Carolyn ParnellAn organization is like a puzzle, with each person a piece that fits snugly to make up the whole. It doesn’t work the other way around, and you can’t fit a round peg into a square hole. In order to achieve the greatest value and success from a team, an organization should help individuals identify what they’re really meant to do and how best they can excel in that area. The best leaders know how to apply those unique attributes to the universal goals that will help a company thrive. So what’s the road map to help an individual lead their own path and find within an organization’s puzzle just where they belong?
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Transcription
Sanjog Aul [00:00:00]:
Hello, and welcome to CIO Talk Radio. To learn more about the show, please visit ciotalkradio.com and as always, we invite you to join the discussion on Twitter #ctrlive and look for this show as #leadership. Today’s topic is Putting Together The Pieces Of An Organization, and our guest for today’s show is Carolyn Parnell, who is the CIO and Commissioner of IT Services for the State of Minnesota. Morning, Caroline. How are you?
Carolyn Parnell [00:00:25]:
I’m fine, Sanjog, how are you?
Sanjog Aul [00:00:28]:
Very good. Thank you so much for being on our show.
Carolyn Parnell [00:00:30]:
My pleasure.
Sanjog Aul [00:00:31]:
And so we’ve talked about organizational development many times on this show, and as a leader, we tend to want to look at the big picture, but really, an organization is made up of individuals, each of whom acts as their own piece of a greater puzzle. So what’s the roadmap to help an individual lead their own path and find where in the organization’s puzzle and they belong. So that’s what we wanted to discuss today. So let’s start with Caroline. In your world, in your organization, what’s going on? What’s new? What’s different?
Carolyn Parnell [00:01:05]:
Well, we have a lot going on. I have been CIO for the State of Minnesota for the last three and a half years, and we have been handed an incredible challenge which is consolidating all aspects of IT for all of the executive branch in the State of Minnesota, and that means the entire stack of IT people, projects, infrastructure, applications, budget. This had previously been very, very fragmented and something that was fragmented also in decision making about it. We have been charged with having one place for the legislature and the governor to go to find out what’s happening in the State of Minnesota regarding IT. So I was particularly drawn to this topic of putting together the pieces of an organization because we started out in a very fragmented way and have built actually a new consolidated information service for the State of Minnesota. I just want to correct what might be some misconceptions about state government.
Carolyn Parnell [00:02:10]:
We have 70 to 80 different state agencies and boards in the executive branch. A lot of people think that state government is kind of stodgy, doesn’t have much or any of the latest and greatest technology, and that is a misconception. We manage about 2,500 applications. Many of them are so mission critical that if they’re down for 24 hours or more, there’s significant risk to the public welfare or public safety. So we sometimes, when we’re building our systems, have to have the latest and the greatest. Now, that doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot of old legacy systems. We really do, and we really value the people who support those legacy systems, but we also need the latest and greatest skill sets to keep up with the turnover of technology that we all in IT organizations manage.
Carolyn Parnell [00:03:05]:
The other misconception is that state government is not or cannot be innovative. We are very intent on being innovative, particularly in ways that we can serve Minnesota citizens better. So we are now a central IT organization. We have a budget of about $480 million per year and about 2,200 employees. So we had the challenge of pulling together all of these different resources. Nobody had ever measured IT in the State of Minnesota before. Nobody really knew how many IT employees there were. So we have, as you can imagine, been very, very busy over the last two and a half years pulling all of this IT organization together.
Sanjog Aul [00:03:56]:
So with your changes or the transformation that you’re bringing about, you saw from a distance initially to say, oh, we have so many fragments, let’s consolidate, and in order for you to consolidate, some cleaning will be done, and which could mean people, process and technology and not, when I say cleaning, not with respect to people being let go. Maybe you would repurpose the resources that you may have. However, when we look at the organization as a whole, would you look at people upwards or would you go business organization downwards? And whatever is the casualty of war, so be it.
