in our careers, coming up to the ranks as driving people or projects they can completion

Jon Walton [00:06:42]:
but I think to be a successful leader, you have to inspire people who want to follow you because that’s the only way you can be successful. I don’t think any leader could slip their time into enough small pieces and five minutes with every person or on every project personally, through their own personal willpower, drive it forward. You have to get people that want to follow and be inspired and be part of a team to make that accomplishments. It’s good if people recognize that I think and can relate to that and focus on developing that aspect of their skills as they become leaders.

Sanjog Aul [00:07:15]:
So you and I are leaders of our respective organizations. We could be feeling that, yes, we are inspiring our team to do bigger, better things so that we all move forward but that could be far away from the truth. Maybe sometimes we would be coming close, but in many cases, it is just us who’s trying to validate our own actions. Is that really a good idea?

Jon Walton [00:07:38]:
I think you have to be honest with yourself. I was having dinner, hello, department head, the other night, and we were talking about that, and sometimes we said it feels like that, undercover boss, where you’re trying to really find out if you’re kidding yourself about how good of a leader you are, if you’re inspiring the organization, if you’re inspiring your department, versus if you’re just telling yourself that, what would be this?

Sanjog Aul [00:08:02]:
What are the signs because people may not say outright to you that we do not really come up to their expectations, or we don’t do things which are in the best interest because they may be concerned about their job, or maybe they would be concerned about being politically correct. Whereas we are trying to say, guys, come and tell us straight out what we may be doing wrong, which may be undermining the potential of our whole organization and individual people. Well, how would we go about finding that out? Undercover boss is great as a show. I’ve watched it a number of times but that’s quite interesting for somebody to work with large organizations but there are many other organizations where you cannot hide as the leader and cannot use those tactics to find out whether you’re truly inspiring someone or not.

Jon Walton [00:08:45]:
I think you’re right. There’s a couple of things that I look for as sign that you’re being a true leader, that I’m being a true leader in an organization. One is people’s willingness to be honest with me at every level of the organization. To your point, in a truly open, collaborative organization, the type of organizations I like to work against, people aren’t afraid at any level of the organizations that say, I don’t understand or I’m confused or this really frustrates me or I don’t see why we’re doing this. We have a number of forums we’ve created in the department. We use online tools to try to create these communities where people can talk about things. We have face to face meetings and group settings at very different levels of the organization where we try to mix up group and different levels of leadership and try to really encourage people to say, look, this in this forum, that you don’t need to be afraid of the repercussion performance issue. This isn’t a project management meeting.

Jon Walton [00:09:38]:
This is for us to really talk honestly with each other, with our badges of rank off about what’s working well and what’s not working well and then I think from a leadership standpoint, you have to not be defensive about that. When people then give you feedback, when you finally get to the point where people are willing to give you honest feedback about, hey, this is working, this isn’t working, or we think you’re crazy or this doesn’t make sense to us what you’re saying as a leader or where you’re trying to take us. I think you have to take that in and think about that and really ask yourself why you’re not doing a good job communicating or perhaps you have missed the mark part of the I think strong leader is willing to admit that maybe half of our ideas seem like good ideas until we really test them in the real world and then we need to refine them or change them or admit we were wrong and those ideas and so creating that, that honest dialogue between staff, it takes a long time in an organization to get people to feel open about that.

Sanjog Aul [00:10:30]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back and let’s look at aspect where we have to find time for growth for ourselves. While I know I wrote a tweet sometime back, a leader should be spending 80% of the time developing others and then 20% of the time or maybe 20% of the time developing others and 80% of the time removing the roadblocks for others and so basically a leader is all about someone else. At the same time it looks if somebody doesn’t invest in their own growth, then they’re only giving the best they could at any given time. So they have to continually evolve and grow. So what does a leader do to grow themselves? So we will have to explore that when we come back.

Sanjog Aul [00:11:07]:
Please stay tuned.

Sanjog Aul [00:12:34]:
Welcome back. So as I just put the foundation there where leader of course is existing to help others but there has to be some portion where we find time for ourselves, resources for ourselves for growth, so that we bring the new, the renewed ourselves, the grown ourselves to the rest of the organization and team and people around us. So what is it that we do? Should we get some thinking time on our recliner? Should we go out and talk to other people who we feel who are better than us? What is it that should be done and what do you.

