Lack of systems leads to crisis. Overstaffing causes additional coordination. And improper organization results in excessive meetings. How are you preparing before launching innovation in your organization? Are you leaning back and rethinking people, processes, and tools to scale your efforts?

Contributor

• • Rajeev Ravindran, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Ryder System

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Transcript 

Sanjog Aul [00:00:22]:

Hello, and welcome to this segment on CTN. To learn more, please visit ciotalknetwork.com. And the topic for today is Lean Back to Scale Innovation  . And our guest for today’s show is Rajeev Ravindran, who’s the Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer with Ryder System. Hi, Rajeev. How are you?

Rajeev Ravindran [00:00:40]:

Good morning. How are you?

Sanjog Aul [00:00:42]:

Very good, sir. Very good. So how is life and business for you?

Rajeev Ravindran [00:00:45]:

It was great. It’s, for any CIO, 100 miles an hour. So, no complaints.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:55]:

Well yeah. Totally. And then, you know, when we talk about running 100 miles an hour, it’s no different than when you are, in this new digital now and next phase, and you’re trying to do a lot of innovation, and you want to scale innovation in an organization and that’s what we exactly wanna talk about. So we have seen organizations, of course, trying to make the best use of the new age of new technologies, new computing paradigms, new business models. And all of that, of course, would require some innovation but then we have also seen lot of fundamental core systems or staffing levels or the processes or the very organizational structure not appropriate to be able to move ahead in a confident manner. And that’s what we wanted to discuss to see what would someone do to take a step back versus just running 100 miles an hour from the get go to first get your act together and then make the most of the opportunity. So that said, what would you think would be a good readiness check that an organization must perform before embarking on any innovation for what they are trying to do?

Rajeev Ravindran [00:02:10]:

It’s a great question. When I started, I’ve only been here 6 months now. When I started I was born to be a strategic CIO. So having the first month I just spent listening, learning and talking to everyone from IT to business. And I realize is that I think I have to turn my strategic head sideways a little bit and become an operational CIO as well. Some of the things again these are my opinions because the approach that you take is not just it’s not always in a playbook. You can get some stuff from a playbook but it really depends on the leadership. What their strategy is? What their goals are? How the IT organization is structured. And what the capabilities are from both the business and IT. And the culture primarily. If you put all this into a vat and mix it up what’s the strategy that you can create based on all these things? So there’s not a single solution to some of the things. So where I started with was and when I say I have to turn my head sideways, it has to be digital is great, but if you don’t have the back end to start it’s not going to go anywhere. It may look good on the outside, but it won’t be strong. So when you talk about what are the readiness checks, what I start thinking about is is innovation part of the core competency in any company? Is the culture of the organization conducive to innovation? Is it a culture of no? Is my role as CIO a “no”? And then are any new ideas nurtured. Is there a forum to share ideas and implement, driving excitement? How do you create that environment? And where’s the baseline? So those are, you know, when I look at the readiness, I think those are some of the key areas. 

Sanjog Aul [00:04:08]:

So when it comes to the readiness check and you gave a couple of different options, Rajeev, of what different questions one may ask for the readiness check. What I’ve seen is the organizations which are some of the most mature ones, they may check those boxes. But most of the rest would not be able to where they say okay we have a culture conducive to innovation or our systems are in place. So whenever you come to an organization like you’re new to this organization or anyone else, or even if you are working in an organization for many, many years but then the times have shifted. The systems and processes and staffing and people, none of them are truly at that level for you to say yes, everything is all hunky dory and we can go ahead and do innovation. So there’s a lot of clean up that may be warranted, but a person may get all confused or all mixed up about where to get started. How do you look at after you’ve done your readiness check and you see most of the check boxes are unchecked or you’re not able to check? What’s next? What do you do?

