Hot Mess Hotline

The demands on IT leaders have never been greater. You’re expected to be technically brilliant while also leading your teams through constant change and disruption. But what happens when your “superhero” drive to do more, learn more, and be more starts to work against you? As Michael Pompey, Chief Information and Transformation Officer for the Girl Scouts of Eastern Pennsylvania, shares in a recen...

The role of the CIO has never been more demanding. In today’s rapidly changing technological landscape, CIOs are tasked with not only managing complex IT infrastructure, but also leading their teams through digital transformation, driving innovation, and ensuring cybersecurity. The pressure is immense, and the stakes are high. Many CIOs find themselves at a crossroads. They are technically brillia...

What if accountability isn’t a weapon? Empowering leaders, like Kerry Siggins, have embraced accountability so highly that they wish for that kind of freedom and ownership for everyone around them. Most trainings on accountability say to “Hold employees accountable.” What if, instead, we invited employees into accountability. It’s an invitation into empowerment. Accountability is a topic we discus...

Scaling without structure in IT often allows bad behaviors to create toxicity in a culture. The Change Architect’s executive coach, Tonya Wallace, shares an experience scaling a team where one person’s toxic behavior was limiting autonomy, creativity, and decision making. This team had recently gone from launching an innovative product to then maintaining it — but the team hadn’t adapted its speed...

Are you accountable for action or outcomes? Jason Botts is an innovative, results-driven technology leader who creates high-performing teams. He is passionate about creating tech transformation that actually matters to its companies, customers, and stakeholders.  We discussed why benchmarks aren’t good enough and how trust and listening can solve even the worst tech disasters. Listen to this episo...

Extreme ownership for IT leaders means: if you’re involved, you own it. Brian Burk brings his IT leadership experience to our conversation with his wise counsel and practical tools for accountability. Today’s projects are complex and have moving targets. It’s easy to want to avoid responsibility for results. But you’re here because you’re a leader that wants to see big change so avoidance is unacc...

How about a specific example of technical debt and its cultural consequences? Ken Knapton shares a real world example where tech silos and cultural silos reinforce each other. This company had several overlapping solutions that wasted money and created at least $5 million in cash expense — while individuals were losing their jobs! If you’re struggling to articulate the case for why technical debt...

Insider threat detection comes from new school technology and old school relationships. Robert Field learned of sabotage coming from one of his employees from a trusted relationship outside of the organization. Yes, technically, technology could have detected this. But the reality was that Rob’s focus on relationships saved his company’s bacon. He had people around him that cared about his success...

What got you here won’t get you there if you’re a leader driving growth and transformation. Ravi Bommireddipalli is a CEO who focuses on unlearning as much as he learns. For Robosoft’s next level, he’s being charged with leading the company to where it has never been. Along the way he’s going to become a leader he’s never been. And he’s going to grow more leaders so that not all operational detail...

Every step of growth has its own challenges and hot messes. CEO Asad Ur Rehman learned these lessons the hard way as he’s grown from freelance software developer to CEO of a 300-person global firm. There’s a myth about success that when you achieve a certain salary, revenue, job, client, etc. etc. etc. THEN things will get easier, better. Here’s the good news: as you uplevel, you get more challeng...

Do you know how to tell the story of your career when there’s too much variety in your resume? Adrian Koehler is an executive coach who has transformed a “hot mess” of career experience into clear confidence for how he delivers compelling value every day and in the present moment. This episode is for you if you’re working to develop the through-line to communicate how your variety of positions can...

Making decisions isn’t always hard, but taking action on the decisions can be hard. Alexei Miller is a leader who lived that firsthand when his company’s locations were caught in the middle of international conflict. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Data Art’s “people first” philosophy was put to the test.  A decision for their Ukrainian employees felt like a betrayal of their Russian colleagues. And...