Jon Walton [00:13:09]:
For me, time to just think. I tend to be a reflective person and sometimes I get so wrapped up in the past. Like many people, I have a long to do list, lots of meetings. I’ve gone from having one hour meetings to 30 minute meetings. I try to pack in more meetings in my and so I have to remind myself to actually set aside time to try to put things in context, to try to really think through and step back along with that. I think two other things. One is I really look for mentors or people who inspire me and, and for me at this point in my career, I really look for non technologists because what I find is in the technology field I become very. I tend to relate to people who already think like I think or who have files like I think

Jon Walton [00:13:53]:
and so by looking for mentors, leader mentors outside my field of historic expertise, it causes me to really look at leadership in a different light about what does it mean to just be a leader, period, irrespective of what the industry is or what the technology is, then the last thing I just have to go back to and say that I really find inspirational to me as a leader is getting to know the public. So many times for me as a public sector CIO, just spending time with the public and going out and seeing what we do in government, how it affected the lives of the people we serve and then being able to come back and reflect on that and really be honest with myself is what I’m doing in my role as a CIO leader in government actually making an impact on their lives and how can I do that to either better support the departments I support or provide more direct services to the public. That’s very inspirational for me.

Sanjog Aul [00:14:51]:
So one is to you going out and meeting others and trying to do justice to your role but as yourself, when we suggest to others how do they grow us to go out and reflect on what all they are learning something new. Do you feel it is better to go out and always help others and feel satisfied that yes, I was able to help some other people based on my own experience or always try to make ourselves more uncomfortable, not comfortable, uncomfortable by getting into or chartering new territories, something totally unfamiliar and then try to see how much are we able to conquer so that it renews us, renews our spirit and bring that sense of being able to handle uncertainty or handling something which is unknown gives us more confidence and that’s what grows us as a leader.

Jon Walton [00:15:41]:
I think we constantly have to challenge ourselves and I think that’s for me, part of the journey. I like to feel, as any human being would satisfy, that I’ve done a good job. At the same time, I don’t think we can. I think part of our leadership role in any organization is to challenge ourselves to do more, to do better, to think about things differently. When the economy here in the bay area was going through some downturns, I used to go to conferences and I would be hitting with fellow leaders or fellow CIOs and everyone would be talking about how bad it was and how tough their job was as a leader and they had less money than they had the year before and I was really pretty dismayed by that because if you go out and you talk to the people in the community, we have millions of dollars at our disposable at leaders, different CIO leaders and perhaps percentage wise we might have less money year to year

Jon Walton [00:16:37]:
but when you think about the challenge we’re faced with, how to best spend hundreds or thousands of hours of staff, resources and millions of dollars of revenue, do provide services. I think that’s where we have to be hard on ourselves as leaders and tell ourselves we still should challenge ourselves to do more and to do better with whatever resources we have and I think we can only. I think we can only inspire ourselves by doing that. I think if we internalize and focus inwardly all the time, focus on the negative in our organizations and ourselves, I don’t think that we’re going to force us better.

Sanjog Aul [00:17:16]:
What do you do when you are going to be facing some things which you are not comfortable with? Do you take it head on or do you seek somebody’s help and what does that do to your ability to feel good about yourself?

Jon Walton [00:17:33]:
And perhaps this is, we’re on CIO Talk Radio, so I, perhaps this is a function of the growth of how technology has changed. I think one of the work things we ever invented sometimes was email. I think email single handedly caused more interpersonal issues and leadership problems than it all. I think like many technologists I had at one point in my career an over reliance on memos and emails to try to solve conflict problems. Part of my leadership journey and becoming inspired by things is I didn’t like interpersonal, my construed conflict well, I didn’t like to take things, I didn’t like to address things up front with people face to face.

Jon Walton [00:18:14]:
It made me very uncomfortable and that’s one of the things I had to change as a leader. I had to learn that if I was faced with a challenge or a situation that needed to be addressed, one of the things I learned from my mentors was to take a very professional personal approach and talk to people in person and to try to work out these things as soon as it became a problem. Don’t let it just ride for a long time and become worse and worse. Don’t try to address it through some antiseptic type memo or through an email that didn’t really convey the emotions or maybe the complexities of the issues behind it and so I would say that one of the things that I really try to focus on now is it still part of me in the core of it still doesn’t enjoy that type of negative situations where you have to take things on from even an organizational or an interpersonal standpoint where you have to address them but I think it’s a very important part of being a leader is being able to have those face to face conversations with one or more people in an organization to address those things.

Sanjog Aul [00:19:19]:
So how do you psych yourself to be able to handle them and start becoming more comfortable you on here? I commend you for being very honest and agree that’s not the easiest and frankly that’s not the easiest for anyone to handle where you have to confront someone in person. So what do you do and what is, how do you psych yourself to feel comfortable in taking those situations because they’re going to come regardless.