Rajeev Ravindran [00:05:21]:

Yeah. So I can give you both scenarios. At Ryder, the biggest change I’ve seen, because I’ve had similar roles in three separate companies. At Ryder I was pleasantly surprised for a couple of reasons. One, the leadership team is driving towards change and innovation which is great. We’ve released a couple of innovative products for marketplace that no one’s done before. One is Coop, the other is Ryder Guide. And these are tools that in the marketplace for transportation logistics, it’s innovative. So I think that’s I see that mark already there. And this started even before I did. The leadership was already starting to think about these things. The second piece of that is the CIO at Ryder is part of the leadership team. And in a lot of my peers, the CIO is a service provider to the organization. Here it’s a partnership. That completely changes the paradigm. So I feel like I’m very lucky there. So you learn from the business. You understand exactly where they’re going, what their strategy is and you’re able to influence it. So that is a little easier. In previous companies where that hasn’t been the case and again my approach may be different from what other people would do. I started small. What I started was an R&D group. I invited key people, developers from different areas of the organization and business analysts from the business, for example, and created a lunch group. And there we would just talk about innovative ideas. I’d buy lunch. We’d sit and talk about it. As a result they were so excited they went out and created their own product for the company that was revenue generating. And it really created excitement and more people wanted to jump into that group where it transformed into a full-time R&D group that was funded and now it’s the digital arm of the organization. So I think you can start small and then grow it. Sometimes you have to talk about things and people won’t really understand what innovation is or if they really realize how important it is. But I think showing it and showing the benefits of it can really help. In that case what happened was the business started getting more excited about it. Now the R&D, the digital innovation is seeded with both the business and IT folks. If you walk into that room where they’re creating ideas, you can’t tell who the business person is and who the IT person is. And I think that’s a win when they’re together driving the change for the organization. The second piece of that is generally, people don’t like change. People are comfortable. So how do you create that comfort level with change? I’m not saying change for the sake of change. That’s chaos. But how do you create that change DNA in the organization. So one of the things I did was I started talking about process reengineering on a very small scale. I brought in a small group of people that actually did these pizza simulations. They’d have an hour lunch and learn where people from the business and IT would come and they would make pizza. That was really exciting. It wasn’t a lecture. It was actually people were hands on. They created pizza and they showed how they will improve; they would be forced to improve it as the orders got faster. By the time they left the room, there was a lot of excitement in it because it was a very active session. And that was the starting point of creating the whole Six Sigma change management, so all the business units started getting their green belts. Eventually some of them got their black belts. Around the organization, apart from creating the efficiency and better process, what it did was create that change DNA. They would go back to their desk and they would look at how they did things and how they can do it better. That started driving the end goal to drive innovation because to drive innovation you have to not be averse to change. It’s really a mindset shift. Even when you talk about digital, you’re really talking about how do you shift the mindset. It’s not a technology play. It’s how you think differently. Even in my current role, what I tell my folks is do one thing different every day. Just one thing. So there’s a lot of formulas that you can play. You really have to, I believe that you really have to get a feel for the organization, where people are at and there’s different things that you can do. But it’s not a big bang where you go out and you have a whole production on change and then suddenly the company or the organization changes. Never works that way, at least in my experience. It’s top down and bottom up approach.

Sanjog Aul [00:10:33]:

So what you definitely described are good mantras for bringing about change. So the new age digital is, first of all, much faster. It has got the newness to it, means most people who may be below or above you may not be aware of what would it take to be successful in it and rightfully so because of the very newness. And for that matter, even as a leader yourself, in this context of digital, we did not grow up learning about digital. It’s new to you too. And when we are talking about innovation, that means you’re almost in many cases drawing on a white sheet of paper. So then we talk about this, you know, the six sigma and the lean practices which are awesome for talking about stability, but then here you want to fail fast and fail small and then learn what does not work and what would best align and then that’s how you build call like we can call them as mini startups within the company. And that’s where you will eventually, not immediately, but eventually get to a portfolio of capabilities which leveraging the newer technologies and newer approaches to doing business or newer approaches to dealing with customers will take us to a point where we can say, yes, we are relevant. Now this is totally different from the age old or the standard ways of bringing about innovation and bringing about growth in an organization. Totally different completely.

Sanjog Aul [00:12:06]:

Does that mean you have to go to a university yourself? I mean, I’m not saying literally but a new type of learning yourself and then bring a new way of managing upwards and downwards so that all people come on board in this digital world and that new mindset to be able to enable innovation. Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back and explore.

