A Human Approach to Technology Leadership
In this episode, Michael Daehne talks with Dan McDermott, Chief Information Officer at Tank Holding Corp., about lessons learned from mergers and acquisitions and Dan’s unique philosophy on managing and developing talent.
Dan shares his four principles of performance management, which guide him in selecting, managing, and developing talent:
Do you make good commitments and do you keep them?
Do you improve the process, the way we do things, or the practice area?
How do you improve yourself? How do you take care of your own development (and that of your team)?
How do you show up?
The lightning round includes Dan’s favorite activities outside of work, book recommendations, and what he’d be doing if he weren’t a technology leader.
Learn more about Tank Holding Corp. at https://www.tankholding.com/
Teaser
Dan McDermott: I’m a runner. I’m a golfer. Yes. A pickleball player. I admit it, I have a problem.
Introduction
Michael Daehne: Hey, y’all. Welcome to Inflect. I’m Michael Daehne. And on today’s show, I’m joined by Dan McDermott, Chief Information Officer at Tank Holding Corp. I met Dan a few months ago at a breakfast in the Twin Cities, and we immediately hit it off talking about technology transformation, lessons learned from mergers and acquisitions, and his unique philosophy on managing and developing talent. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Background on Dan and Tank Holding Corp.
Michael Daehne: Welcome to Inflect, the FlexPoint Consulting Podcast. I’m Michael Daehne and I’m really excited to have Dan McDermott with me today. Dan, how are you doing?
Dan McDermott: I’m doing great, Michael. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
MD: Yeah, really excited to have you on and discuss some of your experiences and interests and have a great discussion.
You and I met at breakfast a month or two ago and I think really hit it off on some of the shared interests as it relates to technology work and technology transformation. And so I’m excited to chat with you and kind of share some of your learnings with our audience. And maybe before we get into some of my questions, why don’t you just tell us a little bit more about yourself, your background, and your current role?
DM: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So, I have a long history in Minnesota. I’m not from here originally, but I came here to go to St. John’s University, love us or hate us. I’ve worked in technology around the Twin Cities my whole career. So large companies like Best Buy, doing some small consulting, et cetera.
And mostly on the application side. Really, really enjoy being around technology and the variety, the variety of companies and the variety of projects we get involved in. My current role is as Chief Information Officer for a company called Tank Holding Corp.
We’re a private equity owned plastics manufacturer. So, you know, sort of the cliche tagline is, we buy resin and make things out of plastic that our customers want. It’s a wide variety of challenges. I’m the first CIO here, due to some growth.
Tank Holding makes a lot of different products through a lot of different brands we have. Everything from, very, very small, robotically created parts for pieces of riding lawnmowers to 10,000-gallon storage tanks for water and agriculture.
Being the first CIO, and we’re a very acquisitive company, we’ve done probably about 25 acquisitions in the last three years. Gives me the challenge of a variety of technology. And we can talk about that a little bit as we get into it.
MD: Yeah, for sure. Well, thank, thanks for the background. And I, I love, I think in your description of Tank Holding Corp., it’s one of those things where your products are all around us in so many different places and have so many different use cases.
And so, I think that’s really fascinating. One of the things that piqued my interest when we talked before was what you just mentioned, which is all the acquisitions that you all have done over the last many years. And I am really intrigued by acquisitions and mergers, not only because the technology components are often challenging and interesting, but also because that’s where a lot of the people and process complexity comes in when you’re bringing teams and organizations together.
Onboarding Mergers and Acquisitions
Michael Daehne: I’d love to kind of dive into that a little bit more. And hear, maybe, about some of the specific tactics you and your team have used to onboard some of the groups that have joined.
Dan McDermott: Sure, I’ll share with you, Michael, my approach. I’ve been here about a year-and-a-half. So obviously I haven’t been here for all of those acquisitions.
The Technology Side of M&A
DM: And they were kind of in a variety of states. So, as you can imagine, if we just look at ERP systems, for example. We’re in manufacturing, there are a lot of niche ERP products out there. And some days I feel like we own one of each of them through these variety of acquisitions. Before I got here, there was some good rationalization of those.
So, if we had a smaller acquisition, we would bring them onto our platforms. If we had a larger one, we would run them as is, and start looking at some ways to kind of bring them into the fold. One of the main things, you know, you talked about specific tactics. You know, our philosophy is really, you know, when we acquire a company, it’s because it’s, it’s a great business, right?
