Latest / You've Been Heard / 447- Learn the Business to Lead Technology w/ Dr. Michael Barr

Transcript

447- Learn the Business to Lead Technology w/ Dr. Michael Barr · You've Been Heard

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Executive level leadership needs to understand that they need to have a partner that understands the strategic and the technical. As we've seen, throwing all of it, all of data, all of the EHR stuff under the chief Operations officer may not get you what you're looking for. So you have to have somebody that actually speaks the language, but also then understands the business component or aspect of that to make sure that everything that is brought into the fold, that's technology related, is able to support what they're trying to do from the operational side. So I think from the executive level is they need a partner who is able to grasp what needs to be done from both sides of the house.
• 0:51
  Speaker B: After talking with IT leaders, I've come to discover one thing. And it's the same thing, you know, it's the same thing everyone else knows, whether they want to admit it out loud or not. Nothing gets done in any company without it touching it. Nothing. But here's the thing. When everything's on fire, when nothing's working, when the ransomware hits, when the whole business grinds to a halt, it is completely indispensable, the most valuable asset in the company. But when everything's running like a well oiled Tesla, you're a line item, a cost center on a spreadsheet. You've done the work, you've built the career, you've earned your seat at the executive roundtable. But having a seat at the table is one thing. How much nicer would it be to actually be heard?
• 1:43
  Speaker A: This is.
• 1:44
  Speaker B: You've been heard.
• 1:45
  Speaker C: Welcome back to today's episode of youf've Been Heard, the podcast for IT Leaders. I'm Doug Kameen, your host and Today I have Dr. Michael Barr, the Chief Information Officer of the Guidance center with me. Welcome to the show, Mike.
• 1:59
  Speaker A: Thanks, I appreciate it. Good morning.
• 2:02
  Speaker C: Good morning. So here we are and you do a couple of different things. You're coming to our listeners here with a background as a, an active cio. You've been working at the university level as a professor in different spaces and you even started some of your own consulting business to help other IT leaders too. So can you tell us a little bit about your history, where you are, what you're doing now, and how you got here?
• 2:26
  Speaker A: Well, I like to stay active.
• 2:27
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 2:28
  Speaker A: So I've been here at the Guidance center in Leavenworth, Kansas, just outside of Kansas City for a little over a year now, so getting close to a year and a half actually. I was brought in here initially to lead through a EHR upgrade, Electronic health records Upgrade, which expanded to a lot of things. Small nonprofit agency had some struggles seeing around the corner some of the challenges that they were dealing with. And so that's grown through a lot of the things. Upgrades to firewalls and network capabilities. Incorporation and new technologies went from one EHR system to a ecosystem of about 10 to 15 tools. Prior to that, I spent a little over a year out at the Missouri Institute for Defense and Energy. It's a standalone research institute under the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Really I kind of supervised the operations and planning for about a dozen PhD level physicists, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, chemists. We executed on contracts for the government, mostly the military during things. But we did research related to unmanned autonomous vehicles or drones, electronic or radio frequency bioelectromagnetics, which is the effects of electricity or radio frequencies on flesh, the human body. And then we did some research in the areas of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. And all that stuff came after a 20 year career in the military, two years in the Air Force, followed by 18 in the army between being an infantry officer and eventually had both hips replaced and had to make a transition somewhere. And then naturally I fell back towards the communications type stuff that I had done previously in the Air Force. So a big background. It's been about 11 years. Instructing at two different universities at the graduate and undergraduate level carried me into some different paths that helped some professional development and that eventually culminated in getting my own doctorate.
• 4:26
  Speaker C: That's a great history. So thanks for your service. I left long graph. It's a long history in the military. There's as well. So one of the things and we have different guests that, you know, guests have all sorts of different backgrounds. So I'm going to just plug that out for a second. And some people go in the military, you're there for like one, two or two tours. What is it, four years or six years or eight years or something like that. But you had 20 plus years in and you made the transition out. You are successful in the private sector. Now what things did you carry from the military? What things brought you or did you get from there that really made you prepared to be successful in the private sector?
