• • Faith Burn, Chief Information Officer, Eskom Holdings
  • Michael Hites, Chief Information Officer, Southern Methodist University
  • Kevin Gray, Chief Information Officer, City of Burbank

Transcript (Building a Disruption-Proof Bottom-Up IT Culture)

Advertisement: Welcome to CTN CIO talk network with your host Sanjog Aul, all comments, views, and opinions expressed on this show are strictly those of the host guests and callers. Now here’s Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog: Hello, and welcome to CTN, to learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalknetwork.com and today’s topic, building a disruption proof bottom-up IT culture, what do I mean by that? IT Leaders are working hard to create an environment where people can grow, they inspire others, they innovate, and of course they keep learning all the time, but then we have to build a bottom-up culture where each of these people always feel that they have a voice. They are allowed and have the freedom to make decisions they are able to and are motivated to create innovative and practical products and solutions to solve the challenges, which business may be facing and also to exploit any growth opportunities they want to capitalize on. So now with that said, there is a resilient component that is required, so yeah, business same old and you would have worked on things and it’s building a bottom-up culture is not new as a concept and many organizations have tried, but we are trying to dig deeper into that if we have a disruption like the pandemic, not exactly the same and we don’t know what the future will bring, can we sustain that bottom up culture, to discuss this we have Faith Burn, Chief Information Officer with Eskom Holdings. Hey Faith,how are you?

Faith: Good afternoon or morning. I’m fine. How are you?

Sanjog: Very good, thank you so much for joining us and we have Michael Hites, Chief Information Officer with Southern Methodist University. Hey Michael, how are you?

Michael: Howdy! It is a fabulous day here in Dallas.

Sanjog: Yeah, I like that, I have a sunny Chicago afternoon, how about that?  So, we also have Kevin Gray, Chief Information Officer City of Burbank. Hey Kevin, how’s life?

Kevin: Life is good, very good and good morning to all, afternoon to some of you others, Sunday, it’s a sunny Southern California morning here.

Sanjog: Yeah, you can tease us, I know always gorgeous weather, right?

All right, so, let’s jump into this first question, so Faith, in your view and how you see culture, what would, how would you define an optimal culture for the IT department which will continue to deliver increasingly more value for the business, given where we are today, which is the testing times we are facing today?

Faith: Interesting question, for me, culture starts with building a team that understands the value that it can bring to the organization and the way that I believe a team understands the value that they can bring is to understand the purpose of the organization. If you have a really solid understanding of the purpose and then an understanding of why the IT team then exists, you’re able to, I think, extract value for the organization and what that means is that you look at the organization, not just as, the IT who is fixing a PC, but it is in my best interest for our organization to increase its bottom line, it’s in my best interest for our organization to have agility, it’s in our best interest for our organization to have a culture, an organizational culture that works and so women IT team actually looks broader than just IT, but they actually think about the organization in terms of the business that the organizations in, I think that’s a good first step into creating a high performance value creating culture.

Sanjog: So, Michael, yeah, go ahead Faith.

Faith: No, I was just going to say that I’m reminded of the book that I read a many years ago about Robin Sharma, I think the title was “A Leader without a Title” and, in a TE he speaks about the janitor at NASA and sorry, I’m South African so, I’m not pronouncing it the way that you guys do my apologies and he is this to the  says to the janitor, “so what is it that you do? And the janitor) say, answers and says, ‘I help put a spaceship into space’ and he wasn’t saying that I’m cleaning the bathrooms, but rather that I’m yeah, about the business of NASA and that for me, what is a strong value creating culture. Thanks.

Sanjog: Great response Faith are now, Michael, I’m going to build on that, so what Faith mentioned definitely is a good way to look at culture and what you could do business as usual so it delivers and people are singing kumbaya and working together. How has that changed your perception, your definition and your benchmarks related to the culture which you would need to have so that you continue to deliver what the business expects and what is that expectation in the first place? Are we expecting everything to be exactly the same what happened before and during, and hopefully  after pandemic?

