• Rajeev Ravindran, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Ryder System
• John Kolb, Vice President for Information Services and Technology & Chief Information Officer, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Transcript (Building Future Leaders for Hybrid Work Environment)

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 and to learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalknetwork.com, and today’s topic is Building Future Leaders For Hybrid Work Environment. So, we all know the hybrid work environment seems to be here to stay. You have to motivate people, you have to engage them, you have to lead the team, you cannot see face to face all the time. How do you do it? Then how do you make sure that the communication, the trust building the collaboration and even making sure that they are accountable, how do you enable something like that happening? Then you got the different leadership approaches that you may have tried pre pandemic and even otherwise in different situations. Do they all still work? If you are tweaking, what are you tweaking? And then more importantly, while you will hold the Baton today, but you will pass that on to someone else, which is a future leader. how are you developing them? Tough questions but I believe the discussion is definitely required on this subject matter because we have our future at stake. So, that said our guests for today to discuss this interesting and important topic is, Rajeev Ravindran, he’s the Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Ryder. Hey Rajeev, how are you?

Rajeev: Hey, how are you Sanjog? Nice to be here

Sanjog: Very good, nice to have you and we have John Kolb, who is Vice President for Information Services and Technology & Chief Information Officer for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. How are you John?

John: I’m doing well also and my boss always says, I have too long of a title, so we’ll have to work on that.

Sanjog: Well, you got a lot of responsibilities, it looks like, so let’s jump in, so we are talking about, you know, in this day and age, when you’re trying to go hybrid, and just before we got started, we were talking about how will you bring people back in and would you stay hybrid or you will bring them all in, etc. So, all of that discussion is under way, but until the time our future really settles down on what we will end up doing and we do not know what next disruption will bring, we have to fundamentally start thinking that there could be disruption or we are in this flux, or we may be in flux, state of flux all the time. So what do you do in terms of leading and motivating and engaging your troops? What do you, in fact, they try now or during the past a year, which was a situation we never encountered before and when you did try whatever you tried, what worked, what did not work and where did you struggle? So Rajeev loaded question, but I guess you can give us a rundown on what did you try doing in the last year?

Rajeev: So, you know, it’s a, you know, right ahead, fortunately, right?  It has had quite a bit of experience looking remotely we have about 900 people in technology, including contractors spread across Mexico, Canada, UK, and several locations within the US and that’s not counting our managed service providers, our business partners are also spread out across these locations as well, so you know, communication has always been the cornerstone to our success and that’s true here too. So we’ve been at this for about a year and a half now and the positives I think are that employees are enjoying having more autonomy), they don’t have home) commutes, especially here in south Florida and you know, remote working has during the pandemic proves that we can be productive outside the office. Now, the struggles that we’ve seen you know, there’s no delineation between work and home, I mean, think about your drive home, right?  You’re driving home, you get to decompress and , you know, you come to your front door, you, most times you leave your work at work and you’re with your family, that delineation doesn’t exist. Right? So that’s been a challenge, right? On boarding new employees and assimilating them into the culture of the company is much harder now, many employees are working very hard and I think there’s a lot of virtual fatigue, right? And they feel like they’re on call 24 /7 and then, you know from a company perspective, we have fear of losing our company culture, and you’ve all heard about the mental health crisis that’s happening right now. So do we expect managers to be qualified to talk about mental health? And so these are some of the challenges that we’re looking at, and as we talk more, I’ll expand on that. So I’m trying to show a little bit of the positive, and then some of the struggles that we facing, right now.

Sanjog: So John, I’m sure you tried whatever you could, based on the experience you’ve had and the things that you’ve seen work. If you were to do a compare and contrast with the newer  post pandemic world, whatever that is today and what you tried to do earlier, in terms of leading, motivating and engaging your people, what did you see working and where did you still feel you need a solution?