• 5:01
  Speaker A: Well, a lot of it was probably the diversity of experience. Most people go in, they spend 20 years doing the same thing over and over and over. Fortunately, I was given the opportunities to transition from one thing to the next. And because I continued to develop myself and get education and there's a thing in the military, you don't volunteer for anything. But I went against that and if I had my roadmap of things that I wanted to do. And as I knocked those things off my checklist, I built the checklist first of all, so you got to have a model to work from. But as I knocked those things off the checklist, I would continually kind of update that. I'd have a strategy for what I wanted to do next. And between getting the education, getting the experience, picking the jobs that maybe some people didn't want to do in places that they didn't want to be. Eventually it built that resume for me. So initially it was technology in the Air Force and I expanded from doing just ground based radio communications to eventually jumping into satellite based communications growth, wanted to go and do some cool stuff. So I jumped over to the army and got those skills and I became an infantry officer leading soldiers in combat for multiple deployments. And then as I said, after I had my medical issues and stuff, I transitioned over back to the technical side and I learned the technical skills, but also understanding how those things impacted the rest of the military. Not just from my perch of being the only technical guy or the primary technical guy in an organization, but now understanding that I'm supporting a thousand or five thousand soldiers along the way. So you got to understand the business aspect of what you're doing as well. It's not just about what I'm doing in trying to introduce the next cool toy, but making sure it supports the business and the goals of the organization. So that's something I see with a lot of my peers is just let's bring the next thing to the table, the next thing that we can spend some money on and get a capability out of. But having that broad understanding of how it actually affects the business in the healthcare environment. I am not the revenue generator here. The clinicians, the medical providers, they're the ones who bring the funding in, but they're also the ones who improve the treatment for clients that we have come in. So without the business, there's no treatment for those clients. So it's a road that we've got to walk down. And the technology is a tool to enable and improve the treatment that we have. So that was something I carried through, was just that wide perspective that there's a large support structure that has to happen to to make sure that the business can function. So creating that strategic perspective over what we're trying to accomplish with technology.
• 7:51
  Speaker C: Great. Thank you for sharing. So my background, you know, I'm CIO myself, IT leader, and you mentioned about EHR and EMR systems and those types of things. But I have background in government IT and in nonprofits, specifically in the mental health space as well. And some of the challenges that like you face, like as you're telling the story here about the various pieces, the tools you bring forward. And I think it's really critical to think about how you are not the revenue generator. You are part of the puzzle that supports the people that are making the revenue in order to keep everything going and to meet the services that you're you want to deliver to the community and that mission that you're bringing forward. Because again, a lot of these spaces, the work that we're doing is the people who are delivering those services, the clinicians and those folks, they are highly educated, not highly paid, passionate about the work that they're doing. And everyone views it in the work itself is a mission to serve our communities. And it's really critical because those needs, they're often unmet or they're challenging to get met. So how do you fit that in to make that happen? It's always the challenge when you're in those nonprofit space. So I'm going to touch on this because you mentioned where you're located, which is Leavenworth. So like Leavenworth, Kansas is known for like one big thing like a federal supermax prison there or something like that.
• 9:16
  Speaker A: There's a bunch of prisons.
• 9:19
  Speaker C: Okay. I could have better if it was just one. And now I'd love to have you share tell for our listeners a little bit about the work you're doing or you you had been doing in academia. So you've been in a couple different. So you tell us a little bit about that.
• 9:37
  Speaker B: If your Internet goes down and you're calling carriers yourself, that's not strategic IT we help teams centralize monitoring, proactive tickets and escalation across every location without capex. Less noise, more uptime, make it boring. Again, just go to you've been heard.com and answer the seven questions to simplify, streamline and save.