Carolyn Parnell [00:04:36]:
Well, first of all, I want to say this. IT consolidation was not my idea. It was a law that was passed and all the business and IT were charged with making sure that this law was carried out. It’s a fine point, but it’s an important one. When we started down this path, we did not, as I say, even know how many IT employees there were in the state. Some of that was a factor of IT classifications in general, maybe paying a little bit higher. So people threw people into those classifications, whether or not they were doing IT work, other people were doing IT work, and they didn’t necessarily have an IT classification. So we had to go through an entire inventory not only of the IT systems that were in place, but of the IT people.
Carolyn Parnell [00:05:26]:
And we were very intent on being accurate and not trying to get the highest number of IT employees for the sake of size of the organization, but we have not had any kind of layoffs or outsourcing as part of our strategy around IT consolidation. That was the commitment that I made to employees very early on. It’s probably important to note that when this law was actually passed, it was passed in after a three week state shutdown and the people who really suffered during that three weeks were state employees who were out of work for that amount of time. This particular law was passed in the last weekend of that shutdown. So people showed up to work and all of a sudden they were told we were going to consolidate all of it. They were fearful, they were concerned. There had been a fair amount of conversation around this that did imply that there would be a lot of layoffs and a lot of outsourcing.
Carolyn Parnell [00:06:31]:
So we had to sort of start communicating with them immediately and manage that fear and manage that change in a way that didn’t mean that we were going to lose a lot of really, really important skill sets in the State of Minnesota. So we have been very intentional in our framework for IT consolidation, very inclusive and very, very communicative with not only business, but primarily with our employees, and we’ve actually capped their brain trust in figuring out how we’re going to go about doing this.
Sanjog Aul [00:07:07]:
How snuggly would you say this puzzle that you have, which is nothing else but a set of competencies and the number and count of human resources who are essentially building up your IT organization? And what was the shape of that puzzle before, what you tried to do for the government versus now? So what was the current or the past state and what’s the current and where you’re taking it for them to all along be snugly fitting, which is very well aligned with the strategy as well. Is that all happening at the same time or it is phased?
Carolyn Parnell [00:07:43]:
Well, I would say to some extent it’s very phased. Our original approach, because this was handed to us and we really didn’t know if it was going to happen. We had sort of thought, but we didn’t have any or I didn’t have any specific plans, but I did have a framework in mind and that was let’s keep everybody exactly where they are while we sort out how we’re going to do this IT consolidation. So we had people distributed throughout state government sitting in the agencies that they supported, and yet we had to build a new identity of an organization and they had to report into this new organization as opposed to the agency that they had maybe been sitting in for 20 years or five years or whatever. So we very intentionally kept everybody where they were. Started defining minute, we changed actually the name. We had a new name for this new organization and started defining all of us as a team.
Carolyn Parnell [00:08:42]:
Now, the advantage in that was that I did not have to go down the path of changing a culture. That can be very, very difficult. What I told everyone is we are actually building a new culture. How many times in government do you get to really start from scratch and build a new organization, new policies, et cetera? So we kept employees exactly where they were while we figured out how we were going to lay out the path or the roadmap for IT consolidation. Our roadmap does consist of identifying what those core services are that are best delivered from a consolidated state, and what are those services that are so unique to that agency that they will never be centralized or consolidated, and remember when we talk about 70 or 80 plus boards and agencies, those are like actually separate lines of business within state government. So building roads is very different from housing prisoners, which is very different from collecting taxes.
Carolyn Parnell [00:09:48]:
And they all have their unique IT needs that we cannot centralize or consolidate. So we have gone down that path of designing those consolidated services. We’re shifting that workload and those employees out of agencies into that consolidated role. They have been very much a part of designing those new services. We’ve had a lot of sort of background work to do. For example, as you can well imagine, there were 70 plus different ways of defining it. So we put together a new IT reference model that sort of had a nomenclature around it in common. So service desk is called Service Desk everywhere.