John: Well, it’s interesting when if you go back to mid-March of 2019, I think most of us thought, okay, we’re going remote for the next couple of weeks and then we’ll be back in here and that wasn’t terribly realistic as we certainly know now and so we had to evolve what we were doing. I went out of my way to connect my senior leadership team to the business if you will, we call them portfolios, so we’re a university, so you know, deans of schools of vice-president, so divisions, things like that and I made sure that they had a direct connection into our leadership team, so they could call up somebody if they want them to. We had a, I think Rajiv hit it right on the head with communications was critical and we had a meeting, I had a meeting of my senior group every day for probably six months, we used to talk about virtual fatigue regime, they were probably fatigued of seeing the CIO too much. But I think that was actually a key to some of our success is, we just spent a lot of time communicating up and down and I spent a lot more time in virtual meetings with, various folks in our units and I think it helped that we knew each other relatively well before the pandemic that you mentioned on boarding, we had some on boarding, but not a lot. Most of the people had already been here, they had dealt with each other face to face so it was easier to move into a virtual mode because you still knew somebody and I think that is really a key. If we started out in a virtual mode, I think we would be doing things very much differently.

Sanjog: So based on Rajeev, when you started, was there an expectation set up front? Because of course everyone was learning it, it came from the left field, we did not know what to do while we will be, may not be totally clueless, but we started, you know, developing things and doing improvisation and somehow got through all of them. But if you were to look at some net changes that you brought about in the methods of communication and collaboration, yes we understand technology part, but besides that, how somebody is supposed to be available, how should they collaborate? How should they communicate? What would you say are some of the pillars of those related policies and methods that you know are working well in the hybrid work environment?

Rajeev: You know, yes great question, so, you know, fortunately, and I hate saying this always one-point improvement, right? And you’re right you hit the key it’s about adaptability. So I’m going to segue a little bit when we talked about you asked what leadership qualities, right? One of the things that I’ve always preached that a leader, a good leader should have, is adaptability, being able to stop, look around and say, okay, this is what’s happening and starting with that person themselves change. How do I change? Because if you don’t change in your fixed in your thought process, then you can help your people. So that one of the leadership qualities that I’ve preached even before this is, that adaptability. So that was key and if your people are the same way, they’re adaptable, then you’ll your employees will actually you know, do better from that. So, you know, we didn’t have to change too much so adoption wasn’t a challenge, you know, because we were faced with the threat of hurricanes and we were prepared with business continuity and disaster recovery plan and that helped us immensely and sorry and immediately. So things like security, bandwidth, redundancy, and availability were all tested in place and we had, our corporate intranet was critical during the pandemic, you know, with continuous communication to all employees, but, you know, I had to stand back and look at how the people feeling and that was the key, so one of the things that when I got together with my team is the constant communication, so we had weekly staff meetings and John’s right, so we, you know, I think they got sick of seeing me on every teams meeting call, right? So weekly staff meetings and my rule is the camera has to be on, so I expect them to do the same thing all the way down to the managers and we have weekly one-on-ones with individuals starting with, it’s not about work, it’s about how are they doing, how their family’s doing, is there anything that we can do to help? That’s the first question everyone should ask and then we have, you know, much larger groups, all hands meetings to set the vision and report out and accomplishments, and then team meetings to celebrate success that was a big thing that we did. We hand out IP awards for accomplishments, we even tried virtual happy hours, which is pretty funny, actually, a virtual team building games and then, you know, one of the things that I like to do is randomly call people and see how they’re doing. But the most fun that I personally had recently was we had a huge ERP project that went live, remotely too, which encompasses a lot of the questions you’re asking into one package. It was a three-year project, huge biggest project Ryders done and what we did recently, a team member, and I drove to everybody’s house with the award and thank them and their families because they spent in all that amount of time. So, everything that you can do to really touch people as far down the chain, as you can, and really make them feel like, Hey, they’re part of a great organization, so those are some of the things that we did.

Sanjog: All right, so when you talk about Rajeev, about the what I call as the glorious you know, things that you did and the projects, what were the bruises? Where did you feel that there was an adoption channel pitch? It challenges, people pushed back and you had to improvise if you will, to get  around it.

