Denise Russell Fleming is an award-winning executive who has led successful business and technology transformations for premier global companies over the course of her storied career. Highly regarded as a transformative leader, Fleming currently serves as the CIO and EVP of technology and global services at BD (Becton, Dickinson and Co.). A member of BD’s executive leadership team, she also serves on the board of directors of Parker Hannifin and is a co-founder of TechPACT, a nonprofit focused on increasing inclusion and equity in STEM.
Fleming recently joined me on the Tech Whisperers podcast to mark the 100th episode of my “Whisperers” interview series. During that conversation, we unpacked her career highlights and leadership playbook, focusing on the key role trust plays in leading at enterprise scale, especially when the stakes are high.
As testament to Fleming’s reputation, nine executives raised their hands to provide “mystery questions” for the podcast, which help us dig deeper into each guest’s leadership superpowers. Since we couldn’t get to all those questions during the show, Fleming took time afterwards to address them, along with other questions about her career journey, lessons learned, and advice for current and emerging CIOs. What follows is that discussion, edited for length and clarity.
Dan Roberts: Tell us a bit about BD and how your team is helping propel its mission of “advancing the world of health.”
Denise Russell Fleming: Founded in 1897, today BD is a Fortune 250 company that produces over 34 billion products annually. Our portfolio includes interventional products like catheters, medical devices like syringes and infusion pumps, and connected care devices like pharmacy automation and those that leverage AI to provide advanced patient monitoring capabilities.
We are committed to shaping the future of healthcare with smarter connected technologies that are powered by AI and robotics, enabling the shift of care to more convenient care settings for patients, and advancing treatments for chronic diseases.
We’re also focusing on execution excellence, including how we can better support our customers with our commercial capabilities, and continuing to differentiate with innovation and exceptional quality. I’m really proud to be part of a team that focuses not only on our products but the community that we serve, making sure we are living up to our mission of advancing the world of health. It’s great to know that my team is delivering digital solutions focused on a mission that really matters.
You are often hand-picked to champion strategic and complex cross-company initiatives. How did you earn your reputation as an orchestrator of change at scale?
I chose a varied and unconventional career path that has led me in and out of technology roles over the years, and I think that combination of experiences on the business side and the technology side is what has made me a candidate for a number of the roles I’ve had. The diversity of those experiences — having led a P&L for a period of time, spending time in marketing, and then a number of years in customer support before shifting to a full-fledged IT role — has given me an opportunity to be on the front lines with customers, so I understand business challenges, how to rectify things when they don’t go as planned, how to manage risk, and how to engage and support customers. I also spent a lot of time in the factory to be able to develop solutions to complex business challenges.
All along that journey, it’s been about people — how do you bring people together to coordinate the efforts to solve complex problems — and a lot of learning along the way. I’ve stubbed my toe a couple of times, and each experience has taught me how to rewire my approach for similar situations and embrace a growth mindset so I don’t make the same mistake again.
None of this would have been possible without all the mentors and sponsors I’ve had over the years who have given me an opportunity and allowed me to bring my experience to the table. These varied experiences allowed me to bring a perspective that’s beyond traditional IT skills, and they’ve helped me make an impact in the places I’ve had the opportunity to lead.
Early in your career, you were chief of staff to the Sprint CEO. Knowing this, your former boss and mentor at BAE Systems, Michael Bennett, was curious about what made you consider the CIO track as a viable career path.
When I went into the chief of staff role, I thought I wanted to be a CEO. And then I had an opportunity to see the role up close and what it required. I thought about my family life and what impact that would have, and I made a decision that a CEO role was not the right choice for me, especially at that point in time. What it did help me to see is that I aspired to opportunities in the C-suite, but it would look a little bit different than the top job.
Prior to taking that role as the chief of staff, navigating in that space always seemed mysterious and intimidating. But what I learned is that operating in the C-suite requires the fundamentals of collaboration and building relationships with those leaders. In that role, there has to be a lot of courage for truth telling. Sometimes people don’t want to speak the hard truths to positions in the C-suite. So it was important for me to be able to bring those leadership traits to the table, and those experiences gave me confidence that I had the ability to navigate that space.
At that point I didn’t know I wanted to be a CIO, but after shifting into more technology-focused roles, and having the chance to interface with CIOs who were my customers, that became very clear to me. Also, the roles I found to be the most fulfilling were those where there was an equal mix of technology and business components, which is at the core of the CIO role. About two years later, I stepped into my first IT role, and that began my journey to CIO.
Given the diversity of your experiences and your career, Abbott CIO Sabina Ewing asks, which career moves felt risky or nonlinear at the time, but, looking back, proved most valuable for you?
