Influencing Without Authority: Lessons from A Project Manager Turned CIO - Engaging Leadership

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Influencing Without Authority: Lessons from A Project Manager Turned CIO

Episode 238 • 12th June 2024 • Engaging Leadership • CT Leong, Dr. Jim Kanichirayil

That's a double whammy of a challenge in any organization, but can be especially difficult in an IT organization. So how do you move forward with the goal of building a high performance team when you're faced with those obstacles? Those are just some of the topics that we're going to tackle today with the goal of helping engage your leaders so they impact Your people. We'll look at how you build a leader, full organization, how you model what good looks like and why technical depth isn't enough when you're looking at building a high performance team and the person that's going to be leading us through that journey is us today is Shannon Thomas. She's the VP of technology for Hennepin Technical College. She's been in that role for almost five years and leading the technology and institutional research teams. She's focused on [00:01:00] strategic planning and initiatives to move her institution forward in accomplishing its goals.

The mission and vision of the organization while maintaining the values. She focuses on a data driven decision making process and looks to find integrated technology solutions to the problems that the organization faces. And she describes herself as a dynamic and energetic leader with a proven track record for leading large-scale technology implementations and driving organizational transformation.

That's a mouthful. Shannon, welcome to the show.

[00:01:31] Dr. Jim: Yeah, I'm looking forward to the conversation, and this is actually part of a series of interviews and conversations that we're having with functional leaders of organizations and particularly I. T. Functional leaders. So this is going to have an interesting twist on our typical conversations.

et the listeners up to speed [: 00:02:00

[00:02:04] Shannon Thomas: Yeah, so I really cut my teeth in business in project management. I've been in several different organizations. roles, including leadership roles for director roles in a lot of different organizations. I've been in healthcare and nonprofits and finance and all sorts of fun, different things. And I found myself in a career transition a few years ago and started at Hennepin Tech as a project manager and basically people left and they asked if I would try being the CIO and I said, yes. So since then, we've just been figuring out how do I, Help run an it team.

[00:02:59] Shannon Thomas: Project [00:03:00] management is a really wide variety of different things. Sometimes it's looking at technology. Sometimes it's looking at building projects. It's all sorts of different things. And I had the opportunity to get my hands in a lot of those things. So at one point I was managing the project of moving everything to the cloud for a company.

I have. I've done many ERPs and CRMs through my career. And while I wasn't doing the technical work, I was coordinating all of the technical work, getting the buy in from the stakeholders, working really hard on the technicians, and really making sure that all of those pieces worked together in order to move us forward and complete the projects.

of the equipment, but I know [: 00:04:00

So to me, it lends itself perfectly into being a CIO.

So if that was true in your experience, how do you feel those lessons that you learned about influencing without authority served you in your transition into the C suite as a technical leader? Not having come from a purely technical background.

[00:05:16] Dr. Jim: When you are coming into a highly technical function and you don't have that technical background, you can often encounter scenarios where you don't have the baked in credibility as somebody who's climbed in through, climbed the ranks from that technical silo.

How did you overcome that leveraging your skill of influencing that you had picked up as a project manager all those years?

I am so excited about the work that you're doing. And so on the technical side of things, I'm willing to learn all of those different pieces. Those to me are some of the things that you can learn where some of the relationship building is a little bit harder to learn, but it's easy to master once you start figuring out like, just even showing up has been a big deal.

Being present with them has been a really big thing. And then being consistent. So when I'm asking for their expertise, I take it seriously and I start using what they. have told me to help build our plan to go forward. And when I'm looking at our strategic plan, I'm pulling everybody into the room.

l of those different pieces. [: 00:07:00

And that was how I started building that credibility with that team, because I listened to them. I put all of that into a plan. We put the plan into action and then we recap it and say, look at all of the things that you did. And it's not necessarily about me. It's about them and their skills and what they see for the team and being able to really see that through.

There's a danger there when you do that though, as an executive is that you start trying to. Mold yourself potentially into that subject matter expert. What did you do to keep yourself from going down that path where you're [00:08:00] working, almost as a player coach, instead of what you really need to be doing as a leader and a coach versus a player, what was your process to keep yourself from falling into that trap?