Carolyn Parnell [00:10:30]:
Instead of Help desk in one place and Service Desk in another, we got all people within it pretty sorted out and reporting up into this new MNIT organization. We were required legislatively to have service level agreements with every single agency which we completed within the first 10 months. So for the first time, not only did agencies know who delivered their it, but they knew exactly what was delivered and how much IT costs. All of this was built around a master plan that we had listening sessions with business, a strategic plan that came out of listening sessions with employees, and a tactical plan that really defines what those changes mean to employees as we shift that workload for those consolidated services to a centralized model.
Sanjog Aul [00:11:22]:
Now, when you mentioned. Actually we’ll take a quick break, but when we come back, we’d like to understand that how much of this was collaborative in terms of what we are going to change, how we will redefine the culture. Because there’s an age old saying that if you take care of your employees, they take care of you and they are inclusive. If this is an inclusive approach, of course that is going to help make an initiative more successful than ever before. So what was done in that regard? How inclusion was manifested as part of your initiative? Let’s talk about that more. Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back.
Sanjog Aul [00:13:17]:
Welcome back. So Caroline, when you are going about this initiative or when you started and right now I’m assuming you’re still going through that journey, how inclusive has this approach been, starting from drawing on a white sheet of paper to tweaking what’s working, what’s not working by getting direct input from the people who are in the trenches versus working in the ivory tower?
Carolyn Parnell [00:13:40]:
Well, we have, I feel, been very, very inclusive and collaborative in how we go about. As I mentioned earlier, we did have a framework, but that framework was designed to be very employee oriented. Remember that we had a very weary and wary set of IT employees who did not know what this meant. They didn’t know me from Adam. They were concerned about being laid off. They were concerned about their work being outsourced. So we had to sort of settle down those fears. First of all, I didn’t mention this earlier, but when the legislature handed us this law, they didn’t provide any money.
Carolyn Parnell [00:14:20]:
So we have had to do this ourselves. Now, many, many other states have gone through some version of IT consolidation. Generally it’s just been the infrastructure piece rather than the entire stack, but we did not get any money. So we’ve had to do this ourselves. There was an advantage in that because we defined very early on that we had an employee brain trust that we could tap. These people were close to the business. They knew it very well.
Carolyn Parnell [00:14:52]:
I inherited this change as much as they did. So my message could be we were all in this together, and that, I think, was a very effective approach. Now, one of the things we did very early on, within I think, about the first month when this was effective, which was October of 2011, was do an employee engagement survey. We wanted a baseline of how employees felt about their job, felt about being in public service. Did they have enough tools, et cetera, did they feel heard? We just repeated that survey, that employee engagement survey, I believe it was in January, exactly the same one with one question, had a little variation in it, but I’m happy to say that every single category of the employee engagement survey saw an uptick. So we didn’t lose any employees along the way.
Carolyn Parnell [00:15:47]:
They were at least, if not more, satisfied with their job, which tells me that they don’t feel like pieces moved around on a chessboard, that they felt like they had something to say about this and that they had enough communication that they were part of the change as opposed to having the change just forced on them.
Sanjog Aul [00:16:07]:
So you did the engagement survey, and we got good information and or good insight. So as to whatever we are doing is actually taking people in the right direction. When we talk about inclusive, let’s dig a little deeper. When you say you are including them, are you allowing them? This is the ultimate where the employees drive the change versus leaders, or leader becomes a servant leader, and let those people who are in the trenches tell where all the changes should be, and this leader is shaping and molding the thinking as well as the action so that the whole swarm moves forward. Is that the approach that was taken? Or would you say you were the Pied Piper and everybody followed you?