Rajeev: Yeah, so things that we didn’t know, because you don’t know what a family’s going through and that was the was the biggest challenge so we had to guess, and a lot of people are very private about you know, what they share and if you look at early on the pandemic, you know, people worrying about their loved ones, their jobs, the economy, civil unrest, nightly curfew and in Florida, top it off, like I said, hurricane season. So, they had all this pressure so there were things that, you know, I think, you know, maybe they want to be, they were trying to figure it out themselves. So sometimes maybe over-communicating and it’s a balancing act, right? So, you want to connect with them, but they’re already burnt out you know, team calls, so zoom calls, and now you’re saying, hey, you know what, hey, here’s me again, hey, how can I help? And they’re like, just, I need some time. So that was one of the things that I was worried about and I think that was the case, right? So, giving them time, letting them figure out how they want to communicate, it becomes more employee centric rather than work centric. So that’s one of the big shifts when we see people going to hybrid. I still feel like we’re trying to figure it out. No one has the answers and every company I think is different because they have a culture that comes along with the hybrid workplace. So those are kind of things we’re still trying to figure out and I think the survey that we talked about is going to give us a lot of insight.

Sanjog: Let’s take a quick break listener, we’ll be right back and when we come back, John, I would like to ask this question, which I still haven’t gotten a real answer, which is if we are saying, we want to be good in terms of communication and collaboration, and we want to be streamlined in a hybrid workplace environment, should we be aspiring to make it as good as in-person work environment and I fundamentally challenged that my own statement by saying is in-person the best, or should we be fundamentally rethinking what that communication and collaboration would look like, which will actually to get us even better outcome then what we use to use as a benchmark for in-person work. What would that look like in your view? What did you use as that benchmark to make the changes that you had to and what happened when you use them as benchmark and put things in place? Did they work? Did they fall flat on his face on somewhere in between? Let’s explore. When we come back, please stay tuned listeners.

Sanjog: Welcome back, so John, I might want to use a brand-new benchmark for what streamlined communication and collaboration would mean in a hybrid workplace versus trying to always look up to so-called holy grail of what in-person work environment was like, because we might be chasing the wrong benchmark. If that’s the case, what do you think?

John: Well, I think it’s multi-faceted and it’s interesting and I think it’s like a lot of other pieces of this it’s still evolving I think that there are, first of all, I think what Rajeev has said about employee centric is very important in this environment of make sure you’re paying attention to your employees. But as always as business people, we’re looking for outcomes, right? You know, the three-year project that Virginia mentioned or other things that we’ve done here, what were the outcomes of that? And that’s really how you should be measuring thing, right? And did you really produce the things that you were supposed to be producing and to do that typically in our world, you need to be very strong in communications and collaboration. I found in the virtual world that sometimes it was actually more efficient and more effective you tend to, when you get on the zoom or WebEx band or treadmill, I guess is a better way to say it I found I was much more regimented in my schedule that and other people were too and starting meetings and stopping meetings because you know, there wasn’t this billing outside my office. It was, we were starting at eight o’clock, we were starting at eight o’clock, starting at two, o’clock starting at two o’clock and so that was more efficient and I think that people were more efficient in some of their use of time at home, even with some, interruptions of home life and so on and they were managing their time too. So, if they got interrupted at two o’clock in the afternoon, they were coming back at seven o’clock at night and working on something and so on, and then making sure that people have that good life work balance was important too. I think one of the things you missed, in the virtual environment versus the face-to-face is the serendipity of running into somebody in the hallway or somewhere else and you can have a chat and catch up and get something done and that’s a little harder to do in the virtual world. But by the same token, the virtual world, you may have your nose to the grindstone a little bit more and can focus a little bit more on some of the tasks that you’re working on, so, there’s a trade-off here and I think we’re also trying to figure out how to make that work as we go forward.

Sanjog: So, building on this, I’ll go back to a prior comment Rajeev, you made that you asked everyone that video is mandatory and because you said it, people will listen because you’re the CIO. But do you think a video is what’s going to make a difference in the way they are engaged? What was your reason for asking that as a mandatory step? Because you would not know how they’re thinking, what their facial expressions are, as people are interacting with each other and when you did present that as an option, did people push back, what happened?

