As chief digital, technology, and integration officer at RelaDyne, Ken Piddington oversees digital and business technology strategies as well as business integration management and ESG strategy. He’s also the ultimate example of a transformational leader who lives by the philosophy that the best leaders are great teachers and mentors.
When you talk with Piddington, his passion for developing leaders is obvious. He doesn’t view culture and people as side projects or HR’s responsibility. They are the foundation of how he drives business impact. On a recent episode of the Tech Whisperers podcast, we unpacked the teaching tools that help him lead, mentor, and multiply leaders.
Over his career, Piddington has demonstrated a unique ability to assess talent quickly, align people to purpose, and set them up for success. His toolkit blends intuition with assessments, people data, and talent analytics to create a holistic, data-driven workforce strategy. After we wrapped our discussion for the podcast, we spent time drilling into his guiding principles for building cultures, growing leaders, and leaving a legacy through people. What follows is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Dan Roberts: How do you identify emerging leaders, and what steps do you take to multiply their impact?
Ken Piddington: When it comes to identifying them, they show up really early. Thinking about my team here, it was clear on day one meeting my direct reports which ones were going to take it to the next level and which ones were really good at what they do and comfortable where they were but were ready for that next chapter and were going to grow into something special. You can see that. There’s an extra shine in how they approach a conversation, how they come prepared, talk to you about where their goals and objectives are. You can also find people who are ready to do a good job but are comfortable in their current skin and don’t want to change. That’s okay, too. If we want to win, we need a well-balanced, diverse group of people on our team.
Then there’s the conversations with them about their motivators, their career objectives and goals, which strengthens the relationship to say, this is someone who I see an opportunity to develop. You figure out how far that’s going to go based on their wants and needs, because you can’t just say I’m going to invest in you and help you grow if they don’t want to do it. There’s got to be a desire and an energy from them to take that on.
You also have to be intentional about telling them you see they have an opportunity, because they may not have thought of it. As you explain it to them, hopefully the light bulb will go on for them. That’s when you know it’s time to be purposeful in building out a program and talking them through it. Because what you do in the immediate versus six months, a year, two years, three years down the road is very different as that leader progresses. You’re looking for other opportunities — inside and outside your organization — to develop them. If you only do it inside, you get tunnel vision of what your culture and organization is. You need that perspective from the outside, because there’s more than one way to do things.
What’s your process for assessing talent and culture in those critical first 90 days?
Part of that starts with a bulleted list I wrote out three companies ago that outlines my beliefs and philosophy as the CIO coming in. They get adjusted for the company and as I continue to become a better leader and evolve, just as technology evolves. I first share it with my direct reports as we have our initial team meeting. Then in my first all-hands meeting, I share a subset about my philosophy of leadership and career development, that it’s important to me.
I close out all the meetings with, ‘Nobody cares about technology, they only care about the outcome.’ I tell them that I get it, that’s hard to hear, but it’s true. When we stop worrying about which shiny object, which manufacturer of which product, and start worrying about what that outcome is going to be, we will deliver a whole lot better.
I share that with them in the early days, and I can see what resonates with them. You can see it in the expressions on their face, what they tend to repeat, what they ask a question about. It gives you clues about what’s going to be the right spots for this new organization. It helps me assess the team pretty quickly.
You’re very data-driven. Can you talk about how you use data to shape your workforce strategy for the short and long term?
Data helps me understand where our strengths and weaknesses are. Part of that data comes from assessments, part of it comes from my conversations and observations, and part goes back to understanding and being involved in setting the corporate strategy, goals, and objectives. That’s what drives what we need to do in the short term and the long term. Where do we need to bring in additional talent because I need that immediately, or where do I have time to develop and strengthen those skills, and which skills should they be, based on the team’s and the organization’s needs. We want to make sure we’re focusing on the right things and what’s most important to us. That’s how I leverage all that data to make sure we’re hitting the right things.
I use the heat map from the Skill Builder assessment in a variety of ways. Once everybody takes their first assessment, I run the report and intentionally wipe off the names. I don’t want to see who’s where; I want to see where we are as a department, and be able to see the green, yellow, orange, and red boxes, and see how that blends so I can say, this is what we need as a team and then take that down a level and go, what do my managers need? That’s what I use to develop the program. It’ll influence books I’ll put in our book club and the workshops we use, as well as those I run myself. It gives me the benefit of using outside help and doing some things my own way, because they need to hear it from me, too. They need the mix of both.
Part of my running a workshop with our teams or even running the book club — sitting down for an hour and a half at the end of the day, once every couple of months, and talking about a book — is that they learn about me. They learn what’s motivating me, and they learn about our company, because one of the key questions we always ask is, how might we apply this at our organization? Should we apply this at our organization? You never know, and I don’t come into it assuming we should. I bring it to people to apply some critical thinking and learn from it.
