Excelling in Modern IT Leadership
Introduction
Michael Daehne: Hey, y’all. Welcome to Inflect. I’m Michael Daehne, and on today’s show, I’m joined by Renee Cline, VP of Business IT at Solventum, a global medical technology company spun out of 3M. Renee has one of the more unique origin stories you’ll hear in IT leadership, with a journey that started in a chemistry lab and landed in the C-suite.
In our conversation, we dig into what modern IT leadership actually looks like, why soft skills matter more than ever before, and how to build a real partnership between business and IT. Renee also shares some great advice for leaders at every stage of their career. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Renee as much as I did.
Opening
Michael Daehne: Hey, Renee, how are you?
Renee Cline: Wonderful. Thank you.
MD: Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I’m really excited to talk to you today.
RC: Yeah, I’ve been really looking forward to having this conversation, so thanks for allowing me to join.
MD: Yeah, of course. Well, we’re going to dive into a lot of good stuff around modern IT leadership and how the role of an IT leader is evolving and changing, so, should be a great discussion.
Renee’s Background
Michael Daehne: I want to start with who you are. Obviously, I know, but for our listeners, I’d love you to give a brief overview of yourself and your role.
Renee Cline: Sure. So, my name is Renee Cline, and I have kind of an interesting background. Started in chemistry and career transitioned into IT. So, my current role is at a company called Solventum, which was a spinoff of 3M. They had a healthcare industry that now is its own standalone company. And within Solventum, I’m the business-facing IT leader for two of our four divisions, so our med surg division and our health information systems division.
MD: Nice. So, I want to double click into the, “I started my career in chemistry.”
RC: Yeah.
MD: Which I think when, when you and I first connected, I was like, “This is interesting. Tell me more.” So, PhD in analytical chemistry to now leading IT and enterprise transformation, how did that happen? Like, how did you end up here?
RC: I know it feels like a wild shift. I, I think that I’ve just always leaned into new experiences. I’ve always been open to doors that open for me. I’ve walked through them. And so I think it’s rooted in my first job was at a startup company that had only eight employees. So, we’re talking grassroots kind of organization.
Because of the size of that company, I landed in situations I wasn’t familiar with several times, and it gave me a lot of confidence to step into new spaces. So, when I was at 3M, I was doing chemistry for a very long time. I loved that role. I loved everything about it. But I also wanted new experiences that were outside of science.
At that time, 3M had this awesome program. It was a Black Belt program, so it was about project leadership, and they were particularly designed to be two years long. So, it was a formal role that you took, not a part-time job. You knew that you had the role for two years. They really encouraged you to take those roles outside of your core area of expertise.
And the reason was that they wanted you to really learn influential leadership, storytelling, getting buy-in from your team. They wanted you to learn that skillset. What they did not want was for you to be able to default to just doing the projects on your own, right? So, it just so happens that I took that Black Belt experience in the IT organization, and I fell in love with the end-to-end dependencies of IT. So, it ended up being a really good fit for my background and experience.
MD: I love that.
Surprises in the Transition from Science to Technology
MD: And I’m curious, as you made that transition from more on the science side into IT, were there things that surprised you that felt very, I don’t know, different or jarring, that kind of thing? And then maybe the flip side of the question is, were there, I don’t know, things that are consistent or like a through line or some themes that were like, “Oh, this is just a different flavor of the same thing”?
RC: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think what struck me immediately was how transferable the skillset actually is between chemistry and IT. When you’re in sciences, you really are focused on a very large problem, how to break that problem into smaller, actionable pieces, and then continuously checking in when you execute on one thing to determine whether you still think your hypothesis is true.
So that continuous, you know, feedback loop about, “am I still on the right track of what I had expected?” that skill set is very much required for major IT programs as well. When you’re running large ERP programs, or you have merger and acquisitions, there’s always a baseline assumption or a baseline project plan that you start with, and then you start plugging along on the program and there’s learnings along the way. So that’s the first thing that really struck me is, how relevant the skill sets are between the two organizations.
One thing that really surprised me maybe in a negative way, really doesn’t have anything to do with the role and the skillset itself. I guess I was used to being somebody that everybody went to. I was an opinion leader. People knew that if I didn’t know the answer, I knew the next person that would give you the answer. I felt like I knew my field like the back of my hand, and it was an adjustment when I moved into IT that not only did I not know the answer, I didn’t know who I needed to talk to to get the answer.
So, it was kind of a soft skill experience that I had to go through where I had to reestablish my network, reestablish my credibility. It’s something that I just didn’t think about. Like it makes sense after you go through it, but it’s not something I had foresight to when I first made that change.