Rajeev: They didn’t push back they actually enjoyed it too, because we don’t spend our meetings just talking about, you know, about work, we try and make it a, you know, we try to connect. So, I think in that, no, I don’t know if that’s a bias that I have because I enjoy people, I like talking to people, I like looking them in the eye and having a conversation, that connection is important for me and so that may be a bias that I have. So, think about that some of these things I have to figure out, is it my bias or is it the right thing to do, right? So, going back to what a lot of things, John said, it resonates really well. I want to start with the fact that I don’t think anyone knows what the hybrid model looks like fully. They don’t, I don’t think people have all the answers so, you know, we went from an office centric, design onsite to a virtual office centre centric, design offsite, and now we’re trying to understand what a human centred is which is a hybrid model and I don’t think we have all the nuances yet because we don’t have enough data to actually bring that in, so when you talk about, you know, starting fresh, I don’t think unless you are a new start-up, I don’t think you can start fresh. So, I agree with John there’s that he mentioned serendipity, there’s a loss of connection I feel and how do we close that gap of that connection? Because you want to be part of something, employees like to be part of something, right? And maybe that’s changed, but I don’t think so because there are people that still reach out and say, hey, I haven’t talked to in a long time and they enjoy the interaction. There’s the loss of consistency and this is a, I think there’s a misnomer because, you know, we used to think, okay, if everyone comes to the office, I can keep an eye on them, I know exactly what they’re doing, not necessarily, you can sit behind your desk and be playing games, right? So, there is some old thinking that we have to break out of and I think most important piece is looking at yourself saying, do I have any biases? That’s preventing me from running a highly efficient and, enjoyable workplace. So, one of the things is, you know, productivity, I’m actually measuring productivity of the people and it is 27% greater than it was before the pandemic. Now, sounds great we’re delivering on time, on budget with quality, but what’s the flip side people are getting burnt out, so there has to be a balance. I think John mentioned that work-life balance that is critical, and this is sort of forcing people to take a break, making sure that they’re spending time decompressing and those are the conversations that, you know, when you are a manager and the employee have, they should be focused on. So, a big shift, I think that lift from a leadership perspective is the empathy piece, right? How do you manage with empathy first? That doesn’t mean you don’t have outputs and deliverables, but it should be empathy first. I think that’s the biggest shift that you’re going to see.

Sanjog: So, John, let’s talk about trust-building, which is essentially a trait of a leader where they should initiate that part and then the trust or that culture of trust could be spawned or fostered within the organization. So, in this hybrid workplace, where did you see potential of trust being eroded or what things that you tried, which allowed you to approach this whole trust building from totally a different dimension compared to when you were meeting them face to face or doing your town halls and or watercoolers?

John: Yeah, I think that’s right in line with what Rajeev was just talking about and I didn’t require a video on people just wanted to have their video on and then a couple of times when I asked people to turn their video on a larger meeting, when they’re being a little shy, but, in general in particular, my senior group, when we meet everybody has their video on, we’re all engaged, we do spend a fair amount of time talking about things beyond work because we enjoy each other, we want to know each other is up to the good, the bad, the ugly, and that’s a, I think a part of trust building that we can have those kinds of conversations in a conference room, in a building and we can have those kinds of conversations on a WebEx or zoom call and because we know each other and trust each other keeping that going is a, it’s part of our culture in terms of what we do, I did like what Rajeev said about focused on people and productivity and we do that here too and I’m particularly attuned to things that might be going on in people’s lives that might affect what they’re doing at work, both negative or positive and I’ve paid a lot attention to that over the last year. I have also spent a fair amount of time having larger zoom calls that go deeper into the organization than I might normally go and know I’ve started some of those conversations off with you know, because the CIO is showing up, everybody’s a little worried, okay, what is he going to announce this time? And I started off with there’s, no announcement there’s no, no things that are different, I’m really here, I want to listen to how things are going for all of you and it could be you know, are we getting those certain projects done on time? And it could be the cat’s driving me crazy every time I try to get something done and so on. So those conversations I think are really important to people and they’re important to me, both the listening and talking about what we’re doing.

Sanjog: So, Rajeev, whenever we approach this whole trust building, we do it with announcing certain things while I know John, you said there is not much of an announcement in a meeting, but people get some sort of an announcement or some sort of a glimpse of a change that’s coming and people might go a little skeptic at first and then maybe over time they will start believing if the right things happen, what you say versus what you do and what you don’t send, what you don’t do, everything has an impact on trust, so Rajeev, if you were to say a playbook was to be  created where someone created an environment and they enable the technology the way you presented it to them and then what you actually ended up doing in terms of implementing it, that’s phase one, second is once that technology platform and policies and procedures were put in place, and then you started actually using them what you said versus what you did, so that the end result is that they feel assured that nobody’s coming down, breathing down my neck, it is for my own benefit, they want us to survive and thrive. What were the learnings and revelations that you’ve got, that what you should, or one, one leader must do and must not do and both of these stages, setting up the environment and then helping them live the environment and all throughout this change, people feel assured and that would be the basis of trust?

