Leading IT as a Trusted Business Partner
Introduction
Michael Daehne: Hey y’all. Welcome to Inflect. I’m Michael Daehne. On today’s episode, I’m joined by Rahoul Ghose, Chief Information Officer at ECMC Group and a seasoned tech executive whose career spans leadership roles at Best Buy, Cargill, Honeywell, and more. Rahoul’s not just an IT guy. He’s a thoughtful culture builder and a pragmatic business-oriented technology leader focused on turning IT into a trusted, business-aligned partner.
In today’s conversation, we dig into what that really takes, building credibility, developing empathy, and practicing the kind of ownership that earns trust across an organization. We also talk about how he’s coaching and empowering his team to be the trusted partner his organization needs.
I really enjoyed this one, and I hope you do too.
Opening
Michael Daehne: Hey, Rahoul. Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us. How are you?
Rahoul Ghose: Doing very well. Thanks. Yeah.
MD: I’m really glad to have you on the podcast. We’ve had some really insightful and interesting conversations, in the last few months, including on the topic we’re going to talk about today. And so, I really appreciate you taking the time to share some of your pearls of wisdom with our listeners.
RG: Well, I don’t know how many pearls I’m going to share, but I appreciate that. I’m looking forward to this as well. It’s, the highlight of the day so far.
MD: Yeah. Excellent. Well, you know, you have had really a storied career across a number of big names in IT leadership roles. And I think when I asked you to join the podcast, the first thing we said was like, gosh, what are we going to talk about? Because we could cover so many different topics from your career in IT leadership.
We focused in on this idea of building a brand of IT within the organization and specifically building a brand or a reputation rooted in trust. And that’s something you have a lot of experience in. And it’s something that I am seeing a lot with our current clients of a lot of folks in that CIO role, that IT leadership role that are really saying, Hey, how do, how do I build that trusted brand with my business partners? And I think it’s more important than ever.
Building IT into a Trusted Service Organization
Michael Daehne: So, kind of with that backdrop, Rahoul, tell me more about the vision behind building IT into a trusted service organization and why it may be more important than ever.
Rahoul Ghose: Right. So, this notion of a trusted service organization that is not new. At its heart is this idea that the business stakeholders we work with, they have the confidence in us, in what we do and that they work with us because they want to, not because they have to. And that’s something that I have reiterate with my teams all along.
But what’s happening today is the pace of change. I mean, technology has always been complex, it’s always been esoteric, especially for people that don’t work in tech. But think about what’s going on now in the world of tech. It’s exponentially ratcheted up. It’s become more complex, but it’s also front and center to what organizations are doing, and it’s front and center to business success.
So that is why our business partners are looking for us, the IT function, which essentially fulfills that role of helping navigate that complexity. They’re looking for us to do that in a way that inspires that level of confidence that I talked about. So, our outside persona as a function, how we show up as a function is germane to that success.
There’s no time like the present, therefore, for us to be intentional about this whole endeavor.
MD: Yeah, something you said in there that really stuck with me is this idea that it is front and center. For a long time, you know, we always heard about shadow IT, it was kind of like a lot of IT professionals would say, oh, there’s shadow IT over in the business, and you kind of shrug your shoulders. That was in many ways the business working around an IT function that they might not have that trusted partnership with, or there could be other dynamics at play.
But now, given that technology is so critical to the business strategy of every organization, IT can’t be in the shadows. It has to be front and center.
I think that’s why this idea of that partnership and that trusted service organization, to your point, is so relevant. It always has been, but maybe even more pronounced right now.
RG: Precisely. Yeah, that’s well said.
Developing an Outside Persona from Within
Michael Daehne: You know, something else that you’ve shared in our previous conversations is this idea of developing that outside persona from within. It’s the internal way we work and the things we’re doing that will ultimately define that persona.
Can you unpack that a little bit more for us?
Rahoul Ghose: Yeah, I think the idea of from within comes from this notion that it has to be aspirational within IT. We have to want to be the trusted partner, not be told by somebody that that is what you should be. So, we have to want to have a seat at the table. We want to have to excel. And I want our entire IT team to have that aspiration, not just me the CIO. And it will require building our collective muscle up and down and across the organization to develop that persona.
So, what that looks like in practical terms is that we build our capability around a core set of attributes. And this set of attributes are things that are visible to our business partners in every point of engagement that we have with them. And across the entire function, up and down the entire function that people recognize the IT function for what it is because of how we show up.