I think there’s also a recognition that leadership in IT, or frankly in any area or field that you’re in, it’s a different job than being an individual contributor. So, there’s also just really understanding what the difference between a role or like a career in leadership is versus a technical career.
MD: Yeah, totally.
Enabling Business to Successfully Lead IT Programs
Michael Daehne: And that’s probably a good segue into something we talked about, in one of our conversations preparing for, for this discussion, which was I think historically there was a clearer line between the business and IT.
You had IT and IT leaders doing their thing, in many cases kind of taking orders, for lack of a better term, from the business and what they needed and what that translated to from a technology platform, data perspective, that kind of thing.
That line is increasingly blurred. And so, I think now there’s sometimes this conversation about, is it better to have a business-minded leader in IT or an IT-minded leader in the business? Can you unpack that a little bit? Because I think you’ve got some really interesting insights on what that looks like.
Renee Cline: That’s a really good question. I think, just generally speaking, our world really is evolving. It depends on how each company is structured and how they’re running themselves. But I think as a general trend, what we’re noticing, especially in the age of AI, is that technology is much more accessible to business partners than it ever has been in the past.
So, where IT used to really control a lot of IT, it was because there was core expertise that was required from an IT organization in order to build new applications and do things like that. But now these AI solutions are allowing citizen development, or they’re really allowing anyone that’s curious to go and build these things.
And so now what I’m starting to notice is that the footprint of IT, and where IT is done, is changing. There is more IT moving into the business, and I think it is healthy. It’s important to consider that it could be healthy. I think we always talk about shadow IT organizations. We say that it’s a dirty word, you know. We, we feel like it’s in the way, we might not have control of it.
But the reality is our businesses need to adapt to this changing world. They need to move at the same pace of the world that we’re living in as well, and we can’t create a situation where IT is a bottleneck or a barrier. So, for me, it’s more about how do we enable these businesses to successfully lead IT programs? Because program management in IT actually is different. It’s hard to just throw a standard project manager on top of that stuff. There are, there are regulations that need to be thought through. There are data flows that need to be thought through. So, it’s more about building the right competency within the businesses so that they can run technology more sustainably themselves.
And then I’m looking at standard IT organizations still having a really important role in enterprise applications, running ERPs, running infrastructure, and still running the governance and processes around IT that’s being deployed, no matter where it is being deployed in the company.
MD: I love the way you’re talking about that, and I think this idea of shadow IT, it has always kind of been a dirty word, like you said. And I think increasingly the conversation with a lot of our clients, I think you and I have talked about this, is like, how do you have sanctioned IT or enabled technology in the business, or pick your word, where it’s like there are some guardrails, there’s some platforms, some standardization, some governance with a lowercase G. I think governance with a big G is scary, too.
But you’re putting some structure in place so that it can work at an enterprise level and you’re able to connect across systems and you’ve got data and a good foundation for AI and all that, and you’re not being a bottleneck, like you said, where everything has to go through this rigorous, like, did IT approve it or not? Because to your point, it’s not like define the business strategy and then tech do we need to enable that? It’s more like how is the technology capability informing the business strategy and vice versa? And it’s much more of an iterative co-created process than a step one, step two kind of thing.
RC: Yeah. I mean, what does not go away is that we have to partner. IT and the business need to very closely partner on what the future looks like. We need visibility of what’s being developed. We do need to make sure it’s congruent with the technology footprint that we want. We still need to make sure it’s secure. All these things don’t go away just because the operating model shifts a little bit.
I recently read this article with AI in mind that – and I loved the concepts that it said – it just sort of said, “Hey, IT organizations, um, you don’t own and manage what businesses are doing in their Excel files.”
It was an interesting way to frame up, you know, what really are we expecting to control and why? And what are we expecting to just offer as a tool and support the tool and how that sustains, instead?
MD: That’s a great, I think, jarring, for lack of a better term, way to be like, “Oh yeah, we, of course wouldn’t have thought about it that way in the past.”
RC: Right. I agree.
Profile of a Modern IT Leader
Michael Daehne: I want to go a little deeper on this idea of the modern IT leader because I think, through the course of the conversation so far, we’ve talked about some themes around soft skills and partnering, like you said, and managing that relationship with the business.
If you were building the ideal IT leader from scratch today, if you’re going go into the lab, and create an ideal IT leader, what does that profile look like? What, maybe what’s non-negotiable?
Critical Thinking
Renee Cline: Yeah. I think the most important skillset that you need to have in your back pocket to be an IT leader today is critical thinking, especially in the world of AI.