Sanjog Aul [00:14:28]:

Welcome back. So, Rajeev, you did give an example of how in a traditional setting, one may use the lean and the Six Sigma and other types of capability development and then work with the people above and below us. And that would also introduce the R&D. Now in the digital age, frankly, the whole organization is an R&D test bed, and you have to work a little differently. You have to fail small. You have to fail quick. So many things are going to shift and, frankly, the people who you are trying to manage above you and the staff and the business unit leaders and the business users, none of them have ever experienced the changes that are to come about and they don’t know how to contribute. With so much of newness, so much of uncertainty. I would not say in a negative sense, but in a positive way — so much of uncertain environment changes that you have to bring about. How does one rally the troops and get their arms around something like this?

Rajeev Ravindran [00:15:33]:

So let me start with I think it starts with the leader in IT. So let’s start talk about me. Somebody asked me years ago when you hire somebody what do you look for in them? And I have to think about that because we typically index on where they’ve gone to school, how their grades were initially when you start, what the experience is. I think all that is important. But one of the things that I look for in somebody, apart from all that, assuming all that is good, is adaptability and having a teachable spirit. As I look for that in them, I had to stop several years ago when technologies are accelerating even more and things around us were changing rapidly. Even if you look at adoption of technology, TV compared to Twitter, it’s accelerating so fast that we struggle to keep up with the technology. So adaptability is huge. One of the things that I did even for myself and my old team was bring in emotional intelligence. All the studies that have been done about emotional intelligence point to self-awareness as a key piece. You have to know yourself. You have to know your capabilities. I realized that I was great at execution, getting projects done, driving the day to day activities. But I never stopped because I never had time to stop and think about strategy. I love the strategy piece. So I think it starts with us having to take a break, look at the future, look at the organization, look at where we want to head. So I think that’s a key part of it is inward facing. The accountability is on the CIO to drive that change. So I think that’s a key piece. Second is you asked the question what happens in an organization when they’re not ready for change and how do you create that change? Things around us are moving rapidly. The old way of thinking, typically projects that’s waterfall, it doesn’t work. So in the current role what we did is we’ve already done an agile strategy. A lot of projects have been done using the agile process. But it’s really having that product mindset. Even if you’re a company that’s not a technology company, you can still have that product mindset, looking at what the consumer wants and tying that back to how you think about your products. We’re experimenting a lot with even on the legacy systems, iterating in smaller chunks showing the value. Now understand that not everything can be done iteratively, but as much as you can. If you do it iteratively then they’re able to fail faster. You don’t wait till two years and then you find out that the project is not on time, not on budget and not what the customer wanted. So how do you prevent that from happening early on? Show the metrics around the success rate of the iterative projects versus the legacy way of waterfall, and take this back to the leadership and constantly have it in front of them showing them the value. I think eventually they get to understand. Same thing with the people when you have an all-hands meeting. Talk about the achievements of the different ways we’re doing things. Earlier on I talked about the culture within the organization for IT. Failing fast is really important because most people have fear of failure. If they’re not used to developing rapidly, failing and adapting, you’ve learned from it. You apply to the next set of ideas and then you keep going. The leadership has to encourage that. Even failures have to be celebrated to a certain extent. So how do we create that environment? We’re looking at having a website where people can submit ideas, and it doesn’t just go into the cloud. We just get the ideas. We talk about it. We have the people come and talk to us about the ideas. Every idea is talked about with the person submitting the idea. Once that happens and there are some good ideas, fund it. It doesn’t have to be a huge amount. Get that excitement going in those people. And then if that project gets done, it’s implemented, reward them. There’s ways of doing it. More than the monetary reward, it’s recognition. People love recognition. How do we foster that? Another idea is taking once an idea gets implemented, taking that individual and putting them in front of a leadership team and having them present. That’s something I’ve done recently here and that excitement runs through the whole organization. The individual came back, talked to his peers saying, hey, I got to meet the CEO. He was really excited. There’s no limit to what they can do. So those are some of the ideas. But it starts with the CIO creating that mental shift, saying, hey, I have to do things differently. Then teaching the people below you how to do it differently. It starts with your direct leaders. They all have to think the same way. When I say think the same way, I mean they have to have that core as part of their competency, one of the core components. So it’s critical. Everything starts from the top but your leadership is critical as well. So the first layer in IT is also critical. Does that make sense?