Jon Walton [00:19:44]:
Well, one is to again the mentors. I again I look for mentors now that I admire how they communicate. I admire how they take things head on. I report to a gentleman now who I find to be a very good communicator and very straightforward and I really learned a lot from him every day, Jon Maltby, I think he’s a great leader and a great communicator and so I think you have to look at people and try to emulate that behavior that you admire and others that you find effective.

Jon Walton [00:20:10]:
Part of it is just practice too. Even when I try not to wait to challenge myself to have better interpersonal communication skills, I think this is part of the problem. It’s like public speaking. I try to set a personal goal for myself. For example, I used to not enjoy publicly speaking at conferences in large groups of people and then I realized at some point I needed to develop that part of myself. So I started just pushing myself out there, did it for a while and then I stopped. I got fatigued by it and

Jon Walton [00:20:39]:
I became rusty at it and now I have to counsel myself. I need to go out and speak in a public forum at least once a month. My goal is twice a month to go out and speak and similar to that, interpersonal skills become rusty and so I think if you wait. My point is, if you wait until there is a critical issue that you have to talk to someone about and you haven’t worked your way into habit of going out, having lunches with people, coffee with people, I go more. We have a walking club where I go walk with some of the other departments and every day if you’re not practiced at having somewhat hard conversations on a daily basis and when those hard times come, it’s just going to be a thousand times harder to actually do that face to face meeting.

Sanjog Aul [00:21:27]:
Now, one thing which people say, it’s a conventional wisdom that in order to get ahead we need to get along. Now that is sometimes it’s seen as correct but would that not be a predicament for a leader because leader also has a responsibility to do the right things for the right reasons and not every time. Everyone who is involved may be on the same page or would like to agree to what you’re trying to do. So you may not be able to get along with that individual or that group and so what do you do? What’s that, is this a conventional wisdom, is there truly something that a leader should utilize or it should keep be kept on the side and we always should be charging ahead no matter what?

Jon Walton [00:22:10]:
I think there’s a big difference between getting along and everyone agreeing. I think one of the challenges of the leader is to create an organization internal to your organization or even external with your partner organizations about a shared vision and what we’re trying to go and a feeling, a sense, an interpersonal sense that we have hard business decisions to make. Sometimes we’re going to feel good about them, sometimes we’re going to be upset or frustrated by them but we do all need to get along in the sense of that we can’t allow negative feelings or interpersonal conflicts that so color the day to day feeling of coming to work, that we don’t want to come to work or we don’t want to talk to each other or meet with each other because that’s just going to create a work that we don’t want to work in over time. However, along with that there’s going to be times where we agree there’s a lot of hard decisions to make. When I came here to San Mateo county, we were $1.4 million in the red for our department and we had to make a lot of hard decisions, have a lot of heart to heart discussions about how we were going to save money and where we were going to reduce costs. At the same time we had a lot of old systems, but when we were cutting in some areas we were having to invest in some new systems and so I can honestly say not everyone agreed with the plan we came up with

Jon Walton [00:23:24]:
but by creating an organization that we tried to be very transparent and very open and take input but then be very clear about, we’re out of time, we need to make a decision by this date and we’ve collected all your input, we’ve created this open forum. Now we’re going to make these decisions and allow people to go through. Some people celebrated the decision making process and were happy and then work with the people that were upset and unhappy and worked through that grieving process with them about they felt that the decision was made was negative or bad but really tried to keep that atmosphere of open communication after decision making fact, keep people engaged. I think it makes a better organization. So I would agree. I think it’s important for everyone to get along but I think you also have to be honest that getting along means sometimes you’re not going to get along and you have to work through that but that’s hard decision you make,

Jon Walton [00:24:15]:
not everyone’s going to agree.

Sanjog Aul [00:24:18]:
Lets take a quick break listeners, we will be right back and then look at the obstacles which could stall a leader’s growth and of course everyone wants to do a great job but then as Jon mentioned, there could be a fatigue factor but could that lead you to become complacent, one is to look at the obstacles which you try to remove to always which could be stifling your growth but at the same time you’ll say okay, I’ll take a stop, I need some rest. So what should they do to not become complacent at the same time not let any obstacle stop them from becoming the best leader they can be. Please stay tuned. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:26:13]:
Welcome back. So let’s inventory what kind of obstacles could typically stall a leader’s growth? Let that be the first one and then we’ll talk about the complacency issue if at all, you start feeling the fatigue by always removing obstacles and always trying to grow into the maximum potential.