Carolyn Parnell [00:16:46]:
I will say that we had actually, again, with the input from business and from IT employees, we had a master plan, a strategic plan, and a tactical plan. The master plan and the strategic plan were the result of listening sessions that, for example, in the strategic plan, we met with employees and said, we are a new organization. What do you want our vision to be? What do you want our values to be? And if you look at that strategic plan and you were in those listening sessions, you could track what was said to the output that showed up on that strategic plan. When it came to the tactical plan, which is our plan for moving those services that can be delivered collectively that everybody sort of has in common, we had a process. There were 18 different projects in that tactical plan. So it was active directory, network, SharePoint, et cetera. What we did was we had each one of those projects divided into separate, separate processes. So, for example, for active directory, we had I believe five different phases of that project and each of those project phases were populated by employees who were expert in that area.
Carolyn Parnell [00:18:06]:
So when we put together for example the project for the tactical plan around active directory, we put out a call to all employees to say we want to hear from you and include you in this project around active directory since you are a subject matter expert. We did that for each phase of those projects and employees. Actually, in the first one, actually the first one we put together was data center. We needed about eight people on that team to help us design that new Service. We had 80 employees volunteer. We ended up only taking 80 of them, but that tells you how much interest there was, and the benefit was we could actually tell employees, you’re our brain trust here and we are going to tap you for how to best do this IT consolidation.
Carolyn Parnell [00:19:04]:
In my mind that was a sort of. We had a sort of roadmap but they filled in the gaps and I believe felt very much a part of of the process.
Sanjog Aul [00:19:15]:
When you have a tightly knit organization and where relationship is the core of how people work, then they are very open, they’re honest, including with the leader. Did you, as part of your journey, get approached by many of such folks who have seen you as approachable leader and someone who’s going to listen and incorporate the changes with some constructive feedback along the way so that we are in it together, that sense of team prevailed.
Carolyn Parnell [00:19:45]:
I certainly hope so. That might be a better question for employees who are more of a judge of that probably than I am. I can tell you that we have been very focused on communication and I have been very focused on regularly touching base with employees. I make it a point to stay engaged. I don’t feel like I can do my job unless I have a pretty clear process of feedback from employees. We send out from the office of the CIO a daily email called the Morning Java which sort of either communicates what’s happening within the organization or calls attention to some achievement of some part of the organization. Or if none of that is apparent, we just send along industry news. I have visited every employee, not individually, but based on the agency that they’re providing services to.
Carolyn Parnell [00:20:44]:
Once a year I’m in the middle of my third round of that. They’re actually mandatory meetings for employees to make sure I tap all of them. This particular go round, I have no presentation. It’s the sort of ask me anything venue. I will continue to do that. I tell employees that I have an open door policy. They all know my email. I really focus on feedback from people.
Carolyn Parnell [00:21:11]:
We have brown bag lunches that are designed around particular topics. So, for example, after we did the employee engagement, we had brown bag lunches that I showed up to talk about the survey and what we learned. Each of the cabinet level agencies, and there’s about 20 of them, has a CIO that is assigned specific to that agency, and just as an aside, some of the agencies that we have are so large that if you were to pick them up out of the public sector and put them in the private sector, they would be a good sized organization. So the Department of Human Services has billions of dollars in budget, thousands of employees, actually 500 IT employees supporting them. We have a weekly meeting with CIOs in order to hear the issues that they bring from their employees and from their agencies. On that weekly meeting agenda, we have a standing agenda item, which is burning issues or through the grapevine, which is designed to be a sort of feedback loop that comes up from employees through CIOs that might be a contradiction in our message. So if they’re hearing on the ground something that clearly is contrary to what we’ve been trying to communicate, we have a way of catching that and correcting that message.
Carolyn Parnell [00:22:40]:
So in my mind, it’s been very, very important. I tell them that there’s nothing sacred about the floor of the office building that I’m in and that people are always free to stop in and they do.
Sanjog Aul [00:22:52]:
So that’s exactly what was my next question that the proof is in the pudding. That means whatever you said and whatever assurances and the science of a good you demonstrated, the result of that, I’m sure, should be in form of active engagement, whether online and or in person, among each other as well as with you. So if you were to benchmark the level of engagement and involvement of the people who are actually making all this happen, are in the trenches, where would you rate that today?
