Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Maureen: [00:00:00] Our guest is Doug McCullough. He’s a leader working on initiatives from smart cities and blockchain. So Doug, I told a story earlier of a young black woman engineer who was recounting to me what happened to her at a holiday party last year, being treated as if she were a part of the service staff. When that happened, she went to the bathroom crying, and then she left.

She left the event. She no longer had a voice. At that table, anytime we opt out, no matter how hurt we are, we make less of an impact.

Doug: I have a similar attitude as Joyce Beatty does about this. In terms of the slights and the pains that come to you in your day-to-day existence. As a black man or as any of us, we all occupy a certain space.

I do wanna say for the young woman who was devastated by that incident that I, I’d like her to know if she’s listening anywhere out there, that she has had a voice. Mm-hmm. Her story has now been told twice here. Certainly a lot of people [00:01:00] resonate with that story and could tell it in different contexts and places.

But she is having an impact by telling her story, first of all. Second of all, I believe that. One of the things that we often are not prepared for is we go to school or into a training program or college for technology and leadership is we are prepared to do the job. We’re not prepared for that particular slight to be asked to go get coffee, to be asked something for a role that you are not there for.

It’s offensive, it’s bothersome, and often we’re not prepared for it. I am prepared for it. I often don’t even notice them anymore, and I will say that I, I was fascinated by Joyce Bad’s response in saying she went and got the coffee. One of the things I have noticed since becoming CIO, and this is not my first CIO position, so I’ve been in leadership, is that we often react differently based on the amount of power that we have.

And I have begun to come to terms with the fact that I have a lot of power. And I’ll be glad to go and get you some coffee because I have higher and fire. I [00:02:00] have budget. I have significant amount of influence in the region. Mm-hmm. I speak globally and I’m very comfortable with that. And so I’m in a different position, so I don’t want to minimize a person who is not in that position.

They made me new in the job. They may be coming around. This is one of the reasons why I feel it’s important for me. Personally to get in front of young new tech workers, people who perhaps have not been prepared for that to happen and prepare them. And let’s have a conversation about not only are you going to be excellent in your technology career, but you’re gonna face certain personal challenges that are going come to you.

And this is how we wanna deal with them, and this is what we’re gonna do about it. We’re not gonna scream, we’re not gonna bang the table. We are going to. Win. Mm-hmm. And ultimately at the end of the day, for Joyce Beatie banging the gavel and running the meeting mm-hmm. Is how she got to victory. It’s also how I get to victory.

It’s by running the project, it’s by signing the contract. It’s by a successful launch. [00:03:00] By the time the people who give slights to people are done with giving slights. That’s old news. We’ve moved on. And so that’s my warning to people who think that I’m here to park your car. We have moved on from here.

Maureen: Mm-hmm. So I was 20 when I started my first financial analyst job and I looked like a kid and someone also asked me to get me coffee and cigarettes honey. And one of my male colleagues said, I’ll go with you. That shift, that voice of support really meant the world and I’m still in touch with that colleague.

Mm-hmm. It turned what could have been an incredibly hurtful request into also a show of support.

Doug: Yeah, I’m interacting a lot with, uh, women in the field, in technology, and I, I realize that it’s important for me to be present, to stand next to them, to be a voice, and not just to go off by myself when I observe what’s happening in the field.

And I can have a lot of influence on a person’s experiences for [00:04:00] myself. I’ve gotten past many of those things. Mm-hmm. I started my career as a project manager with people who did not regard my role very well. It’s like, you’re the cleanup guy. No problem. I’m gonna take opportunities to meet the actual cleanup guys.

Mm-hmm. You know, and support the people who are in more support roles. And I gained from that. What I think we find is that people who don’t know how to treat people mm-hmm. Eventually begin to crumble in their levels of influence. And those of us who are supporting young women in the field are the ones who are going to have access to them when the time comes to recruit.

Let’s not lose track of the fact that we’re in a battle for talent. There are a lot of people who are not in position to have a relationship with people, to have the credibility to get that interview. The table has turned. It’s no longer I need to get the interview with the person who can hire me. I now need to get the interview with the person I’m trying to hire.

So I need to have a reputation as a supportive, inclusive leader in [00:05:00] order to build superior teams. You know, that’s what I think where we’re going.

Maureen: For people who don’t know the statistics, I’m not gonna recount the statistics at this moment, but teams that are diverse, so black, white, male, female, L-G-B-T-Q, all of that comes together to create better thinking.

Mm-hmm. Better work products. But how we lead is different when people come from a different background.