Jon Walton [00:26:32]:
For me, the two things I personally look for that I try to avoid slowing my growth. One is self limiting myself. So one of the things I do keep one ear early point. I try to look for things when I work for an organization, in this case San Mateo county, where I can be a leader not just in my area, but I challenge myself to try to take leadership roles in the bigger organization and I think that’s important for a CIO. I think we self define our roles and by not seeking out opportunities to be an overall leader in the organization, do things that are non technology leadership roles. We can limit ourselves sometimes and again I like to focus myself into uncomfortable new things. This year for example, one of the things that I took on was small thing probably in some people’s mind but a big thing for me was being the leader for the charitable contributions campaign for the entire county.

Jon Walton [00:27:25]:
So that’s just an example where historically I wouldn’t as a CIO think what nothing to do with technology or what do you want me to do? Create a website but this is really going out and meeting with the community, getting events organized, getting people to donate constantly. Charitable contributions, not typically what’s historically seen as a public CIO’s role, but something I really enjoyed and caused me to grow. There’s a technology aspect to it, of course. I’m always trying to think of new apps, how technology can make the process better, but really it’s a chance for me to connect the dots to my organization about public service and the partnership and communication and how everyone needs to work together to provide better services to the public at all different levels of the public and then the other thing I struggle with as a leader that I always have to remind myself of is as I came up from an entry level position through when I’m stressed, when things are not going well in my department, my natural tendency is to dive into the details and microman because I feel like I have a lot of passion and feel like I need to get into a project in detail or service area in detail if it’s struggling or not doing well, and spend a lot of time and a lot of effort to help you pick that problem. What I’ve learned and what I had to recognize in myself is that really has the opposite effect on the organizations I work in. When I dive into the details of my organization, many times my managers feel like I’m undermining them or second guessing them, not trusting them

Jon Walton [00:29:02]:
and so I really have to push myself to manage the people and honor the teams that we try to create and challenge my managers, challenge my supervisors and staff to nick feed, to mentor them, to brainstorm with them, but then also to challenge them to solve their own problems within their areas so that they feel proud of it, that they take ownership for it, so that they can celebrate the successes when they finally do work on those obstacles and in the different areas.

Sanjog Aul [00:29:35]:
So if you were to go out and try to create some sort of a benchmark as an individual, as Jon Walton, what would those be where you’d say, okay, I met this benchmark or exceeded it, so that’s why I should feel satisfied and I’ll say I’ll relax a little bit and then move ahead. So do you set something like that or you would just take it as it comes and you always are just in that mindset where you’ll say, I’m going to try to grow inch by inch but not have something to pursue as a goal, that this is where I need to reach before I’ll feel satisfied.

Jon Walton [00:30:10]:
That’s a very good question. I think interpersonally I tend to push myself all the time into new and different challenges because I like to be challenged. I like to feel like there’s something I thought I couldn’t do or something outside my comfort area that I want to try to become better at in terms of setting specific goals. I’m of two minds on it because I’ve tried it both ways. Early in my career, I set a goal to have a certain decision in the organization. For example, when I got out of college, I wanted to be the GIS coordinator. My degree was in geography and my ultimate goal at the time when I got out of college was I want to be the GIS coordinator of some organization

Jon Walton [00:30:51]:
and that was great. It gave me a goal to shoot for. I worked towards it. For me personally, and this is more of an interpersonal reflection, is when I achieved that goal, then a letdown period where I went through a period in my career, I was like, achieved it. Now I get this it, this is what I’m going to be doing now and I felt unsatisfied to some degree that I’d achieved that goal and then I hadn’t planned half of that goal as to where it was going. I do set goals for myself in both my career and my developments, but I try not to set it as the end goal. I try to set it as that

Jon Walton [00:31:21]:
and I think where do I want to go next? Where do I think I could be more rounded or better and set an incremental goal to get better in that area? So I try to leave myself open to where that ultimately might go in terms of where do I want to be when I’m 40 years into my career? I couldn’t and I haven’t set that goal.

Sanjog Aul [00:31:41]:
So if somebody was to take you up as a mentor or a coach, would you have given them that sandbox approach that you’re just suggesting that you go try new things and see what growth comes out of it versus pursuing a goal like you did for the GIS coordinator when you started, which one, reflecting back in hindsight, 2020 would have worked better for you and of course, what would you suggest to others who are coming to you for guidance?