Carolyn Parnell [00:23:21]:
I’m not sure what kind of a scale you’re talking about, but one to five.
Sanjog Aul [00:23:25]:
One to five, if that’s what you’re to take.
Carolyn Parnell [00:23:27]:
Well, one to five was our employee engagement scale, and we got pretty close to fours or a little above fours on almost all of them. So that to me is a very good sign, but again, sometimes the employees are the best source of information, and when I go around and meet with these employee groups, which I’m in the middle of doing now, I always have a kind of gauge of how candid the questions are, and they are actually invited to ask provocative questions. I don’t promise to know all the answers, but I think what that serves as much as anything is a message that you don’t have to ask all these questions, but you have permission to do it. So that kind of openness and that openness to feedback, I think is what goes a long way.
Carolyn Parnell [00:24:17]:
Now I also expect my employees to be judging me and my readership related to consistency and do I do what I say, and so I’m always sort of conscious of that, and that’s where a certain amount of my consistency in message focus comes from. Because that, I believe, is how you build trust, and when you’re going through the level of change that we are going through in the State of Minnesota, that trust is everything.
Sanjog Aul [00:24:47]:
Now, as part of your journey, I’m sure part of that would also be happening because you would always have moves or shakeups in the puzzle, and puzzle being the organization, how do you detect or diagnose if there are people who are, or there are groups which are not fitting properly and. Or there is a mismatch? What is your way of doing that on an ongoing basis and what did you do up front to ensure that the first step is to bring that puzzle together for them to be able to most effectively work on the tasks that get assigned to them?
Carolyn Parnell [00:25:18]:
Well, a couple things. One is, as I mentioned, we started right away with communication and a sort of, this is your leadership here and these are the things that are important to us, but the other thing that we did that I think was also key is we started focusing on the level of supervisors and managers that we have. So, for example, out of the 2,200 some employees, about 250 of them are in a management or supervisor role. In my mind, that middle management group is the group that really are the change agents. We started focusing on that group very early and saying these are our expectations of management in this new organization. Now, we’ve probably all had some experience with a poor manager, and in my experience, you take that home with you and it kind of poisons your life.
Carolyn Parnell [00:26:17]:
Well, here’s an opportunity to define what our values are around management and to keep building those policies that focus on employee centered management. So we have quarterly meetings with managers. They’re online. With the exception of, I should say, by video, with the exception of one time per year we meet physically, altogether. It’s a way to keep our message consistent, to make sure that that message of inclusion, it goes through the ranks. I can say only so much, but the real measure of how a person is managed is with their direct manager or supervisor. So that I believe has been an important part of our strategy and will continue to be.
Sanjog Aul [00:27:04]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back, and Caroline, let’s explore the potential gaps that might have gotten created when you went about the journey. Did your engagement survey try to align people and yourself towards that end goal? But there would be a few people who may not see say anything would just come along, but may not be fully charged up, and unknowingly we are getting one or two pieces of the puzzle getting loose. How do we detect that proactively and how do we make sure that that particular loose piece of the puzzle issue is not getting out of hand? Because then otherwise you’re jeopardizing the whole initiative from quality standpoint. Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back.
Sanjog Aul [00:29:12]:
So Caroline, we know that you’ve done a fantastic job of taking whole organization through this journey and you also mentioned that there was not any attrition or any loss of jobs, et cetera. Now that is completely a utopic state where you could say that everybody’s fully charged up, but most probably that may not be happening on the ground because there will be some people who will say I don’t like the pace of change, I don’t like the type of change, and they may be getting somewhat pulled back into their own zone and their inertia and that could also be counterproductive at some level in the organization so in the context of this topic, maybe one or two pieces of the puzzles are getting loose without you actually noticing it, and so how do you detect that proactively? Even if you, when you detect it and these people exist and they may be causing a dampening effect versus as a catalyst, how do you turn them around?