I want them to feel the freedom and the ownership of their job. And if I start doing that player coach I take that away from them. And then that's not a good experience for them. And then we start getting frustrated with one another. And. And the best function for both of us is for me to understand it enough to help them with barriers, but really get out of their way and not be the barrier myself.

So when you did that, and you built out your strategic plan, what was your process for prioritizing What initiatives got tackled first?

And so I took that as an opportunity to move us into to better phone systems and letting the team really help with building the requirements and the [00:10:00] project on that one.

If you ran into that, how did you break the tie? What was your process for overcoming that sort of conflict where you have two sets of competing priorities that are high value based on whatever perspective you're looking at it from.

It was about nine or 10 months in when we were finally able to take a breath and say, okay, now we can really be thoughtful about the next few projects. There was a point in time where I think we [00:11:00] had 10 Big projects happening all at once. And that is not sustainable for most teams. And and I kept telling them like, this is not how I want to keep running the team.

This is where we're at right now. Let's figure out how we can fix some of these things so that in the future, we're not running this ragged. And as soon as we got to that point where we could breathe, then we took that breath. We said nothing for a couple months and then we were able to start again. So then when we had some things that were competing, what we did is we took a step back and we looked at the college priorities, looked at other stakeholders to see if there was something based on those things that had more weight to it than one of the things that we were thinking of.

Was there a people gap? Was there a technology gap? What was driving all of this firefighting that you walked into?

And then we worked really hard on the team and, and letting there be automations and not feeling like we had to just own this piece of land because that's what we've always done. And so it was both technology and it was a little bit of a culture gap, just that in the culture, it was so reactive and not planful that everything was on fire because, We were only fighting fires.

We weren't [: 00:13:00

[00:13:00] Dr. Jim: Oh that's interesting perspective that you bring forward. Thank you. I think that the lack of planfulness makes sense and why you would why you would end up firefighting all the time. So when you play that forward, when things calm down, how did those early lessons shape how you hired?

Because if you're dealing with a technology gap, a culture gap, Potentially a people gap. Some of that you have to develop that internally, but you can't solve it all just through internal development. You have to hire as well. So when you're bringing people into the organization, how did that first year of firefighting inform.

What you prioritized when you look at those culture fit items those knowledge fit items that you were considering when when going through the hiring process.

And and so we built out the hiring based on. More based on like personality and aptitude than it was actual skills.

The one thing that I'd like you to expand on is that when you look at. That manager tier [00:15:00] that you had in your organization. You said some of those managers had to be developed. Others ended up exiting the organization and you wanted to really emphasize leadership skill.

Tell us a little bit more about what that looked like, what behaviors and values that look like when you're evaluating a manager to come into the organization or even an individual contributor to step into that manager tier, what did that skill profile look like?

We're thinking ahead. We're excited about people and their possibilities and the possibilities that we had for our technology teams.

I think.

I've had managers who are [: 00:16:00

They were excited about diversity. They were excited about equity and they wanted to think. outside of the box and that they didn't feel like they were the smartest people in the room, that they could find other people to use their skills and apply those to meet the needs of the organization.

Get a framework in their mind of, Oh, this is what I need in my [00:17:00] managers versus this is not what I need.

And I started. And then we went around the room and we talked about the ways that you can fail forward and how you solve problems and how you get other people to help you think through problems. And so when I'm looking at managers and I'm trying to figure out who's going to move my team forward, there are people who.

rough other options. They're [: 00:18:00

[00:18:16] Dr. Jim: So that makes sense. I think one of the problems that I would anticipate when I'm trying to do that, especially within the I. T. space and you would know more about this than me, like technicians are wired to solve things. So how did you put infrastructure in place or guardrails in place that helped your managers not rushed to that solutioning mode?

How did you get them? To be in the habit of holding back and probing more so that the people underneath them are actually solutioning it versus the managers driving the solutions.

We're going to just document everything that you've done. We're going to document everything that's wrong, all of the things that are down. And then we're going to start ideas. We're going to put all of our ideas up and then you're going to go figure out if it's right or wrong. And you're just going to like methodically go through this list and figure it out.