• 9:58
  Speaker A: So initially, if we go back 11 or 12 years, I finished my master's degree and then the department chair for the business or the management program at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, where I was stationed at the time I was at Fort Campbell and just a shot down the road to get to the Austin Peay campus. I had started gaining the certifications in the background in the IT side of the house that they were interested in having me instruct a management information systems course for the undergrad. So that's how I got kickstarted again my interest in various things, volunteering is I kind of extended that out to purely business courses within the management program. I even at one point instructed an Excel course to undergrads. And then as I worked down that, that's where I worked for probably seven or eight years, main or only at the Austin Peay State University. And I was able to transition to a remote or remote courses or online courses when I moved over to Fort Leavenworth. But as I was doing that, I had the opportunity to. Again, I volunteered and we were coming into Covid concerns and started seeing the lockdown stuff. And the university started trying to push more of their courses or more of their instructors to go through Quality Matters training and then getting the courses certified for quality by external peer reviewers to go through this process, make sure we're providing the best quality of education for students who were not sitting in the classroom. So I got involved in that, went through the training. I was asked to actually certify two of my courses. By that time I had started instructing at the graduate level. I finished my doctorate. But once I got involved in the Quality Matters program, they're like, hey, now that you're able to do this, would you be interested in helping out at the K through 12 level also? And they're like, we got these cool certifications where because your experience and your education, we were offering this opportunity to become a master peer reviewer, which is essentially the team chair, where you become the lead on a three person team for some external quality review of courses. So I was like, okay, well let's go through the training and do it. And so I did my first course and we certified that course. And then they're like, hey, by the way, we've got The K through 12 stuff that we're looking for people to. Terrific. Okay, it's not killing me here, but go on and add more things. But then that expanded too. They also were interested in quality reviews and master peer reviewers for publications. So I started doing publication reviews for higher education and K through 12 textbooks and that type of stuff. So I kept walking down this road and getting more and more things. And then I actually led a couple of my own courses through that peer review process. So both of those were actually at Austin Peace State University. But through that process I found that I was not just certifying courses for quality in business or technology areas, but some of the courses I was certifying were talent management, accounting, economics, software, lifecycle development. Some of those things that maybe were like peripheral to what I was doing. In my professional life and definitely peripheral to what I was doing in academia itself. But I had finished my doctorate recently, but I was instructing a couple classes. I was doing master peer reviewing. So again, leading the teams and certifying courses from organizations across the country, this wasn't just like local things, this is getting on calls and being certifying, leading three or four different teams at a time to certify these courses as they're trying to get bulked up for lockdown. So it was a great opportunity. And then eventually I picked up the University of St. Mary, was looking for instructors in certain areas that I had now had a niche in. And I was able to jump over to their MBA program. And primarily my course of instruction was the MBA capstone course, which was strategic management and ethics, which fell right in line with where I was looking to go in the future, which is right where I'm at now.
• 14:11
  Speaker C: So I'm going to draw some lines here for folks listening here. You've got this background in business administration, doing this coursework, putting together the courses, teaching lots of students along the way here, and ethics in particular. So what are some of the key lessons in that as it relates to it? So I'm going to pull this right back into IT space. What are the key lessons that people, leaders need to be keeping in mind, especially those up and coming leaders as they're making their journey in this space from what you've done in that route, Business ethics, business leadership, how is that connecting into it?
• 14:44
  Speaker A: So I think there's a lot of lessons you learned. You cannot solely survive this business world just having certifications or education or experience. Be able to get the job, apply for the job and get the job. Most cyber leadership roles in general, they're going to require some level of education. Bachelor's degree, but usually more of master's degree level certifications are great, but they don't tell the story on what your experience is. I could have five years of experience and if you're asking for a CIO role or five years of experience to get the certification or CISO role requires a CISSP or something. Now pick your certification. That's the baseline, the minimum requirement to do that. But you don't get to the table if you can just say, hey, I've got 20 years of IT experience with no education and no certificate certification. So as professionals continue to try and grow themselves and build them into the position where they're looking at business, they're looking at it. Whatever the requirements are is they have to have a combination of the three that supports where they're going. And as you working through that development brings in other things like being able to manage a budget. At some point you've got to be able to manage the money to make sure the revenue that's coming in is able to pay for the things that you want to have. You've got to do talent management, be able to manage the staff. Some people struggle to get along with other people. They end up in a leadership position and oh, I can't go into a room and have a conversation with somebody
• 16:18
  Speaker C: or maybe they come in with the wrong idea of what that means when they want to interact with somebody. So there's a story I tell sometimes with guests on the podcast and officially a question of and I I'll ask you this too, but it's the the what is 40 something year old me regret about 20 something year old me as a leader. And for me I was in IT leadership in my mid-20s. So like I was in an IT consulting firm. I got elevated to be the director of technical services at this IT consulting firm. I had 10 people on my team. And I remember at one point in time I had a guy who just, he didn't like what was going down or how I was doing it. I mean, he did his job. It looked like he did do his job. But I remember distinctly the conversation in the room, sitting in this conference room and having a department meeting and he's like, well, what if we don't want to do this? And I'm like, well, I'm in charge. So I'll tell you what we're going to do. Right thing. As 26 year old me unilaterally declaring this is how it is because I'm the one with the title, right?