I mean, I think for a long time we’ve just sort of trusted that our systems give us the answer. But now it’s a little more nuanced than that. And I’ll give you an example because I had this firsthand experience, is that we were doing a Super Bowl draft that I was invited to participate in, and I am not into football at all. So, I asked my AI solution, I said, “Who’s going to be in the top four? What is the final score going be?” You know, and I asked it to help me fill out my bracket.
And it gave me an answer, but it gave me a team that wasn’t even in the top four as one of the teams. And that’s what I mean is like, we do have to really be thinking about the results that are coming across our desk now in a way that we never had to before.
And so, in leadership, not only do we need to get our mind around this ourselves, it’s something that we have to really teach the people that are using these solutions as well. It’s harder to diagnose problems now because it’s not so straightforward as, oh, this integration is failing. You we can’t just put Splunk on it or a monitoring solution on it and say, “This is the gap.”
There’s just more nuance associated with where these problems could reside and why we’re not getting the results we’re expecting.
MD: Yeah. Oh, what a great observation, and I think the point about critical thinking for AI-generated outputs in particular really resonates with me. I mean, part of the challenge is that it looks so nice.
RC: It does.
MD: And so it’s like it might be totally wrong, but Claude sounds really sure about it or ChatGPT or Copilot, whatever you’re using, or in some of these enterprise AI tools where it’s leveraging a model and spitting out an answer, “You should go focus on these customers or this market or this product or whatever.” Um, it’s kind of deceiving because it looks nice and shiny and well-packaged. And so it can be easy to not, to not think critically about that.
Have you heard the thing about asking one of these models about going to the car wash and if you should walk, drive, or ride your bike? I heard this recently and it totally resonated with me, which is you go ask ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, “Hey, I’m going to the car wash. It’s 100 feet away. Should I drive, ride my bike, or walk?”
RC: Oh, interesting.
MD: And it comes back and it says, “Well, you should walk. It’s only 100 feet away.”
RC: Oh, that’s interesting. I haven’t heard that one.
MD: You’re not saying, “I’m going there to wash my car. I must have my car there for the visit to the car wash to be useful.” And so, I just think that’s another good example that I’ve been using in different conversations about prompting and context and all that, but also around it sounds really confident when it says, “You should walk, dummy. Why would you not walk? It’s so close.”
RC: Right.
MD: I think totally along those same lines around critical thinking.
RC: Yeah, I love it.
MD: Kind of building on that, you know, I think as we’ve talked before, you’ve had some really interesting experiences in your career, doing M&A and divestitures and operating model design. Now you’re kind of on the forefront of the AI revolution.
You mentioned critical thinking. Are there any other skills that really jump out at you that have separated those people in your career that really thrived in some of those challenging times?
Being Open and Adaptable
RC: Yeah. I think you really have to be open and adaptable to a changing world. I do think that IT was a little bit, I don’t know if stable’s the right word, but it just was, uh, you capitalized things, right? You put something in place, and you expected it to be live for 30 years, I mean, for a very long time, right?
But now IT is moving so quickly, I think it’s caused me to really rethink, what is my strategy? Is it to put something in place and just do upgrades and maintain it forever? Or is it to make the design much more modular so that my strategy actually is, instead of upgrading, I’m constantly swapping out the pieces to the latest and greatest, whatever is out there.
I think the build versus buy conversation is also interesting, again, because we really relied on core expertise of different vendors to build these SaaS solutions, which are getting cost-prohibitive at this point. Now, that build conversation, I think, is becoming a bigger part of the picture, a bigger potential of how we’re swapping these things too.
So, somebody that’s paying attention to what’s going on in the world, someone that’s really watching the lay of the land, not only understanding their own technology roadmap, but also understanding the technology roadmap of our vendors. So, you know, do I need to build an agent if Salesforce, for example, is going to build that agent in six months, right?
So, like getting intimately familiar with the outside world. What are their technology strategies? Matching it up with our technology strategies, and really being open to change. I think the days of coming up with a technology roadmap for 10 years and just sort of executing on that 10-year roadmap are kind of done, with the exception of things like ERP, obviously. Like that would be difficult to be switching out. But I do think that we’re going to need to be far more adaptable than ever we have been in the past to keep up with this changing world and remain competitive.
MD: Yeah. A couple things jumped out at me. The modularity, I think that’s such a key thing that increasingly we’re seeing, especially with larger enterprises where it’s like, “Hey, let’s make a lot of decisions that give us optionality versus one big decision that 10 years from now we will be unable to adapt from or with.”
