Change Management Blog Posts - The Change Architects

IT Leadership Growth Mindset with Michael Pompey

The demands on IT leaders have never been greater. You’re expected to be technically brilliant while also leading your teams through constant change and disruption. But what happens when your “superhero” drive to do more, learn more, and be more starts to work against you?

As Michael Pompey, Chief Information and Transformation Officer for the Girl Scouts of Eastern Pennsylvania, shares in a recent podcast interview, many IT leaders fall into the trap of believing that “more is more.” They push themselves to the limit, taking on every challenge and striving for perfection. While this drive can lead to early success, it can also become a recipe for burnout and stagnation.

CIO Coaching: Leading with Clarity and Confidence in the Age of Digital Transformation

The role of the CIO has never been more demanding. In today’s rapidly changing technological landscape, CIOs are tasked with not only managing complex IT infrastructure, but also leading their teams through digital transformation, driving innovation, and ensuring cybersecurity. The pressure is immense, and the stakes are high.

Many CIOs find themselves at a crossroads. They are technically brilliant, but may struggle with the “people” side of leadership. They understand the importance of change management but may lack the tools and frameworks to effectively lead their teams through this process. This is where CIO coaching can make a world of difference.

Accountability Isn’t a Weapon, It’s Empowering with Kerry Siggins

What if accountability isn’t a weapon? Empowering leaders, like Kerry Siggins, have embraced accountability so highly that they wish for that kind of freedom and ownership for everyone around them. Most trainings on accountability say to “Hold employees accountable.” What if, instead, we invited employees into accountability. It’s an invitation into empowerment.

Accountability is a topic we discuss a lot, especially when it comes to change and transformation. Nothing changes unless individuals decide to change first. Organizations don’t change; people do. Not only does Kerry share her story of transforming her company three times, she transformed her own life from addiction into recovery because of accountability!

Mind the Gaps

You already know how important team communication (and your team communication strategies) are to success. In this article, you’ll learn how to improve communication with some specific and easy tools to use.

Stefanie thinks communication is the BIGGEST factor for success! When you talk about how to improve change management, making sure that you know how to improve communication for team collaboration is absolutely critical.

Scaling Without Structure Creates Burnout in IT with Tonya Wallace

Scaling without structure in IT often allows bad behaviors to create toxicity in a culture. The Change Architect’s executive coach, Tonya Wallace, shares an experience scaling a team where one person’s toxic behavior was limiting autonomy, creativity, and decision making. This team had recently gone from launching an innovative product to then maintaining it — but the team hadn’t adapted its speed and practices to this new way of working.

Tonya shares how she helped bring self awareness, scalability, and structure that drastically improved trust and culture in a very quick way. Her quote blew me away, “Play chess with your hands behind your back and all you can use is your words.” This is influence in our modern working world. This is the key tool we have: our voice. As an ambitious leader, wouldn’t you want to use your most powerful tool in the most powerful way? This conversation will increase your power! Won’t you give it a listen?

If You’re Involved You Own It: Extreme Ownership for IT Leaders with Brian Burk

Extreme ownership for IT leaders means: if you’re involved, you own it. Brian Burk brings his IT leadership experience to our conversation with his wise counsel and practical tools for accountability. Today’s projects are complex and have moving targets. It’s easy to want to avoid responsibility for results. But you’re here because you’re a leader that wants to see big change so avoidance is unacceptable.

Brian shares multiple tools to bring more change and accountability — all while making a successful business even more successful. There are training ideas and a process for group brainstorming called SARGE. Listen in for ways to bring more ownership into your teams.

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There with Ravi Bommireddipalli

What got you here won’t get you there if you’re a leader driving growth and transformation. Ravi Bommireddipalli is a CEO who focuses on unlearning as much as he learns. For Robosoft’s next level, he’s being charged with leading the company to where it has never been. Along the way he’s going to become a leader he’s never been. And he’s going to grow more leaders so that not all operational details continue to come through him.

This episode covers great ground on how CEOs and CIOs need to problem solve at higher levels, cover both the offense and the defense, communicate simply, and hire people who challenge them.

Solving the Right Problem with Change Management with Juan Betancourt

Solving the right problem with change management is a perennial problem for IT leaders. Juan Betancourt is a tech entrepreneur who is willing to keep looking in the mirror, ask the hard questions, and continuously improve until he gets it right. Our conversation focuses on how he led his team through massive business shifts because that’s what it takes to keep up in his industry.

Leading a team through change that is forced from external pressures (looking at you ‘rona) is different from leading a team through change because of internal pressures and business vision. Listen to this episode as Juan describes his leadership and company pivots when demand for their services went to zero.

Action Can’t Get in the Way of Empathy with Don Monistere

Action and empathy move at different speeds in companies. Don Monistere is a longtime IT leader who has driven a lot of change. He’s led the acquisition and merging of several companies and freely admits that plans on paper sometimes sound great and play out in the real world in a terrible way. He cares deeply about his people and he has a strong bias for action. For those of us who have a bias for action (me included) it’s easy for us to run over people, push them out of the way, or dismiss their concerns because it slows us or the result down. Bottom line is that we end up with less people following us because they don’t want to keep up, can’t keep up, or think we’ve lost our minds.

Listen in as Don describes how he now prioritizes listening and empathy over action and how that leads to more buy in.

IT Needs to Say No Sometimes with Heather Darring

How to say “No” in IT is tricky. Heather Darring shares with us what’s even trickier: saying Yes too frequently, projects going out of scope, and then reading an IT audit that says, “You suck.” Okay, okay it didn’t actually say that she and her 1 colleague sucked, but it described missed expectations and she took it personally. Years later she’s able to share how that experience turned into an opportunity to reset expectations across the entire business, to grow, to learn, and ultimately expand her department and become the CIO.

Listen in to this episode with Heather, the CIO of an international nonprofit, as she shares what happens when IT doesn’t say No to their business colleagues (and should) and how they’re mortals like us not magicians! ha!