Carolyn Parnell [00:30:09]:
I am quick to say we do not have outsourcing layoffs as part of our strategy, but the State of Minnesota has a huge retirement factor, and I believe in the next three years there’s upwards of 30% of our IT employees who are eligible for retirement. So part of my message has been my job is to retain you, those of you who know the systems that we have to support that are not going away anytime soon, and to attract the best and the brightest. Now, any IT organization has a broad spectrum of people working for it. There are people, quite frankly, who just want to come into work and show up and they’re fine supporting a 30 year old system and their real life. Most of their interest lies outside of work. We all have those kinds of people and that’s perfectly okay.
Carolyn Parnell [00:31:11]:
On the other end of the spectrum, you have employees who eat, breathe and sleep IT stuff and are always on the lookout for how to do things better, how to be innovative, etc, and then you have people sort of in the middle who you want to move along with you. So I’m pretty open about sort of that categorization of employees, and I believe that the feedback loop that we have in place and the frequent contact that I have and my executive team has with employees allows for that feedback. In addition, CIOs kind of are on the lookout with their employees on what issues might be coming up, and quite frankly, we will lose some people. That’s just the nature of it. We are not always competitive in state government with our salaries, although we are getting better and better about that.
Carolyn Parnell [00:32:05]:
But the other thing that we’ve done in MNIT is to launch an innovation program, and that innovation program has a couple of purposes. One purpose is to focus from an enterprise level on how we can better provide services to Minnesota citizens. We had little pockets of IT here and there. There were some fishing and park mobile apps in the Department of Natural Resources. There was some health applications from the Department of Health, but we didn’t have a focused approach to an enterprise, innovative set of services. The second purpose for an innovation program was to tap those employees who are really interested in that, and in fact we have virtual teams that we pull together from across the agency, from all the different agencies that they’re serving.
Carolyn Parnell [00:33:02]:
And we put them on these virtual teams that work on projects that we have set up as challenges that have been proposed by employees. So we are in the process, I believe, of not only having a new organization that people prefer to work for, but one that challenges those people that want to be challenged and yet recognize that that’s not every single employee. Now we do have high standards and that’s one of the reasons that we have focused on managers and supervisors. They have got to have a consistency in standards regarding what we expect from employees. I do have to throw in here that there’s also a history, at least in Minnesota, of a misperception around state employees, and when I came to this job I had very little experience with the state, with state IT employees, and I have actually been blown away by their commitment and the quality of services and their skill set. There are some of the best people that I have ever worked with in state government.
Carolyn Parnell [00:34:11]:
So they had, I think gotten a bum rap in the past. The perception was, there’s too many of them, they don’t do anything anyway. That is just absolutely so not the case. So I think we try to be open about that range or that spectrum of IT employees. Again, the reason we have our burning issues agenda item is to hear about these things that might be happening on the ground and to if necessary, touch base with employees and learn a little bit more about what their concerns are so that we can either remedy them or give a clear message that no, this is unlikely to change and this is the direction that we’re going.
Sanjog Aul [00:34:54]:
You add in the previous response to a question mentioned that there are two camps. One is where people would want to just support a 30 year old system. So are you okay with that mediocrity and or inertia when you are trying to move the ship onto a totally different pace and or direction?
Carolyn Parnell [00:35:13]:
I don’t consider that inertia or anybody who’s stuck. Those systems are old. We are actively, in fact last year we got about $50 million in investment money for replacing some of those old systems. Some of those old systems are mission critical. So I don’t consider it a bad thing that that’s what they want to do. I don’t consider that inertia at all. I appreciate the fact that they have stayed on and that they know as much as they do about the system. Our challenge there is to make sure that we have more than one person familiar with support of that system.