• 17:14
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 17:15
  Speaker C: And like 40 something year old me knows full well that it's not how you lead and you learn those lessons and how to interact and how to handle people, how to build the relationship with them. I mean today that might be a polar side, maybe a conversation about things like, look, we all have important roles. Your role is no less important and mine's no more important than yours. But my job is to be the person who makes the decision. So I'm going to ask you to understand that. But I'll make sure you can be heard. My promise to you is you. You're heard. But I in reverse, what I am hoping to get out of you is that you understand that I'm the one who has to make the decision. So if I make the decision, you were heard. But you get respect and that's. But you respect the fact that you're part of the team.
• 18:02
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 18:04
  Speaker C: You know, so I'll turn that back on you real quick. This could be interesting. This would be interesting because you have military history. I have some other friends who are in the Air Force and stuff like that. And he'll be like the things that people do or say or hear sometimes could be a little wild. What would already something year old you kind of cringe. I'll use air quotes and say cringey from a leadership perspective that 20 something year old you did.
• 18:24
  Speaker A: Well, that's tough because 20 year old me was an infantryman. So that was kind of like my
• 18:29
  Speaker C: early 20s or even your early leadership. Yeah.
• 18:34
  Speaker A: Well, so we've had discussions around here recently about pushing initiatives forward and I would say one of the things that I had to learn over time that I kind of take to heart now is that things don't just get done. And we work in a world where a lot of the staff functions data and cybersecurity. They're really analytically focused. That's their mindset is that hey, I need to make a decision on this thing, but I can't make it unless I have all the data. And this week we'll wait for next week, give it a week, let things work out and then next week they didn't get the data, now they're waiting to the next week. So you get into those analytically minded people who it's hard to budge off of something and make a decision because they don't have all the data. So something I did learn from my early career, especially in the infantry world is you've got to take the information that you have, make the best decision and move forward. No, I know that's maybe not the case. In a huge massive global project sometimes there are a lot of aspects of things that have to happen, but at the tactical level, sometimes you're not going to have all those answers. So I remember sitting in those meetings, leading those meetings where it seems like we've been talking about this for a month now, having weekly meetings or bi weekly meetings or. And we're just not pushing the ball forward. So that was something that I remember doing when I was younger is just waiting for that next person to come up and tell me, tell me how to do this thing. And when you're living in, you're the senior guy in any kind of organization and you're in the middle of combat, there's not time to wait for that Decision to be made. So that is kind of a learning under fire, but that is something I carry over now is that I'm not going to have all the answers because there's a lot of things moving around in healthcare and behavioral health and IT and business that you got to take the information you have available, make the best decision and move forward for the good of the organization, whether they want to move forward or not.
• 20:38
  Speaker C: Sometimes I think about this just from a strictly like management leadership perspective. But in my mind, I'm drawing a connection here to what you just mentioned in these combat or very live and life or death situations that are going on around you. And one of the things that you have to be able to do is as a leader, I think is create the space for your team to understand that they can make those decisions. The decision making is okay, but from an IT leadership perspective and how you have to create a certain amount of psychological safety for your teams to be able to have operating space to move and feel that they'll be supported at the end. And I think that's like in your case, when you're talking about the infantry work and those types of things, you had the confidence that your sergeant or whoever it was that was up above you would be like, hey, Mike, you made the best decisions in the moment and we're going to support that. Like, even if it didn't always work out the best, you knew that everybody had a good understanding that we had to work with the information we had. And we can't punish people for doing that work.
