Summary: Christain Lupoe, Director of IT at Goodwill of North Georgia, joins Dr. Jim on the HR Impact Show to discuss the importance of creating space for innovation in high-performing organizations. Christain emphasizes the need for defining business processes before seeking technological solutions. He shares his career trajectory, from Geek Squad to IT Director and how it informed his leadership philosophy. Christain highlights the game-changing realization of allowing team members to have space for innovation and act on their creative ideas. He explains the benefits of giving the team room to think and try new things, while still maintaining clear standards and processes. Christain concludes by emphasizing the importance of communication and feedback in striking the balance between innovation and structure.

Key Takeaways:

Defining business processes before seeking technological solutions is crucial for success.

Giving team members space for innovation and allowing them to act on their creative ideas leads to high performance.

Clear standards and processes provide a framework for innovation while maintaining consistency.

Communication and feedback are essential in striking the balance between innovation and structure.

Chapters:

00:01:00 The danger of leading with a technology solution first

00:03:00 Importance of defining the business process before seeking technological solutions

00:08:00 The role of technology in fostering creative thinking and innovation

00:13:00 The importance of understanding the existing process before suggesting changes

00:16:00 Creating an environment for team members to share ideas

00:21:00 Striking the balance through clear communication and feedback

00:23:00 The importance of having a standard and encouraging ideas

00:25:00 Summary of creating an innovation culture

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Let me give you a little bit of background on on his story He's got 20 years of it leadership generally spearheading transformation initiatives with large retail and customer facing organizations. His career has been defined by the strategic fusion of technical and leadership acumen.

He's consistently delivered innovative solutions that optimizes operations and customer experience. He typically takes a visionary approach when it comes to technology adoption, and he's got a deep understanding of the business objectives that a technology transformation initiative is trying to drive.

Christain Lupoe: Thank you, Dr. Jim. Certainly glad to be here and appreciate the opportunity to be part of the show and certainly be able to share any insights that that I can bestow upon your audience.

Dr. Jim: I'm really looking forward to this conversation because typically this show features voices from the human resource leadership space.

You're in IT leadership, and I think you're going to have a unique perspective, and especially when it comes to how technology can be leveraged to amplify certain strategic initiatives. I think that's going to be an important sort of lens that we're going to look into. But before we dive into that conversation, I.

Christain Lupoe: I appreciate the opportunity and certainly glad to. To share some insights, at least from the I. T. Perspective. And I think you nailed it for the most part in what you shared. I've been in the I. T. Space for quite a while. I've been more specifically in the leadership space where you know where I've been leading a team over the past 10 years or so, and I've learned quite a bit after transitioning from what I'd call it an execution role, right?

So oftentimes when we're, in the I. T. Space many of the roles in I. T. Really land in that execution space. And I'd say even in my leadership roles that I've been in, still played a huge part in in executing. I think that becomes quite important in terms of understanding how the team needs to execute some of the challenges that you may be faced with.

Dr. Jim: Thanks for adding a little bit more context into the conversation. Before we dive into our discussion about the game changing realizations that you've had, I want to do a little bit of myth busting. You talk about any business issue that might exist within an enterprise. And oftentimes leaders can fall into the trap of saying, Oh, okay, we can solve this through a technology fix. I want to hear your perspective on that sort of thinking and why that might be mistaken or misguided thinking where you're leading with a technology solution first, share with us a little bit about why that can get you in trouble leading with a technology first solution mindset,

Christain Lupoe: I like how you phrase that, right?

Depending on the business. And as you shared in the intro I've been in the retail space for a while as it ret as it relates to an industry. And most recently I've had the privilege to serve in both the retail space and the non nonprofit space. So it's almost like two sectors in one.

And it's certainly given me a whole new perspective on how to deliver IT solutions. But but oftentimes when we've partnered with the business from an IT perspective, we're coming in to help. The business to deliver solutions or accomplish a certain goal with technology.

And upon kind of digging in the process from the business standpoint, just removing any technology, the process had not yet been defined. me a little while to to really understand that is critical before you begin to go out and assess any sort of a technological solution.

The process really needs to be defined. You really would want to understand what the process is before jumping out and looking for any technology solution. The risk there is in short, just if you've not defined that process, then we're relying on the technology to define the process. And in many cases, the technologies process does not line up with what the business needs.

And that is really what creates the danger.

So I love that, how you call that out. So let's dig into the meat of the discussion. The big focus of our. Conversations that we have with people leaders all the time is how do you build a high performing team? And the specific lens that we look at is when you're part of a small to midsize organization, you're typically running lean, you're extremely busy.