Carolyn Parnell [00:35:54]:
So I guess I don’t see that as inertia. That is part of the sort of age of systems that we have to support that is going to take time to replace and repurpose.
Sanjog Aul [00:36:10]:
So would you say that there would be areas in which you were trying to make a change? Yeah. So I get your point where these systems are critical, but would you say because of the State Department that it is, or state government and you’re trying to run it for them and letting go of people or transitioning people out is not the easiest of the tasks? Are there places where you would have had to make a conscious choice to say, I’m going to pick my battles versus trying to boil the ocean?
Carolyn Parnell [00:36:38]:
Absolutely. We’ve had a dual track of not only bringing employees along with us because quite frankly, we are in a pretty good market in Minneapolis and St. Paul in the IT world right now. There’s a lot of competition for IT employees. So again, one of my jobs is to hang on to people, but also we have had to bring along all of the business units and all of the business people who in and of themselves were unhappy with this change. This is where I had an advantage in terms of, hey, people, we all inherited this. We’re going to do this as efficiently and quickly as possible, but it’s something that we all have to do.
Sanjog Aul [00:37:21]:
How do you see the puzzle that you wanted to see in place? What’s the blueprint of that puzzle that you want to put in place for your organization? Yes, you have an agenda to meet with respect to government initiatives, but from people standpoint, what puzzle would you create so that when there is the next change, you don’t have to go through this grind yet again? The company or the government and the people will fluidly move to that new state because you build that platform or the set of people who are snugly fitting together.
Carolyn Parnell [00:37:51]:
I think one of my primary messages and this has been to employees, it’s been to business, it’s been to legislature, and it’s been to the governor that this particular change is not something that I interpret as the need to do less it. What we are doing is smarter it, and I think that when we started down this path, the perception of everybody was that, oh, you have to cut everything that you’re doing, you have to cut the people. You’re spending too much money. When we actually, and in fact, I negotiated with the legislative authors to pull out any of those expectations around saving money or laying off people or outsourcing services. I said, what? I may come back to you and ask for more money, because nobody’s really looked at what’s happening in the world of it in the state, and in fact, that’s actually what happened. The next year we went back to the legislature and said the State of Minnesota has been underinvesting in it.
Carolyn Parnell [00:38:54]:
There are a lot of efficiencies we can find. In fact, in the first year we logged about almost $20 million in savings, and that was hardly trying. That was largely through procurement and rolling up all of the fragmented contracts that we had into more enterprise contracts with all kinds of discounts based on volume, for example. So we have not had to meet a lot of expectations around cutting costs or cutting people, but I have promised efficiencies and there are ways to get to those efficiencies. We have been very intent on consistently reporting our progress in any number of ways and benchmarks, but my overriding message has been I’m not here to give you less it, I’m here to give you it in a smarter way.
Carolyn Parnell [00:39:51]:
And that means efficiencies. It also means given the retirement factor in the State of Minnesota that I spoke to earlier, we may only have to replace two people that are retiring with one person. That’s something that we’re balancing literally on a kind of weekly basis. So a lot of it has to do with how you message it and people have been open to that message and it makes sense to them if we’re handed. Well, first of all, let me say that this change is a multi year change. We are at the point now where the sort of rubber is hitting the road. It’s going to mean daily changes for some employees in their reporting relationships, but overall, I think the fact that we have managed this change so openly paves the way for further change down the road.
Sanjog Aul [00:40:43]:
Now a good leader is supposed to to build an organization which outlasts themselves. So for that you need to have a good cabinet, a set of lieutenants who at least one or more of them would start getting prepared to take your position as you move on doing bigger and better things. So when you started building this puzzle and started looking at this organization from the ground up, what was the mindset or what is the strategy that you’ve utilized so that once you built it, let it not be just dependent on Caroline being there for forever for it to work the way you expect it to work for going forward, but before you get onto this, please listen to stay tuned. We’ll be right back and explore.