Rajeev: First of all, I want to say, I think John and I were separated at birth because I think a lot of things that he said is exactly what, you know, the approach that I have as well you know, when you talk about trust, trust is such a broad word, it can mean so many things, right? And trust doesn’t happen overnight, if the employees didn’t  trust the leadership in IT, me before the pandemic, that mountain is much harder to climb. So we also have long tenured employees that have witnessed leadership walking the talk, as you said, right? But that doesn’t mean that we can rest on our laurels so, it’s even more important to our people during our crisis, think about what they went through initially, when it first started, everything was an unknown. So the first thing is the transparency, right? So, the leadership team, the executive leadership team we had meetings on a weekly basis and the only thing that was talked about in that one-hour meeting, where the employees, how are they effective? what can we do for them? You know, where are we going with this, right? Also, they see that we, you know, we provided necessary PPE and safety protocols to the whole workforce that’s required that had to be on location and we implemented the response services for rider to provide cleaning supplies and any necessary items to support the employees. So, when they see that trust saying, hey, they have a back, but the most important thing I think is a transparency. So, the communication, the CEO, all the way down the leadership team would communicate with all the employees saying, hey, here’s exactly what’s going on, here’s what we don’t know, here’s what we think is going to happen and that transparency and that constant communication, it continued to build, but like I said, this trust was already there before we went into the pandemic so it was continued but even with that, people were worried that you can’t, you know, if you don’t have any information, you know, you sort of make up your own stories in your head. So, to alleviate that we were very transparent with what’s going on, including the coming back to work. We still don’t know we are learning, let’s see how it goes, let’s try these things, if it doesn’t work, we’ll change and that communication is what’s really creating the trust I think.

Sanjog: Let’s take a quick break listener when we come back, so John, you get the honors of talking about accountability, which in a way is also going to use trust as the background. So, I’d like to pose that question starting from trust-building or restoring or maintaining trust and how did you lead that to establishing or at least preserving the accountability that existed before hybrid or before we went remote, please stay tuned listeners, we’ll be right back.

Sanjog: Welcome back, so John, as I requested, let’s build or get your response on the trust-building, what did you do any different than what Rajeev did and how did you use that or did something different and new or more to actually restore or establish accountability among the people who need to all work together to get things done, because accountability is an own animal and it can keep shifting depending on the environment and this was a big shift.

John: Well, for all of us, it was a big shift, in our business we have students returning in the fall and so on of fall of 2020 and we instituted a new testing program for them, we instituted some restrictions on who was coming back and who wasn’t coming back a number of things that if you will, a little bit outside of the IT world but it affected the IT world in terms of things we had to do. We started up our own COVID testing lab and we were doing that here too, so, we could get a less than a 24-hour turnaround testing but to do that, we had to develop some IT tools to automate the process, to scale it up to doing on the order of 10,000 tests a week and without the IT, we wouldn’t have been able to do that. So being accountable there, it had to work, everybody’s watching and this was something brand new that we were working to make work with not only the local doctor on campus, but the lab that we had set up with one of our biochemists the state health lab and a local hospital and so on. So, you know, there’s a project that came out of nowhere in our planning a year or two before was nowhere on our radar screen and everybody’s watching, you have to be accountable, you have to make it work, so we certainly needed to trust each other in terms of how, how do we go forward there? And where were the pitfalls? One of the things that we’ve done a lot on this campus, and I’ve been a part of the leadership on this is, we’ve done a number of tabletop exercises where we’ve actually put a scenario out there, like, okay, here’s all the students returning for the fall, how are we going to test them? Or here’s another event coming where we’re going to, we ended up saying our residential students’ home at Thanksgiving and doing finals because we didn’t want them to go home and then come back and so on. So, over the year, I think we had 10 different tabletops and the tabletops include not only IT, but it includes public safety, it includes administration, physical plant folks, it includes the health services folks, the people that are testing everything else and how do we go through that included procurement? Because there were some items that were difficult to procure that we needed for the testing and so on. So, when you do that and you have 50 or 60 people from around the campus that are, you know, one, person’s worried about research one, person’s worried about transportation, one person’s worried about something else and getting all those folks to focus on, but this is how we’re going to bring families in and they know that their son or daughter is going to be safe here and we’re going to take care of them here. How do we go about doing that? And you know, that’s trust not only inside in terms of the community that runs the university, but it’s trust to your clients and customers who are looking for you to be, you know, best of breed in terms of how do you do these things. So hopefully that answers your question with a little bit of an idea.