Jon Walton [00:32:07]:
I think, and this is perhaps where technology’s changed, I think technology changes so fast is much more of a multi talented area to work in than it was perhaps when I started 25 years ago in this field. I would suggest more of a sandbox approach to the people I mentor now and it’s usually actually the people I do mentor, it’s the advice I give them. Usually when I start to talk to them about where they are in their career and what they’re focused on, they tend to be very low or what I consider narrowly focused. So I have managers that I mentor that come to me and say I want to be a CIO someday. I say great. What you need to do for example is more rounded in finance. I noticed there’s a job over here in the department they need a villains GFO.

Jon Walton [00:32:53]:
Have you considered offering to do that job and they’ll made to me things like how did that, what that have to do with being a CIO? I would been their CFO for a year help me. So I try to get people to understand that in their professional careers even if they want to be a CIO or if they want to be a lead technologist, it’s much more than being the expert, the sort of guru on the mountain about a single technology that I think is going to lead them to success. So I try to get them to challenge themselves about where they can be more rounded and look outside their normal comfort zones and experiment and I think that will ultimately make them better leaders.

Sanjog Aul [00:33:32]:
If you are to go out and try to make sure that you are at the top of your own potential and you also have crisis at work which could perhaps make you do things which would take you back a couple of years or try to have you make compromises, would you do that or you’ll stick to your guns?

Jon Walton [00:33:56]:
I tend to see the type to stick to my significant. I think now looking back over my career and the times I stuck to my gun and the times that I responded to a crisis, crisis mode management I think is easy to fall into the trap of everything is a crisis and I’m not saying that there haven’t been some real crisis in my career where they wouldn’t go back in single instances and address it. We had just one instance. I’ll never forget where I was on vacation and on Christmas Eve one of my managers called me to tell me that our server cluster had just gone down and had to get payroll off crisis. Many choices but to forfeit a family Christmas to address a crisis but overall I think sticking to your guns and trying to move forward is an important thing. I do think you need to be open to adjusting the path you take while you stick to your gun because I think you just can’t charge blindly ahead like we used to write a five year plan and damn the torpedoes, go straight ahead no matter what.

Jon Walton [00:35:04]:
I think you have to be agile and selectable enough to adapt as you go along but I do think it’s important to keep the big picture in mind and pick tear gun.

Sanjog Aul [00:35:12]:
So on one hand we always try to identify things which if we do or that happen to us when we go back home after long days of work, we feel satisfied. We feel professionally and personally satisfied that we created value today. What are some of those things which may cause dissatisfaction that I really did not utilize my day to its fullest extent?

Jon Walton [00:35:36]:
I think on the days where I simply sit in my office and try to plow through hundreds of emails are the days where I feel the most dissatisfied. Those are examples of where the administrative or the busy work aspect of my job, even though it’s a requirement in the sense that you have to do it, you have to grind through sometimes at day to day stuff leaves me feeling very unsatisfied. The days I enjoy the most we had a day just yesterday. We were doing the six month budget check on our budget and four of us out in an office and got out all the spreadsheets and we’re looking at revenue and cost centers. Traditionally we could all sat in our offices individually and look at those spreadsheets and come up with our own ideas. What I enjoyed about the day yesterday was the conversations between us when we were struggling through the and being honest with ourselves about, hey, we’re making a profit here, we’re breaking even there, we’re losing our hurts over here. We made some bad decisions and we all owned it. There was no finger pointing.

Jon Walton [00:36:38]:
We were very honest with ourselves as leaders about we took our best estimate of what we thought it was going to take to do this and we estimated wrong and so now we’re going to have to fix it. Yesterday was a very satisfying day to me because of that. Those are the types of days I enjoy.

Sanjog Aul [00:36:52]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back and let’s look at how a leader recognizes that he or she needs a break because we have to become conscious of our subconscious and if you spend your whole day just flowing through emails, that could also be interpreted as a sign that I’m just playing tired of fighting those battles every day and I subconsciously decided to sit in my office and just chill and if you are doing it, you are being unproductive and also dissatisfied. So is it not better to really take a step back and say, really, do I need to really work this hard? I’m already doing the right things, but I also deserve a break. So I take that, come back rejuvenated and not having to go through another day where I’m just plain sitting flying emails until dissatisfied at the end of the day. Please stay tuned. We’ll be right back and explore how do we recognize when it’s time to take a break.

Sanjog Aul [00:37:44]:
Please stay tuned.