Somebody’s built a great business, so, far be it from us to come in and say, you know, we’re going to tell you how to run things. So that’s kind of the process side of it. So, we look for areas where we can really collaborate. Some of those may be around integrating systems. But oftentimes we’ll start with a conversation that’s pretty broad around something like security.
And that’s a, hey, you’re part of the family now. We’ll tell you a little bit about our footprint, what we do from a cybersecurity standpoint. But I’m really interested to know what they have. One, because I just inherited it. And two, it’s just a way, again, for us not to say thou shalt. But it’s something that we can really work on together.
And so far all of those conversations the leaders at the companies have been very receptive about sharing and learning from us, us learning from them. And it’s been a great way to start the conversation around collaboration. We do the same thing from a data perspective.
And we have conversations around how they manage their data, how they use it for decision making. I think, you know, specific tactics is a little hard because you know, it’s very different if it’s a small acquisition, we may just, as they say, swallow them whole a little bit.
We bring them onto our systems, we bring them onto our network, we use our security tools for them. But if we acquire a company that’s substantial in size, they’ve got a lot of good practices in place. So, I’m always interested in finding out, you know, what do they have today? And there might be some things that, whether it’s a great contract they have in place, that we just let it run for a while.
So hopefully that’s a little bit of an overview. I know it’s not like the specific onboarding playbook, but I’d say we’re developing that, too, in terms of our approach.
MD: I think what, you know, there are two things in your answer that stood out to me. One is this idea that there’s not a one size fits all, right? Every, every entity that comes on board has its own unique identity, size, scale, systems, security footprint, all that stuff. And so really being, being thoughtful about tailoring the approach to each is important.
And I think the second part that really stands out is this idea of not coming in with a thou shalt attitude. Because that obviously can make all of these conversations more difficult. And so I think that’s probably a great, great way to, like you said, welcome, welcome into the family and really drive that collaboration as you’re working through it.
The People Side of M&A
DM: Yeah, absolutely. And we didn’t talk a lot about the people part other than that collaboration is a great way to start, but you know, some of these companies are smaller, so they might not have an IT department. They might have one person or a controller who sort of manages the tech function, and then they work with a managed service provider (or MSP) in their region. I’ve been lucky enough to, and I’m not saying that tongue in cheek, really lucky enough to inherit a few of those because they’re good partners.
I wasn’t sure because they’re third parties, but to a firm they’ve been pretty responsive in terms of giving me a good lay of the land of what they see as needed. Sometimes it’s a little bit, maybe a little bit overkill for what we need. But they’ve been great in terms of again, helping us out when we’re going through our cyber security insurance and I don’t know the environment as well as they do. So, I rely on them a little bit. Certainly, we want to maybe start taking some things off their hands if we can do it internally and not rely on them as much and learn the environment a little bit more.
But they’ve been great. So, I mean, from a people perspective, we rely on them as much as, or if not more than some of the people in the acquired company.
MD: Yeah, I think that’s such an important part of the acquisition activity. And like you said, kind of driving that collaboration.
Team M&A Wins
MD: As you think back on, on all this work, are there one or two wins that you are most proud of for, for you and your team?
DM: Yeah, there’s a pretty good list, but you know, I think one thing that really stands out, in addition to continuing to onboard some acquisitions and integrate them is, I mentioned multiple ERP systems.
Well, as an entity, as we grow, we still need good data for decision making, whether that’s sales data or operational metrics. Looking back to a year or so ago, I could, I could focus on trying to get us to a single ERP, right, integrate those in and, and realizing that, you know, not only would that take probably years to do, but by the time I got there, um, with our acquisitive nature, we would have more of them.
So, we put in place, with the help of a third party, we put in place, a data warehouse, with BI reporting on it, where we can extract the data from all of the ERPs we have, and we recreated some of what was being done manually from a, a sales perspective. So, it’s automated, which helps codify information that’s been around in people’s heads for years and, and, and how we get there.
We’ve improved it in some cases, and on the operational metrics side, we’ve been able to deliver some things that people simply just didn’t have before because of the level of effort and trying to create it manually. So that’s been quite a win both at a point in time and also as we onboard new acquisitions, because we can take a look at them and say, gosh, in maybe six to eight weeks, we can connect to the new ERP and start having data flow into the warehouse and make its way into those, those daily reports as, as it gets added to the dashboard.
So that’s been a win for the team to accomplish something like that, but it’s also been something that’s very visible to the business for decision making when you have all these different brands and entities.
MD: Yeah, very thoughtful design, thinking ahead towards additional acquisitions and really prioritizing that speed to market, for lack of a better term, in terms of getting the data and the insights into an aggregated view. I think that’s such an impressive case study.