• 21:43
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So in my organization now the world of a nonprofit, we have other peers who are more, I guess, aligned with counties. So they walk into the beginning of the year with a budget. There are other corporate variations, but again, what we start with at the beginning of the year is basically a zero start off. And what we make throughout the year is what you get. So trying to get the team to understand that there are things like that. And then we walked into. When I first got here a year and a half ago, my first month here, I had to hire my data quality specialist. My second month here, I hired my EHR specialist. It was ramping up for the EHR upgrade and stuff. They were just resources I didn't have. But along the lines with that is that the team has been given responsibilities for different things. And unfortunately, when you're just trying to crash everything, I can't hire people for every little task. Which we would come back to the funding gaps at the beginning of the year, but some people can just bring on a whole team and know what they want to do and that strategic plan, they follow it and they've got all the resources here. I've had to build the team first of all, and now I'm trying to develop the team. Each individual has their own personality, got their own challenges and they got their own the good things they're at. But as we've worked through this, my doctoral study was was on succession planning for IT executives and I find myself normally thinking about who would replace me if something were to happen. So we've toned down some of the EHR upgrade stuff. Now this is where I'm starting to get back into the strategic planning and try and put some of those pieces together and figure out who on my team replaces me. If something happens and not everybody wants to be in that position of being responsible, great. But at least some people may not be capable. Some people may need five or six years of training or 10 years of training before they're able to do that. Some people just may not have that potential to do that. So working through with my team is that's where I'm kind of at now as I'm trying to develop them, give them the latitude to do the things. You're not always trying to fight the fire itself, you're trying to contain the vigor fire and eventually we'll get to those little grass fires and stuff to put them out. But getting my team to move from doing the tactical stuff all the time to looking at more of the operational level of things and managing projects and programs that we have or initiatives that we're doing and then coordinating and synchronizing the team that we need to be able to support us from the clinical or administrative side. So it needless to say, there's a lot of aspects in there that get pulled into this when you're trying to make a decision in how you develop somebody or you pull somebody towards a task and you help them grow.
• 24:43
  Speaker C: So I'm going to jump to a different topic, but before we jump there, I just thought I'd make a comment that sometimes in the small and mid sized business space here, the succession plan is just to know that if I leave or something happens, like yes, the team can survive for a while, but you're gonna have to go to market. Like we're just not big enough to have like a deputy CIO hanging around in the back corner. It's just kind of take over if I get hit by a bread truck tomorrow morning. So like being realistic about it too is Oftentimes So like success to me, succession planning always it intersects with the ideas of professional development because I'm a huge proponent of. Personally, I think a lot of, A lot of folks in the IT leadership space really follow this mantra. True is people's careers don't always exist in our organization. Like I'm going to have somebody, maybe they'll work here three years, maybe they work here five years. But then if they want to go to leadership and I'm not ready to move on, that means their next opportunity is going to be somewhere else. And that's totally okay. Yeah, like that's fine. And creating that great experience from start to finish is what makes us good as a leader, but also builds that network, builds those connections, build those that time in what happens in the future. I like right now I've moved. I shifted from a nonprofit. I'm moving into a new role. But one of the new roles that I'm moving into has a connection back to one of the roles that I was in before because I made good connections. I was thinking about that. The thing I wanted to shift us to here the last. We're probably the last five to seven minutes of our podcast here, but was just about some personal background on your space, but 20 plus years in the military space. But before that, when you were a kid, you're growing up. Were you into tech? Were you like a tech kid or something like that? Or did. How did you end up in the technology space?
• 26:34
  Speaker A: So I grew up without a lot.
• 26:37
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 26:38
  Speaker A: So I played sports and everything, growing up and everything. But lost my dad when I was 15 and. But I think I got my technical interest from my mom. She was always interested in taking things apart and out there trying to make the phone line work and everything. Not the city or county phone lines, but it wasn't the modern age where if something breaks, you go out and buy a new one. So my mom became very adept at fixing electronics and stuff and she ended up going start starting associate's degree, went to classes for one semester and then just having five kids and feeling that situation. So. But that did lead me towards having an interest in computers using DOS and stuff when. When I was really young. And then when I was in high school, I was able to swing sort of an internship. Instead of going to study hall, I would go to the IT director and I would help them set up computers and stuff, deploy new software and different things. So I. I definitely had an interest in that. And when I got to college, I shifted around a bunch of different things. But I was playing basketball and eventually I just kind of settled on a degree that would get me by. But then the opportunity came after I graduated from college to go in the Air Force. And I had high enough scores that I could be able to take any job I wanted. And initially I was going to be an airborne linguist. And then kind of came over and fell onto the ground, radio communication side of the house, working on radios and doing maintenance and helping set the azimuth on antennas and different things. And I got to work in an air traffic control tower, communications and GPS stuff. And that fell onto something that I was comfortable with, although at a much higher level, with a level of technicality. But as I said, I stepped away and I got to go and shoot things and blow things up for a while and do that. Then when the time came, it was a naturally to fall back to something. For that period of 10 years or so before, I had been encultured with technologies. So I wouldn't say I was sitting there building my own computers and other things, but I was learning electronics.