Uh, now I want to qualify that by saying that I am proud of our IT team. So, this is not about a hole that we are trying to dig out of. It is more in the spirit of continuous improvement and being intentional about it.
Intentional about doing something that we are doing organically in different places, but now putting it in a package and giving it a name and a center of our consciousness.
MD: Yeah, I think the comment on continuous improvement is really, really spot on too. Because your team, like all of our teams, teams want to win, right? Teams aspire to be successful. No one comes to work and says, I want to be bad at my job. I want to have a low trust environment with my business partners, any of that.
And so, this idea of kind of identifying core attributes in helping do the skill building and development makes everyone, everyone on your team more successful. And of course, your business partners and the enterprise more broadly. What, what are some of those attributes? Do you have some examples?
Attributes of IT as a Business Partner
Rahoul Ghose: Yeah. So we’ve settled on, and we worked on this quite a bit, but we’ve settled on roughly half a dozen what I call external facing things that I want our business partners to see and recognize us for those. These are things like 200% ownership, customer centricity, having a growth mindset. These are three of the six. And we want these, as I keep saying, to be exhibited up, down, and across the function.
I’ll give you an example. One of the attributes is technical expertise, which you would expect. That’s what we are, you know, put on this planet to do as an IT function to provide that. But I want that expertise to be visible, commensurate with our place in the organization. So obviously technical roles will be deeply technical, but I, as the CIO should personally know enough about, say, cybersecurity or AI to engender that confidence and trust with my peers with the CEO and the board.
And I shouldn’t have to feel like every conversation, I need my team to be present in the room or have to defer to them for that understanding. That’s pretty important because that is how that level of confidence is built, is when we show up, up and down and across the organization in, in, in a consistent way around these attributes.
MD: Yeah, you know, you and I, have collaborated on some technology leadership, professional development type things. And I think that that nugget in there of you can’t know every technical detail, but you do have to know enough and be in the weeds enough to drive confidence with your leadership, with your peers, with the board. I think that’s a challenging balancing act, particularly as folks are growing in their careers. And they’re having to give up some level of clarity on the details that they might’ve been used to, but without going to the other end of the spectrum of not having enough situational awareness and understanding.
So that’s a tough balancing act. I like that y’all are weaving that in for your whole team to, what is that level of technical understanding or technical acumen that might be required based on the role.
RG: Right. and just to build on that, we are even helping people on our teams who are deeply technical to be able to situationally rise above the fray because, just as I need to know enough to be credible to the constituency I work with, I want the folks who are in the sort of engine room also be able to expand their ability to kind of connect at a different level if they need to.
Not always, but if they need to.
Deliberate Practice
MD: Yeah. How do you actually do this? I always feel like, you know, you in these kinds of things. You’re trying to build a culture, build a brand. It’s easy to talk about it. I think you have done a lot of hands-on and experiential type learning. What does that look like? What’s the impact been of that?
RG: A specific thing that we’ve done, and we’ve been doing this for about a year, is getting my extended team, so my directs and their directs, to practice doing presentations to our executive team for the ELT. And these are real topics. These are not just made-up topics. These are things like presenting a proposal that we need to get buy-in from the ELT on all the way to an incident that occurred that we did a lessons learned exercise and the ELT needs to hear about what we learned from there.
So, we practice these once a month in our extended leadership team meeting, and we purposefully craft time for someone to make these presentations and we provide feedback in a safe setting so that that becomes something that, you know, can move forward in a more effective fashion. We’ve done these things not just for ELT presentations, but for any presentations that you’re doing to an audience that is, to use the phrase, one or two step removed from the work of IT.
That’s what we are looking to help train the organization. And so, that’s something that we have been doing very deliberately for some period of time. And the way that translates itself is that these are actual presentations that people end up having to make so that they’re just not training exercises, or that it stops at the practice and doesn’t go beyond.
MD: Yeah. I’m, I’m so glad you hammered home that point. Because I think that that idea that you are weaving this into your operational cadence and your flow for your team. It’s not, Hey, once a year we’re going go have a training session for half a day. It’s like, Hey, as we are navigating real conversations, real problems, things that you probably, in fact, are going to share with the rest of the executive leadership team or the board.
Giving your team members that opportunity to kind of put themself in in that position, exercise some of those muscles and try it out. I think doing it in a setting where it’s more real world versus kind of a simulated training type thing.
RG: And I have had them do the presentations themselves to the ELT. In essence, gives it that sense of realism that you move from practice to prime time.
MD: Yeah, exactly.
