Taking a people centered leadership approach with Ken Grady

Introduction

This week I’m joined by Ken Grady, the Corporate Vice President and Chief Information Officer at IDEXX.

We discuss Ken’s perspective on people-centered leadership and how it has changed in just in the past six months. We talk about the role of IT, the changes that are taking place along with several silver linings that these changes bring. Ken shares his perspective of how these changes are also impacting him as a leader.

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Speaker Profiles

Ken Grady Twitter: https://twitter.com/gradyken

Ken Grady LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-grady-9bba881/

IDEXX: https://www.idexx.com/en/

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Audio File

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Featured Hashtags

#CIO #Leadership #WFH #DigitalTransformation #CIOitk

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Podcast Transcript

Tim Crawford 0:02
The companies are looking for new ways to transform their business to remain relevant and differentiated within their industry. Technology now plays a central role in this transformation. Hello, and welcome to the CIO in the Know podcast, where I take a provocative but pragmatic look at the intersection of business and technology. I’m your host, Tim Crawford, a CIO and strategic advisor at Avoa. This week, I’m joined by Ken Grady, the corporate vice president and chief information officer at Idex. We discuss Ken’s perspective on people-centered leadership and how it has changed in just the past six months. We talk about the role of it, the changes that are taking place, along with several silver linings that these changes bring. Ken shares his perspective on how these changes are also impacting him as a leader. Ken Grady. Hey, welcome to the program.

Ken Grady 1:01
Thanks, Tim. It’s good to join you.

Tim Crawford 1:03
So, you know, Ken, we’ve known each other for some period of time. It’s great to have you on the podcast, but for our listeners, maybe to get us started, tell us a bit about who Ken Grady is, your company, and your role as CIO.

Ken Grady 1:19
Sure, as you mentioned, I’m CIO at IDEX Laboratories, which might not be a household name unless you’re in the veterinary care or animal health space. It’s a diagnostic company, diagnostics and software focused on animal health, on companion animal, livestock, poultry, dairy, water testing, and obviously all of us are very engaged and aware of the importance of diagnostics, blood testing, screening, et cetera, these days with the human health crisis, and actually recently IDEX applied our diagnostics expertise and launched a COVID 19 test as well. It’s a really, really exciting place to be, and an opportunity to contribute to the communities in the current crisis. Obviously, it’s a great shared sense of purpose. I’ve been in the role for almost six years. In fact, my anniversary is next month, here coming up in August. It’s this really dynamic, interesting space. I love life sciences. I’ve been in human health and diagnostics and vaccines industry and molecular biology at New England Biolabs and Novartis, before that, and Chiron and GE Healthcare, so it’s just it’s a space that I really enjoy. It’s a great opportunity for me to help bring technology into kind of advancing care and diagnostics.

Tim Crawford 2:30
Now that’s great, and you know, one of the things I know you talk about is not just the technology but the human component of that, and when I think about that, you know, one of the things you do talk about is this concept of people-centered technology leadership. Can you share what you mean by that, and why is it important?

Ken Grady 2:49
Well, I was talking to somebody recently about this, who joined the organization. She was laughing, and she was saying, “I didn’t expect it to be so people-centric, and I said, “You know, when you think about what we do, I know there’s some stereotypes out there, right, but I said, look, what do you think about what we do? It’s actually really natural, because our job is so much as technologists, is so much to introduce change, you know, we’re deploying new features, new platforms, new apps, whatever it is, new processes, we’re asking people to change their behavior, change their experience, and if you’re not people-centered, if you’re not really thinking about whether it’s your customer experience or your employee experience, change management is a lot harder, right. We know that, and so I think it’s natural for technologists to really be people centered, or at least it’s certainly a strength when we bring a people-centered focus to the user, the customer, the employee experience is we’re thinking about technology and advancing it, and that’s why I think it’s really core to who we are, and as technologists and leaders, it needs to be a part of our conversation,

Tim Crawford 3:52
and when you talk about people-centered leadership, I also think about how things have changed for us over the last six months, I mean, our world has been turned literally upside down in many different ways. How has that changed how you think about people-centered technology leadership?