Michael: Yeah, I’d love that, what’s the value to the business question because we’re a residential institution, so the students want to be here, they want to come to a university and we made that shift to online back during, at the start of the in March of 2020 and one of the things the students had always asked me for prior to the pandemic was, can we have more and better online support to make it easier for students to participate remotely and what the pandemic did is it made that process go really, fast for us so within a matter of a week, as the faculty were leaving campus, the students were leaving campus, we had to train everybody as quickly as we could to use those remote tools, so that education could be delivered remotely and online and what we’ve been finding from the students is now that they’ve had a taste of that, they want us to continue a few things and one of that, one of those things is to use the learning management system, all of that. So, the learning management system is a way to organize all of your courses in one spot and before the pandemic, some faculty would use it, some faculty would not use it and the students would say, can you please, you all use it and now they do. So that’s something that we don’t want to go back to once the pandemic is declared over.

So, I think that did give us the opportunity to make some changes that were in our original strategic plan, that do add value to the students and the pandemic made it come faster and I think some of them are going to persist.

Sanjog: So, Kevin, in Michael word, it accelerated right where we want it to be and that kind of worked as a trigger, would you say faster is better in today’s context?

Kevin: In today’s context, yes, faster is better and, I say this because, you know, in our line of work, change is consistent, change is constant, and in these days, change is happening faster than we’ve ever seen before and if we can’t remain agile and be able to change and pivot quickly, then we won’t be able to keep up.

Sanjog: So, Faith, when you are looking at what is going on in today’s day and age, and when you talk to your people and who also have, issues with, you know, the whole pandemic thing when they’re dealing with their personal situation, you know, they’re humans at the end of the day, how much of it where people able to transcend, because you did some phenomenal job as a leader, or what baggage that you feel you still have to help handle on their behalf or help them learn how to handle so that culture doesn’t take ahead?

Faith: Interesting question because, with the pandemic has necessitated that we all work remotely and for many of us, “reading 9:36 being in” South Africa so in South Africa, we have challenges around network connectivity, etc also people needed to suddenly know how to teach their children and you would invariably be on a team school or, any kind of collaboration tool, and you have the baby in the background that needs attention with the homework that needs to get done. I say all of that to say, for me, the importance is to always understand that we all human beings and that we do, we are impacted and because we’re human beings and we impacted. We have a wonderful culture within our organization where we talk about safety before we even go into any item on a meeting agenda, so every meeting is opened with safety and so one of the key things is to check with the team members, whether they safe. Are you safe emotionally and physically, mentally and I think that sometimes many people, forget to, you know, you’re expecting people to just move on, but I think it’s really valuable for team members of your organization to realize that it matters to you, whether they are feeling safe and, whether they are in a space and you can quickly pick it up from all answers and so on, whether there is something to worry about and you can have a one-on-one afterwards. But the key for me is to always understand and know that people come first and to take care of that people matter first and then the work follows because the connection, the emotional contract that you have within is such that because you care that much later thinking -11:24) about the outcomes of the organization, so it sounds fluffy, but it works.

Sanjog: All right, so Michael, you know, that people have an issue with the original way the culture was being developed, which was top-down, the leader sets the tone, tells how the organization is going to function some rules and best practices and values, etc and that’s how even traditional, you know, business planning and strategy and everything else is designed. Do you think we could eat the cake and have it too, that we have that, you know, a top down approach to setting up the tone of the organization at the same time you enable bottom-up culture, go ahead, Michael?

Michael: Yes, for sure, I think that you can do both of those things. I think you need to inherit your values from the organisation, so rather than the IT organization, it’s the university at large ours are excellence, integrity, intellectual freedom, open dialogue, diversity, and conclude an inclusion.  I think from an IT perspective, we should spend our time looking at the practice piece of that, so do we have policies, procedures in place that make it easy for people to go ahead and do their work, to make their own decisions while they’re doing their work and we established the guard rails that are around them.  I’m also a big fan of not promoting bad practices, so if you think that it’s valuable for you to keep your calendar up to date or answer your email quickly, make sure people know that, so, they know kind of the rules of the organization that way they can participate in kind of a little bit of top-down, but then some bottom-up where they help us put together a cohesive culture.