So when you're looking at that sort of context, what was the game changing realization that you had that allowed you to build a high performing team?

And one of the kind of groundbreaking things that stood out for me was when I began to really allow the team and specifically individual team members to have space to be innovative, right? Really given them to the room To think creatively, but then above and beyond the ability or the room to think creatively further, given them the space to be able to act on kind of the creative thoughts and ideas that they have certainly being in the I.

Where we've gone from, having technology that very heavily was in what we'll call our physical data centers, these environments, these locations that we had to manage as as I. T. Personnel where we're physically managing servers and things from a physical standpoint, and that began to.

To transition to virtually managing these things, we'd have one or several pieces of physical equipment that then was virtualized and expanded to hundreds of of resources. And then we've seen that kind of change and migrate over into what we see very commonly today, this cloud space. And then, even fast forwarding even more, and we're beginning to see, AI come come into the conversation.

And that's when things just really take off.

Dr. Jim: That's a really strong idea. I'd like you to add some context into it. What I'm really curious about is you went from geek squad to it director. When you look at that career trajectory and those experiences, how did that experience inform your leadership philosophy about creating the space for innovation and creating the freedom for innovation?

Christain Lupoe: To add a tiny bit more context there, going from geek squad, I went from geek squad to then, breaking into the professional industry, corporate industry, I should say, at the help desk level very much entry level, and then just worked my way through, various roles.

How do you allow them to bring that to realization? When I joined several organizations over the years and different roles as I progressed through my career, of course, I'm gaining additional experience. And there were some scenarios where, okay, I have an idea. And maybe that idea was allowed to be exercised and used.

At that time I was at that time joining the help desk of this new organization, coming in with an idea, right? A fresh idea. I'm if we wanna look at it in the context of the organization that I'm now newly joining this isn't an innovation. For this organization. Now, it's not an innovation in the industry, and that's the key when we think of or when I use that phrase allowing space for innovation.

It doesn't always mean, it's something that is brand new and is revolutionary. And it's just gonna, change the whole world. It's not. It's not always that sometimes It's innovative for the organization. And when I joined at that time using this scenario I was given the room to introduce this new concept of imaging and long story short it just leaps and bounds added great efficiency, right?

Dr. Jim: When you look at that example and other examples like it, and you think back to your leadership at the time that you made these observations, what were they doing that allowed you to verbalize? That idea and what were the things that they did after listening to the idea that, that offered up the space to run,?

So I then learned the idea of imaging, generally speaking, had been presented, and at least what I. understood at that time. It wasn't, it just wasn't something that the leadership team wanted to do. And this is what I would share with me being a new team member. And so I think that certainly set an expectation in my mind, right?

I'm thinking all right I know this works and I know it's highly Efficient and highly effective because if we're, having to set up 10 to 15 devices a day, that's a it's a lot of work. Comparing that to imaging, which, is a fraction of the time maybe going to leadership isn't necessarily the answer.

It's very easy to set up s O. I went on to set it up. It was within the boundaries of what I was allowed to do. And I think that's another key when we think of I'm speaking from a team member standpoint with an understanding that maybe leadership isn't gonna allow this thing. Maybe it's been presented.

In that scenario, I created the idea or the solution. So I had to create the space on my own right in that case, just because of the feedback that it. I had been given. And that then set the stage for now presenting this to my then leadership team, right? So particularly my manager will just say for my manager at that point.

Now I have something that's working and I actually have some factual proof to back up my idea. I'm presenting an idea to say imaging is going to save us a lot of time. And it is something that will work. Instead of just going off of an idea and having to paint the picture I created the picture, right?

And I think from a leadership standpoint, what we can do as leaders is we create the room. And so we say, Okay what does that look like to create the room? One way that can be done? And this is what I do with my team, right? I'm transcribed I am always wherever the opportunity presents itself that can be in one on ones that can be in team meetings.

There are several different ways, but wherever the opportunity presents itself. I'm engaging the team and asking if there's any ideas that they may have. Now, that's a general concept, right? Generally speaking. And we're just opening up the floor more specifically. And in real reality and I T we have projects that we have to execute.

Hey, how do you think we can approach this? And add some value to it. How could we do this differently? Is there anything we can do differently? But that's just some examples as to how we can create some room for the team to feel free to share and and now give us share some of those creative ideas.

Dr. Jim: It sounds like you probably adopted this philosophy going forward, the role of leaders is to ask questions about problems that exist, and then ask questions about how can we get to the outcome, which is solving this problem that exists and then freeing up what you can within the bounds of what's acceptable.