And they did, and they figured out the, it was actually two issues, which is part of why it was so hard to troubleshoot and they figured it out. We got everything up and running and then we did a debrief after. So I sat with the manager and I said, so tell me what you noticed. Tell me what was happening in your head.

out. We congratulated them. [: 00:20:00

And the manager was like, it was so rewarding to be able to see them feel excited about it and that I didn't have to be the smartest person and I could let them take the win. And. That is when I knew I had won him over and that we were going to, we're going, we were going to manage well together because then he could take on the next incident and I wasn't going to have to worry that he was going to overstep the team.

Yeah. What's been the impact when it comes to your ability to retain and develop people as you were going through this transition?

I had one guy who really wanted to be a police officer. I don't have that on my team. So we figured out. What kinds of skills he would need in order to be a police officer. We let him do that as long as he was going to be on the team. And then we supported him to move into his next thing. So I'm really proud of the fact that at this point, no one has left because they don't like my management style.

They're leaving to something that I couldn't give them on the team. And they're moving up into bigger and more exciting things.

That provided those opportunities for the people on the team. Because oftentimes if people don't have those things, don't have a sense of ownership, don't have a sense of career path, they end up leaving. So what did you do to put that into place when you were working through this cultural transformation?

And so I was like, tell me what you like about your job and what you don't like. So we worked to move the things he didn't like out of his job into somebody else who really liked some of those pieces. And [00:23:00] then, like I couldn't move everything. And so we just said, Hey, you're not going to like some of the parts of your job, but let's make sure you like most of your job.

And then for some of our entry level people. I wanted to understand from them where they saw their career going so that at least if we had opportunities for projects or something like that, they would be able to start using those skills and get, development and training from the people on the team that were already doing those things.

So I had a service desk person who helped with our network upgrade because she just really wanted to learn about the network. And so allowing the team to, Do some training of their peers and other team members and get training from their team. And then also figuring out which things we needed to go outside for and allowing that to be part of our priority.

k too. So then my Salesforce [: 00:24:00

[00:24:11] Dr. Jim: When you look at that development arc that you just described, everybody on the team is maturing in their skills, which creates opportunities for new team members to join the organization.

How did that process that you put into place, how did that tie together with the talent strategy or vision that HR or the broader organization might've had in terms of growth overall as an enterprise? Was there any relationship there or coordination there?

And so [00:25:00] that's part of how I've been able to move that strategy forward. And then to be able to show the tenure. Take, like being longer than it's ever been or than it was, I think that's also really helpful because there's a long history of short term people in it.

And so that helped me get the buy in and then it also ends up being cheaper overall because it's so much easier to retain good talent than it is to find new ones. I

So when you're talking about retention and turnover and the impact on the bottom line it's to every organization's benefit [00:26:00] to look internally first for those development opportunities, because it's easier to grow your own than find somebody from outside the organization and bring them in. Awesome conversation, Shannon. I know there is a lot more to this than what we've covered because we can talk about any one of these items for, a full hour or more. But one thing that I think would be useful is when you look at your almost five years in this transformation journey, coming in as the outsider, and then winning over the team and doing some pretty great stuff, when you look back at that entire time span, What are the key lessons that you've learned that other leaders who might be in similar situations can take away from your experience that might be useful for them?

And I would also say Change always takes longer than you think it's going to. And so if you're in the middle of a really big change and you see the end, you've already done so much more than you think. And you, and like having the tenacity to keep going is sometimes the hardest part is to just keep showing up.

[00:27:30] Shannon Thomas: I would say probably LinkedIn. My LinkedIn is Shannon dash R M dash Thomas dash MBA.

They didn't have a lot of tenure. Everything was on fire. So the priority became, how do we get out of that so that we can be a lot more planful and your emphasis on taking quick wins Was really effective in setting the stage. So when I'm thinking about any new leader that's coming into the organization, what gave you the space to focus on those quick wins is that you took the time to listen and understand what was going on before you acted.

And I think that's an important lesson for any leader who wants to build credibility quickly in a new organization, rather than imposing your vision onto the team, find out what's important from the team and then prioritize those things. So you can get out of survival mode. And then be much more deliberate about what you want to focus on.

body can take away from this [: 00:29:00

You can find that at www. engagerocket. co slash HR impact, and then tune in next time, where we'll have another great leader joining us and sharing with us the game changing insights that help them build a high performing team.