Sanjog: So, Kevin, when you try to do this whole mix of top down and bottom up, you want them to have that intrinsic motivation, if you will, that is the epitome of a good culture and if you were to ask yourself, would you truly be intrinsically motivated when a boss is hammering down here?

Kevin: Oh, no, absolutely not, now let me make this point, I don’t believe that a disruption proof bottom up culture and a common vision are mutually exclusive. The most impactful thing than an IT leader can do is, develop and drive a vision, that doesn’t mean that you do everything or that you make all of the decisions or that you hammer down on people, even in an extremely decentralized decision-making culture that everyone has to be moving generally same direction and chasing the same goals of the entire team has to be playing from the same playbook or chaos in suits. But you know, I am a true believer in the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers, when you use that term Sanjog it really spoke to me, because I do believe that knowledge workers are intrinsically motivated. They want to do their job, they want to do their work, they want to deliver and if you give them that ability, if you empower them to do that, they will and you know, I’m also a believer in the term fail fast and that is doesn’t mean that you’re trying to fail, but it means that you enable people to make failures. If they make decisions where their hearts are in the right place, they’re trying to meet the right objectives, the right goals, but they happen to make a mistake, then that’s a teaching moment, right? That is a coaching opportunity, to help them, maybe make a different decision the next time going forward, but you want them to stay motivated and feel empowered to make those kinds of decisions.

Sanjog: Let’s take a quick break listener, we’ll be right back after these messages and let’s talk about why most people lose their motivation or leave the organization, it’s not because the leader is not trying to be the best they can be and set the right values and lead by example, etc it’s many times the mid-management. So then, when we were talking about the openness, the empowerment and the abrupt everyone’s ability to voice their opinion. While you might evangelize all you want, but you might have a layer in between of lieutenants who may love that freedom themselves, but they may be hesitant because they feel they will lose their control and their power and their goes your effort to build that bottom up culture out of the window and it’s not that it’s all or nothing, but these things happen in closed doors, it happens at many instances, which erodes and it corrodes that effort that you have. So how do we make sure, and this is a question going to be for you Faith, when we come back, how an organizational leader like yourself, who is a little removed from your staff, the field staff, who is going to be instrumental in helping with the bottom of culture, how will you prevent your lieutenants to undermine the end goal, what would you do? Please stay tuned listeners we will be right back.

Sanjog: Welcome back, so Faith we want as leaders, the best thing for the organization and I’m sure nobody gets up in the morning and says, I want to be a jerk today, but there may be reasons why a mid-manager and I’m not going to grossly generalize there are some phenomenal managers, even I had in my life who shaped me, who I am, but there are many who might not take exactly the coaching and the message that you are trying to convey and the culture you’re trying to develop and the empowerment and the intrinsic motivation, and they might tweak it because of their survival instinct kicking in, insecurities, you name it, but then you’re not going to get your next million dollar performance appraisal if they do something wrong and at the end of it, the culture doesn’t get developed, the delivery doesn’t go the way it’s supposed to, so how do you prevent this from happening? How do you help those individuals versus firing them? So, they become your evangelists, they become, in fact, a catalyst they accelerate that whole process of building a good culture.

Faith: Yeah, that’s an interesting challenge because we don’t have control over somebody’s insecurities or their fears. I think for me, there’s a couple of things that’s required, the first is, I think there needs to be avenues around understanding whether there actually is a problem, you can’t fix something that you don’t know is exists. So, and the way that that I’ve been doing that is I have different points of conversations or communications with a wider team. Now, as a leader, you can’t be talking to every single person in your thousand-member team, however, there are ways and avenues of, reaching and touching them to get an appreciation of whether the messages that you’re trying to send actually goes through. So, for me, that’s the first thing is to actually, understand whether there is a problem or not, and to do it through that way. I also do, in some of the organizations I start or what I call innovation hubs, or think tanks and I do that typically with the layer that’s below that middle manager layer, so that there’s an interaction visa there’s a sharing of this culture that I’m looking to create and there’s also an interaction from my side within as well, so that they touch and feel the essence of where I’m going. In, from a personal perspective, because your question was, how do you help the individual, you don’t just want to fire the individual, I think what’s important is to understand what motivates that person and what the fears and the insecurities are around the person but also importantly is how, how is this person being measured. In my previous life, I managed a team that I felt there was a breakdown in the team spirit so there was like, I’m only working for myself and I’m only worrying about myself and not about my neighbour kind of a culture and working to the performance, conversations and measurements are working to that, major of your team effectiveness and that measure was done, on a 360, so that you were evaluated by other people around that and in that way, it made people start to think about, well, wait a minute, what I’m doing is important but so is my neighbour. Now I know that we’re talking about the people below the middle manager, but in the same way, when you measure that individual around with them the actual message, the building of teams, the appreciation of high-performance and whatever the culture is that you’re striving for when you build that measure in, you probably get the behaviour, unless of course, there’s something else that she does and that’s why it’s important to understand is there any other type of insecurities that you need to work with individual with, or I’m sorry to say ,this Sanjog but sometimes the individual does need to part with you and go their separate ways.