Ken Grady 4:10
Yeah, I mean, even going back before COVID, right, what we call the before times, you know, this is not the IT that this is not the IT I grew up in. I mean, I’ve been in IT for 20 plus years, dating myself, but again, change is just a natural, and here we are with Covid. You know, it’s been a catalyst for change. I mean, certainly unexpected, not all positive, but there’s a number of silver linings. You know, we’ve all gotten really good at virtual meetings, we’ve all had a masterclass in business continuity, you know, and across organizations, and the connectivity, the collaboration, the coming together in a shared purpose, you know, is really at the forefront of my mind in terms of how do we create those experiences, how do we, how do we onboard new employees in a completely virtual world, how do you get people to embrace the culture of an or. Organization, when you don’t get that chance to meet face to face and break bread, and I think there are some organizations that had already progressed down that road. I mean, you know, certainly, as I think about my team, we had a flavor of that, because, like, a lot of organizations, I have a global team, and so there was always some virtual component to any meeting that we had, or conversation, or work, but now we’ve leveled the playing field, and we’re all virtual all the time. There’s some great silver linings with that, in terms of really forcing us to think about inclusion and belonging for a virtual team, but there’s also some challenges that come naturally with that, where you can’t just grab people in a hallway conversation, you know, or have the unstructured interactions that you would when you’re just face to face, face to face meeting. I was just talking about this with another colleague, and I said, you know, when you have a face to face meeting, you can get a little lazy, because you know you’ll have the opportunity to interact. You don’t have to plan it as much, because you know you can just kind of put yourself in a room with a whiteboard and get some stuff done with a virtual interaction where you have a different dynamic of, you know, taking turns to speak, and, and some other pieces to gain attention. You need a little bit more planning upfront to get the same value out. On the other hand, that becomes much more efficient, because you’ve actually planned that conversation in a different way. So that’s kind of the, the yin and the yang of moving to a completely virtual world. I think that we’re facing,

Tim Crawford 6:25
yeah, that’s that’s interesting. I hadn’t necessarily thought of it as more efficient, but that’s an interesting take on it. How has this kind of changed who you are, who can is as a leader, and maybe some things that that you’ve evolved within your style, within the way you think, beyond just the people-centered technology leadership.

Ken Grady 6:45
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting because we’re all using video, we’re using Zoom or Webex or Bluejeans, or whatever your favorite is. I think I have them all installed at this point, but you know, we get a view into people’s lives, like people get a view into my life, and it’s interesting, because I’ve had junior people on my team, you know, new employees or whatever, that are joining, that have reached out and shared that they appreciate seeing me at my kitchen counter, you know, with my kid next to me during a meeting, or and I made a rule pretty early on for my kids, who, you know, I had, I have two children, and they were both had to go to completely virtual school, and the rule was, you can always walk in. I don’t care what meeting I’m in, you can always walk in and ask me a question, because they were really, you know, they had their own struggles to go into online, and my team appreciated that in ways that I didn’t even think about up front, but it was helping to tell them it was okay too, and actually seeing into people’s lives, like seeing their home, seeing their families, maybe their dog, their cat, you know, we’re an animal health company, so you get extra points if your dog shows up on screen. That sort of offsets some of the lack of face-to-face interaction, because you became more vulnerable and more human. And I started a.. it wasn’t planful, but in the first week or two that we started working from home, I started doing a weekly wrap-up video, and you know, I’ve used video for a lot of meetings, etc. but I just pointed my phone in my head and just started talking about whatever, and that got in, actually, into a routine with my team, and I recorded, and I, we use Microsoft Office 365 so I use streams, and we, you know, have a kind of enterprise YouTube channel now with CIO messages, and again, my global team, who not weren’t always able to real time dial into a town hall or a Webex because of time zones, found a new way to consume information and a weekly update about what was going on, what we were thinking about, and I, you know, answer any question they ask, and just make sure, and so it just became a more personalized message than I was doing before, and it, I’ve actually really enjoyed what started out as an experiment, I plan on keeping going forward as one of my primary communications channels, because the response has been terrific,

Tim Crawford 9:01
and that, that seems to be a pretty common thing that I’m observing. I know you and I have been on calls when another CIO has brought their dog into the frame, and we’ve had the conversation shift to their dog, not about CIO-related issues, but it, it brings that human component to life, right? It shows that, hey, we’re not, you know, someone necessarily sitting in a glass tower. If I bring a stereotype into the mix, but we’re real too.

