Raj Polanki’s five steps by which CIOs can lead holistically

CIOs hear constantly that their position has evolved, that it’s now a business position. But whenever this is pointed out, the emphasis tends to fall on the tactical responsibilities of such a position—the “plan, build, and run” of it all. But just as important now are holistic matters of people—diversity, inclusivity, employee welfare, and so on, and perhaps few technical leaders have concerned themselves with these as enthusiastically as Raj Polanki, the US Division CIO of Wacker, the seven-billion-dollar German chemical manufacturer, and the co-lead of its DEI council.

“The way I see it,” he says, “the CIO role obviously needs to make sure the business can run while contributing to growth and transformation. All those are well and good, but the current, evolving CIO role, it’s not just about going from technology to business, but from business to people. As a technology executive, I have a unique position to contribute to the human aspects of it all…DEI aspects.” And accordingly, since coming to Wacker in 2018, Polanki has worked both to embody Wacker’s DEI principles and, alongside his fellow council members, to inject such principles into the organization’s ethos.

Now, he hopes to amplify his impact by sharing some of what he’s learned with other technical officers who might themselves hope to make a bigger and longer-lasting impact. “What leaders get wrong about DEI is that it concerns much more than what can be observed by the naked eye. We are all shaped by our experiences, and the better we understand each others’, the more we can achieve.” Indeed, Polanki suggests that any leader can reap better outcomes across all their responsibilities by embracing this philosophy. Here he offers five steps for doing so.

Step 1: look inward.

Be the change you wish to see. It’s a well-known adage and clearly present in Polanki’s first bit of advice: “Start with self-awareness. Look inward.”

Embedded in this philosophy are two propositions. The first is that you do in fact want to change something. Therefore, a good place to start might be to understand why you do. While it’s fine to cite common talking points about the benefits of DEI, you’ll find yourself more motivated (and therefore more able) to employ such principles if they mean something to you personally. Polanki, for example, found inspiration in his background, in which technology and business overlapped significantly. “I’ve always thought in terms of how I could bring these things together to create real value for people, and value can mean many things. I recognized that Wacker’s DEI council would present a great opportunity to provide an important value pulling on both business and technology.”

The second proposition is that you must embody the change, and as Polanki suggests, you can do this in few ways more effective than to consider your own unconscious biases. He implores leaders to constantly ask themselves: “Am I jumping too soon to a conclusion? Am I assuming certain things?” And if you think you don’t have any biases, congratulations: You just discovered your first. It’s called objectivity illusion—the belief that we are more objective and less biased than others—and it underscores the gravity of Polanki’s advice. Everyone has biases, and they shape our societies. They lead us to elect taller CEOs, hire certain candidates, and sink money into failing projects. According to one survey, unconscious biases may cost the workplace $64 billion annually. Having biases doesn’t make you a bad person, but making yourself aware of them, as Polanki suggests, can free you to make better decisions and thereby become a better leader.

Step 2: start small.

Next, start embodying your principles among the circles that you immediately influence—like the teams you oversee. When Polanki came to Wacker, he inherited a team whose previous manager had served the company for thirty years. Although that leader had left behind a solid team, Polanki wanted to suffuse it with his own ideals, two in particular.

“One was self-respect and respect within the team,” he recalls. “Yes, I had a list of things they could do better, but I started by respecting [the team]. I used not just my words, but showed it in my actions. I recognized them for the things they didn’t even know they were doing well, and with time, they would even come to me and say, ‘You don’t seem to get upset easily. You really maintain your composure.’” Soon, Polanki’s reports began imposing the same warmth, patience, and appreciation on their own teams, and the respect collectively expressed across the department grew steadily. It also nurtured Polanki’s second ideal, “customer oriented.”

“Because I came from an outside consulting and value-driven mindset,” explains Polanki, I put the customer in the front. I would tell my team, “If the business comes to us with a problem, we’re not trying to fix the problem alone; we’re trying to save their day to be more productive and efficient. That means we directly affect the business. We are not just a back office. We are sitting with the business. We are partnering with them to support them, and we should take pride in what we do.” He recalls evoking a sentiment he had once heard from Starbucks: “I asked them, if ninety-nine out a hundred coffees are right but the hundredth is wrong, is that acceptable? I explained that this was part of taking pride in yourself.”

And pride they took. Together, these two ideals—respect and customer oriented—energized the team and propelled what became a virtuous feedback loop. It improved morale as the teams began to celebrate small wins and to believe in themselves as more than order-takers. And the changes showed. Polanki recalls that the business partners would remark, “Your team is really solving issues, and they’re very approachable.” And in one of the team’s internal customer-satisfaction surveys, they scored 97% positive feedback—one of their highest scores ever.

Step 3: become a catalyst for your principles

After you’ve proven that you can instill DEI principles among your own teams, you can become a catalyst for wider adoption through mechanisms like your company’s DEI council. Or, if your company has no such council, you can start it.

“The first thing you’ll want to do, if it hasn’t been done already, is specify the council’s DEI principles. And don’t squander this opportunity”, warns Polanki. Too many councils adopt principles that are either generic or otherwise similar to another company’s. Contemplate what DEI really means to your organization and connect it to the goals and mission of the enterprise. At Wacker, Polanki and his fellow council members conducted extensive internal research to ensure they did just that, and in the end, even became an advisory council to the executive team.

Next, you have to spread the word—and show your employees that you stand behind it. “After we had defined our principles,” recalls Polanki, “we published them on posters, which were put up across Wacker’s offices. They had our signatures on them, and the executives’, so people knew we meant it.” Polanki and his council also took advantage of town halls and modified several of the company’s programs—including the leadership and management development programs and new-hire orientation—such that they incorporated DEI principles. “We even hired an external person to help us connect the content to the programs.” They also dedicated a SharePoint site and several communication channels to the cause, and instituted internal advocacy groups, including one for LGBTQ+ members and one for veterans. Polanki says more will follow.

Step 4: amplify your principles with data.

Once you’ve spread your principles, and others have started acting on them, you can further amplify their effects, says Polanki, by “starting with the data.” It makes sense. ESG-related efforts are driven heavily by metrics, and so few tools can propel you toward your DEI goals as forcibly as data can. And as a technology leader, few have the power that you do to mobilize that data and to do so not only for your department but for others.

Polanki recommends that, above all, to employ your data more meaningfully, you make it more visible, which you can do even by simply starting conversations with other leaders, since many of them will hesitate to ask what’s possible. He recalls one such conversation with Wacker’s very own ESG team: “We asked them, what can we do for you? What’s on your mind? And it was only then that they said, ‘Well, actually, we’re having a lot of containers shipped to California and we’re concerned about the waste.’ I explained that we could give them some visibility by pulling data about those containers—what materials they contain, whether they’re recyclable, and so on. They didn’t know we could do that, and it helped them act much more effectively.”

The other tool is longstanding data solutions, like dashboards and accompanying analysis, both of which Polanki’s team constructed for Wacker’s Environmental Health and Safety group. As a result, the group could now get, in mere hours, data that once took them at least days to collect. And it came with trends, to boot. “We could now ask questions like, okay, where is it happening? Is it a seasonal thing? Why does this one area have so much variation?”

Step 5: look outward.

Polanki plans to resign as the co-lead of Wacker’s DEI council later this year. He feels that he and his fellow members have built a sturdy foundation from which the next leaders can further expand the council’s influence. “If you think in terms of crawl-walk-run,” he says, “we’re finally walking. The next council can take it further. They can set up new resource groups, engender more inclusivity, and start to have a more direct impact on the business.”

Yet Polanki’s far from finished improving the welfare of the people around him. A graduate of University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, Polanki has been approached by that community to become more involved with certain university activities, like becoming a resident council member for the university’s Flint division technology and innovation center. When asked by the university, Polanki asked Wacker whether they saw any conflict. They didn’t, and encouraged him to participate, knowing that his doing so would advance their own mission to “make the world a better place with our solutions.”

This outward growth demonstrates Polanki’s last bit of advice for looking beyond your traditional responsibilities as a technology leader. “Be thinking, can I help my communities where we operate? Can I partner with the local community? With universities? How can we make a bigger difference?” Leaders who ask these kinds of questions and embrace these responsibilities, he says, will find they create better results across the board, in part because they have wide-ranging intangible effects.