Sanjog: Yeah, definitely does, let me speak about trust, so then accountability is okay, so there is a thought around the fact that people don’t do what you expect, people do, what you inspect, and that could happen at a field staff level, but as you go higher up, you see that some sort of a leadership DNA could be expected while you could have a person who could demonstrate leadership at the very, you know, field staff level, but then the accountability, should come from somewhere, it’s come from within themselves, it’s in the way you develop them or you create some environment and, or you create trust. So, I’d like to bring this question to you Rajeev, if I were to create a recipe of having people accountable, who were accountable earlier, have them maintain that accountability and all people who were developing there, they start becoming accountable and not use the shift or this disruption as an excuse, how did you manage all that?

Rajeev: So, yes, all of the above, so, you know, I think most things you can apply the bell curve to, so when you talk about accountability with accountability, it’s not holding somebody else accountable, it has to start with you, you have to feel like you own it all the way from beginning to end and what I heard from what John was saying, I and John, if I’m wrong, you correct me, I have to, I think that you were personally involved in a lot of things that you talked about, the tabletop exercises, etc. So that’s where it starts, I think you have to show that you are deeply ingrained in the success of your team, so some of the things that we’ve done, for example, right? So, we have a project dashboard and it’s not a dashboard you throw up and no one looks at, so every two weeks I have a meeting to talk about every project that we have, every big project, but it’s not just the IT folks in that, I have the IT folks on there, I have the finance folks, and then I have the business folks who own the project and that accountability is across the board, so the project dashboard has multiple lights. It’s not the traditional on-time budget alone. There is issues with vendor that can be turned red. there’s, the business not collaborating well, there’s IT not collaborating well, so I’m showing that we’re all in this together. It’s not about one team it’s across the board, but again, these are things that I’m showing to you to demonstrate what accountability looks like, if we have another, you know, we have a, I use signal for communication with the IT folks and I have a group chat there with 70 people in IT. When there’s a system outage, it automatically triggers the signal application saying, Hey, we have this system issue and I’m on there too. So, I will ask questions if I see a lag in response, so they know I’m on there, so what this has done has it’s completely changed the way we tackle issues with that many people getting an alert saying, Hey, there’s an issue people jump on it from anywhere, right? And that’s what really helped us through the pandemic as well. So, accountability can be demonstrated, some people are just it’s in their DNA, some people you can share and they realize that, right? So, shadow of a leader, right? So, I have to show that I have to demonstrate that and then people will follow and there’ll be some that just don’t have the accountability and then there’s another path for them.

Sanjog: So Rajeev, like you mentioned that you are on that chat group, which has got 70 people, and this is just one outage we were talking about and I hope that there are not that many outages that happen in an enterprise, but there could be many other places where such a group might be created, but if you start adding yourself in each group, while you’re demonstrating accountability, you’ll go nuts and not be able to sleep and that’s why you have a bigger enterprise, so how could you make sure that you did not have to be on that group and still have people become accountable versus them knowing that Rajeev is watching  so let me behave?

