TECH TITANS: How to Be an Effective Leader with Hillery Hunter, the CTO of IBM Cloud

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) For the next five episodes, we're doing something very special. We're taking the best leadership episodes from the most popular past guests and distilling them down to ten-minute segments to turbocharge your leadership. If you want even more ten-minute condensed leadership episodes, you can subscribe to Joel Beasley Tech Titans in your podcast app. Hillary from IBM joins us in this episode to share her best advice on rising in the ranks at a globally renowned company. You're listening to Joel Beasley Tech Titans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:35) A lot of people often will ask me that are farther along in their career. They'll say, hey, I want to get experience and understand more things about the P&L because I talk about it a lot on the show because I'm an entrepreneur and, you know, I didn't go to a college to learn. I just opened a business. And when you spend your money, you figure it out real quick. Right? So how did you get that opportunity to go from not managing a P&L ever to the first time you've gotten to manage one?

(Hillary (from IBM) at 00:01:04) A lot of, you know, stepping into a general manager role within our industry clouds program, as I mentioned, came as a natural step because I'd really helped define what the technology, you know, would be. And I was working with so many clients, but taking on some additional responsibility and then, you know, track and monitor the health of how that business was going and get more involved in the go-to-market and in other aspects of it came as a pretty natural step for me. But I'll tell you honestly, that journey started back in 2017. I was appointed an IBM Fellow, which is a technical ranking within the company. And I think like many companies, IBM talks about a technical career path and sort of what the steps on it are. And then it talks about more of a business or management career path, you know, which has the different rungs of layers of management. And I was, you know, at the time, I would say much more invested in my technical career than I was in necessarily being a business leader. And I went in 2017, the very first week that I was appointed as an IBM Fellow, I went to someone whose advice I really respected and I said, you know, hey Dave, you've seen many fellows, you've seen, you know, folks that have been successful in getting their ideas adopted by the business and folks that haven't been successful that are technical geniuses that just haven't managed to convince the company and its leadership that they should invest in what they're proposing. So what's the difference? And he said the difference is the amount of time that you personally invest in understanding what's in the head of the business leaders. Right? And so that started me on a path of, you know, consuming even as just a technical leader, so to say, consuming as much of the financial information about the business, the processes, the operations, how are we actually selling things? What did customers think of us? NPS scores, all that kind of stuff. Right? And I was really doing that so as to be more effective in helping to get investment for the technical ideas that I had, that my team had, et cetera. And it just gave me exposure to how a lot of what we do from a business perspective has a lot of engineering to it. Right? We tend to separate the worlds, but there's a lot of, you know, process engineering. Right? If I do this and I go to market that way, it's going to cause this effect. And if I compensate people in this way, cause different parts of the business to function in different ways. It's not that different fundamentally from what many of us are trained to do in engineering. Then once I was kind of able to get that perspective, it helped me be more effective as a technologist, but then also made me much more comfortable with getting into those, you know, those processes and mechanics in terms of the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:53) Oh, I completely understand. The first three businesses I built, I was the technical co-founder. I was just responsible for building the technology and the teams and all of that. And then on this most recent business that's been going on for about five years, I'm just the solo founder. And so when I had to go through the process of learning sales and learning how to build sales infrastructure and sales teams and generate steady flows of meetings and things like that, as I started to get into it, I'm like, this is engineering just with humans and processes.

(Hillary (from IBM) at 00:04:27) No, you got it. I mean, I think that there's a lot of language, and I think a lot of people get kind of intimidated by the language. But I think, you know, there are some really concrete techniques. Right? You know, find a CFO friend. I always, you know, warn the current CFO that I work with, and I'm, you know, going to talk about how helpful the openness and transparency that we've had. I mean, he comes to me with technical questions. I go to him with finance questions, you know, and just, you know, it's a very much agreement that there are no dumb questions. We're just going to, you know, ask each other what we don't know. You know, find a buddy in sales, you know, that you can have a totally transparent conversation. I feel like I should know how, you know, something happens in step 32 of a contract, but I don't. Can you please tell me? Right? And likewise that, you know, those folks come back to me and say, I feel like I should understand X, Y, or Z about our product offering. I don't. Can you just tell me? Right? And I think that intentionality in moving into any new area, but also in trying to cross that bridge between technology and business and management within a company or within the company that, you know, you're founding. Like, often I know a lot of founders I talk to have a board of advisors, so to say, right, that they have that totally transparent relationship from, hey, I sense I have a blind spot or a knowledge gap over there. Can you just, you know, tell me how this goes? Right? And I think that that openness and that learning process, you know, really helps overcome any language gaps pretty quickly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:58) I'm curious to know, you know, to get to where you've gotten professionally, it takes an enormous amount of focus. It takes enormous amount of discipline. I'm curious, where did you pick that up in your life? Did your parents have it? Did you go through some difficult moments? How did you acquire that discipline?

(Hillary (from IBM) at 00:06:15) I think it's probably genetic. I can't take too much personal credit for it. But, I mean, I was really focused in school because I love learning. If you ask me when I was a kid what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wanted to be a teacher. You know, when you want to teach, you want to know, you want to grow, you know, so that you have something to share. And so I think I was very focused from a pretty early age on school and achieving and learning in school. And, you know, that translated, you know, into then, you know, pursuing graduate studies. And, you know, I think that that also, you know, one of the things that's helped me stay focused is mentors that I had pretty early in my career who really helped me fine-tune what it was in an understanding of what I was good at or the value that I brought to particular projects. Right? And that often was in a translation kind of function. If you heard just five, ten minutes ago, I talked about, you know, the language gap. Right? And figuring out how to get through the language gap to understand business discussions if you're coming at it as a technologist. But if I hadn't studied engineering, I would have loved to studied linguistics. Right? I've been someone who always wants to understand, you know, what's being said, what are we actually talking about? And so, you know, kind of helping understand, helping me understand early in my career, I had multiple mentors that were really influential and really helping me focus. Right. And you've got to kind of figure out what you're good at and what you're not going to add. And eventually as you move into management, that means what are you going to do versus what are you going to ask other people to do? And having that, you know, awareness of where you need to get better at things and grow. So you're going to take it on for that reason versus, you know, where your time personally is best spent. Right. So, you know, I will often personally get involved, you know, again, whether or not it's with clients or internal teams and situations where, you know, folks are kind of at loggerheads and, you know, not understanding each other. Right. And I find that, you know, thirty minutes and I can often help untangle, okay, wait, you know, what's everyone saying? Right. Back to, you know, the personalities within clients, you know, why is the information security team not going to approve what the CTO is doing, you know, vice versa? Why is the CTO not able to move quickly enough? How can we help create a new structure? How could we use technologies to do that internally? Why do we have a debate going on about the best path forward? So sort of how I spend my time and where I spend my time with my teams, I think has been really the product of amazing mentoring that I've gotten that has helped me kind of understand, you know, where my natural proclivities are and where to therefore, you know, the types of projects to jump into so that I'm going to be most successful in helping the team push through them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:06) Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, most of business is talking to other people. And I found that a lot of, as you mentioned, a lot of the miscommunications are two different people saying the same thing but with different words.

(Hillary (from IBM) at 00:09:19) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:20) And then, you know, being able to connect that up is incredibly valuable. You were talking about strategy. And I want to know, where is a good place to start learning about that? Any favorite authors or books?

(Hillary (from IBM) at 00:09:37) One of my favorite descriptions of how to do kind of strategic innovation, when the book came out, it didn't have the exact, exact sort of graphic in it that the professor had described when he was teaching it to us. But it goes roughly by saying that, you know, if you're wanting to do strategy, you can set ambitious goals for a team. But when you start, they're not going to know much about the topic because you're working on something that's going to take two, three years to develop. And this applies to a startup as well. He was talking specifically about innovation in large companies, but you're going to start with a sparse set of data, right? If you imagine, you know, a graph, an X-Y plot, you're here at the origin, you're wanting to go to the moon somewhere out there, but, you know, you only have a couple of dots that tell you how to fit a curve on that graph. And do you have to have the right culture to say, we're going to address a strategic topic as a team? What do we all know? Going back to some of the things that we talked about and sort of being as egoless as possible in these kinds of conversations that mix technology and business, what do we all know? And how do we stick a couple of points, data points, so to say, on the graph and decide as a team to take the leap of faith and set a strategy, set a curve through those dots. But how do we continue to come back together and openly discuss and debate? Oops, I found another data point. Oops, there's a cluster of data developing on the bottom side of the graph. Maybe we need to shift the curve, shift the technology, shift the direction we're going a little bit. And I just love that description. And it's not something that I use as a formal method with any of my teams or projects, but it's constantly in the back of my mind. Let's go ahead and make a leap. Like, let's, you know, encourage an investment. Let's look at a business case that's aggressive. Let's look three, four, five, ten years out and let's get going, right? Let's get a squad of people heading in a direction, building technology, doing something, but let's constantly check in because if we send that, you know, project or that team or that technology off and we don't constantly check back on it and have, I guess I would say the humility to adjust the strategy based on new things that are learned, we're probably not going to get to the moon. We're probably not going to, you know, hit the target. And so that for me is just sort of a powerful thought that is in the back of my mind, you know, when working on future projects. Let's get as much information, let's try to take decisions, but let's try to, you know, constantly go back and revisit and learn and refine and discuss those things and have the right team culture where that's then possible.