Sanjog Aul [00:21:34]:

It does. And this is a fabulous answer to how do you get people all charged up. Right? So which is good and you also get them to get their juices flowing and there’s a lot of excitement in the air. Now let’s bring out the execution side. So when there is a lot of excitement, things are going in different directions, people are experimenting, talking to each other, presenting to each other, and doing proof of concepts, etcetera. And that’s what happened with digital starting 2015. But frankly, February and later, business started and this is a trend that was watched is that businesses started saying guys, okay, you are working on these digital initiatives. So much excitement, so much experimentation going on. We are all talking about trying new things, but we see that the innovation that you are trying to do, our meetings, we have a meeting for a meeting, we have planning meeting for planning and then you got things going out and less work is getting done, more talk is happening. And then you’re trying to rip apart the processes by saying that, hey, we have to rethink them, but that doesn’t mean our existing customers and our existing business starts suffering. So you’re trying to support innovation and you want to become relevant to this new age, but you’re also ripping apart the fabric which built it to the point it became so far. Can we eat the cake and have it too? Can we have continuity of what brought us this far and also do innovation in a fashion where, yes, you foster creativity, yes, you foster newness in the organization, but it doesn’t offset what is your current strength. 

Rajeev Ravindran [00:23:25]:

Yeah. That’s something that’s in flight and I’m still a lot of thought behind. Not 100% sure on the execution of it, but here’s what I’m thinking right now. You’re absolutely right. The core systems that are revenue generating, like the legacy systems, that’s the keys to the kingdom for the company. Without that everything stops. Forget innovation, forget all this digital stuff. We are here to support the business. We’re here to drive the strategy for the business as well on the digital side. But the baseline has to be your existing systems. So how do you change the oil in a car while the engine is still running? How do we do that? This is where we’re focused on right now. We can’t stop the transformation that’s happening, but we have to keep the current engine going. The goal is looking at all the tier 1 applications, how do we drive efficiency? For example, if you have 100 people supporting your legacy systems, we’re asking why are there problems happening? It’s not just keeping the lights on, it’s also enhancements to legacy systems. So talking to the business and saying, hey, let’s look at all the enhancements that we’re spending tons of money and time on. Do you really need those enhancements? Or can we bundle them up and create a new project that can be off the legacy system that can be standalone? What is the true value? So really managing the cost and the time. And again you need that partnership with the business. It should drive down the enhancement cost of legacy systems. At the same time, it’s IT’s responsibility to look at streamlining processes within the support side. We hear a lot about bimodal IT. I think it’s really valuable. How do you create two teams? One keeping the lights on, driving the existing applications’ health and well-being, high availability, and then you can slowly transition some of those folks into doing the new stuff. This is a challenge. It’s much easier to talk about than execute. The challenges come up: why am I on the legacy? Why can’t I go do this? They have to have a rotation program as well. These are some of the things I’m thinking about. But it’s critical. We can talk about digital. If your foundation is shaky, you’re building on a shaky foundation. You have to do both. Not everything can be done as a standalone because a company that’s been around a long time has a lot of tying back to legacy systems. So that’s the initial approach I’m taking. We’re building a roadmap right now with a strategy for each department and then we’re going to tie it all together.

Sanjog Aul [00:26:18]:

So given what you just used the term, bimodal, which assumes that you’ll have a separate team which will do the innovation and other people will keep the lights on and keeps the engine running. Now even when you are trying to position an organization for innovation for the future, we cannot simply let legacy remain untouched, if you will. Because even that has to have the placeholders or some form of a shift, even though it may be slower, it has to be positioned for scaling innovation in the future because we cannot just be innovating in smaller areas unless otherwise it is pervasive. You’ve not really moved the whole ship forward.

Rajeev Ravindran [00:27:04]:

Right.

Sanjog Aul [00:27:04]:

So are you saying the mindset at the top is to say, okay, whatever was built in 1970 should not be touched because that does my payroll? Is that what your ask is?