One of your ‘Ken-ism’ sayings is ‘Retention is recognition.’ How do you ensure people feel truly seen, valued, and positioned for growth in a high-demand, fast-moving IT environment?
Some of it depends on your organization’s culture, but the easiest, no matter the culture, is to just say thank you. When I end my direct reports team meeting or my all-hands meeting, I always tell everyone, ‘Thank you for everything that you do. Let me let you go now so you can get back to doing all the great things that you do.’ I say it every single time. That’s something I’m very intentional about. It makes them know they’re appreciated and what they do makes a difference.
My previous organization had a phenomenal recognition program, which I think contributed greatly to retention. They had something called Thanks Awards, and any employee could give any other employee the award. While some of the awards came with gift cards for our company store, what I saw come out of that more was people hanging the thank you certificates up in their cubes and offices. I remember in the first week, walking around the company and seeing all those certificates and asking about them, and they were so excited to explain to me what it was and why they had it. There were different levels of awards, too, some that only the manager could give, or only a department head, or only an executive team member could give. It was a structured way of doing recognition that was open to the entire company, and it really made a difference.
In the podcast, we talked about how to communicate, being authentic and getting to know our team, listening to understand. That plays a big role in retention and recognition.
Getting to know someone, asking about their family when you know something is challenging, or their kid’s starting high school or playing a football game — when you come back and ask about that, you’re recognizing they’re important. You recognized them as a human being who’s part of the team, and you cared enough to say, how’d your kid play? And they want to tell that story to you. They’re excited to. That keeps people saying, ‘I want to work at this organization.’
If I ignored them and didn’t bother to think about what they do in addition to all the work they do at our organization, if we’re just another job and I’m just another ‘boss,’ they’ll be headed off someplace else when the next opportunity presents itself.
Stephen Webster, a longtime colleague of yours, says you’re one of the few leaders he’s seen who doesn’t take a ‘rip and replace’ approach to management when taking on a new corporate role or team. Instead, you get the existing team motivated to high performance. How do you pull off this team transformation?
It’s an interesting question because, ultimately, I think it’s proven to be a good thing, but sometimes, as we’re getting there, I’ve been challenged by other leadership to move more quickly and do some of that replacement. But because I really believe in the people, I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
In this organization, we are going through a lot of change, but it took time to understand our company. The company has been going through a dramatic transition with our executive leadership team, what we’re doing, the growth and continued M&A, all these acquisitions that had already happened over many years that were never fully integrated, which includes all the people in the teams, getting double of everything, and people who have been here for a long time, being able to understand how they were going to play. I really needed to see how they were going to respond to the new leadership and everything around it to make the right decisions.
In getting to know them early on, I firmly believed I had a lot of good people, but needed to adjust how they were operating, what they were doing and where we had those opportunities to develop some of the skills we needed. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, you’re not the right person, time to get off the bus.’ It was, ‘I need you on the bus, but what role do I need you to play? Are you ready to play that role, or do I have some work to do to help get you ready? Or does the role you’re playing continue to be that role?’
I told a story on the podcast about a time early in my career when there was a push for me to take someone out of the organization, and I was hesitant, still believing. What I didn’t mention is that I actually terminated that person. It was a very hard thing to do, because this was his second time working for me, and it certainly hurt the relationship. Later, after we’d made a lot of cuts across the organization, we were starting to build back up, and I would see him around, and I saw that he was changing. So I said to him, ‘I’ll be perfectly honest, I think you needed to go do something else for a little while. I’d like you to come back, and let’s figure out how we work on this together to get to the next level.’
I was still new in my career and maybe hadn’t been as purposeful in the way he needed it. It was when he came back that a lot of that more intentional, purposeful coaching happened, and he rose to being my top person. I could trust him, rely on him for everything. But it took that challenging moment in the middle where I did hang on a little bit too long, but I did let him go, and then ultimately was able to bring him back and help him develop into a great leader who’s done a lot of really good things for his company since.
What one Ken-ism do you think will be your legacy?
‘Leaders grow leaders’ may be the one that people think about me and remember for a long time, because that’s really who I am and the one I’m most proud of. The solutions are cool. They win you a CIO 100 Award, and you get a plaque to hang on your wall. But when you can see somebody advance in their career, who comes back to you someday and asks you a question, says thanks for that guidance, I really appreciated that little piece of advice, and you keep a relationship many, many years into the future, that’s what’s most rewarding for me. That says to me that I did a good job making whatever I got to touch a little better than it was when I got there.
For more of Ken Piddington’s eight pillars of leadership excellence, tune in to the Tech Whisperers.
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Read More from This Article: ‘Leaders grow leaders’: CIO Ken Piddington on developing IT talent
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