Stakeholder Empathy
MD: You know, another piece of this that I think is part of your overall vision and effort around this trusted IT function is stakeholder empathy. I know that’s something that that we have talked about before.
Can you share some examples? You know, tell us more about what you mean by that and maybe some examples of how you or folks on your team have learned to develop more empathy for your stakeholders.
RG: So, in concept, this is about being customer centric, right? But I’ll illustrate this with two examples from my career.
One was when I was at Cargill a number of years ago. Here I am down at one of our divisions and these grain delivery trucks are stuck at the plant because the Waybridge server is broken. And this has been happening for a couple of days. Things are lined up. My team tells me that they have the server on order and they’re tracking its progress and delivery progress.
This is a time when our hair should have been on fire. We should have been running around trying to figure out how to get to a solution in the moment. And for whatever reason, we didn’t put ourselves in our client’s shoes to feel that same sense of urgency. So, this is an example of what stakeholder empathy does not look like. I’ve always used that as an example to say, here’s how we need to be or not be.
The other one is more recent. At ECMC, we put our entire tech platform into the cloud about five years ago into AWS. We did that as a lift and shift, so the sense from my team was it can happen behind the scenes. There’s really nothing that the users have to really change or do. So, we can do it without engaging them and save them some time.
But the reality is that, though we did a lift and shift, that impact of failure, had it happened, would’ve been immense. Our entire company essentially runs on this tech platform, so I insisted that we set up an advisory board just to bring people along and enlist their buy-in into the process. We did that and turns out it was the right thing to do. Because obviously it gave them confidence because they were brought along every step of the way and it helped enlist their support when we had a few things that did go wrong because they always do. So, I use that also as an example of meeting our stakeholders where they are and putting us in their shoes is a very important thing for us to keep in mind.
We do that even when we put out routine announcements from it around, things like that we are doing to upgrade our software or hardware. We just are going through a Windows 11 upgrade, and it was important for me that the notification that went out to the organization was couched in terms that the users could understand and could relate to how it impacts them, what they need to do or not do. So we are becoming more purposeful about putting ourselves in the audience’s shoes and uh, I think that’s important.
MD: You know what I love about those examples and the way that you are coaching and leading your teams and folks you work with is, I think some of that is the distinction between IT management and IT leadership. Like IT leadership is being really in tune with your stakeholders, the business. It’s having a pulse on what’s important to them so that you and your teams are able to empathize with them before they tell you, you need to empathize with them. Right? I think sometimes when you have a collaborator, a business partner, whomever, and they’re very frustrated by something, you go, oh, I can see how you feel that way. I empathize.
I think the magic of what you’re doing is helping, build up your team’s ability to see and feel that ahead of time, right? And intuitively know what might be important because they’ve built that trust in some cases vulnerable, like honest relationship with their business partners. All of that I think helps drive that empathy up and that ability to understand and put themselves in in other people’s shoes.
RG: I think that is very, very aptly put this idea of being proactive in our sense of being empathic is very, very important.
200% Ownership
MD: It’s a good segue to, one of the thing I wanted to ask you about as it relates to the attributes and the playbook or the framework you’re using, which is, you said 200% ownership. What, what do you mean by that? Or tell me more about what, how y’all have defined that.
RG: So I always maintain that every point of engagement that we have with our business stakeholders, partners is a brand building, hopefully not breaking, moment.
And I’ll give you an example. This is another actual example from my past where the CEO meets this IT team member in the elevator and talks about his printer not working. And this person says, well, somebody else handles that, I don’t, and here’s the number to call, which clearly wasn’t the response that I would’ve expected.
The response would’ve been, let me follow through on that. Go back to the person, coordinate. And then circle back with the CEO to ensure it had been taken care of.
So that to me, the idea is that you are accountable. You feel ownership and accountable for the greater good, for the persona that we want to project across the IT function as a trusted partner and your action every day, even though it does not fall directly in your wheelhouse. Should be in service of that notion of being a collective trusted partner. and so, I use that example to again, show something that, um, I expect to see across our organization.
Consumer Experiences Shaping Workplace Expectations
Michael Daehne: Something that I’ve been thinking a lot about and working with a lot of our clients on is this idea that a lot of your interactions or my interactions outside the workplace as consumers. Those interactions have rapidly changed in the last 10, 15 years, mostly for the better. Not all, but what we expect from Delta Airlines when we call in or want to make a flight change or what we might expect from the app for our grocery store or Target or pick whatever kind of B2C brand you want to think about, those expectations have risen so much that we, we as individuals are used to pretty real-time responses and feedback and not a lot of, Hey, that’s not my department. They have figured out in their omnichannel experiences how to shield us from how they’re structured departmentally.
