My Leadership Philosophy

 

During a Zoom interview a couple of weeks ago, the interviewer asked me how my leadership style or approach might set me apart from others who may be interested in the position. I went about explaining my leadership approach, which I have basically used over the last fifteen years. I told the interviewer that I what I think that so many IT shops and leaders get wrong is being stuck in processes that have just become habits. So many of us in IT get bogged down by completing our daily, weekly or monthly checklists and tasks without ever turning a critical eye to those processes and tasks and questioning whether the processes still deliver the same value they did when they were established. For instance, are we asking ourselves when the last time this process was reviewed to make sure that it was necessary, at least in its current form, or whether something in the business has changed that could have impacted the process? Does a person really need to perform this task or can it be automated and alerts set up letting us know that the process has completed, or better yet, only alerting us when it fails to avoid alert fatigue? Are we looking at how to offload repetitive tasks in favor of doing higher value work or are we too locked into our processes to even ask those questions? I then explained that as a leader, my goal is to really do away with what I call the technician mentality in favor of a more analytical mentality. A technician typically completes tasks assigned to them and really doesn’t add any value to the tasks other than completing them. An analyst scrutinizes what they do and is constantly asking is there a better way or can we somehow derive more value. My focus as a leader is on the value, we as an IT organization bring to our customers and those we serve. “Keeping the lights on” is a necessity, but staring at the light switch to do it is not.

I was a little bit shocked by the reaction that I received from the interviewer. I expected questions digging further into how or even why I take this approach, but they really appeared uninterested in this approach and quickly moved on to the next question. Now, I realize that jobs at my level are not easy to come by these days, however, the reaction I received raised a red flag for me. I may be intuiting too much, but I what I took away from this reaction is that progressive, out-of-the-box thinking was not really what they were looking for, which totally goes against my philosophy of leadership. You see even as I was coming up through the ranks, I never ever really considered myself a manager. I always looked at myself more as a leader, even when I didn’t have a title because the way I look at it, a leader can be anyone and whether you are looked at as a leader doesn’t depend on your position or title on the org chart, but rather the value you bring to your team and your company and whether people look to you to help them or solve problems. To me, that value comes from always questioning, always looking to improve and always listening.

In my humble opinion, IT should be the department that is constantly evolving and changing. We are the keepers of the organization’s technology strategy and stack. Technology seems to be literally evolving right before our eyes these days and so if our IT departments aren’t evolving and changing as well, how can we expect to provide our customers valid counsel on what technologies the organization should be looking at? Many times, we as IT professionals are asked to come in and evaluate a business function or workflow and look for ways to streamline it and possibly use technology to assist our users in getting more done. How can we have any credibility in that role if we are not “eating our own dog food” so to speak and critically looking at our own processes? The phrase my teams have learned that I hate to hear above all else is “well, that is the way we have always done it!”

As I embark on the search for my next leadership position, I am quickly learning that not all organizations take this view of IT. It saddens me to think about what all these organizations may be missing out on, but it also has made me ask more questions upfront to assess whether the organization that I am looking at views IT from the same strategic lens that I do.

I appreciate you reading this far and know that this was probably a somewhat long-winded rant, but I would be curious to hear what all of you think on this subject.