Rajeev Ravindran [00:27:16]:

No. No. Not at all. Not at all. What I was talking about was the first stage to stabilize the environment. The second phase of that would be to look at the hub and spoke model. If there’s a play in the digital piece touching some of the legacy systems, is that small enough? Can we take the legacy systems and break it down to discrete business components, business functionality? Can we go after that separately? The next phase would be really a transformation team, a digital team and keeping the lights on team. All three have to work very closely together. How do you transit when you talk about legacy systems? It’s huge. Every diagram I’ve seen in every company looks like a spaghetti bowl with 100 different connections, data all over the place. So how do we focus on a small piece at a time? That whole agile mindset, if you look at the agile process holistically, you can apply that to the organizational strategy as well as the legacy transformation strategy. So small piece at a time and using a hub and spoke model where you create, for example, a centralized data warehouse that has all the applications coming off it, creating the service layer between legacy and digital platforms. Eventually, you can move some of these things to the cloud. The technologies make it easier to do this. We have technologies that didn’t exist even ten years ago that help enable this. So I think it is a great time to start modernizing legacy systems.

Sanjog Aul [00:29:06]:

So while we spoke about IT and you mentioned bimodal IT, if you think digital, it’s truly a business initiative where you’re fundamentally rethinking how the value is created and experiences created for the customers through changes in not only just the IT systems, but also the underlying processes. So there is no bimodal business model that has been created. What that means is that you want to innovate, you have to rethink the processes which are creating an experience and creating value for the customers. And you want to also at the same time make sure that while you’re innovating, the stability is not jeopardized or compromised. So while you may be wearing a CIO’s hat, what is it that is being done or should be done working alongside the business unit leaders so that these processes see a shift, see an improvement, see a tweak so that eventually you are able to bring it to a point so that they are positioned to become nimble and more conducive to the times that you have to support ahead.

Rajeev Ravindran [00:30:25]:

You talked about capability initially and what the capability gaps are. You brought up one: the processes are very different within the business. At Ryder, let me talk about the chief marketing officer. The chief marketing officer, she’s amazing. She already has that same innovative thought process. She’s more like an IT person and a business person combined. When I talk to her, it’s not just about the business. It’s about the business, the technology, what the customer wants. I learn a lot from just listening. So that shift in pockets is already happening. When you talk about capabilities, I think some of the folks that have been traditionally in IT should be on the business side too. I’ll give you an example from my old company. I was drawing a graph and the graph showed going back 10, 15 years, IT was in the back corner and the business would say, hey, I want this done and we just go do it, more order takers. Now everybody has an iPhone. Everyone has full access at all times. The business folks are getting a lot smarter. They read a lot. There’s a lot of articles now. What is that gap between business and IT that shows our value to them? One of the things we did was some of the folks currently in IT should be in the business. I moved a lot of the business analysts into the business. I took some of the business folks and put them into IT. These are folks that have capability on both sides. The IT folks need the business, the business needs IT. I don’t think it’s there now, but as the years progress, there’s going to be a melding of the two. I think that’s where the key is. That’s when the process will change. I think as the communication with the other leaders in the organization should be focused on not purely technology, not purely business, but ideas and how we can bring people together. It’s really about the capabilities of the groups between the business and IT that’s going to create that process change. I don’t know if I made myself clear.

Sanjog Aul [00:33:01]:

It’s no. Definitely. You had a take on how you would change process and of course, let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back. And we continue to explore that how an organization, of course, leveraging technology wherever it can, but start thinking as a cohesive unit. So that this positioning of being able to leverage digital or leverage innovation is not becoming just IT’s responsibility. Everyone is coming on board, all hands on deck. So that when we are to lean back, the whole company is leaning back to rethink the processes, the staffing, the approach we take to how do we get the work done. What does it take for us to do it? Well, yes, you are the CIO and, yes, you are helping lead the chart from a technology standpoint, but how do we bring the business counterparts along? Not just at the leadership level, but also at the management level and the field staff level. Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:35:54]:

Welcome back. So, Rajeev, the whole idea is that we want this organization to be not just seen as a few progressive people, which is IT and you mentioned marketing. We also have supply chain, we have HR, we have finance, and many other parts of the organization who need to all step up and all become at least open to changing themselves, positioning themselves, leaning back and rethinking themselves for a better, faster future ahead. But is this something as an individual, you from IT will say, okay, I’m gonna run faster. If you can come, please come and catch up. Is that how you’re gonna approach this? Or how is the organization approaching this?