Sanjog: So, Michael building upon what Faith mentioned, one is to, again, deal with these situations when businesses as usual so you see whatever that person is doing, you see a pattern, etc. But then when the disruption like pandemic happened, there was a global plea and appeal to introduce more and more empathy, because if a person’s insecurity are inherent, that’s got nothing to do with the disruption, that’s one thing. But since we talking about this topic in the context of us making the organization and the culture resilient, which means no matter what this person does not blame, or you do not give him or her, the benefit of doubt of this disruption, how would you, you know, suppose something happens in the last two months, how would you have processed this act of someone trying to be more controlling because that person could be doing it because he doesn’t know if he’s going to lose his job or some other, impact may be on his or her career because they are trying to give too much freedom they are allowing everyone to speak openly.

Michael: So, I think that Faith that talked about that a little bit before, and the sympathy towards the individual there, our university made some statements early on at the beginning of the pandemic to try to ease people through that, we’re not trying to just shed employees, we’re trying to help people through this and everyone’s going through something and once you’ve established that everyone has issues out there, I think giving people good concrete tasks to do during the pandemic is the best way to make sure you keep that cohesion. So, I expect leaders to develop other leaders and here we use a cohort model, so, we’ll get five or six people together and we’ll put them through a leadership training program at the same time, so they can, they can work with each other so, it’s not me necessarily telling them something it’s their peers that are telling them something and we try the most knowledgeable person about what the technology or a service as the ones that are driving the solution, regardless of the organizational chart and I can give you an example of that when we had to reschedule all the courses in the entire university, because of the pandemic, so we made a decision that in fall 2020, we were going to have a live in-person semester at SMU. And that means six-foot social distancing in every one of the classes and what we determined rather quickly is all the people don’t fit in the classes anymore so, now you have to take spaces that traditionally you’ve never used before at the university athletic venues, large venues, auditorium, and make them suitable for classes in a hurry and then figure out where are you going to put all of these people? And conveniently, we have a super computer here at SMU, so we were able to get some of our data scientists to take a look at all of the rooms, all of the classes, all of the people and shuffle all the spaces on campus and redo everything related to the schedule, kind of at the Nick of time, we finished all this work in August, right before everybody got here, but it empowered people to use their skills and kind of get some of that anxiety off their mind and focus it on something that they’ve never done before and it was truly a benefit to the university.

Sanjog: So, with what you’re saying here, Michael, that you tried and people got creative, right?  And that is good, so now when we talk about decision-making and this is for you, Kevin, when people like to make decisions, and when they are saying, I want to be able to do it independently, you got to give them that idea that yeah, you can do it, but then it should not become a wild west either. And when you’re trying to hold them back, then we say we are stifling creativity and stifling independence. Who do you end up pleasing?