Successful leaders find themselves creating alignment during change. Michael Judd shares one of his initial turnaround gigs where he learned this skill directly and then took it with him for the rest of his career. Learn from his experience and self awareness: Do you know your business’ safety net and risk tolerance? Do you know how to create clarity when there’s confusion? Do you know how to alig...

Richard Luna came to a hard realization when he said to himself, “If you micromanage, then you’re not managing.” As his business and team were growing, he learned — the hard way, of course! — that he was controlling too much: filtering 1,000+ emails a day; creating specific dispatch schedules; putting out fires; selling services; being the CEO, COO, CSO, and CTO; working 18-hour days, the whole sh...

Leaders lead humans and people working together, not robots working together. Denise Cooper and I explore this topic in a very frank conversation. We’ve gone off course with leadership when we think that multi-tasking and motivating all employees in the exact same way is going to work in the 21st century.  Humans can’t multi-task; hell we’re not even supposed to have multiple priorities. (“Priorit...

IT executives have too many root cause analysis examples to count. Benjamin Pulatie is a leader and entrepreneur who’s no different. But because of his mega hot mess he learned how to take control when everyone was in charge but no one was in control; and check his emotions at the door. Listen to this Hot Mess Hotline episode as Ben describes how he methodically evaluated what wasn’t working acros...

Solving the right problem with change management is a perennial problem for IT leaders. Juan Betancourt is a tech entrepreneur who is willing to keep looking in the mirror, ask the hard questions, and continuously improve until he gets it right. Our conversation focuses on how he led his team through massive business shifts because that’s what it takes to keep up in his industry. Leading a team th...

Leadership is about taking risks, not seeing into a crystal ball. Pamela Diaz is a leader that asks her team to trust her enough to take risks with her. And she returns that trust with empathy. Here at The Change Architects, we work with a lot of teams that demand all their questions be answered from their manager before they move forward with plans — which stalls progress and problem solving. And...

Resistance to change doesn't always show up in your team like you think it does. Jessica Carroll is an executive who has driven multiple digital transformations as a CIO and Chief Customer Experience Officer. The same lessons that apply to "going to the cloud" also apply to digital transformation and how to use AI in 2023. In this episode we discuss how it's easy for the leader t...

Have you ever felt like you weren't delivering the results as an executive that matched your compensation? Scott Couchenour is our faculty member who can tell you exactly why and how to get you focused on results, actions, and the mindset needed to do the strategic work necessary at your level. It's easy to get sucked into too many meetings, too many decisions, and too many tasks. As a sen...

Action and empathy move at different speeds in companies. Don Monistere is a longtime IT leader who has driven a lot of change. He's led the acquisition and merging of several companies and freely admits that plans on paper sometimes sound great and play out in the real world in a terrible way. He cares deeply about his people and he has a strong bias for action. For those of us who have a bia...

How do you come back from burnout as a leader? Jimmy Burroughes was an overachiever who tried to prove himself for too long and burned out. In epic fashion. As someone who knows he's here to make a difference in this world, he wanted to do too much, be too much, and was burning the candle at both ends. One day in 2017 it all caught up with him and the life that he had unraveled. Luckily for hi...

How to say "No" in IT is tricky. Heather Darring shares with us what's even trickier: saying Yes too frequently, projects going out of scope, and then reading an IT audit that says, "You suck." Okay, okay it didn't actually say that she and her 1 colleague sucked, but it described missed expectations and she took it personally. Years later she's able to share how th...

Courageous leadership is a choice. Deseri Garcia is a coach and faculty member here at The Change Architects. Because she's been in the trenches as a leader, she knows what it takes to have hard conversations, lead with clarity and vision, and adapt to those around you while maintaining authenticity. Deseri's experience is now in teambuildng and coaching. Specifically she creates teambuild...

"Challenge the status quo!" The executives we work with shout this from rooftops with their teams. "Business as usual" means a slow decline toward irrelevancy. The reality is that a business that isn't growing in some way is in decline and shrinking the value it's bringing to the world. And "growth" doesn't always mean revenue, profit, and headcount. Growt...