How CIO Mona Bates builds winning IT teams

A three-time CIO who’s been named one of the top executive women in tech to watch, Mona Bates is known for her mission-driven approach to transformation, her passion for building award-winning teams, and for driving meaningful change for the business.

Today she is doing just that at Collins Aerospace, where she is leading digital transformation across Collins’ strategic business units and functional support organizations. As vice president of digital technology and CIO, Bates’ responsibilities include strategic planning and execution of all facets of IT and cybersecurity as well.

In a recent episode of the Tech Whisperers podcast, we went beyond the traditional “I” in CIO to unpack the full story of what makes Bates such an effective and impactful leader. We explored Bates’ role as the chief influence officer, the chief innovation officer, the chief impact officer, and more. After the podcast, we continued that theme focusing on Bates’ role as chief investment officer, including how she invests in her company, her business, and her people. What follows is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Dan Roberts: In the podcast your former mentor, Rebecca Rhoads, talked about your ability to keep the business case and vision in front of everyone. Why is it important to show up as a business leader first and technology leader second?

Mona Bates: It’s a great opportunity for us as CIOs to bring the solutions the business needs most to address our biggest challenges. Just connecting the dots as to where the need is, makes the investment a little bit easier to justify, because we’re not investing for the sake of technology. We’re investing to solve a business problem. And if we connect these dots and articulate the value, that makes it a little bit easier to justify and sell the idea and the business case.

But it isn’t always easy. In some cases, there are other things we need to prioritize for investment. So it’s equally important to realize maybe this idea needs to take a back seat at the expense of another idea that has higher priority or drives the highest value. It’s a consistent trade-off in where we prioritize investment to drive the highest results.

Building this muscle comes with repetition. I’ve been told ‘no’ many times. You just have to be persistent when the idea is strong, and if people are not seeing it your way, maybe you did not communicate the business case as clearly as you should; so try again. But you also have to understand when it doesn’t make sense because of other priorities. It’s a trade-off, and we improve every time we pitch a big idea.

What investments you are making in your people to position them for the future, while also positioning Collins as a digital employer of choice?

My team is more than 2,200 employees strong. We are a global workforce — 60% of our employees are domestic and 40% are outside the US. We partner very closely with the business and tend to deploy our talent close to our large sites and manufacturing facilities so we can help provide superior service for our business. We do this by partnering with operations and engineering and the value stream leaders that enable our business.

I deeply believe nothing is possible without great talent and a unified team that is highly engaged, believes in the mission, and understands clearly what we’re trying to accomplish. Without that we cannot be successful. With that comes a responsibility to invest in our people. We have an enduring goal — one that’s been on my list of goals for many years — around attracting, retaining, and developing talent. Every single year we evolve the roadmap and the initiatives under this goal.

As an example, this year we’ve started a program called Tech Tracks, which is modeled after a program our engineering organization started many years ago. The ability to get into that program for my function was very limited. On any given year, we may get one or two people into the program. But it was such a powerful program, we said, why don’t we do our own Tech Track as an extension of the engineering Tech Track?

We are able to nominate about a dozen shining stars — our technical leaders of the future — to a cohort. The program gives them the opportunity to dedicate time during their day on developing new technical skills. It gives them the opportunity to work on projects they don’t necessarily get to work on in their daily job. It also gives them the opportunity to shadow other technical leaders. That on-the-job learning and deliberate transfer of knowledge is a big characteristic of the program. It came from us saying, let’s start our own. Let’s find new, creative ways to invest in and help develop our people.

We’ve also doubled down on our Fellows program. When I came to Collins, we had one Fellow, who was trying for years to get more energy around the program, and I thought, why not? How could this not be a focus? Digital as a technical function needs to be more actively engaged in the Fellow program. So, again, we partnered with our vice president of engineering. Last year we graduated four additional fellows, and the pipeline is deep.

It’s incredibly important that we develop our technical leaders, but also our people leaders for the future.

You have always been a strong advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Tell us how DEI fits into your talent strategy.

That’s another example of investing in people that I’m really excited about. I stood up our DE&I council when I came to Collins. It has four committees, and it’s very aligned to this people goal I just talked about. One committee is focused on attracting talent. We’ve hired a lot of people in the last several years with support from HR and others. They’ve really helped us attract the best talent out there, diverse and engaged.

We have a committee around development and another around retention. We also have a committee focused on women in digital. With that, we take all these major initiatives from the other committees and target our female population to make sure they are getting the support and opportunities we need to give them.

The DE&I council isn’t a separate thing here. It’s embedded and is a key enabler to our people goal. Through that, we also generate ideas. We create organic events that keep our employees engaged and connected. So it’s absolutely powerful.

Another ‘I’ I see in your leadership approach is that of ‘chief interested officer.’ You’re always learning from your team and genuinely interested in others. How does being intentional about this help you as a leader?

I’m intentional about this because you have to watch yourself. When I’m in meetings, it’s easy to take the platform and talk. But I try to be deliberate, to listen, to ask questions as a way to learn. I’m genuinely interested in learning. I’m surrounded by amazing talent. They are way smarter than I am. The way I look at my position, it’s my job to integrate all that knowledge and smarts to create something bigger than any individual.

In two weeks, I’m going to be in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I scheduled a couple of hours to go into the AI lab so I can geek around a bit to get deep into the technology and learn what the team is doing. Because sometimes, we see that at the surface, but it’s important that we understand it. I’ll be sitting there as a student, and they’re going to be teaching me.

I love doing that, and I feel like we can’t be the smartest person in the room. We’ve got to give people a chance. And the fact is, we have a lot of opportunity to learn from our team.

What else do you do to invest in yourself, to keep yourself relevant, energized, and excited so you can energize your people to do the hard work?

Learning is definitely one. I look at every meeting as a learning opportunity. If we are sitting in an executive leadership team meeting and my peers are pitching their strategies, their operation reviews, whatever it is, it’s an opportunity for me to expand my knowledge about the business and all the things we talked about.

I also listen to your podcast a lot on my runs, and others like Peter High’s, because I really try to learn from my peer CIOs and their experiences. I have a whole lot of books, but to be honest, I don’t have time to read a book cover to cover. I’ll get the summary, figure out what the book is about, and then, if it’s interesting enough, I’ll dedicate the time.

Learning aside, I invest in my mental wellness, and those runs keep me going. Even if all I have is 30 minutes to lace up and get on the road, it is amazing what that does, not only physically but mentally. It’s extremely important.

I’ll share with you something cool we’re doing today. We have this program called the Accumulator that is sponsored by the DE&I council. It’s a twice a year event where we set a mileage goal, and we have people sign up, and we have this application that tracks how many miles people are putting in, whether it’s running, walking, the elliptical, whatever. For this event, our target is 15,000 miles, and we have 300 people signed up. It is just a great way to energize the organization and stay focused on wellness, both physical and mental.

For more strategies and insights from the leadership playbook of three-time CIO Mona Bates, tune in to the Tech Whisperers podcast.