Kevin: Well, you know, again, I really don’t believe that these things are mutually exclusive, you know, for me, I think it’s important that we, that we give people the empowerment , we give them the power to make decisions and for me, my staff, they don’t even have to ask me, a perfect example, one of my assistant directors was, she had emailed me last week about, she’s responsible for infrastructure here at the city of Burbank and we had received the complaint that at the farmer’s market here, several locations within the farmer’s market didn’t have Wi-Fi, a good Wi-Fi signal, and so on, it’s a big farmer’s market that happens every weekend for us here at the city and so, she went out, she had her people go out and do some research to figure out the best way for us to solve these particular problems because this Wi-Fi access is outdoors, it’s in a parking lot and in a park and she was trying to figure out the best approach, to solve this problem and so she emailed me a couple of options and asked me what I thought she should do and I sent her a message back as saying, well, I’d like to hear your recommendation, what do you believe we should do? And so, then she sent me an email back again saying, well, I think we should try this, what do you think? So, I reminded her that this is your responsibility, this is your decision, you don’t have to ask me, you know, please don’t ask me and what I tell everyone is that, you know, I am judging you by the realization of the objectives that you’re seeking. If you’re meeting the objectives that you and I set together for you, then you’re accomplishing what I expect you to accomplish. I don’t need to make all the decisions for you and I don’t want to make all the decisions. Now, the big decisions, the ones that are, real have a real huge cost impact or may have a huge reputational impact, I want to be looped in, so that I can help make those decisions, but for the most part, I tell all of my directs, I tell my entire team, that they are empowered to make decisions, now we’re all driving towards this common vision and I think it’s important that we set that vision and we set those expectations and we really lay out those objectives for them to meet but it’s up to them to figure out how they want to meet them.

Sanjog: Let’s take a quick break listener, we’ll be right back. And Michael, we spoke about decision-making, but then given the disruption, the uncertainty that exists, is it fair for us to either throw the people in swimming pool without floaters and say, you go make a decision, I’m giving you the independence, but the person doesn’t have all the wherewithal and nobody wants to, at this time be singled out because they are manoeuvring or they’re navigating through Hayes and I’m sure even if you were to be put in that situation, you would not want to say, okay, I’ll do it just because I have to make a decision I’ll take any decision. So, how you preserve the spirit of independent decision-makings, but don’t judge people because they could not take a sound decision and as a result, they did not deliver to your benchmark because there are unknowns?

Sanjog: Welcome back, so, Kevin mentioned he would judge people on the results and which is fine and he would also like to have people of course learn how to make decisions and whatever you said, Kevin, that was spot on, but I’m trying to dig deeper here and that’s why Michael, the question for you is what would you do to make sure that nobody’s forced to make a decision and is not judged based on the outcome, given the unknowns that we have dealing with, so you don’t stifle or don’t come across as stifling, individual’s credibility, you don’t want to cradle them because you want to build them to be independent decision makers yet not judge them. So, is that honeymoon for anyone involved or can we make it realistic so that we eat the cake and have it too?

Michael: So Sanjog, I do have a stack of get out of failure free cards that I have used, so I do know that when people take risks, they sometimes fail and getting out of a single failure, that’s wonderful, everyone’s there to help them through.  It’s the multiple failures that you have to then start working through issues with human resources and those types of things but what we found during the pandemic is that we utilized two groups rather effectively, and one was our emergency operations centre and the other was the president’s executive council and so the emergency operation centre, it’s about 40 people that are in charge of something throughout the university, so it could be IT, HR, finance, student housing, food service, those types of things and we would meet twice a week for an hour to talk about what are the next steps of the pandemic and it gave people and an open space where they could talk about what their problems were, discuss possible solutions, go through the pros and cons of these things and hopefully collectively give someone the power to make the best decision possible and if we didn’t make the best decision possible, it would come back to emergency operation centre and say, all right, what can we do better collectively? And we had this large group of people that could help others through the issues, everyone was there to celebrate successes and we were also there to talk collectively about failure. Our discussions then went straight to the president’s executive council, which is the decision-making body of the university, so our debate, our failures, our successes got fed into the senior leadership so they could make the best decision possible, once they made the decision, it’s back to the emergency operation centre for us to figure out now, what do we do? But we had successes and we had failures and I don’t think that if we had a different structure that we would have been as successful in navigating the pandemic.