DM: Absolutely. I mean, I won’t say absolutely to the impressive, but it was, it was absolutely both thinking about, well, how do we address this issue of multiple endpoints today? And also, know that we’re going to continue to add them and we’re going to continue to want to have a full picture of reporting.
It’s been very visible. Is it perfect? No, absolutely not. Do we have a scalable platform that we can continue to mature over time? Absolutely we do. And that’s what we’ve been doing is not only adding new entities as they come on board, but continuing to say, hey, if you find something and you say this isn’t right. Great. Help us make it right. And then it’ll forever be right. So, so that’s, that’s been fun to see.
MD: Yeah, I think some great, great learnings in there in terms of how to approach acquisitions from the collaborative style and the right-sizing your approach through to the data and security pieces. I appreciate you sharing that.
Managing and Developing Talent
Michael Daehne: I’d like to switch gears a little bit now and talk more about the people side and managing and developing talent, which is something you and I have talked a lot about offline, but I’d love if you could share with our audience your overall philosophy on performance management.
Dan McDermott: Sure, absolutely. And I’ve enjoyed your perspectives on this as well. I guess when I first started managing people, it wasn’t, um, it wasn’t a philosophy yet, but as the teams got bigger, I realized that I had to take the best of what I had seen and liked, throw out maybe some of the things I thought that didn’t work so well.
Four Principles of Performance Management
DM: There are really four things that I look for when, and this could be during an interview process, I can ask these as questions, or when people come to me and they, you know, send on my team and say, Dan, how do you evaluate performance?
And there’s really four things. So, the first one is I ask or evaluate, do you make good commitments and do you keep them? And I think I shared with you, Michael, I started by just saying, do you keep your commitments? And then I realized that, well, you can overload people and they can burn out their motors by taking on too much.
So that shifts the conversation to, well, let’s talk about what making good commitments means, right? It means that if I send you a 30-page PowerPoint deck and say, “Comments, Michael?”, you don’t have any idea what I really want. Do I want you to take a two-minute look at it and say, “I like the font”? Or do I expect you to spend three hours tearing it apart? So, let’s make good commitments, but then once we agree on what it is and when it’s going to be done by when, that you meet that.
The second thing is, do you improve the process, the way we do things, or the practice area? Because it’s one thing to do the work. That’s the first thing about keeping your commitments. This is help make us better, right? Help us make a better place that we don’t keep, you know, doing the same things over and over again, like manual reporting subject to human errors, et cetera.
The third thing is, not only, I just talked about how you improve the process or practice. This is, how do you improve yourself? So, it’s how do you take care of your own development? And then I added after a bit, kind of in parentheses, and that of your team. If you’re an individual contributor, I’d like to know, how do you build a better Michael, right? What are you going to do this year that’s going to help position you for the kinds of goals you have for yourself? But if you’re a leader, whether that’s two people or 20, how do you interact with your team?
The fourth thing is how do you show up? This is the values piece. You know, you can be the best salesperson, but you’re a total jerk and no one trusts you or wants to work with you, so that’s a fail in my book. So those are the four that I’ve landed on, and they’ve proven pretty effective so far. This is probably over about the last seven or eight years.
MD: Yeah, well, I appreciate you walking through those. What I love about those four and the way that you articulate them is the nuance of each one, right?
In a management 101 book, it might say, keep your commitments. Like, yeah, okay, that’s self-explanatory. What’s not self-explanatory is, are we making the right commitments? Are we thinking about the right ones to then hold ourselves accountable to and similarly management 101 would say Yeah, we should all adhere to our processes. But it might not necessarily say, are we also thinking about how to improve the processes and improve the practice?
And so those are just a couple of the examples, but I think that really adds the necessary nuance to make each of those a little more complex in a way that I think is reflective of how complex people are and humans are and that, and that management and growing, of our teams is, I think it’s such a great group of, of ways to think about our team members.
Performance Management Tactics
MD: What are some of the processes or tactics you use, particularly around that commitment-based management style to really bring that to life?
DM: Oh boy, there’s, there’s a number of them.
One is, and people who’ve worked with me, we talk about the conditions of satisfaction between a customer and a performer. That sounds like foreign language, but, it’s really just that notion of accountability, right? So, making it happen, whether that’s daily, weekly, or monthly.