So then when we all come to work, we bring some of those same expectations to the table for what we expect from our IT teams, from our consulting partners, and in my world, from our vendors, whatever it may be.
And so I think that plays a huge role in this of what we all expect. We’re used to a little bit more white glove automation, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so, when you have the broken printer being told, Hey, that’s not my department, or that’s, that’s not my job. It, that really doesn’t land.
Rahoul Ghose: No.
MD: It never has. But particularly now, I think as the expectations have changed.
RG: I think just to build on that, you are absolutely correct in that our experiences in our own personal lives should be mirrored in how we think of ourselves in IT relative to our client base, because. Who would you rather work with? The technician who, who repairs your furnace and has a bedside manner, so to speak, or takes ownership of an issue. Uh, or somebody who pumps it off to someone else. I mean, think about it those ways as well.
MD: Exactly. Well, just a couple more questions then I’m going to get to the lightning round we always like to end with.
Challenges in Building IT into a Trusted Service Organization
Michael Daehne: Everything we’ve talked about, obviously you can hear the energy in my voice. I love it. I think I can see the, the value of what you’re doing, but I know it’s easier said than done. What are some of the challenges or roadblocks maybe y’all have run into?
Rahoul Ghose: I think the challenges are not very exotic. They are just regular challenges of getting everybody on the same mindset, getting people in the IT organization thinking very intentionally, purposefully about this is how we want to be, and this is what better looks like.
And the same thing with our business clients. This is what better could look like, even though we feel content with what we have. That is probably one of the big things. And the other is practice, practice, practice. I mean, these are even the example I was using about preparing for ELT presentations. It’s more than one round at it that gets you close to where you want to be.
So, people spending the time to practice, people taking the time to put themselves in the customer’s shoes before they send out a notice or a communication. That’s where I think the hurdles come about.
And so my job I see is to be that evangelist, to constantly put it in front of my organization that this is how we need to be, this is how we need to show up with all those six attributes, every opportunity I get, I like to say that so that it’s using the teachable moment, so to speak.
MD: Yeah, absolutely.
What, what’s next? Are there any other things on your, your radar or your plan as you continue to kind of invest in this?
RG: So, on this particular topic, it’s a personal passion of mine because I want to feel like there’s a legacy I’m leaving behind, a legacy that says we are a world-class organization and we are recognized for that. So, I want to systematize what we are doing organically, put a framework around it, make it part of people’s development plans and goals, and put it in a spot where it can endure even after I am gone.
I would say the work ahead is to give it a structure and a process that builds on what we are doing and have it be an ongoing thing.
MD: Yeah. Love that. Making sure that it, uh, is kind of sustainable and evergreen into the future.
Lightning Round
Michael Daehne: Okay, Rahoul, just a few more lightning round questions while we have you.
Interestingly, we’ve, we’ve spent most of our conversation talking about a lot of soft skill stuff. What’s the one non-tech skill you think every IT professional should build or have?
Rahoul Ghose: I’d say demystifying technology for non-technologists. I think that’s 90% of what I do in my job. I think everybody should know how to do that.
MD: What about the most underrated quality of a great IT leader?
RG: The great IT leaders are usually great business-oriented leaders, and I use the word business-oriented rather than just business leaders, because what I mean by that is they intimately understand the business model of the organization they’re in, and where technology can play a role in advancing that business.
MD: Yeah. What about a leadership mistake you’ve made that taught you something valuable?
RG: Oh, many, I’m sure. But one that comes to mind is having an overabundance of empathy. Where I did not make changes on my team fast enough and when I should have.
MD: Been there. Yep. That’s always, that’s always tough.
Last one, best advice you’ve ever received on this idea of building trust?
RG: Be authentic. Don’t have any hidden agendas. Care about what you do and, what people see is what they get.
MD: Yeah. Awesome.
Closing
Michael Daehne: Well, Rahoul, I have really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you for taking the time to share some of your ideas and, and indeed pearls of wisdom.
That’s where we started this conversation on building IT as a trusted service function. I think it’s going to be a really interesting and valuable listen to those who follow Inflect. Thanks for joining us.
Rahoul Ghose: Thank you. I really enjoyed the opportunity as well, so look forward to. Seeing how it turns out.
MD: Awesome. Thanks, Rahoul.
RG: Thanks.