Ken Grady 9:29
Yeah, and I think that, again, that creates this empathy in the conversation that perhaps now more than ever is just really important, because people have these stressors, you know, and they’re worried to read the news, I get worried, you know, and just showing that, hey, we’re human too, we’ve got, you know, I got to help my kid with his homework, or whatever, is good. I think it’s been, it’s been a positive engagement factor.

Tim Crawford 9:51
I can remember and relate early on in the process where my little one immediately shifted to online Zoom classes, structured class. Classes and she came into the room in the middle of a conversation I was having with a couple other CIOs, said I can’t get connected, I’m having trouble, and so it’s like hold on a sec, I’ll be right back, and so I had to exit the meeting, go play tech support, and then come back, and that’s just it’s an example of the reality of the world we live in today.

Ken Grady 10:21
Yeah, I was going to ask if the other CIOs jumped into tech support mode, because sometimes I found myself doing that. I’m like, well, go click this button and try now it is, and you know it also, because I’ve been thinking a lot about, like, I mentioned before, how do you, how do you continue the culture, or how do you help people find that culture in your team that you’re trying to set as a leader, you know, in times like this, or with kind of this experience, and this has been one of the things. So, I’ve actually, I’ve actually inserted some running jokes into the weekly video series. Number one, as you know, because, as you mentioned, we’ve been on a couple of calls together, I’m barefoot 95% of the time, because one of the benefits of not being in the office is like, hey, I’m not going to the office. You can’t make me wear shoes, right? It’s fine. And so that’s that shows up on video. I also have some pop culture references. Everyone is kind of named like a friends episode as I send them out and stuff, and it’s just a little bit of humor, a little bit of that culture that you want to create, of, hey guys, like we can’t take ourselves too seriously. We’re here for work. We have a shared purpose, but we have to find ways to de-stress at the same time, and so that’s been part of the messaging as well, and again trying to build that empathy into the org, that that culture of appreciation and that culture of support as we move forward,

Tim Crawford 11:32
and you know, beyond culture, you know, when you think about inclusion, and to your point about who’s barefoot on the call, and I remember one of those calls where everybody went around at the beginning of the call. Okay, who’s currently not wearing shoes? Who’s not wearing shoes?

Ken Grady 11:46
So, there’s like 60% of us were not wearing shoes.

Tim Crawford 11:49
60% of the executives on the call were not wearing shoes. It was hysterical. That’s

Ken Grady 11:53
right.

Tim Crawford 11:54
But I think it also goes to show not just that we’re human and we’re real, but we’re dealing with the same things as everyone else on the planet. It’s not, it’s not like some folks are immune to this and others aren’t. Everybody is having to contend with it, and so in some ways it’s almost a forced inclusion of some sorts. You can’t separate, okay. Well, Ken has it better than Tim, or Tim has it better than Ken, or is immune to these types of issues, and I’m curious, how that’s kind of fitting into to your thinking, and what you’re experiencing.

Ken Grady 12:32
Absolutely, you know, it is a, it’s a unique moment in a lot of ways, and no doubt there will be dissertations and white papers written on this, and studies, but to your point, this is a crisis that is happening to everyone. It is not singling out a.. I mean, it obviously has different impacts on different industries, on different geographies, but it’s a shared moment. And you know, we.. we talk, you and I talk, and we show up in different conferences and meetings, and we.. we’re all talking about the same thing, all of us. I don’t care what industry you’re in, I don’t care what level you’re at. We’re all talking about it, and that creates this opportunity in a way to find common purpose, to share best practice, to, you know, help support one another. That I think I’ve, I’ve – I don’t want to say enjoyed, because that seems like the wrong word, but I’ve certainly appreciated that we can reach out and leverage that network, and I have, honestly, Tim, I’ve leveraged – I mean, I’ve always been pretty active in leveraging the network, and you know, talking to other CIOs or other IT leaders or industry analysts or others about, like, what’s going on in the trends, but I’ve – I have ramped my game up in the last few months on this. Have the good fortune to live in Maine. It’s a beautiful part of the world. I’m two hours north of Boston, so it’s very convenient for a lot of things. There’s not that many CIOs in Maine. It’s a small town, we all know each other, and we have a network that we form where we call each other and say, “Hey, how you dealing with this? You know, what are you doing for work from home? What are you doing for.. are you seeing this in security? And, of course, then there’s national groups, and there’s other communities, and I’m probably spending at least two or three hours a week in conversations with groups of CIOs or IT leaders outside my own company, just sharing and talking and supporting and asking, you know, these kind of questions. You know, what are you doing for an internship program when you’re completely remote. How are you thinking about conferences? You know, what do you see? And I have found huge value in that. And so, certainly for those listening, I hope and encourage – I would encourage you to actively, because people are glad. Kind of the flip side is, I find myself talking to like the same 15 people most of the week, right? Because you don’t run into people in the hallway and have a different conversation, so I’m talking to my direct reports and my peers and my colleagues, you know, and it’s mostly the same cast of characters, maybe it’s 20, I don’t know, but this gives me an opportunity to talk to different people and get some different perspective, because otherwise you’re kind of in an echo chamber and you need some of that innovation and that happens when you have. Of you know new dialogs,

Tim Crawford 15:01
but arguably, Ken, why now? Why is that happening now? Because you could have done that six months ago, a year ago, five years ago. What’s changed now? That’s that’s kind of changed your thinking, but also changed your action of how you’re executing on that.

Ken Grady 15:16
As I said, I mean, I have always been fairly good and active at reaching out and talking to others when the opportunity presents itself, but you know, I’ll give you two answers: one is kind of a professional one, and one is a personal one. On a professional one, you know, I do want to make sure that I’m positioning my team, my colleagues, my company to take advantage of if somebody’s out there getting good best practice. Now’s the time. I really need that. All of us do, and a lot of the things that we do talk about in these, about how are you dealing with these are not competitive things. This is not a secret sauce. This is helping all of to your earlier point that we’re all facing the same challenge. So these are things where we can kind of a rising tide lifts all boats kind of thing, that’s one thing on the personal side, you know. Quite honestly, like many others, I have to ration how much news I’m watching these days, because there’s a lot of negativity out there, and there’s a lot of challenge, and you can go down a pretty dark hole, and what I found is, so, again, live in Maine, right? So I taught my kids to ski, and when you teach your kids to ski, if you’ve ever done it, you know, you teach them your body goes where your eyes go, and if your eyes are always focused on the crisis, on the bad, on the negative, on the risk, then you kind of.. it’s a difficult place to lead from, it’s a difficult place to help support your team or others from, and so I found that I found a positive benefit for myself, just personally, in talking to others and offering support where I can, and taking support where the, where it was available, you know, in terms of my own attitude, my own outlook, my own opportunity. So I found a real benefit from that,

Tim Crawford 17:05
you know. And if you think about how that impacts us going forward, and you know, maybe post crisis, or post the virus crisis, post the economic crisis, how it impacts us from a social perspective, how it impacts us within the workplace, or whatever the workplace may look like from your perspective, I mean, where does the future of work come into play, and how does that, how does that evolve? I mean, you’ve learned some things along the way that that were surprising for you too.

Ken Grady 17:35
Yeah, I, you know, so there are things that I think we always have taken for granted that have now been challenged, and we look at and go, “Wow, did we ever really need to do that? Right? I mean, you know, am I ever going to go to another conference in San Francisco with 140,000 attendees? Right, is that really necessary? Do I miss it sometimes? Yeah, I mean, I actually miss getting on the plane and going and eating, you know, in the restaurant and things like that, you know, the silver linings of all that kind of stuff, but

Tim Crawford 18:01
well, maybe not the plane, you know, the restaurant, okay, but not the plane.

Ken Grady 18:05
I’ve never actually enjoyed travel, like the act of travel. I enjoy being in that other place, but we can import, and we can invent teleportation, that’d be great. I’m sure Elon Musk is working on it. No, so you know, it does challenge some, some of the old ways that we worked, and so the silver linings of some of this. I’ve always been a big believer, and I want to hire talent wherever the talent is. Right, time zones are hard to get around, but otherwise I just want to go where the talent is. And we have absolutely demonstrated that we can work effectively that way, in a way that there may have been just inertia or resistance against just organizational resistance in some companies against and I think that that is super, just think about from a diversity perspective, which we have challenges in technology, we know that when women are underrepresented, particularly at leadership levels, we know some demographics are underrepresented, and you know, here I am. I mentioned our headquarters are in Maine, you know, which has a certain demographic balance. Well, if I can really open it up and make the organization.. well, the organization is now very, very familiar with distributed management virtual teams, right? And now I can.. hey, Uncle, are you in Atlanta, Memphis, London, Japan? I don’t care. Honestly, we have great work to do in a fantastic team. What that does from a talent attraction and demographic perspective is a huge bonus to the organization, because we gain that diversity of experience and perspective, you know, from international, from a demographic perspective, which is awesome. Now that means some development of skills, right, from a management perspective, from a team management all the way up, and what the new normals are going to be, but I think that that’s one of the exciting outcomes. Again, maybe exciting is the wrong word coming out of COVID, but it’s one of the silver hidings.

Tim Crawford 19:57
Yeah, it’s something we’ve learned, we can actually work. Remotely, and going back to that old adage, that meme, if you will, work is a thing you do, not a place you go. And I think the great experiment has kind of shown that we don’t necessarily have to go to a place, for most of us, we don’t have to go to a place to do work.

Ken Grady 20:16
Yeah, I mean, there are roles, I mean, you know, I work alongside research scientists, and it’s hard to do genetic sequencing in your garage, right? So, we need laboratory space and such, but you look at the balance of things, and to your point, there’s a lot of our roles that we can do remotely, and we should be doing much more extensively, taking advantage of that.

Tim Crawford 20:36
Yeah, how does that create a potential advantage for your organization from a competitive standpoint, either your org or a broader organization.

Ken Grady 20:46
I’ll just speak broadly about, you know, technology and it, and whatever company you’re in. This is a moment where we, I mean, honestly, Tim, it looks like some of us could see through time and had prepared, you know, we were like, okay, we know what pandemic’s coming, so we’re going to have Zoom, but we’re gonna have Webex, we’re gonna have like all these tools available in Box and OneDrive, and whatever it is to work remotely, work in the cloud. No, we didn’t know that was coming, but we knew these technologies were enabling us to collaborate and produce differently, and I think organizations that position that had already positioned themselves for that are right, I have risen to the top in terms of effectiveness and continuity, and those that were behind perhaps have some catching up to do, right, and I think that that’s going to create that sense of, of are you, and that is both again on the employee experience side, that’s on the customer experience side, are you thinking about how you’re changing the way your customer interacts with you, with your customer’s customer? Are you supporting that? Are you there where they need you to be? Those are the organizations that are going to prosper and create competitive differentiation, quite frankly. And those in the that have some catching up to do really got a lesson in that over the last few months.

Tim Crawford 22:01
Yes, I completely agree. I was just having this conversation yesterday with someone, and we were talking about the classifications of folks, you know, folks that are looking at at the world very differently and recognizing that things are changing demonstrably. And one of the other classifications were those that are kind of taking a wait and see approach, kind of sticking their head in the sand and saying, well, we’ll just wait till things kind of play out, and then we’ll figure it out later. And I’m kind of curious, like, your your take on that?

Ken Grady 22:28
I don’t think this is a wait and see moment,

Ken Grady 22:30
honestly. I mean, there’s definitely uncertainty in our future, you know. We haven’t conquered COVID as a race yet, and you know, we’ll see when a vaccine comes out, we’ll see therapeutics come out. You know, there’s a lot of speculation, there’s a lot of science, there’s a lot of great science. Is one of the things I, one of the reasons I’ve always kind of stuck in life sciences industry, because I’m fascinated by this stuff. But I think this is definitely not a wait and see moment. This is a really a scenario planning, certainly a focus on continuity, and focus on the customer, and focus on enabling productivity is more important than ever.

Tim Crawford 23:02
Well, and it kind of goes back to what you were saying, right around people-centered leadership. Is think about your employee, think about your customer, and then use that as your guiding principles to make the other decisions. So, where do technologies come into play here? As you think about how this is evolving, you think about what you’re going through what others are going through. What technologies do you think are game changers? You mentioned a couple of cloud technologies, and they’re not asking you to name companies necessarily, but just more are there technologies that kind of stand out for you that you think are game changers as you kind of look forward,

Ken Grady 23:41
yeah. I mean, certainly, you know, all of the collaboration-esque technologies, you know, document creation, certainly video conferencing, you know, all without, without naming names or naming favorites. I mean, we all have our flavors, and there’s reasons for that, but we’ve seen those that have really benefited from the rapid adoption, which is great. You know, one of the other interesting things I’m saying, too, is that as people shifted to working from home, so it’s a little bit of a sideline, but as people shifted to working from home, you know, all of us kind of run a CIO part of your job is IT operations, infrastructure, help desk support, right? It’s interesting too, because I’ve always kind of been frustrated with the fact that, like, if somebody’s, I don’t know, mouse broke at work, they’d come to the help desk, and I’m like, what would you do if your mouse broke at home? You’d Google it, right? You figure it out. And as people shifted to working from home, we’ve seen that trend, and it’s not just in my.. I’ve actually talked to others, and we’re seeing that as well. Is that people are becoming more tech fluent, more tech proficient, more self-sufficient, and that reduces the cost or drag on IT operations for the enterprise, then you can shift to other things, and I think that as this has gone on long enough, I think that it’s got a little sticking power, which is really interesting to me. And so we’re deploying other, I think there are other interesting tools for self-service, and again, whether it’s in your customer or in your employee experience that people. Are interested in, you know, service chat bots and those kind of tools that I think are useful, because we’re all like, you can’t just drop by the genius bar, you have to figure out another way to connect and monitor, certainly other things, like, you know, there’s security, because now we’re securing 1000s of offices, essentially at your home, versus a few core, and so that’s a changing dynamic as well, and I think that that’s something that we have to really pay attention to. There’s been some interesting, you know, the bad guys are not taking any time off, and we’re all responsible again for security and risk management too. So there’s this kind of pros, and then there’s these watch outs, and the trends applications are generally just doing what applications do, you know, your core ERPs, they’re going to keep doing what they do, they’re going to continue to be essential to businesses, but I think these other things are changing the dynamics, are changing them more, more actively at the edge.

Tim Crawford 25:51
This is great. So, as we’re kind of wrapping on this episode, I just want to ask you one question. If you were to kind of pinpoint what’s exciting you most about your role as CIO, and where you go from here. What would that be?

Ken Grady 26:04
So, you know, I touched on before, so this is not the IT I grew up in, and that’s awesome. You know, it is the most exciting time. I’ve said this before, you’ve heard others say, but it is the most exciting time ever to be doing this job. I love my job. I honestly, I love being CIO, because you get to work with every part of the organization, you know, from the front line to R&D and product development, and bringing products and services to market, and you just.. it’s just a fascinating place to be in any enterprise, and the role that we’re playing today in technology leadership, and thinking about the art of the possible, and talking about what’s necessary to get there, I think we have this moment that people have recognized that technology is the glue that’s going to hold us together as we face really unprecedented and challenging times. It’s going to be the enabler of connection and community and purpose, and you could be in a for-profit or a nonprofit enterprise. You could be in almost any sector, and technology is a part of the solution for how businesses are continuing to grow and prosper, and face these challenges, etc. And being in that role as a CIO to broker and help enable that, or at any level within the IT organization, frankly, today is some of the most exciting times. We will look back on this and see this as an inflection point in technology.

Tim Crawford 27:28
That’s great. It’s always great chatting with you, Ken. I very much enjoy the conversations that we have. And thank you so much for taking part in the podcast today.

Ken Grady 27:38
Thanks a lot, Tim. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Tim Crawford 27:41
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