Doug: And if you’re not prepared to lead in that way, you are not as effective a leader. And what I would say, if you have 10 people who all think the same way. You have one person, you are paying 10 people for the benefits of a single one.

If you have 10 people with different backgrounds, different races, different genders, different religions, different creative methods, you have a hundred people because their interactions with each other are generating better ideas and more friction that you can use to build better products and better projects and those kinds of things.

I feel that we have a class of leadership that is very misguided [00:06:00] and I’m taking advantage. I have risen to a position of being able to have a wider network. I know all of the African American technologists in Columbus, so if you are having trouble recruiting them, it’s because you’re not doing what I’m doing.

I spoke at Columbus Women in Technology this past year and the year before, and when I meet CIOs who are saying, how can I get more women in technology to work in my organization? I didn’t see you at the conference last year. You were most welcome. It’s one of those things that. Having an attitude of this and, and being able to engage with people who are different from you is a strategic advantage.

We are in a new phase of the struggle. We are not in the phase where we have the right to be hired. We are now in the phase where we are competing as organizations and those that are more diverse are going to win.

Maureen: This is a leadership show, right? As leaders, if we are not looking at diverse talent, at building it, [00:07:00] at building our leaders to manage diverse people and lead diverse people, we lose, our organizations lose.

Doug: We had a conversation earlier about being in the room and how as a woman or as a African American or whoever you are, you need to find a way to get into the room. The flip side of that, that I will say is, as a leader, you need to get out of the room. And if you’re having struggles having a diverse workforce, you need to go get them.

They’re not in this room. This is, there’s a big table in here and 20 chairs. It’s a board room, it’s a, it’s a conference room. They’re not in here. You’ve gotta go out and get them. Mm-hmm. And so there’s two sides of the story. And on the one hand, you need to be open and available to getting into the rooms where you’re with decision makers and you are a decision maker.

But if you are a decision maker and you might be and not know it, you may have more influence than you’re aware of. You’ve gotta get out of that room and you’ve gotta go and pull other people in and expose them to the opportunities so that we are creating more leaders along the way.

Maureen: And [00:08:00] that’s what we’re trying to do with our IT team Leaders program where you speak regularly.

Doug: Absolutely. This is another opportunity in which the CIO community in particular. Looked around and said, if all of us left today, it’s not that large of a community. If you look at the entire tech community of Central Ohio, that’s a very tiny group, and this group alone is not prepared to replace themselves.

We do not have a regular pipeline of people. Ready to become CIOs. I don’t even know that the CIO role is permanent, but let’s just say senior leadership or middle management leadership, we have not created the right pipeline, and that’s one of the reasons why the IT Leaders program is, is so important. I do wanna mention though, sometimes we.

Attack the pipeline. At today’s deficit, we need to look at the entire pipeline all the way down to how we’re educating students before they’re in college, high school STEM programs. But we don’t need to just get stuck at STEM programs. We need to look [00:09:00] through college. We need to look at alternatives to college.

We need to look at. New entrants. We often train people and we give them a great job at the entry level and we abandon them. They do not have a path up to another ladder. They don’t have access to a network that can get them to middle management or greater certifications. And certainly we’re not getting them into management.

So when we’re start talking about senior management and senior leadership, we have not constructed a full and complete system that is diverse and that is functional, and that’s a gap that I am personally trying to work on. And advocate for, and I think we all need to be doing it.

Maureen: And you’re doing that through perca, so, so share what that is.

And in the bigger picture, what are you doing to help bridge those multiple gaps?

Doug: I’m a board member of perca, and Perca in particular concerns itself with non-traditional pathways. So you may be a person who went to college but didn’t finish or went to college for another career field, or you didn’t go [00:10:00] to college at all.

You may have gotten an associate’s degree in something else. You’re not heading towards a tech career, but you want to. Mm-hmm. And often the remaining steps to a good entry level tech career are very few. They could be a certification and some foundational knowledge that allows you to move into a tech career and become part of that pipeline.

We so desperately need. PERS is a free program that people can enter into. It’s very rigorous. It’s a difficult program, it’s challenging, it doesn’t cost any money. People emerge from that. We’re gonna have a cohort emerging in just a couple of weeks with being very well prepared to enter the industry. So I’m on the board of Perca and I’m a supporter of it, and I’m also on the Board of Tech Core.

Tech Core takes it professionals and leaders, and moves them into schools, gives students exposure to people who are working in the field. One of the challenges that it has is that people looking at it and kind of interested in going that direction, have [00:11:00] a weird perception of what the field is. It’s either.