Sanjog Aul [00:39:09]:
Welcome back. So when do you think Jon, a leader can recognize that whatever they are doing is actually the result of them weary and tired and boredom? Maybe there’s not as much boredom in life of a leader, but maybe they are just plain tired and they have to take a break and if it is too late they’ve already caused a lot more damage by plowing through email type of days.

Jon Walton [00:39:34]:
I think there’s the little break and the big break is what I would give people. Something for me I have to be cognizant of is when I the example I gave when I find myself sitting in my office with my door closed, simply piling through six month old emails that for some reason I kept and never got around to reading. Now suddenly six months later I’m just making busy work for my those are signs that I’m just mentally fatigued. Perhaps there’s too much going on. I need to step back and gain some perspective on what’s important and what I need to focus on. Then I think I would say to anyone listening to your show today, I think you also as a leader have to realize when you’re just over organizationally fatigued and I know that’s a controversial thing maybe to say, but I think there’s a time and a place for every leader in an organization and the leaders I most respected was knowing when they added value to an organization and knowing when it was time for them to move on.

Jon Walton [00:40:30]:
When for whatever reason their fatigue with the organization had reached the point where they weren’t adding as much value as they should or being the leader they should be in that organization and that’s a hard thing to do. As a leader, a lot of us have a lot of pride and we like to see things through to the end but I think there’s a time and a place for every leader in an organization and I really admire those people. I would talking to a CIO the other day who had been the CIO for the same organization for over 20, 25 years and he was and I was shocked because usually my leases, we’re all in an organization lasts between somewhere between four and seven years and I was asking him myself, how do you do that? How do you stay fresh? How do you not get pet and he was walking me through how he has to reinvent himself and re challenge himself but for a person like me, and I’ve always been very honest with the organizations I work for, I find my value as a leader,

Jon Walton [00:41:24]:
when I find myself becoming organizationally fatigued, I would rather step aside and acknowledge when I perhaps feel too fatigued or I need a new challenge and let then some new leader come in and breathe new life into an organization. So I think we all as leaders have to be honest with ourselves about are we willing to make that commitment to reinvent ourselves, to rejuvenate ourselves as leaders within the organization, or is it time for us to move it live and let a new leader.

Sanjog Aul [00:41:54]:
So let’s look at the scenario where a typical leader who would take pride in having the required experience to get the job done, mentor others and even just because of their pure confidence, be able to take some of the situations head on. Now all of that as a fundamental foundation is shaken because of the new normal. You got businesses changing the way they could do business, not they wanted to, because the consumption patterns are changing the way we exchange information, changing the way we try to consume anything. That is changing fundamentally, there is a shift. So essentially the foundation is shaking for a leader to call themselves as a leader or an experienced leader. So are you like a kid today where you are trying to say that you are a leader and people are expecting something out of you, but you do not know where to go because you don’t have any training in this new environment?

Jon Walton [00:42:48]:
I think for me at least one of the big changes in being a CIO technology leader, so to speak, was early in my career when I became a deputy CIO and I was moving towards what I wanted to be as a leader. I think I had the perception that my job was to be the smartest and to have all the answers and I was afraid to say I didn’t know the phrase to really, as a leader, be open to collaboration in the sense that I thought my role was to tell people a lot of things, to tell them how it was, tell them the technology we’re going to use, tell them exactly to your point, how the business was going to be successful and I think that one of the transformations for me as a leader was realizing that my role was changing and we’re going to have to change in the new normal to be an enabler of other people’s success and to allow them and to admit that perhaps they knew more or better about how to use technology to be successful in their business and realize that there was going to be more and more times that my role was to listen as actively as possible and then think about how my organization or myself as a technology leader could make them more successful in their idea, which is things that they control and to not always strive to give direction or to control everything that looks like technology core. I do dictate something be done from a technological standpoint, but really to create the opportunity for other people.

Sanjog Aul [00:44:28]:
Okay, three words, Top three words that come to your mind. Only three words which will allow a leader to maximize their potential every day.

Jon Walton [00:44:38]:
Communicate, inspire and honesty.

Sanjog Aul [00:44:43]:
On behalf of the show and our listeners, I’d really like to thank you, Jon, for sharing your thoughts on what could be a great day in the life of a leader.

Jon Walton [00:44:50]:
Thank you very much. It was great to be on the show.

Sanjog Aul [00:44:53]:
Thank you so much, again. Please like us listeners on Facebook, search for CIO Talk Radio and be sure to follow us on Twitter. Thank you again for listening to CIO Talk Radio. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Till next week take care and god bless.

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