And I think building on that, I think you said, you phrased it as openness to change. And I was just talking to a CIO recently who was of recounting a conversation she had had with her boss, the CEO, where she was basically advocating for building something. And he said, somewhat in jest, but I think also legitimately asking the question, like, “You’ve been telling me for 20 years we should buy, not build. Like all I’ve been hearing is go to SaaS platforms, you know, embrace these big, these big COTS solutions. Like, what’s changed?”
And it’s like, a lot has changed.
RC: Yes, it has.
MD: I think that can be challenging to say, hey, you know, permission to get smarter or permission to evolve as the world around us is evolving.
And so maybe something that would have been true in 2015 or even 2020 is not true in 2026. I think that, that openness to change is really a key thing. I love that you highlighted that.
RC: Yeah, I agree that’s exactly what is happening is, we were making decisions with the best information we had available at the time. And at the time it really was move to the SaaS solution, you know. But now we have new data. We have a changing world, and so we need to adapt to what we see today.
MD: Maybe one more question, then we’ll do some lightning round questions.
RC: Okay.
Advice for Early-Career Technologists
Michael Daehne: We’ve talked a lot about what leadership looks like in that role at the top, but something I have come to know and admire about you, knowing each other the last year or two, is that you care a lot about people growing in their careers, whether they’re early career or the folks that work for you. I’ve seen some great stuff where you’re really promoting the growth of those around you.
So, what’s your advice to someone who’s maybe early career and saying, “Man, I’d love to be in Renee’s seat. I’d love to be in that role”? What advice do you give folks that are earlier in their career?
Focus on Doing a Good Job Now
Renee Cline: Yeah. I mean, I would say give yourself the time, right? Like, enjoy where you are at because you’re building a foundation for your future. I think sometimes people are in a rush.
They just can sometimes come straight out of school and say, “I want to move into leadership,” without really understanding what is that role. Like, what does it mean to be in leadership in the first place?
So, I would say, you know, just first focus on doing a really good job with what you have and where you’re at. But yes, absolutely keep an open mind and have open conversations about where you want to go so that you are building the right experiences that will help you get there.
Understand What Leadership Entails
RC: One thing that I will say that is something that a mentor once told me that resonated at the time was, people need to be careful not to build themselves out of a role that they love. At the time, it seemed a little bit confusing. I was like, “What do you mean? I for sure want to advance my career.” But the reality is a role in leadership is very different than a role as an individual contributor. You’re no longer in charge of your own destiny anymore, right? You, you really have to influence others. You have to coach others. You have to give up control and give up reins and trust that your team is going to be able to run with it.
And actually, the role in leadership, the higher you go, becomes much more administrative than you would expect, right?
So, I do think that people that really, really love technology and they love coding, they sometimes can do themselves a disservice by advancing their careers because maybe they move outside of things they’re actually good at or their core area of passion and expertise.
So, I do think it takes a little, like, pay attention, maybe shadow your leaders and just understand for yourself, is that actually something that you want, or is it the buzzword that you feel like you should be chasing? Because I do think when people follow their passion, that’s where success comes, not because you’re chasing the next job or not because you’re chasing more money, but just doing what you love.
MD: Yeah. Oh, that’s great advice. So insightful and I think thought-provoking, because I do think for many people, myself included, you’re going through your career and you’re like, “What’s next? What’s next? What’s next?”
And sometimes you lose sight of why you like the parts of your, your job you like. And will, a, quote-unquote, promotion or a people management role or a leadership role, will that still fulfill the stuff you like? It might, and if so, great. Go for it. Rock and roll.
But, but I think for a lot of folks it’s like, “Oh, no, that actually sounds terrible if I really sit and think about it. I don’t want that. I want X or Y.” So being thoughtful about that is smart.
RC: That’s okay, too. Like, we need all different kinds of people, and sometimes growth can mean different things. Growth doesn’t always need to mean that we’re just moving up a leadership track. You can start in one technology and then, you know, move to another area of technology and another area of technology. These lateral movements are important to give you a well-rounded experience too, and that is also really valuable growth.
MD: Totally agree. Oh, I think that’s awesome advice.
Lightning Round
Michael Daehne: Okay, well, just a couple lightning round questions for you, and I’m going to skip past a couple I was going to ask because they were about IT leadership characteristics and skills, which I think we’ve covered really, really well.
But I love podcasts. I love listening to podcasts. Are you a reader or podcast listener? And if so, do you have any favorite recommendations?