Sanjog Aul [00:42:46]:
So Caroline, how about your lieutenants and the cabinet so that they are trained? You go to your two weeks vacation to Hawaii in due course and still the culture is retained, good, high quality employee morale is retained, and also you got a strong puzzle which is resilient that is retained well.
Carolyn Parnell [00:43:04]:
Sanjog that’s a really relevant question for state government. My position is appointed by the governor and as we all know, governors serve for four years. This particular governor, Governor Mark Dayton, is up for reelection this year and so in a sense I’m up for re election myself. I may or may not be back depending on the outcome of the election. He’s doing very well in the polls. I have hopes, but all along that has been a consistent understanding of my position, especially in the light of the great change that we’re going through. I have put together what I believe to be a very, very strong executive team. It’s been a learning process for me to differentiate and not micromanage to sort of lay out my philosophy and the framework,
Carolyn Parnell [00:43:58]:
and then my deputy sort of takes that and operationalizes it. He is absolutely outstanding. He was here when I got here. His name is Ed Valencia. He’s not only deputy commissioner, he’s also the state CTO, but we also have a really outstanding executive team in terms of communication, legislative direction, legal counsel, service delivery, et cetera, security and risk management, and I have had the advantage of recognizing that I have to motivate them to stay and give them enough challenge themselves in all of this to make sure that they’re satisfied in their work. I feel like if I have any talent, it is putting the right people in the right jobs and keeping them there, and we have just a really, really excellent team who really does not have any issue with the direction that I’ve set.
Carolyn Parnell [00:45:00]:
Some places it might be far too, what shall I say, soft for some people. They have been very, very open, and by the way, I inherited an agency before it consolidation with a very different culture than I was accepting of. So it’s been really great opportunity to sort of change the nature of how it is delivered and focus on not only the value of employees, but the value of the leaders that I’m depending on to help me carry out this change. Although we have leaders and recognize leaders at every level, this particular team that is in the front lines of this change have been really, really great to work with.
Sanjog Aul [00:45:48]:
What are some of the key learnings for you and or for your team as you went about this journey?
Carolyn Parnell [00:45:55]:
Well, first of all, I would say don’t try to do it without any money. I wish I would have made a stronger argument for we need some dollars to invest. On one side, it’s been kind of an advantage because we’ve had to be creative about how we do it, but we should not have agreed to not having any money. The other part is to always be willing to course correct, and if you’ve got enough feedback loop set up, you recognize when you have to do those course corrections. The other thing is to not focus on communicating just for the sake of communicating, but communicate when you have something substantive to talk about. So we’ve often told employees, we’ll give you an update when we have one, or we will put out this document when we have one and not sooner. So having that feedback loop and being willing to actually learn from it and correct your course as necessary is a really, really important part of the change that we’ve been going through.
Sanjog Aul [00:46:58]:
What’s your message as the last one last question for you. What’s your message for people who would like to build that Snuggly fitness puzzle in their respective organizations?
Carolyn Parnell [00:47:10]:
I would say focus on employees, value employees, listen to employees, stay in touch with all levels of the organization. Recognize that as a leader, people are watching you to make sure that you have integrity and that you mean what you say, and lastly, don’t put off the tough questions. When I go out and meet with employees, I always invite provocative questions. That’s, I think, where you get most of your insight and useful information. So it’s building a culture of openness and value for employees at every level.
Sanjog Aul [00:47:52]:
On behalf of the show and our listeners, I’d really like to thank you Caroline for sharing your thoughts and your journey about putting together the pieces of an organization which is effective and consistently delivers value.
Carolyn Parnell [00:48:03]:
Thank you Sanjog. It’s been a pleasure.
Sanjog Aul [00:48:05]:
Thank you so much again and listeners. Hope you enjoyed. Please like us on Facebook, search for CIO Talk Radio and be sure to follow us on Twitter. Thank you again for listening to CIO Talk Radio. This is Sanjog Aul your talk show host till next week. Take care and God bless.