Rajeev Ravindran [00:36:45]:

Yeah. Early in my career, the CIO called me to his office and asked me how I was doing. I had just started that company, probably about a month in. I said, you know, everyone’s so slow. I said, here’s all the things I have going on. I think I can get this done in a month. He said, hold on. I said, you know, there’s a lot of value in that. He said, it’s like running a marathon with the team. If you get to the finish line and you look around, you don’t see any of your teammates with you. You’ve failed. You have to bring them along. So that was a teachable moment for me. That’s the philosophy I’m trying to apply wherever I go. Fortunately, Ryder, all the leaders are on the same page about innovation, driving strategy, driving the digital mindset. So it’s less work there for the IT person. In other companies that I’ve been at, marketing naturally is conducive to strategy and technology because they need to be forward thinking as well. That’s why the Chief Digital Officer initially came about too; it stemmed from marketing. But I still think that it’s incumbent on the CIO taking the lead there as well. Not saying that they’ll be able to do everything. They always need a partner. What I’ve done in the past is to build that, to bring more people over to your side and you to them is the empathy piece. When you’re sitting in front of a business leader in supply chain or elsewhere and they understand that you know their pain and you know what their drivers are for their business and how you can close that gap — it could be process, it could be putting the right people on it, it could be technology — that relationship is key. It’s not a technology play. It’s more about the collaboration and the communication. Once you get close to that leader, the next phase is having a common terminology, understanding all the business language and teaching them the technology language. They have to have a common language when we talk about it. The third piece is show. You can talk about all this and it has no value unless you put it into practice. When you do it, bring them along. Bring their people along. Not just from a leadership perspective, go below and go deeper into the business folks and involve them in some of the strategies, ask them their opinion, and have IT folks there too. I think that good noise will rise all the way up. That’s the first piece of the collaboration. That’s the approach I would take if leadership was more fragmented.

Sanjog Aul [00:39:45]:

Let’s talk about staffing for a second and of course people is where the buck stops in many cases because here the things which are not evident are the internal resistance or their own desires and their own aspirations. When you’re trying to make a person move from their own cozy regular routine to something new, not everyone is as gung ho about that change or any change is tough for people. So when you are looking at the staffing, not just thinking about people as resources, but people as people who want to grow in their own respective areas and sometimes they just want to do the same thing. But you at the same time want to move this whole ship forward. What is it that you would do to customize the incentives and customize the vision for those individual groups of people such that they all want to come together, want to be able to help bring about the changes that are needed for you to position your organization for innovation?

Rajeev Ravindran [00:41:00]:

Yeah. Where do I start?

Sanjog Aul [00:41:04]:

So start with IT. Maybe what you could do is you could start with IT because I know while on the surface, we can say, yes, everyone in IT is progressive, but frankly, they’re not.

Rajeev Ravindran [00:41:14]:

Yeah. Even IT. People are people. I started this conversation by saying people don’t like change. They are comfortable in what they’re doing, especially if they haven’t been challenged. This is a problem across any organization. Every organization has to have some folks that are steady, that come in and do their job. There’s value in there too. They’re good at what they do. They’re really good at what they do, but they don’t want to go above and beyond. There are roles that way that should exist. Not everyone can be doing a digital transformation. Having said that, I believe that life is a bell curve. You have people on one extreme that don’t really want to change, don’t want to do anything new, people in the middle who are malleable, they can be molded, they can be taught, and the people that are already going 100 miles an hour. The goal is how do you shift the middle sector a little bit more to the right to become a little more innovative and adaptable. It starts with the leadership team. It’s my accountability. It’s the vice presidents under me that we should all be speaking from the same page. So the first thing is communication. Over-communicate. Have all-hands meetings. That really talks to the people. Create your vision, create your strategy, report out on it. I do skip-levels, but I go all the way down. I have lunch meetings with 10 random people from different areas of the organization in IT. The goal of the meeting is they can talk about anything they want. The rules of the game are anything said in that meeting cannot be shared outside. They can’t talk about each other. I don’t take that information back to anybody by name. If I have four or five of these lunches and the themes come out that are very similar, then it becomes actionable. So I don’t use names, but I’ll go back to my leadership and say, listen, I heard that communication is not filtering all the way down. We really need to get our communication going. The next step is report out. Create a blog. Here’s some things I’ve heard from you guys. Here’s how we’re going to fix it. If it doesn’t get fixed, please stop by my office. I have an open door policy. I believe in a flat organization. I don’t believe in levels. I don’t believe in hierarchy. You need some of that to get the job done. But the way I operate, it doesn’t matter to me. Anyone can tell me, hey, you did this wrong. I’m okay with that. As leaders we should be approachable, we should be open and people will start coming to you and talking to you about issues and improvements. We can’t just sit in our office and rule from the tower. It doesn’t work, especially with the new generation coming in. They want to move fast, they want to learn fast, and they probably leave fast too. It’s the nature of the beast. So those are some of the things I’m trying to do to bring the people close together. Communication, explaining your vision, sticking by it and the last thing is measuring IT. How do I know how well I’m doing? What’s our measure? We’re creating dashboards, we’re creating different metrics that go all the way down to the individual so they can contribute to it. We report on it. At every all-hands we say, hey, how are we doing this month? So people all have a connection towards the same goal. Does that make sense?

Sanjog Aul [00:45:05]:

Yes. Yes. And what you just said definitely makes sense. And, of course, it has to start with you. What we have seen, though, is while the leader is great and has an open door policy and makes themselves available, so people open up and come to them, but then if you’ve got layers in your organization, and this is just IT you’re talking, it could be any other department. They eventually end up talking to their managers and those managers themselves may not have bought in to what you’re trying to accomplish because it requires change in themselves as well. As you’re shifting things, it also requires change in them. If there is resistance, they themselves may not be willing to change and the people who report to them as part of the hierarchy would eventually not open up. So there may be toxicity, there may be resistance, there may be slowness, all of that may persist because they did not sign up for this crazy maddening pace and variety and the volume of change that is coming their way.

Rajeev Ravindran [00:46:24]:

I agree. The process that I laid out, what that has done, what I’ve seen it do in the past is, again, it depends on how open you are and how open to feedback you are across the leadership. It could be my VPs too. I have to be very self-aware and I have to be aware of the capabilities of my team and my direct team as well. That’s on me. But as you get down to layers, there may be managers that create a toxic environment. What I’ve seen is if you accelerate this, bringing all of the folks in IT together, that comes out pretty quickly. I’ve seen it come out very quickly actually. Then it’s a discussion with them. I’m not saying take them out and fire them. Have a discussion. Maybe we haven’t done a good enough job explaining the situation. Maybe we haven’t taken the time. Maybe they feel slighted. It could be many reasons. The first step is to really try and connect with even the toxic managers. Then, if you just can’t help somebody, we need to move them out pretty quickly because it creates a toxic environment and that spreads even quicker. So yes, the organization has to be aware. I am very closely aligned with HR. HR is not a service organization to IT. They’re a partner with IT.

Sanjog Aul [00:48:01]:

thirty seconds. 

Rajeev Ravindran [00:48:02]:

The HR relationship has also helped. HR at Ryder is not seen as an adversarial role. It is a very collaborative role. People go to them to unload and they have an idea without naming names. They’ll come and say, hey, you may wanna look at this area. You may wanna look at that. So partnership with other areas is key. You can’t do this alone. It takes a village. It really does take a village. You’re right. But you can read these people pretty quickly.

Sanjog Aul [00:48:35]:

On behalf of our show and the listeners, thanks so much, Rajeev, for sharing your views on organizations, how they can build a strong foundation for innovation. Thank you so much.

Rajeev Ravindran [00:48:45]:

Thank you for having me.

Sanjog Aul [00:48:47]:

Thank you so much. And listeners, hope you enjoyed, got some nuggets out of this. Please like us on Facebook, search for CTN dot CIO Talk Network, and be sure to follow us on Twitter and join our LinkedIn community. Thank you again for listening to this segment on CTN. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Till next week, take care and God bless.