We’re kicking off a project here with our, with our finance team, and I want to understand clearly who’s the customer for that, who’s the one customer for that, so that we know who we need to go to, so that it’s not three different answers. And who’s the one performer. And then those two negotiate between them, you know, what does it mean. And when I say conditions of satisfaction, Michael, I know that sounds foreign a little bit. That’s really just the, what’s the commitment, right. That’s how you define the commitment. It’s the time, and the what, and what does done look like, or any of those terms you’ve seen in the past.
You know, and then on a personal level, I would just add that, there’s some very, very simple things that I’ve done where every day I have my BIG list, and it’s just a quick acronym Before I Go – B I G – and I keep it, it’s old school, but, I’ve walked halfway to my car, glanced at it, turned around and went back in because I said, you know what, I promised Michael I’d get that to him by end of day on the third. I’ve got to go do this because that was the commitment I made to him. So having those in one place where you can quickly glance at it has been really, really helpful.
MD: Yeah, I love that, BIG. I really like that idea.
Some of the things we’ve talked about in terms of how you show up, and your values, managing your commitments, I think that probably all plays into how you look for talent and hire, but are there any other attributes or characteristics you look for when building your team?
DM: I think there are nuances, Michael, but, but, you know, within those four parameters, when you, you know, there’s the notion of behavioral interviewing where you’re asking people about specific, this is the old, tell me about a time, but it really does highlight it.
If you can understand how people track their commitments and really manage them, you know – and saying that you’re going to keep 100% of your commitments is a fantasy standard as, as a CIO I’ve worked for many times would like to say – you can manage them.
So, I may call you from the parking lot tonight and say, “Hey, Michael, I have a commitment to you by five o’clock. Um, I didn’t get it done. Would tomorrow at noon work?” I’m managing the commitment and you might say, “Oh, yeah, that’s fine, Dan, if you have it to me by noon tomorrow, no problem. But hey, thanks for the call.” Or you might say, “Ooh, I’m meeting with the board tonight at eight. And I really needed that piece of information from you.” “Got it. I’ll walk back in the building and take care of it.” But again, you’re managing the commitment.
So, if you can get those stories out, how they take care of their development, what they’ve liked about cultures, where they’ve worked, which speaks to how they show up, that can all come out on the interview side.
MD: Yeah. Excellent. I really appreciate all the thoughts and learnings you shared both on the growth and acquisition topic, as well as the talent management and development piece.
Lightning Round
Michael Daehne: I have a couple of quick hit lightning round questions for you before we run out of time, so I’m going to go fast.
The first one is, what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Dan McDermott: Oh, it would be some version of, “Don’t ever think you have nothing to learn from someone.” Everyone has a unique perspective.
MD: Excellent.
What’s your favorite thing to do outside of work?
DM: I like being outside. So, I’m a runner. I’m a golfer. Yes, a pickleball player, I admit it. I have a problem. Anything outside. My wife and I, we love to do those kind of things together, which is great. We get a walk in every evening, and that’s where we get caught up.
MD: Yeah, great.
Any good books you’ve read or podcasts you’ve listened to recently that you would recommend?
DM: You know, you asked me this a while ago, and there are a number. I’m going to go for a non-popular book called The Slight Edge, and here’s why. Most books and things have told me how to help me accomplish my goals. That’s great. What if I don’t know what those are? So, The Slight Edge, it’s sort of a takeoff on Atomic Habits. Small things make a big difference, but it’s not as popular.
But if you go back to one of the chapters toward the end of the book, there are templates for goals like finances, career, health, and it’s one of the best starter kit lists for goals that I’ve seen. So, I’m going to go with that one.
MD: I’ve added it to my list.
And my last question is, if you weren’t in a career in IT leadership, what do you think you’d be doing?
DM: I started my career at Accenture back when it was Anderson Consulting, and I’ve always thought it would be interesting to work for a large firm like that in talent management, where you’ve got a supply of great, great human resources, people, to match up with demand from a variety of clients and geography areas and all that growth. I just thought that’d be a really interesting challenge that’s not tech, but kind of.
MD: Yeah, very adjacent to a lot of the work you’ve done, with a different lens on it and I think bringing us full circle back to some of the things you already shared around managing and developing talent.
Closing
Michael Daehne: So, Dan, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk. I really enjoyed the conversation and look forward to continuing it down the road.
Dan McDermott: Oh, me as well. And I appreciate the insightful questions. It’s a great overview.
MD: Great. Thanks, Dan.
DM: Appreciate it, Michael.
Mentioned
Tank Holding Corp.: https://www.tankholding.com/
The Slight Edge: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/590652
Atomic Habits: https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits