Adapting to Rapid Technological Changes, with Grant Walsh - podcast episode cover

Adapting to Rapid Technological Changes, with Grant Walsh

Apr 04, 202543 minEp. 32
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Episode description

On this episode of the IT Matters Podcast, our hosts are joined by Grant Walsh, Head of Information Technology at Flow Control Group. Together, they discuss adapting to rapid technological changes and what makes a good leader.

Thank you to Zscaler, this episode's sponsor. Zscaler, universally recognized as the leader in zero trust, employs the largest security cloud on the planet. Their cloud native Zero Trust Exchange platform protects thousands of customers from cyberattacks and data loss by securely connecting users, devices, and applications in any location.

Conversation Highlights:
00:00 A message from our sponsor at Zscaler
[01:55] Introducing Grant Walsh, Head of Information Technology at Flow Control Group
[09:08] Leading IT teams in a changing landscape
[20:51] Finding a good culture fit
[31:46] Building a strong IT team
[39:49] Grant's message to CIOs

Notable Quotes:

  • "You have to be able to get out of your office, get in the trenches with the folks, and be there, side by side." – Grant Walsh [32:42]
  • "Be a CIO of the people. Understand your team. Be part of that team." – Grant Walsh [40:09]

Connect with Grant Walsh:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grantwalsh/

Explore Zscaler's Offerings:
Website: https://www.zscaler.com/

The IT Matters Podcast is about IT matters and matters pertaining to IT. It is produced by Opkalla, a technology advisory firm that helps their clients navigate the confusion in the technology marketplace and choose the solution that is right for their business.

Transcript

A message from our sponsor at Zscaler

Aaron Bock

Welcome to the IT Matters podcast hosted by Opkalla. We're an IT advisory firm that makes technology easy for your business. Our vendor neutral technology advisors work

Leading IT teams in a changing landscape

directly with your team to assess technology needs and procure the best IT solutions for your organization. On this podcast, expect high level expertise from our hosts, plus experience driven perspective from the leading experts on topics like AI, cybersecurity, industry focused IT solutions, strategy and more. Now let's get into today's discussion on what matters in IT.

Keith Hawkey

This episode is brought to you by Zscaler, the world's leading cloud security platform. Let's talk about VPNs and firewalls. They've been the backbone for security for

Building a strong IT team

decades, but let's face it, they're outdated complex. It can

Grant's message to CIOs

hold your business back, and that's where Zscaler comes in. Zscaler takes your organization off the network and into the cloud with their zero trust exchange making your security simpler, smarter and more effective by creating a direct connection between your users and applications they need. Zscaler eliminates the unnecessary traffic jams and reduces costs and complexity. With Zscaler, your business

isn't weighed down by old school infrastructure. You'll increase agility, improve security and enable your teams to move faster than ever before, all while knowing your data is fully protected. So why stick with the old when the new is this good? Transform your security with Zscaler and experience true business agility. Visit zscaler.com to learn more and take the first step toward a simpler and secure future.

Welcome to the IT Matters podcast hosted by Opkalla. We are an IT advisory firm that helps businesses navigate the vast and complex IT marketplace. At Opkalla, we work alongside IT teams to design, procure and implement and support it solutions without an agenda or technology bias. But on this podcast, you can expect a high level of expertise from our host, plus interviews with leading experts and topics like AI, cybersecurity, industry specific IT solutions and

strategy. Now let's get into today's discussion on what matters in IT. Aaron, who do we have the pleasure of guessing on the IT managed podcast today.

Aaron Bock

Yeah, it's good to see you, Keith. We've got Grant Walsh, who is the leader of infrastructure and security at Flow Control Group based here in Charlotte today. Grant, welcome to the show.

Grant Walsh

Thank you, sir. I am pumped to be here.

Aaron Bock

Love the Opkalla orange that you've got on today. Oh, there we go. We go way back with grant. So he's a he's a fan, and we're a fan of him. So thanks for joining the show where we're excited to to interview and learn from you today. But I think Keith's got something for us to start off with today, So Keith, I'll pass it to you.

Keith Hawkey

Yes, I have a little little trip, yeah, game for the two of you today, if you're willing, Grant absolutely you're willing to put your mind to the metal, two truths and a lie. And it is based on the recent CES robots edition consumer electronics 2025 that they had earlier this year. So I've come up with there's three robots I'm going to introduce, and two of them are actually at the event. One of them is completely made up, okay, all right. Are we ready? Let's go.

Ready? All right. All right, team. Let's play a quick round of two truths and a lie. CES robots edition, hey, here we go. Option a Meet mirumi, a sloth inspired emotional support robot that attaches to your bag and reacts bashfully when touched, averts its gaze and even size when overwhelmed by attention option B, say hello to toast. E, a bread scented AI robot that delivers motivational quotes every morning while toasting actual slices of bread. And option C then there is arrow cat

tower, an air purifier that doubles as a luxury cat tree. It cleans the air and tracks your cat's weight and syncs your phone to deliver daily feline wellness reports. I. So we have marumi, the emotional sloth. We have toast e the motivational toaster and arrow cat tower, the air purifier, feline health and wellness expert.

Grant Walsh

They're all legit. They all actually could see any one of those being an actual robot.

Aaron Bock

Yeah, I Grant, I don't know I, I'm thinking B. The smell of bread just seems like a random smell that some AI bot made up.

Grant Walsh

I could, I mean, I yeah, I mean, I think people love cats a lot. A lot of viewers love cats. So I can see, see for sure, being one and tracking your cats weights important, I guess, and the emotional support sloth, we all need emotional support, yeah, I mean, and that's, and that's airline friendly, so I feel like you could take it when you travel. So that would be, you know, benefit there the toasting one. I just seemed as much as I say, No, I still say like, well,

it does multiple functions. It gets toast, and it smells like bread, and it gives you motivational quote, The Adeline, B is the lie.

Aaron Bock

I think B is the lie.

Keith Hawkey

And the answer is, b, that is the lie. Congratulations. So you have both won the beta version of marumi, the emotional support sloth. Let's go. So expect that in your mail there actually is a toaster that, instead of toasting bread, you slot your phone in there and it charges yourself. So it's a little bit of a variation of that

Aaron Bock

I did see that it charges it in like, under a minute, or something crazy. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, thank you for indulging us with with that wonderful CES trivia today. Grant, we're excited to have you on the show today, I guess, for the audience out there who don't know you and your background. How about start with your introduction of just how you how you got into it, and your journey to where you're at today as a leader in it. And then we'll kind of dig in from

Grant Walsh

Yeah, if we go way back, back into the 19th, 1900s there. the name golly, my it, don't say it career, but me for it, have always been, I guess. Remember 1986 getting the Commodore 64 and typing out commands in a book and run running games that way, and putting ball cards into a small, little database back then. But I've always been kind of a tech guy when it comes to it did that worked at Radio Shack from back in the day, for a lot of folks who don't know radio check, but that was, that

was the place to be for technology. But overall, for, you know, the actual IT career started back in 2003 in the infrastructure operation side of things. Majority of my career

really has been in leadership. So I've had opportunity to grow from, you know, a lead service engine, a service engineer or it analyst, depending with how you call the roles up through, you know, site managers, regional managers, senior managers and some large organizations have the opportunity work for some smaller companies where you get to do everything from E commerce, social media, ERP, service desk, the whole nine

yards. So good exposure there. But now, you know, in the in a director capacity, or head of infrastructure and security for the company. Met now, but it's been about, I said, 22, 23 some odd years in IT with like so the vast majority, in the in a leadership capacity. And that's really been the most fun, working with people, watching people grow, driving cultural

change. That is, that's, that's that's my bread and butter. Like some, some people geek out on technology, and I, I used to, but now it's like just, you know, helping people grow, driving solutions to the business and just driving that change wherever. You know you have to work. I don't think anybody, and you know that I've worked with ever comes in, I don't have to work. I'm just here for a good time. But you know, trying to make it a good time is really what's been the joy of my career so far.

Aaron Bock

And I guess on that, because if you think about you, you just said you're not you used to geek out, maybe not as much now. But like, if you compare the IT function in a business to accounting, marketing, et cetera, it's all changing because of technology, right? So technology is what's driving it, and in technology, it's growing. It's changing faster than ever. So like, what's, in your opinion, like,

is it harder? Is it what's the difference between leading, like, an IT team and keeping good culture, versus, like, maybe an accounting team or a finance team, etc? And the organizations you've worked at,

Grant Walsh

I think today is different because the technology is changing so fast that we're kind of at a tipping point in terms of, there's a lot of good IT, engineers, services, people, people that know technology for a while, but we're pivoting to, and I think Cloud's been around, obviously, Cloud's been around for a number of years, but we're kind of tipping into, do we

have. Enough expertise on the cloud side? Do we have enough expertise on the AI side that you're trying to encourage to help people grow into those new areas so they'll get passed by? Because if you've just been server 2016 windows on on the an IPv before type environment, and that's all you've ever done.

Cool, but those opportunities are lessening and lessening because technology is changing so fast, so trying to have a culture where you want people to grow, and then trying to, as a leader, you know, kind of pour into that growth and want people to grow, and then the folks that don't, and your company's evolving and changing and becoming, you know, they're adapting to this new technology, having those real, honest conversations with folks that don't want to change that maybe

this isn't the place for you. So it's it's tough on the IT side, just because that there is so much change happening so fast that you have to keep your people up so they don't get passed by.

Keith Hawkey

Those are great points, Grant. I mean, you guys are moving very quickly, and I'm curious, how would you describe the team culture and the IT department of Flow Control, What? What? How do you like if you're in if you're interviewing a prospect to join your team? What would you say about the culture that you instill.

Grant Walsh

So the culture we try to drive, from a leadership standpoint, is really a servant leadership culture, where we pour into our team, we try to help our team grow. But one thing that I've done, and I've had the opportunity to build the whole team here at Flow Control, when I got here, was me, one service desk person and two engineers, and now we're much

larger than that. We've built out the entire team, but I value the input of all our engineers, all our services folks, all of our managers, so much so that when we do interviews, it's not me doing interviews. I want it to be a cultural fit so that team is comfortable working with this new individual. Like, are they going to come in and chip in where necessary? Are they going to come in and wear a lot of hats? Like, I'm if I'm coming in, I'm just a backup guy. That's not really what we're

looking for. You have to be to feel flexible to do servers. Today could be a networking issue. Tomorrow, could be working with a partner in the firewall. Whatever the case may be, is be flexible and be concerned about your team. Now my my goal from leadership standpoint, is to ensure that culture is not burning you out. So we do do a, I think, a good job in terms of trying to set that line of work life balance. So it's the expectations. You're not coming in working seven days

a week. And I know some IT groups do. They work all the time. They work nights, they work weekends. I've been there, done that. That's tough, and sometimes you have to go to that while you're building that change, because you're trying to get everything where it is. But I think we're at with Flow

Control Group. I control group. Sure, you're gonna do patching, you're gonna do some migrations at night, you're gonna do some things here and there, but the norm is not to have that work life balance so skewed that people get burned out and don't want to come in the next day. So I want to make sure our team has that, and that's the kind of culture we sell when they when they come in, they're going to come in, we're going to have a good time. We're going to, you know, I won't say we're family,

because that's kind of cliche. Because we're not family, we are work buddies. We're gonna do our jobs, we're gonna go home, go a separate ways. We can leave and come back the next day, refresh. I don't want you to, I don't want to be your work buddy. I don't want to, you know, I love you guys when you're here at work, but when we leave, go home your family, go home to whatever makes you happy. So tomorrow you're recharged and you're ready to work. And then again, when something blows up, and it

does, you're an IT. Something will happen. Will blow up that All right, everyone stops. How can I help? What can I do? How can we rally around this problem, get it taken care of, and get back to what we were working on before? So that's the culture. We built a Flow Control Group, and we have a really, really good team, and I think, not by any force. And Aaron's been there and met our team, not by any force, not by anything

that's directed or demanded. We've ended up with a very diverse team of individuals from different backgrounds, different ethnicities, different gender, just everything by no force. We just find the right people, and they are so good, and I have in those different perspectives when they look at issues or

concerns or things. Hey, here what I think, or here's what I've seen in the past, has helped us really push, you know, push things forward and drive that kind of truck, that change we're looking for just through natural, just, you know, experience that they've had. So again, we haven't gone out and tried to look for this stuff, and we just hire the right people. We have our team again, interview everybody. We bring the teams of people and say, Hey, so we're interviewing for

this role. Who wants to jump in and help out interview. And the questions are great because you get questions from all over the place, and you see how people react and and then we go back and take their input, and I don't make the final call, like, I'll if the team says this person is the rank the highest, then we'll go with that person. And then, you know, I'll interview them if I think they're great fit. I may ask questions or not, but so far, I haven't said, Oh, the team picks

somebody. And I said, No, it's always gonna, everything's worked out. So it's, it's a really good culture here of a real team input and transparency and just be honest with each other. That's been the big thing for us, too, to really build that trust amongst the team. Is nobody's BS in anybody. It's all and whatever I tell you is the truth. I'm not going to give you blow smoke up your butt. This is, this is what's happening. So,

Keith Hawkey

Yeah, I think you're exactly right. And you mentioned something that this sticks out to me is that, no, these, these are our colleagues. They're not our family. They're fundamental, fundamentally different. And you, I think, I think for a while, and even today, I mean, you'll go on LinkedIn and you'll see companies advertising. We have open slots in our family. Why don't you come join us? There are different types of relationships that both can be

positive. I'm curious. You've been leading IT. TTS, IT teams for a long time now. I'm always curious as to what is, what do you think some of the wisdom, kind of the older wisdom that may be may have been lost in your years of managing IT teams. And then also, what are some of the new wisdom that you think older IT managers might be able to take advantage of? That's

Grant Walsh

pretty tough. Okay, so older wisdom that's been lost. I think there's as I touched on before, that, not an IT or not. I mean, honestly, if you're an IT, you've picked the wrong career for eight to five, that's just and I think that's lack of transparency and honesty sometimes can bite us. And just like, listen this role, yeah, during the time, you're gonna come at eight, you're gonna go home at five, you're gonna take

your lunch, do your thing. But if you're an engineer, if you're security, forget that nine to five stuff and stuff you know, the attackers don't normally hit nine to five. So that's some of that old wisdom, just being honest people, that this is not that kind of job. And if you came out of college thinking that the late nights you did study, and the late nights you did writing reports, that still happens here. I mean, don't

write reports. You don't study. You'll have a teacher, you have a test, but every day the test, and you're going to have some late nights and things you have to stick around for. I think new knowledge, new wisdom, is really that, I think early in my career, it's, you know, there was the lack of, how do I grow? Was always tough when, before I became a leader, like, how do I grow into my next opportunity? How do I get to that next spot?

I think companies has in generic these trains are out there, but nothing specific to the career path I wanted to have. So I think in the newer wisdom, for folks coming out of college, how do I keep growing? How do we get to that next role? And they want it fast. They want to be there. I started here, and a year

later, I want something else. Okay, well, let's make sure we put the training in place to get you there, but let's also make sure we're doing number the role we have today that you're assigned to do that do its best before we talk about that role, let's make sure you excel here. Before I go talk about the next role, do that. I think this is, this is kind of go back to old wisdom. You know, you're doing your job and you're training for

Aaron Bock

Yeah, and I think you could take that. What you the next role. Your training typically happens after hours, and it's been a tough thing to sell you. You take your training and see you make sure you can go to, I think Opkalla does a great job with some lunch and learns. We've done a lot of stuff there, send people to different Azure trainings and things like that. That's been great. But if you're really serious about moving into that next cloud role, security role, AI role, whatever it is,

it's going to take some of your time. We're going to invest, as an organization, in you who may pay for it, pay for search,

things like that. But your time is your time. I can't give you the time that you need to do your job then go off to the training, because we still need you to do your role, but we're willing to invest to help you, support you, talk about it, create that path, but you got to give your time, and that's a hard thing sometimes for folks to understand, like, well, I need to, I need Tuesdays off every week for the next 12 weeks. Do this training. Well, that just takes me out, you

know, a number of hours I don't have a good support. And that's not saying we don't support you, because we are financially, and we are, you know, enthusiastically pushing you along, but you need to invest your time. It's a partnership here in terms of getting you there. And I think that's some old wisdom that's hard to sell to some folks, because, well, I'm doing this for you, like you're not really doing it for

me. You may get this role here, but if we think about long term for you as the employee, and if I'm really, I care about you, that next role may not be here, and that's okay if you grow out of what we can offer you, and your next role somewhere else, I will give you a recommendation, because I don't have that opportunity for you here. So we're investing in you. Sure it would help us short term, but long term is going to help you in your career.

just said, that's, I think that was a very great nugget of advice. You could apply that to almost any industry too, because I know at Opkalla, I always tell people when they're interviewing or when they're joining the first 18 months if you put in the maximum amount of effort, which does mean after hours sometimes. And so I can't, I can't sit here and say you will be the most successful if you only work 40 hours. That's up to

you. I can't make you do anything at night, but if you want to get the most ahead, you want to have a fast start, it's going to take some self learning, some some work after hours, some organizing after hours, whether that's a cert, whether that's a course you want to take, whether it's just understanding what you're doing. And I think anyone would say that that like, the the longer you've been in it, yeah, you can kind of hack the system, because you've been doing this forever,

and you can use experience you have. But if you're new and you're trying to learn it, that's how you have to get it. You just have to put in the work. And so Grant, I have a follow up question to that. It's kind of two parts. So one, first part is answering, from. Um, like, if you're if to our audience members who do interview, and the second one is, second part of the question is to people that are interviewing. So you mentioned how you do interviews today,

where your team interviews, and then you'll do an interview. But you also, we talked about how tech is, is changing very fast. There's new tech, there's new concepts, there's new industries, right? And so culture is important. How do you like, how do you interview someone who is possibly, who has skills in an IT segment that's maybe newer, that you're not as familiar with, and you're trying to validate how well they could be in that role, balancing, like, their knowledge with the

culture. Like, how do you weigh that? Like, what are you trying to ask? Like, what are you trying to uncover in that interview, from your perspective, to make sure that one, they can do the role, and two, they keep the culture that you have and are a good culture fit?

Grant Walsh

Yeah, I think that's, that's a good question. I think it's one of the things where you can teach tech skills, but I can't teach cultural fit, right? So I'm always going to lean to cultural fit over tech skills. So if you can do it for the most part, for what we know versus what we don't know, we

can, we can figure out the rest. I think there's also, without saying, I'm not going to go in there blind, we've been able to leverage partnerships with whether it be an Opkalla, or some other, you know, partners we use that are industry experts in these areas that we may like today. We're as we grow, we lean

heavily on partners for certain areas of expertise. If I want to shift that internal or not even get rid of that partner, but bring somebody in to help us internally, have some expertise and have more insightful conversations with these partners, because I lack the internal I can engage them or have engaged them in the past to help us do some of the interviews. Now we're in an interview with myself and this other person who doesn't work here, but is an expert in that

field that we need to hire you for. So if that person is, yeah, they are, hey, there's, you know, our partner told us they're 75% of where they should be, but I think our team interviews them and they're like, 100% cultural fit. We'll go. Because if I can find somebody that fits us culturally, that's more important right now than, you know, finding that tech expertise. Hey, the perfect tech expert, because a lot of times they're so focused on this one

area that they can't do anything else. And even if I bring you in for AI or bring you in for cloud security, you're probably gonna do other stuff. I mean, we're now imagine with, you know, being in Charlotte, we have a lot of, you know, Fortune 500 companies that have very siloed folks who do very specific

things. I have a number of friends that do that, and that's great for them, but in our org, where orgs I've been in, you're gonna have to do a lot of different things, and that cultural fit is more important for us, that you have the flexibility and willingness to help out whenever that issue comes up. And

Aaron Bock

so flip side, you just kind of hit on it, but to that person that you that's on your team or is interviewing, or they've been the server 16 person for a while, or they've

been the backup person for a while. How do you besides just making sure that they fit and they do what they're supposed to do, how do you convince them, slash, help them understand, like, evolving in their current role and in their education is important and and make sure that they're taking on new roles and making sure they're taking on new certifications, etc, so that they don't get left behind because the tech passes them by.

How do you coach that? Have you? Maybe there's an example of someone that you talked to for, you know, with a for about a year, and then all of a sudden it kind of hit them, and they they started realizing they needed to do it. Share an example.

Grant Walsh

Yeah, I think that's that happens. So we do, you know, when I first started here, I didn't have the management team I have, far as you know, kind of a tiered option between infrastructure, operations, security, so a lot of the folks reporting directly to me. And as we grew the team, we built out a management team. But even in the one on ones I had with all the engineers or the the operations folks that

they're those meetings really focused on. Not only okay, what are the big issues you're dealing with each week, but what are you doing week to week to help improve yourselves, make yourself better. Where do you want to be so that that's important to make sure on those weekly one on ones, or even now, with my managers making yourself you're making sure you're ready for that next opportunity, whatever presents, because you

really don't know when it's going to show up. I mean, sure I can plan to grow this role, but lot of times there are unexpected changes that may pop up a new opportunity. I think we've had some folks along the way, and even here at Flow Control Group that we've coached for a while, hey, you've got to get ready for this. You know, we are seeing a shift to more of the cloud. I talked about cloud a couple times today, but you know, we're seeing more that shift off the on prem, to the

cloud. And we have a partner now, and we understand it to an extent. But you know, Azure AWS is different than your legacy on prem day. So we have a number of engineers. Somebody's got to step up and want to take Azure. I can't force you to. I can't, I can't push you into it, because you're not going to do it. Because you're not going to do it. You're not going to want to

do it. I need somebody that wants to excel. And we had an individual that, you know, is managing some legacy technology that, hey, we're going to outsource this technology to a partner that does it on the regular, whether it be a phone system or firewalls or the case may be, that's going away. So when that goes away, what are you going to do? Because that's been. Your primary role for a long period of time, what are you going to do? Because at that point, what are you adding to

the team? If that's all you're working on so and finally, it was an aha moment. Oh, that's true. And think about that. So now they're pivoting to taking the training, putting a process together that day, in six months, we should be here 12 months. We should hear making sure that the manager and that the manager and that person is working together, that their

progress is moving on. Hey, we are again, full support, paying for search, paying for training, making sure that you're involved with the projects that are with that partner today, so you energy. Can get some exposure, so you can see how things are done, you can ask questions. So again, just really investing in that person to help them grow, and then just keeping that pulse, making a point every week, on your one on ones, or your bi weekly one on ones, where are you at? How are we

moving? Because you know, if you don't do it on a regular basis, then it slips, and next thing you know, it's been a month, two months gone, and that's for this individual. Hey, man, I've been here two years. We talked about this a year and a half ago, and you're finally getting the point. Imagine where you would be if you started a year and a half ago, when we first told you that this is somewhere you should go. So it's just again,

it's, we've had that happen. It's sometimes, I think people, it's a thing too, where everybody's got busy lives outside of work, and they have to want to invest that time as an employee. And then sometimes you got to paint it, pick the picture, form this solution that you're doing today is going away, or you're all this work that you do is going away. What are you going to do? And then sometimes it's like, Oh, crap,

yeah, I needed to get that. I need to get moving on that I need to get moving on that so I don't get kind of left behind.

Keith Hawkey

That's such a unique aspect of of being in technology, especially today, especially over the last 10 years, because you're right, like the job that you've trained for and the job that you're doing. I mean that that technology could be supplemented by a partner in six months or a

year, and now you no longer have to manage it. And then you have to find either a new technology to manage, or you have to move into leadership, or you have to find another usefulness of your time, which is certainly unique to IT and unique to technology, just by the nature of how the market is moving, and how there are more and more companies that are able to offer automations and they're able to offer services that can do the job

better than one individual at a particular company. How do you like how many, how many people have you interviewed in your life? How many candidates you think a lot of number on it. Lot,

Grant Walsh

hundreds, across the career hundreds, yeah, at least across all the companies I've been at. Yeah, 500 Okay, okay. I will say the majority of my career is building teams like it's coming in with either a you're assessing and rebuilding, or you have nothing. And hey, you get to build from scratch.

And that's why, why I came to Flow Control. So you come there, you think about that, all those different opportunities I've had to build teams in every role, you're interviewing 10 people, or whatever it is, it's a lot of people

Keith Hawkey

In the interview process. How do you convey this message? Because this is just almost as if, hey, we're interviewing you for this job. But how do you convey the message that there may be a chance that you might not be doing this in a year's time. And we also need to be thinking about culturally. We need dynamic employees that that that want to grow and develop and want to chase the challenge,

chase the next technology, chase those cloud opportunities. What are some of the ways that you're able to kind of filter the candidate pool. Convey this in an interview, I'm curious about how that conversation goes.

Grant Walsh

We always listen for, you know, in most candidates, I ask, you know, even when I'm in there, sure I took this this role, what's my path to the VP role? What's my path through the CISO role? What's my path here to where I want to be? Like, I'm asking the VP of HR, I'm asking them who, whoever my manager would be at the time, who were, you know, the CFO that I interviewed with, what's the path there? So we're listening for those kind of questions too from our

candidates. Like we say one of the biggest things I feel an interviewing process like one of track of coach people on is like, when it's time to ask questions, ask questions. Don't say, I have nothing. You have nothing. You literally, you have nothing. To ask us, because one of the questions should be questions should be, hey, I know I'm higher being higher for this role, and I want to learn this role, and I want to do it great,

but the next role, what do you guys do for that? Like, that's not a question that I know you're not interested in growing, and maybe you're just nervous, but then you're not prepared. So it goes both ways. So we're looking for those types of that feedback, because in our interviews that they're not. It's not a stuffy area. You're not sitting across at a table all by yourself with like five people there just firing questions off. It is a conversational thing. We try to

joke. You'll see the culture in our team when the interview happens. So we're looking for that. I mean, for me, I I cannot. I say it. We want to grow people. And I say that in an effort to try to get that back and forth. And it really comes down to the candidate we're listing for certain key things to say we're looking for them to, you know, where they want to go. And I'll give an example too, on the security side. Because, you know, security is a very niche or

specialized area. And just like you know, if you want to have hired a Salesforce admin, or you hired cloud security, or just security in general, try. To find the right people who have the actual experience, not just book experience, but, like, hands on. I've been in the trenches to fight, you know, the attackers and people coming in. I've done this, and I've seen this, not the ones that just go off and play with flipper zero or, Hey, I've, you know, watched this podcast. Cool. But what are

you doing? And how are you growing? Because security is evolving rapidly. You know, the attackers are getting better and better. And better. The use of AI is getting better and better. So what are you doing? So if we're not hearing that, if you're not already investing your own time, and that you haven't set up Cali at home and tried to hack this or hack that, or you haven't done some basic stuff, then it's like they're

not interested in growing. You just want you got you went to school, got your degree, now you want the money, but you're not really want to grow. You feel like it's done and it's not done. If you got an it, it's not done. Like, if there's just, should be more of that in the in the interview. And we're trying to listen for those keys and like, and we're not going to come out and say, Tell us exactly what you're doing at home. We're just listening like, hey, what do you what are things

you've kind of got into? What have you tried on your own? And, oh, this is my first interview out of college. Okay, cool. What have you done? And like, you get, there's so many free, free opportunities to build your own virtual environments, set up things on your own, try to hack things, set up Active Directory

in your own. You can do this on your own. That's what we're looking for, because that means you're willing to take your time, invest in yourself, and then we can come along there, and we can kind of, you know, boost that too, by paying for search, paying put you around the right people, get you in the right in front of the right tools and solutions. I mean, all the solutions we have today on the security side, offer

training. Now, you can become an expert on trainings, but if you're again, if you're not doing that on your own, what am I to think that you're actually going to change that? When you join our organization, you're just going to do your job here and then go home, and then tomorrow, come back in and start over again. That's gonna be a slow progress forward a year

from now, you'd be like, when do I get to move up? But you haven't done anything in the last year, other than do your job, which is great, but you kind of do your job and then figure out how you get that next step on your own. So you

Aaron Bock

should, you said you're you've throughout your career, you've been fortunate enough to be able to build teams. So interview a lot of candidates, bring them on. Stand up teams. Take, let's take the IT leader that may be listening to this, or who is struggling to create a great culture. So either they realize that their culture is not as good as it could be, or they're newer to an organization where the culture

may be lacking for whatever reason. What advice would you give to someone that doesn't get to just go hire a whole team of people on how to create a better culture in IT and create the, you know, the motivation to go learn things on your own, and the motivation to help out your teammates. How would you do it? Or what advice would you give that person?

Grant Walsh

So I think when you're building a team, or you have trying to cultural change is you don't want to be a an office leader, so I'm staying in my office, and I'm just kind of barking commands from the office that will kill culture in a heartbeat. You have to be able to get out of your office, get

in the trenches with the folks, be there, side by side. And you're trying to first building things out until you have the expertise that you want or you're looking for, and you have those leaders that you need, you've got to be out there to be one of them. And when you mess up, you got to say, Oh, I messed up. You know, we're all doing this together. Things happen fast. You react fast. Sometimes you make mistakes because you react fast. But being honest and transparent and people is a big

boost. I think, you know a lot, one of my roles we that I was in in South Florida, we went through with a team was called The Five Dysfunctions of the team, and that, you know that that bottom base is trust, like having trust, you know they have to have trust in you, that you're looking up for them, and vice versa, that you know they've got your back, you know, making sure that as a leader, I think one of the biggest things the leader Holly is, is running that buffer, providing that

cover for your team, because the business is looking for somebody when something goes wrong, to blame and point at. Let it be the leader. Don't. Let don't ever give a name. Hey, this person screwed up. No, no, no, no, you're the leader. You took the money, you took the title. You're going to take the beating. You know that's your job, to take the blame, and then you talk it over the team. Hey guys, we messed up here. How can

we make sure it doesn't happen? And while you're not saying, Hey, I covered for you, if you say that, then you've you've blown it up too, but it's really we've messed up. How can we do better? You know, what can we do to make sure it doesn't happen in the future? Listen, provide that back and forth. The team picks up on that. Individuals pick up on the fact that as a leader, you're doing your job to run that cover and to run the

kind of shield, if you will, from the team. You know, that's something I've always tried to do, is make sure I can run cover for the team. Allow them to do what they need to do. These are experts in what they do. Go do go do what you need to do, and I'll run the cover for you. And just that, that'll build culture really fast. Build that trust really fast. I think another thing for leadership is allow people to talk. Hey man, I'm having concerns with this or that. This tool we bought, or

this tool we're looking at, I don't agree. I don't think it's right one. Sure. Why don't you think it's the right one? Or why don't you think this is, is the right, not the right solution? Let's talk about that. Let's have that open door and do so in a respectful manner, and have that back and forth. And at the end of day, if it's something that you know, as a leader you have to make go with, be able to explain, hey, we chose to go this route because of A, B and C. I know you had concerns, but

this is why we went that route. Sometimes, in those roles, they don't. See all the details of the financials, or whatever the case may be about solution, or whatever it may be that you have to kind of explain that to them and be transparent about it. So I think transparency and trust are huge in building that culture and just again, getting out there. Don't be copy behind a door in an office, and just barking commands is not a place to be that'll kill culture really fast,

Aaron Bock

trust, transparency, speed. Those are our three core values at Opkalla. I didn't tell that to Grant before this, but he just named two of them. I think from my perspective, you know, again, I see different issues than you all do, but communication, like the communication to your team, and I always say, like, I have a huge hole in the middle of my chest from falling on swords for people, because sometimes we do mess up, and sometimes we just have to own it, and then

internally figure out, like, what went wrong? How did it go wrong? But like, we are all humans, and I think deep down, everyone understands that. And so what people crave the most from, whether it's their team, their partners, their you know, spouses, whatever it is in life you want someone to that you know has your back, and you can communicate with and then when things go well, they can communicate. When things go

wrong, you also can communicate. So I would, I would second that, and I would say that 95% of the issues that I deal with as a leader is related to communication and not setting expectations, and just not following through. And so, you know, I think, like you said running, you called it running cover, I would say falling on swords sometimes, like whatever it is. But Grant, as we close out, I got one, one for one last

question. Then Keith will, will close this out. But we're in 2025, you know, you've, you've you've been doing this 20 years. What trends in it excite you, or what trends in in IT leadership, or leadership in general, like, what do you see coming for leaders that will be leaders the next five years, or continue to be leaders the next five years that you care about, you're concerned about, like, any, any thoughts on that. I think because,

Grant Walsh

you know, we talked about, keep talking about things evolving so fast, I think you'll have a there's a lot of leaders in this that been doing it for a while, but you're gonna have leaders grow quickly that don't have the experience, and that of there's things that you can't learn to book. And I think a lot of things in terms of dealing with people, leadership is so

much about people. That's about technology. You can learn all the technology stuff you want to and I think, you know, Keith mentioned earlier, like people talking about, do they grow into a leadership role, or do they go into another technology role? There's a fine line of the people that need to go into leadership that don't. There are a lot of good technology people that should never go into leadership, because managing

people is vastly different than managing technology. Whether you can be a great technology leader, know the technology No, no systems and processes that are great, but that experience of leading people, sure, you can go leadership courses, you can go to different trainings on how to lead people, read books, do a lot of, you know, quotes, all that fun stuff, but there's

stuff you just can't learn until you've led teams. And I think that's something that you know, from a concerning standpoint, as we grow fast, you're going to have all these leaders pop up, so you have to turn into that. There's a lot of learning, and I think we'll catch up, you know, over time here with that. But there's a lot of new folks who jump into it because it is so

hot. From a cybersecurity standpoint, cloud standpoint, there are a lot of folks coming out that want to move up fast, and naturally, companies will see that progress and say you've done really good in this role. Is throw you into leadership role. There gonna be a lot of burn out there. It just happens, you know, naturally it happened years ago. It'll happen again here too, with the change in and cloud adoption and

cybersecurity. But, I mean, I think there's still a lot of exciting, lot of exciting things when it comes to I didn't say AI was cool, because you got to say AI at least three times in every chat. But even on leadership side of me. I talked to Gemini, we talked to Chat GPT, we talked to Copilot. I mean, that and that, the advancement in the this, you know, the the way to fill in the skills gap, if you don't have it, but you can ask it and get an answer, and you have a way to validate That's

truth. I mean, you can grow over your technology skill set. Now, I wouldn't lean on it 100% because if you ever get an interview, you'll be called out for it. We're going to know exactly if you know what you're talking about. But there's a lot of exciting things going on on the AI side, but it's also a lot of concerns there too. So there's, it's just a lot, I think there, again, there's a lot of growth opportunity.

People who grab, grab onto AI, grab onto cyber security and run with it, will get promoted into roles that just don't have the experience yet with people. But you know, I didn't have the experience of people when I first started, either. You just got to learn it and figure it out. But it's a fun challenge to have.

Keith Hawkey

Well, Grant out those very insightful we're going to wrap up here. But before we do, we always like to ask one question to everyone. I'm going to paint the scene here. Let's say Grant you are in Davos, Switzerland, and you are presenting in front of 1000 of the most powerful CIOs in the world. If you were going to going to convey one message that you think is missing at the top end of leadership and global CIO ism, what would it be? One

Grant Walsh

message? This for the global CIO ism

Aaron Bock

Keith just made up a conference for CIOs in Davos. Says this as if they need another conference. It

Grant Walsh

sounds cliche, but be, be a CIO of the people like to understand your team. Be part of that team. I think that's, you know, we had a VP here for a while. You know, he just left for the CIO opportunity, but he was the VP of the people the team. He talked to the team on the regular. He was here part of the team. I tried again to do that on the regular. It's always when you're a service desk person or you're a new engineer, sometimes you feel weird about talking to a VIP or CIO. He

should be break those walls down. That's the biggest thing. Because again, back to where we talked about, you know, the team can't trust you because they can't see, because you're often, it's never, never land, because you're the chief information officer, then it's hard to follow. It's hard to get behind that and follow, because you're just, you're that, you know the

distance figure. But that would, that would be the one thing be a CIO or leader of the people that you're you're leading, making sure you're transparent, honest people where you can obviously there's some things, there's some discussions that can't be had, but just being transparent, honest, and be part of the people and play lots of golf.

Keith Hawkey

Play lots of golf, I think you're gonna get a standing ovation for that. That latter part there at the network, I want to wrap up here. Really appreciate you spending some time with us this morning. Grant, it's always great to have insights from Dynamic IT leaders. We consider you a very impact heavy IT leader. So we really appreciate your time this

morning. We know you have a lot going on and in your traditional role, and we appreciate everyone that is tuned in to the IT Matters podcast for support assessing your technology needs, book a call with one of our Technology Advisors at opkalla.com. If you found this episode helpful, please share the podcast with someone who would get value from it and leave a review on Apple podcast or rate us on Spotify. Thank you, and we'll catch you next time.

Aaron Bock

Thank you for listening, and we appreciate you tuning into the IT Matters podcast for support assessing your technology needs, book a call with one of our Technology Advisors at opkalla.com. That's opkalla.com. If you found this episode helpful, please share the podcast with someone who would get value from it and leave us a review on Apple podcasts or on Spotify. Thank you for listening and have a great day.

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