Coming from watching NCIS or some hacker movie or something like that, and, and and truly are confused. They don’t know the great incomes that are available. They’re not aware of what would my lifestyle be like. And so, you know, organizations like Perus and Tech Core and IC Stars and, and many others. Are struggling because the image of an IT worker is not the reality.

And so we have to go out and particularly with something like Tech Core, we need to go into schools and say, as an African American man, I can tell you that I might as well be a unicorn in many of these schools to stand there and say I’m a senior executive. Leading work on smart cities. I work in these kinds of technologies.

And there’s a path for you there. Mm-hmm. I make a lot of money. I support a family, I support a community. There’s a a role for you. There’s a life for you in this space, and I think a lot of people are saying, I’m not good at technology. I’m not good at this and that. [00:12:00] We need to do more in our field to open ourselves up so that students at all levels, including people who are working in the field, see a greater path of growth for themselves.

So that’s part of what I’m doing.

Maureen: Thank you for doing this, because there are a lot of human souls, human families that get lost. I’m thinking of a movie where you go to the end of the bridge and there’s a gap. The bridge has collapsed. How do we help people make that jump so that they don’t get lost?

Doug: I do think that there probably are enough programs, but some of those programs don’t scale.

Mm-hmm. They’re not going to be churning out thousands of graduates, but they are turning out dozens. One of the craziest dichotomies that we have right now in our market is that we have negative unemployment in technology. The demand for technology workers is insane. Salaries are going through the roof, and then we have pathways for people to get into those tech jobs.

Which [00:13:00] are free. And then we have a large population, particularly in central Ohio, who are unemployed and poor below the poverty line. That’s ridiculous. And as a technology leader, I feel directly responsible for us as a community addressing that. It has nothing to do with my particular organization, but as an economy, our economy is not gaining the greater benefits and growth that it could because we have talented people.

Not gaining access to jobs and we have jobs not gaining access to people. This is some of what smart city is about. You know, actually connecting people to resources. But that’s insane to me, and I feel like every technology leader, every HR leader, every business owner, every educational leader, all of us need to attack that problem.

It’s a stunning issue. Mm-hmm. And we do have an issue, forgive me for going on about this, but we have an issue with diversity and inclusion where this is concerned as well. I know of African American people who are able [00:14:00] to fulfill many of the roles that are there. They’re not getting access to it. I know women who are able to fulfill some of these CIO roles, they’re able to be ready to be called up.

And they’re not getting the opportunities. Well, what’s up with that? What kind of a system are we creating in which we are crying that we don’t have enough people prepared for these roles, and women are saying, I’m right here. I don’t think that’s the women’s fault. So these are the structural problems in the informational gaps.

That I think are fixable.

Maureen: I’m an executive advisor to the Women in Technology Group. You’re seemingly a board member of everything. The more you see the parts of the system and the flaws, the more you and I and others are able to pull together and address some of those gaps,

Doug: the existence of these institutions and these bodies.

By themselves don’t make that happen. Mm-hmm. So our relationships, our networks, the [00:15:00]connections between all of them, it’s going to take all of them. It’s gonna take the nonprofits, it’s going to take the educational institutions, the big universities, the legislation, and uh, individual leaders to make those connections.

Maureen: It’s good to live in a community that all of those do come together. And again, for our global listeners who are in communities that don’t have this, who don’t have an environment where you have a shortage that creates opportunities for women in diverse populations.

Doug: It’s an odd mix. I think people on the outside looking at a community like Columbus or Central Ohio and saying, let me get this straight.

You have talent, you have jobs, you have training, you have funding, you have nonprofits, and you can’t build an economy out of that. We would love to have have of what you have. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That’s, uh. Unacceptable. And it’s not as bad as I’m kind of painting a picture of it. Mm-hmm. But I will say that we have all the tools.

So I’m gonna gonna be a glass half full person, and I’m gonna say we have everything we need to maintain a sustainable pipeline of talent, [00:16:00] to have diverse workforces and to have a very strong economy that serves and benefits everyone here, including the poorest among us. We have what we need.

Maureen: I’m gonna close on that note, we have what we need.

Thank you, Doug. And to our listeners, what stood out to me most is in a time where we are more visibly sharing our challenges, finding the path forward, finding the programs, finding the opportunities, finding the role models and mentors. And this idea of virtual mentor, you may never meet Doug McCullough, but hopefully their words will inspire you.

So I hope you found something from today’s conversation that you can take forward in your life and make the contribution that allows you to be your best self.