Rajeev: That’s a great question, so, and this is a discussion that one of my leaders had with me and initially it was fear, well, yeah, it was fear, but I’m in it and what happened over time is that I had to respond less and less, initially I was constantly texting, it almost seemed like it was micromanaging, but that was when I first started at rider in the past three is I’m, I barely even, I look at it, but I know that the team’s got to handle, so it’s a declining curve. So, if there’s an issue, then I create a separate team that I want in there, the whole team, I’ll have team meeting and have a discussion about what happened. Now I also, if it’s a serious issue that I feel like it’s dragged on, I will have a meeting, I’ll call a meeting and I have a discussion and I listened to everybody’s point of view and then weigh in, so I try to lead by example and have them make the decision and I’ll guide, I don’t, I rarely dictate unless it’s a critic issue, right? It’s like, you know, the story that, you know, the there’s a ship that’s heading towards an iceberg and the captain, you know, hands off the steering wheel to his first mate and says, Hey, you know, this an iceberg, keep an eye on it and then the ship gets closer and the ship has steered away from the iceberg and the captain comes as, Hey, don’t forget this nice work, half an hour later, it’s getting close, the captain takes over the steering, steers around the iceberg, gives it back to the first mate and then when it’s all clear, they have a discussion about what happened to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. So that’s the approach I always use.

Sanjog: Let’s take a quick break listener, we’ll be right back and John, when we come back, let us talk about the different specific approaches that you try to do to make sure that people do the right thing and the things right when no one was watching, including yourself, we’d say it’s a pursuit of perfection, but put in throwing the you know, this, the Skirball of hybrid work and pandemic and all of that, what did you do specifically as a leader? Not as a manager, as a leader so that they did the right things and all the things they were supposed to do right without you watching. Please stay tuned listeners, we’ll be right back

Sanjog: Welcome back, so John doing things right and doing the right things, both are important and you got a hybrid workplace and you had a pandemic and people facing whatever they are facing and yes, you can try to be around in every situation, watch everything, but that’s not practical. So, what would be your moves, special modes and leadership approaches, which you would have tried and you would recommend other strides so that both of those things mean doing the things right and doing the right things happen when you are not watching.

John: Well, I think it ties back well to one of our previous segments and I think Rajeev, you’ve talked about, you have to hold yourself accountable before you can hold others accountable and so, you know, I certainly dug into a number of things to make it clear that I was in there working with other folks to get things done, these tabletops that I mentioned Rajeev was, right. I was very much asked to be a leader of those, even though I didn’t have an awful lot of experience doing some of those tabletop exercises and the way they’re conducted and so on, but it sent a pretty clear message that  at the highest levels of the university, we’re very interested in having these things done, done well and here was the VP of IT that was helping to lead all this and part of it, I think is without getting lost in a parable, but at some point as a leader, you don’t want to do all the fishing for folks, you want to teach people how to fish and I think that’s what we were doing with our tabletops and other things is we were teaching other people across the university, not just in IT, how to fish and the last I think there’s the next tabletop I will probably take a more rear seat of view on because I think others are ready to really step up and lead that and the last couple I’ve noticed how things have just gone smoother as we’ve gone, because people have, are starting to anticipate what they need to have done or answered before they get into these tabletops and it’s nice to see across the organization, not just within the division that I manage, but across the organization, there’s a lot more comfort with, oh yeah, well, I’m supposed to be doing that and I’ll be ready to answer those questions and so on and so, once again, I think you focus on outcomes in some respects, you’re not going to be able to see what everybody’s doing every second of the day anyway, so that’s kind of a throwaway exercise to begin with but if you’re focusing on what you’re trying to produce, what you’re trying to get as an outcome, I think you can then measure it and you can understand whether the right things were done and were things done right.

Sanjog: So, Rajeev, if I were to you know, compare this to say disaster recovery in business, continuity, planning and testing, like you do pull the blood test, but what if I were to say, Rajeev, just go take a trip to Hawaii for two weeks now and if you had to leave and we were not as much in touch, because you’ll be busy on the beaches, what would you think will happen with the people, would they continue to do things right and do the right things and if you do not feel confident, what areas do you think could potentially go down? And this is not question for you finger pointing or are trying to put you on a spot, but more for a leader, if any leader wants to today turbulent environment, can they take a vacation? Can they make sure that they could in their absence, have their team do the right things and to do the things right?