Sanjog: Faith you and I both know that if you are to go and stand next to a lake and paint, when you have all the peace in mind, you might come up with a great painting, right? But when people are dealing with personal and business turbulence, besides their survival instincts kicking in and them coming up with so-called quote unquote creative solutions to somehow get something done that is still doable, but now when you’re trying to say, go guys, do the blue sky thinking, come up with things which would move us to the next level while you are in middle of a pandemic, or you’re recovering from it, how practical is that expectation? And if we can pull it off, what would it take?

Faith: Well, I think that your blue sky thinking, especially in the world that we live in and in South Africa and, right now we are experiencing our third way. It’s the worst wave that we’ve ever had, the numbers are really high and we haven’t had the opportunity to roll out all the vaccines yet so we don’t have that minimum, what do they call it? A herd immunity, so we liked this, so we  well, as you know, I know you guys are probably in a different space, but for us we are there, we are in the middle of this war, right? So, if you’re asking us to do blue sky thinking, I think that’s going to be a little bit tough for us because we’re in the middle of it. However, I do think that we can be creative, but pragmatic as well, so if that creativity is steered towards something that is impactful, so for an example, what I’ve done with one of the innovation hubs is to look at the business problems that we’re going through right now to define that business problem, what it is and make sure that the definition is clear for us because you can’t solve something, if you haven’t defined it properly, make sure the definition is clear for us and then within that constraint of defining the different business problems, selecting the top ones, you cannot don’t all things to all people. So just shifting out the most impactful ones and saying, let’s take these two business problems and let’s see how we can do blue sky thinking on these problems and deliver a solution that is impactful to the business, still gets our creative juices flowing, still gives them an impact on our bottom line, but doesn’t leave us in the room to consider and think about blue sky while it feels to us as though the whole world is collapsing around us and what that does is it narrows it down a little bit for us right now, it gives us an impact, we see the results sooner, we do the minim viable products. We see the results and then we can move on to the next, so, my   answer is shortly, I can’t find blue sky thinking.

Sanjog: So, Michael, if I were to bring this question back to you as well, if we do not have that blue sky thinking, and I think faith, you said it’s like partial, right? Then where do we go from there in, from an evolution standpoint, so essentially what we’re saying is whatever you can get done to stay put you do it, but then that also stalls the agenda, which business has set for you and I know businesses realistic and trying to tell you that, okay, we understand their is pandemic  and there will be a little bit of a delay, but then partial also, if not measured, you will not know how much of that is, what percentage of that is truly blue sky versus whatever is, you know, just keeping the lights on or, you know, getting through this. So is that a transition that you anticipate that’s going to happen where we say, okay, folks enough of this pandemic burn and an overdose of pandemic thing and we are able to move to the true-blue sky thinking capability.

Michael: Absolutely and I think that we’re on our way there at SMU, so one of the interesting things that I observed is the first people that had to make a plan and execute and get into a pandemic support mode where the IT professionals, so we had to make sure everybody else could work for home and then everyone else had to figure out how to work from home. So, we’re starting to be the first groups that are coming out of it, so while facilities have a lot of work, making all of the drinking fountains work again and putting the furniture back and food services, allowing people to step next to each other, IT is now taking a step back and saying, how can we support our faculty research agenda?

We have a brand-new provost she’s been here a year, she wants to see SMU move up in the rankings and to do that, we have to have more faculty in the labs doing research and the IT team is trying to figure out what’s the best way to do personalise support for individual faculty members to make sure that they have everything they need and that’s a big shift from trying to figure out how do I support 15,000 people so that they can study and learn and turn it around and go into an individual IT support mode. So collectively we’re kind of leaving the pandemic and trying to figure out what’s our support model look like in the future in order to achieve all of those goals that we had back in 2019, that we’re returning to right now.

Sanjog: Kevin in your role, as the CIO, people are expecting you to be a confident driver who is navigating, you know, like an expert professional through whatever is coming and you’re dealing with it and I’m not going to say you’re not doing it, but frankly, no one has all the answers and no one is aware of whatever the next thing would bring, our next day would bring given the uncertainty that we have lived with, in your role, what would you do so that people in that bus, which you’re driving, they feel not only safe, but also are willing to say, Hey Kevin, why don’t you let me drive a little, you might be tired, let me help lead, or maybe I will lead in my own little group or I’ll make your job easier versus everyone looking up to you because yeah, you can be a hero, nothing wrong with that, but that will be too much for you to take on and successfully deliver, if everyone was truly looking up to you and them not having to look up to you is also in your hands where you give them so much comfort, so much confidence, that no matter what happens, you’ll take care of them so that they start looking out for each other and for the department and you, how would you pull something like this off?