• 28:47
  Speaker C: Yeah, no, that's super cool that you got. It's like all the podcasts I've done. It's the first time I've heard that. It's like my mother got me into electronics because my mother did this. That's really a great background. So I'm going to ask a little bit of lightning round questions here and then we'll wrap up. So what's the most important idea you wish every executive want to understand about modern it? When I say every executive, I mean the other executives, not other IT executives.
• 29:12
  Speaker A: Yeah. So I think it's understanding what IT C suite person can bring you. I go back to what I said earlier. It's a combination of education, certification, experience and those things. But executive level leadership needs to understand that they need to have a partner that understands the strategic and the technical. As we've seen throwing all of it, all of data, all of the EHR stuff under the chief operations officer may not get you what you're looking for. So you have to have somebody that actually speaks the language, but also then understands the business component or aspect of that to make sure that everything that is brought into the fold that's technology related is able to support what they're trying to do from operational side. So I've seen it fall under CEO. I've seen it fall under a cfo. I've seen it just kind of out there on its own and do whatever and just let me know if you have any problems or need anything. So I think from the executive level is they need a partner who is able to grasp what needs to be done from both sides of the house.
• 30:19
  Speaker C: Yeah, I found that as you think about what the strategic importance of IT is, oftentimes dictates where the organization thinks that it should report to. So like if it is like a strategic imperative, then you report to the CEO. Oftentimes, if it is considered just like a function to make sure we get other stuff done, then you find like a COO or a CFO type of reporting structure as well. So that's been my personal like observational experience. So let's see if you could fix one big challenge in IT leadership tomorrow, what would it be? I think this one's relevant to you because you get to teach people. You spent many years teaching people in business leadership and things like that. But what did you see?
• 30:57
  Speaker A: I think if I could fix anything, it's that talent development pipeline again. My mind comes back to a lot of different things, but I have a significant background in education and in cybersecurity. So big challenge is creating that talent development process that then drives the succession planning or vice versa, depending on how you look at it, being able to prepare the talent that is coming up right now. I've got an intern who was a high achieving cybersecurity student and he was an intern for me last year. I'm like, great. But he doesn't really know a whole lot. He just graduated. I mean he knows what he learned from school and education stuff, but he doesn't have a lot of experience and he's never been in healthcare, so you gotta build those things into him. My data quality specialist, he's super great with the data and stuff, but he's never configured a switch or a router. So just as you go through all those things and you learn about the people and you develop those, I think that's the biggest challenge is making sure that the team is actually prepared to be able to do the job. And then if I or somebody else, my computer specialist takes a cruise, which is a real example, took a cruise and we had trouble accessing video from one of our facilities for purpose of a police report. I couldn't do anything until he got back. So that was a place where I learned that I had a corner that I was not able to look around. You've got to have your team ready, prepared, in place and then know what they're doing, have the experience, the certifications, the education, be able to carry out the function that I expect them to carry.
• 32:43
  Speaker C: So, last question here. As we wrap up advice for other IT leaders, I'm going to draw one theme that I've picked up from you, which is like your, your penchant for volunteering for things. And then step it up. Not be afraid to raise your hand. But what advice would you have for other IT leaders and emerging leaders?
• 32:59
  Speaker A: Get educated and get educated in things that you don't think necessarily pertain to your job. If it's an opportunity to go to an accounting class, do it. If it's an opportunity to go to a healthcare convention and learn about new technologies that are out there, do it. I mean, those things cost, they come with resources. But you're not going to be able to fulfill a strategic role where you're required to know how the world works if you don't learn how the world works as you're coming up. So take those opportunities for professional development to dip your hands in things that you may not want to do. I mean, like some people, their bread and butter is not sitting up in front of a group and talking to people. But if you're going to be in a position where you're expected to lead groups of people, then you need to be able to stand in front of them and present a plan or give a status update on something. So it's learning those things, growing in those things that may not be of interest and scare you a little bit, but you got to step up and learn those if you want to be in a leadership position.
• 34:04
  Speaker C: Awesome. All right, Mike, thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.
• 34:09
  Speaker A: Thank you. I appreciate it.
• 34:12
  Speaker C: So I'm Doug Meen, and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode of you've Been Heard. The platform for IT Leaders.
• 34:25
  Speaker A: It.