Rajeev: Yeah, vacation Hawaii sounds really good right now and then, I think the answer is, yes, I can I took a week off last week and unfortunately it wasn’t a vacation, but I had to take a week off and the teams stepped up in a big way. We had issues, they didn’t even text me, I just saw it come across the text message, but I didn’t respond. I think it starts with two things, the shadow of a leader, right? So how do you teach people to do the right thing, people are watching and anything that goes wrong in technology, it’s really my accountability, nobody else’s at the end of the day because I haven’t grown my people, I haven’t done the right things, I haven’t built the right team, whatever it is, it really comes down to me. Let’s start with that and my people know that that’s how I feel. Accountability is a huge, huge core value for me. The second thing is really having the strong leadership team and what do I mean by strong leadership team, people that have a lot of emotional intelligence people that are very good at what they do from a skillset and people who have the experience and for me, what I really care about is how they treat people, so if you have a strong leadership team, then you can act, doesn’t mean that we don’t all make mistakes and then now you have built a really strong leadership team, listen to them, collectively their brains are smarter than yours. So I have to be open to them pushing back and saying, yeah, that doesn’t make sense, so I think that’s the key to building a strong team. What happens now and then I have a first team principle and the first principle is the loyalty in my leadership team is to each other, not to the groups below them so, if somebody else is feeling the pain, everyone else will jump into alleviate their pain. What does this do? It creates it, it breaks down the silos under them and decrease the finger pointing. So, everybody’s accountable because they helping each other, that mentality I think is critical and it’s you know, we’re trying to push that whole thought process down all the way down the organization, if that makes sense

Sanjog: Absolutely, so now John, while you know, both you and Rajeev spoke about your insights, what you learned, and I’m sure there’s some growth that has happened even for you as individuals and or for your people who were trying to do things and, but now there’s a responsibility for you to also help build other leaders and if you know that there is no academy for building leadership as usual in this newer environment. So, if you had to build one academy and a curriculum, what would you have put in there, maybe one or two things that you can share and then Rajeev could share one or two things.

John: Well, I really like a number of things that  Rajeev just talked about and I never used the terminology, a first team accountability, I liked that a lot because we do that also, but we just never used that terminology, so, thank you Rajeev, the issue of about emotional intelligence, I think is incredibly important and particularly, when you’re dealing with you know, in the IT world, most of the people that are attracted to IT are somewhat introverted if we look at the bell curve, it’s shifted to the left and so helping those people understand other people develop that emotional intelligence and I do think that can be developed is an incredibly important part of being a leader and understanding that you know, one of the things I’m not a complete person to believe everything about Myers-Briggs,  but I do like looking at some of the differences with people that might be in different roles of, you know, who’s attracted to being a chief financial officer or chief operating officer versus a chief information officer and how you might interact with those different people and, and what their goals are and so on that’s when I think he really starts to develop leadership when people understand others and how they fit together.

Rajeev: Yeah, I like what John said you know, he talked about the bell curve being on the left side and I agree with that, right? So, when we talking about an empathy driven management style, and that’s what the shift is going to be, that’s prioritizing people over process, right? Do we have, and I’m not talking about your first level of leadership, right? All the way down to the managers, do they have the skill-set required to be empathetic because all these years we’ve been talking delivery right? Now, if they haven’t had that shift in the leadership education, how do you create that mindset? That’s one, so, you know, fortunately the HR team and the IT team are very close, IT is not, I mean, sorry. HR is not viewed as an adversary entity that you’re in trouble with all the time, they’re collaborative, so, they help us with a lot of discussion around leadership, growth and development and, and one of the things that we recently did was, look at how we can create leaders in this environment and, you know, they, those are, I’m trying to remember the name of the program, I think it was something like leadership remote leadership, and they’re looking at all the nuances of it. But I think the biggest thing is just sitting with people and just having this discussion, like listening to John right now you know, even after this call, I’d like to connect with them because there’s a lot of ideas that just sitting there and talking through it can give you some insights into it. So how do you create that open communication across the board that’s really what it comes down to.

Sanjog: So once again, thank you so much, Rajeev and John, for sharing your insights about how organizations can work together with their leaders, the business and technology leaders to actually build future leaders for this hybrid work environment, thank you so much.

John: Thank you.

Rajeev: Thank you. It was very nice meeting you, John, thank you Sanjog and we will connect more.

John: Absolutely.

 Sanjog:  And hope everyone liked it, got a few nuggets myself, please connect with us on social media, subscribe to our podcast and once again, thank you for listening to CTN, this is your host Sanjog Aul signing off until next week, take care and God bless.

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