Kevin: Well, first of all, I am anti-hero culture and I repeat that over and over again. If we have people that are having to be heroes to keep us afloat, then we’re approaching things in the exact wrong manner. I shouldn’t take heroes, I don’t need to be a hero, I’m not going to try to be a hero and I don’t want other people on our team to be heroes, I want this to be really a team effort. So, one of the things that I do with my leadership team, for example, you know, we’re working on our plan to move to the scaled agile framework here at the city of Burbank. So, we’re implementing safe here at CIT city of Burbank, and it’s something that hasn’t been done at a California municipal operative, California city of any size that I’m aware of yet, so, it’s something that we’re doing that’s not unheard of in government. It’s definitely been implemented in various federal government agencies and state agencies and things like that. But I’m not making all the decisions about how we get there, I am setting the vision that this, you know, this framework is what we want to implement and this is why we’re implementing this framework and if, of course we’re going to implement it in ways that work for us and work within our context. But, I brought my entire leadership team together and we have multiple brainstorming sessions, you know, in the pandemic we became avid users of Miro, where, you know, we’re using it as a board to throw up ideas and visualize solutions to the problems that we’re trying to solve and everybody, all my entire leadership team is always involved in these discussions and so, what I look to do is to maybe help drive the discussions, elicit the ideas.  I may even sometimes, control the mural board, but I’m not controlling in that I’m writing down what I want to write down is that I’m writing down the ideas that they’re coming up with and then we discuss these things all together and we figure out what are the, what are the ideas that we want to move forward with, and which are the ones that we don’t and why and so, I’m fostering this culture of collaboration amongst us all to talk through these things and for everybody to come up with ideas, throw all of their ideas on the board and I repeat, no, idea’s a bad idea. We may decide it’s not an idea we want to move forward with, but if you have an idea, come up with your ideas. We did a mural board very recently about, we want to plan a post pandemic celebrate at some point, we’re going to bring the team together and we’re going to have a party and we want to know what’s this party going to look like? How do we want to do it? Where do we want to do it? What do we want to include? How do we make it a party that everybody’s going to want to participate in and feel positive about, and the entire leadership team, again, we set up a mural board and everybody threw up their ideas, some really bad ones, like, I survived the pandemic t-shirt to see, you know, some really good ones that we might want to do and so that’s how I sort of try to drive that culture to where everybody has a voice and everybody can pitch in everybody’s ideas.

Sanjog: All right. I just have a minute, so, I’d like to have each of you just shared a word or a phrase, which will signify the mindset that an IT leader like yourself should embrace so that they can be instrumental in building that disruption proof of bottom-up IT culture, starting with you, Michael, a word or a phrase, which is instant you know going to instrumental.

Michael: “Personal recognition of achievements of IT staff is imperative for success.”

Sanjog: Kevin?

Kevin: Well, two words, empowerment, impairment and you know, that intrinsic motivation and knowledge workers are really important, too.

Sanjog: Awesome and Faith?

Faith: To simply put what every person does so what I do in IT matters to my business and, we’re in the business of provisioning, electricity, transmitting and generating itself, every day when I come to work, I am enabling that so simply.

Sanjog: Once again, thank you so much, Faith, Michael and Kevin, for sharing your insights about how leaders, the IT leaders and organization providing the support can build a disruption proof bottom up IT culture, thank you so much again!

Faith: Thank you!

Sanjog Thank you so much folks, and okay listeners, please connect with us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, social media, and subscribe to our podcast. Once again, thank you so much for listening to CTN, this is your host Sanjog Aul till next week take care and God bless.

Advertisement: Thank you for tuning in to CTN CIO talk network with your host Sanjog Aul, to learn more about our program or for show archives, comments or questions, please visit www.ciotalknetwork.com.

Thank you again for listening.