Why I love giving back

My first coaching

My undergraduate degree was physics, with a minor in mathematics. I'd always been interested in the sciences, and my career goal was to graduate, earn a PhD, and work in a research lab. Along these lines, I landed an undergraduate internship at a national lab, taking x-ray diffraction data on thin films. This was exactly what I wanted to do!

Everything changed the following year. The economy dipped, and I couldn’t find any internship working in labs. But I leveraged my other programming experience and successfully applied for an internship at a local software company. I wrote programs to run reports against databases. I told myself it was just a small detour for the summer, and I’d be back on track working in physics after graduation.

To my surprise, I found I enjoyed working in computer science! Programming was solving problems through logic, and physics is really just problem-solving through mathematics.

I was fortunate to have a wonderful boss in the internship who respected me and took me under her wing. She was my first mentor. She was kind and supportive. She understood that I was new to the Information Technology (IT) field, but she recognized my potential. Throughout the internship, she offered coaching and advice to help me along. No matter what obstacle I faced, my mentor reminded me that others had faced the same challenge before. Rather than let me get overwhelmed by a problem, she encouraged me with coaching. Her coaching encouraged me to take a step away from my initial issue and see the larger problem. With that new perspective, I usually could work out a solution on my own.

Changing gears in my career

I graduated with my physics degree that winter. I decided to change gears in my career and move into IT. I went back to work for the same local software company after graduation, this time as a junior systems administrator. My mentor from the internship became my boss. Again, she was a great coach, and she helped me grow in my new role.

Her coaching and advising had a profound impact on me. Throughout my career, I tried to pay forward what I learned from my first boss. I remained in IT, but I moved from working as IT staff to managing IT teams, then leading IT departments. Throughout, I coached my direct reports, and mentored my rising stars. By developing my IT teams into empowered IT leaders, I like to think I created a flexible organization that flourished. And along the way, I gave a boost to some pretty awesome colleagues, and helped them reach new heights in their careers.

For example, I once hired a systems administrator, but quickly realized he wanted to do more. I saw potential in him, and I wanted to help him. I provided coaching and mentoring for him, similar to what my first boss did for me. I brought him along to meetings. I asked him to help create budgets and work plans. A year later, I was proud to promote him to a team supervisor position. A year after that, I promoted him again to a manager role. I left the organization after that, but I stayed in touch, and watched him grow into other leadership positions.

Mentoring is a win-win for everyone. In supporting someone to take on larger responsibilities, I’m also helping the organization by developing new talent.

Supporting the next generation of leaders

Looking back across my career, I’ve been in different levels of IT leadership for 25 years. For over eight of those years, I served as Chief Information Officer (CIO) in higher education and government. We made major strides for our organizations, implementing projects including an electronic health records system, operational excellence through IT consolidation, and modernization systems. I am proud of that track record.

Over the last few years of that time, I looked to change direction in my career. Rather than lead IT organizations, I want to provide coaching, advising, and mentoring to other IT leaders. 

The inspiration came to me when, as CIO, I attended various “round table” events with other CIOs across local industries. I was struck by the number of people who were new to the CIO role. Typically, several CIOs at each event would share that it was their first time in a senior IT leadership role, usually around a common theme: “most senior person in IT when the previous CIO left.” These newly-minted CIOs asked a lot of questions about how to be successful when stepping into a leadership role.

I saw an opportunity to support the next generation of leaders through coaching and mentoring. That's how I decided to launch my consulting practice at Hallmentum: Supporting CIOs who need help generating an IT strategy that meets the organization’s needs, or need help aligning their IT organizations, or need help preparing a presentation for their Board. Or helping Chief Technology Officers who need help creating a technology vision for the next five to ten years, or need help establishing a strategy to leverage new modes such as open source, or need help crafting a digital first strategy to best position the organization. Or working with IT Directors and IT Managers who need help establishing best practices, or need help building a documentation library, or need help preparing for (or responding to) an audit.

The goal is to help IT Leaders at all levels become more productive and strategic, to provide that extra boost. It's almost six years into that venture, and I’m still excited to make this transition. I love “giving back” through coaching, advising, and mentoring.