Christain Lupoe: Don't get me wrong. I'm in. here at Goodwill, as we grow and the size that we continue to grow to be right, we're of a, very easily mid sized organization.

And then we grow larger policy and procedures is critical, so that the key is, As we're in organizations that begin to become of size, processes and I should say standard processes and SOPs and policies become necessary to create a consistent environment that you can manage, right?

To give ideas and to really really have the team feel like their idea has a voice. I will be I'll be completely honest here. Not all the ideas win and not all ideas have to be tried and tested. Some clearly won't work right? But that is very different. From allowing the team members team members on our team to have a voice still, we allow them to have a voice and then being leaders.

That's our responsibility, really giving them the space to have that voice by doing that. That now extends our ability as leaders to see risk to have mitigations to those risk and to have solutions to those risk by allowing the team to freely Move. voice their ideas and even opinions in some cases when it's opinions on ideas already there.

We're gaining that value. They're helping us to, in some cases, catch risk that we might not have on our own scene, especially as the organization grows. We can't be everywhere, but our team, generally, they are, right? They are. So that's Where that benefit comes in.

Dr. Jim: There's a component of what you mentioned that I think it's worth pulling on and that's this idea of you have to make sure as leaders that you're creating the space for your team to be heard.

And you also mentioned earlier in that answer that you have to strike the appropriate balance between innovation and then policy and procedure. So if you're trying to thread that needle. That's a tricky needle to thread. How can you do that effectively?

Christain Lupoe: That's the key, right? Like it's almost like they say what's the secret sauce? That's a secret sauce, right?

With kind of their creative thinking and various ideas that may come about while also making sure that we're staying within the bounds of whatever our policies and processes is. And standards are really I should have start with really started with standards because we find that really as in definitely in the I.

T. world, we live by standards. It's just we find that we have to because particularly in order to provide that. top notch service and reliability that our users expect from their technology. The only way for us to really be able to guarantee it is by establishing a standard.

And if you go beyond that, we're now outside our standard. That's, I think the key there is kind of communication and more than that. Making sure that policy standards and procedures first, even before the communication, making sure those things are clear, because if those are clear, then communication comes next in that the team member on their own, they already know what the standard is and when and in what area, when can we break the standard?

When we're in the lab, but when we go to production, we No, we don't just roll out a test, blindly to production. And again, by establishing clearly some of those standards and then the processes, those two things, by making them clear, the team members on their own begin to understand how far to go and then when it's appropriate to then begin to ask questions.

and while at the same time staying within the standards that we may have established across the organization.

Dr. Jim: Really good stuff, Christian and to call out the big theme and what you just said, whether you're talking about policies, procedures, standards or whatnot it's all about clarity of communication across those things, which will help define the framework that an employee has the ability to operate in.

What are the things that you would suggest?

Christain Lupoe: We definitely have to have a standard, right? And that standard really is hugely beneficial to have that standard clearly defined.

That then allows space. For this kind of innovative room that I've been sharing throughout the conversation, right? When we talk about giving the team members some room for them to try things, that's really what it's all about. And really, the point I'm illustrating, giving them the opportunity if they come up with an idea, really want to give them that space, come up with ideas.

We want to do that encouragement, come up with them. And when you do, then you let me ask you what you need, right? What do you need for me to allow you to try out this idea to see if this will work if we're establishing a clear standard and communicating that clearly, then when we're testing, then it will then become just second nature.

Dr. Jim: Awesome stuff, Christian. Last thing before I wind everything down, where can people find you?

Christain Lupoe: I'm by all means at every once in a while, if you pop into a goodwill store, you might see me. So I absolutely will say donate our, at our stores. When you donate, then your money from your donation, then Is used to put people to work.

So it helps us to really carry out our mission here at Goodwill in North Georgia. But if you are looking to try to reach out and you want to contact me, maybe get a little bit more information. I am you can find me over at LinkedIn. You can search my name, Kristen Lupo with an A C H R I S T A I N.

Lupo, L U P O E. You can find me there. I will reply to any messages and I think that'll be the best place for for your audience.

As long as you're doing that and you're operating within a framework or standard that you can operate in, you're creating a nice balance between innovation. And structure, which you'll need to help, which you will need in order to build a high performing team. So really great stuff, Christian. I appreciate you sharing all of that insight with us.

For those of you who have listened, if you liked the, this conversation, make sure you leave us a review and then tune in next time where we'll have another leader coming on to the show and sharing their game changing realizations that help them build a high performing tea