Renee Cline: I don’t do podcasts, but I am an avid reader. I have a policy when I go on vacation that I first read a book about leadership before I go on my merry way on my vacation.
So, one of my favorites is The Art of Possibility, and it talks about really reframing things and, and I’ll give you an example. So it talked about an inner-city school where people’s primary focus are, “How am I going to have my next meal?” That’s what they worry about, and yet they’re expected to show up in school every day and get an education and it just seems so unattainable or unimportant because they’re worried about their food security, right?
So, when we talk about things like “earn an A,” for those kinds of students, it seems like, “Why would I even try?” Like, that is such an uphill battle for me that I give up before I’ve even started.
But then there was this teacher that came in one time, and she said to her class, “Class, every single one of you has an A in my class today. You have it already. All you have to do is keep it.” And just that mindset shift completely changed the course of her statistics in her class because it removed the barrier of it being unattainable. They already had it, so it wasn’t something they had to work for in their minds. It was something they had to keep.
So, the book really talks about very slight shifts in framing that matter of how you’re unlocking potential in your people.
MD: Oh, I love that. And I come from a family of educators, so any story about teachers helping their students succeed is a winner for me. So, I love that. I have not read that book, though. I’ll have to check it out.
As we’ve talked about your career arc, and if somebody goes and looks at your LinkedIn, it’s like, oh my God, what an amazing, perfect career trajectory. So I want to ask, is there a mistake you’ve made? Is there a curveball, a turn you made that in hindsight you’re like, “Oh, it was a mistake, but here’s what I learned from it”?
RC: I love that you’re asking this question because I agree. We look at what people present to the outside world, and it’s never as clean as it looks, right? So, is there a mistake? I love that you said a mistake, because I have 150 mistakes and choices, right?
But, but the reality is, no matter where you go wrong, it is just a data point. It’s just a stepping stone. There are no wrong moves you can make. It’s, you know, it gives you information about where you want to go, and you can course correct. I mean, I went from chemistry to IT. You can literally change your mind about everything.
But I guess a few examples of, I guess, mistakes is, starting way back, I really wanted to have my education at Emory University. But I was not accepted into the program there, so I went to my backup option, which was the University of Minnesota. At that time, I actually didn’t have a lot of confidence in myself, so I only applied to the master’s program. I did not believe that I could earn a PhD. And actually, due to a clerical error, I was put into the PhD program there.
MD: No way, amazing.
RC: Yes. The world sometimes turns out, right? So, I was put into the PhD program, and I thought, “Well, I can either argue that I don’t belong here,” which seemed weird, “or I can give it a go.” And so, I ended up with my PhD. And that’s again what I mean by sometimes doors open and you just need to have the strength to walk through them.
MD: I love that. That is like the most fun, interesting story I’ve heard in a long time. And also, we should clarify that you got into the program with a clerical error, but you earned your PhD very much.
RC: I did.
MD: That was not an administrative error.
RC: Yes.
MD: What a great story.
RC: Yeah.
MD: Okay, last one, then I’ll let you go.
You shared some advice earlier from a mentor, but any other good advice you’ve gotten through the course of your life or your career that has stuck with you?
RC: Oh my gosh, I’ve had so many wonderful mentors. It’s hard to pick one.
I once had a mentor tell me, “Don’t put up walls where there aren’t any.” The biggest barrier that you’re going to have is your own insecurities, your own thoughts that get in the way, you know, your own barriers.
She really challenged me to explore, first and foremost, what is the most possible without ever, saying that something won’t work. You know? But don’t jump to that right away. First jump to, “If I did have a magic wand that I could wave, what would this look like and how would this get done?” And we can worry about whether it’s possible later.
But not start by scaling back. First be a little bit of a dreamer. And I think that has served me really, really well, to really think through how I want to transform.
MD: Oh, I think that is great. I think that’s a perfect note to end on to a very empowering thought for all of us about not, not putting up walls where they don’t, don’t exist.
Closing
Michael Daehne: I so appreciate you taking the time to talk, Renee. I feel like we covered a lot of good ground on modern IT leadership and of what shadow IT looks like in the new world and how to support our business partners as they’re embracing modern technology. And then I think just all the stuff on kind of the soft skills and career growth and overcoming mistakes or clerical errors in one case, I think that’s all just so helpful, and I know, I know our listeners will enjoy the conversation.
So, thank you again so much.
Renee Cline: No, I really, again, appreciate it. Even more fun than I expected this to be. So appreciate the time. Thank you for inviting me along.
MD: Thank you. Hope you have a great rest of the day.
RC: You too.