When I was at Sprint, one role that I took was leading the service and repair business. Up to that point, I had been in the business-to-business space, so going into retail probably seemed a bit out of alignment with the rest of my journey. But in hindsight, that experience of having to understand customer satisfaction from the perspective of the end user and the factors that tie into that, the analytics of understanding customer sentiment — how do you make changes in your service model to create a better customer experience, how do you measure that over time — that has served me well in the CIO role, where you’ve got tens of thousands of users across the company who are essentially IT’s customers.
Having that customer experience mindset has also helped navigate the world of working with employees who are hourly versus salaried. Having a team of 3,000 people who were mostly hourly requires a different type of leadership. But it has served me well as I navigate third-party partnerships with large organizations.
Another experience that may have seemed non-linear was having a P&L role where I was accountable for bringing in profitable revenue, understanding our competitive landscape to position differentiated products, and creating a great customer experience. Having had some of that experience firsthand has been very helpful in working with my business counterparts.
That was a big “answer the call” moment when you were tapped to own the profit and loss of Sprint’s $6 billion-plus wireline business. Could you tell us more about how that opportunity came about?
I started in one position in the group and my role kept expanding due to organizational changes leading to increased responsibility. I started out with responsibility for the product and pricing. I worked with some peers to put together a strategy around driving growth in that space. We took a new differentiated product to market, and we were able to take market share with that new offering. So when my boss moved to another role, an opportunity arose for me to take on even broader scope and lead across the entire team. The track record we had built in our prior work was a factor in being considered for the opportunity.
I had a mentor who once told me that success equals preparation plus opportunity, and it’s one thing I’ve always kept in the back of my mind. In that instance, the preparation and some of the impacts we had positioned me to be considered for the role. That’s something I’ve carried with me throughout my career. That was a great experience to be considered and to get that call.
Rona Bunn, CIO of the National Association of Corporate Directors, notes that you’ve worked through divestitures, mergers and acquisitions, and restructures, situations that require making tough decisions. Can you share a time when something you championed didn’t go as planned? How did that experience make you a stronger, more effective leader?
I was in the aerospace industry, transitioning into a new role where I was asked to help lead a transformation within IT. We were working to bring five different IT organizations into one. We had to determine what are the right talent and resources to remain with the business units, what should be centralized and what are the ways of working? I did due diligence before building and proposing the plan but later learned that I didn’t go deep enough to be able to really understand some of the history and nuances of the culture within one of the business areas. As a result, the plan I developed worked in some parts of the organization but didn’t apply across all of them. As I went to roll it out, the plan was pretty much rejected in a critical business unit. It got a lot of pushback.
So, I had to regroup. I spent time onsite with the leaders, to understand what those nuances were, and then came back with a co-creation approach. As we moved through that plan together and made some adjustments, we got there, but it was one lesson that I have never forgotten — the importance of really understanding the environment, doing deep due diligence with stakeholders to understand what good looks like and some of the history of what happened in the past that they were trying to avoid. Without having that history, I didn’t understand why there was resistance. But together, we were able to come up with a better solution, and that change did work after the collaboration. That’s definitely one lesson I have taken forward, especially as I’ve been involved in a lot more transformations and M&A work.
Former CIO and fellow NACD certified director Bharat Amin asks, what advice would you give CIOs and tech executives who want to become board-ready?
For me, it was a journey to understand governance. Some of the experience I had earlier on was working on nonprofit boards. There is not a direct one-to-one correlation between the expectations on a nonprofit and for-profit board — the responsibility is distinctly different — but you will gain an understanding of management and the difference between that and oversight, and also how to navigate the boardroom, as well as Robert’s Rules of Order, strategy, managing risk, and building relationships with your fellow board members.
For corporate boards, it’s a lot about understanding the experience you bring to the table versus the strategic needs of the company, and fit based on the needs of that board. The question will be if your experiences match with what their needs are at that point in time. One misconception people often have is how the board selection process works. What I just described about fit and the board composition are critical to that. For those considering board service, it means really understanding what your skills are, preparing a board resume — which is very different than an operating resume — having clarity about what specific skill sets you bring to the table over the course of your career, and understanding how that fits with the company and the value you bring. That is one of the one of the most important pieces of being ready to be considered for board service.
Over four decades of working with, learning from, and exploring the career journeys of thousands of CIOs and C-suite leaders, I’ve come to appreciate that each leader forges their own journey to that executive chair, whether that involves rising through the IT ranks, crossing over from the business, or bringing a hybrid of technology and consulting experience. But while the paths may vary, the best share a common thread: a set of defining attributes, mindsets, and “answer-the-call” moments that shape their careers and their organizational impact. Denise Russell Fleming exemplifies those traits: leading with trust, courage, and a deep understanding that transformation is, at its core, a human endeavor. For more lessons from her leadership playbook, tune in to the Tech Whisperers.
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Read More from This Article: Transforming diverse experiences into a storied CIO career
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