Speaker 0 | 00:01.956

Welcome back to today’s episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m your host, Doug Kameen, and today I’m talking with Callan Schoonenberg, CIO at Wausau Supply Company. Welcome to the show, Callan.

Speaker 1 | 00:13.999

Thanks for having me.

Speaker 0 | 00:15.640

So, Callan, you’re in the Midwest, the upper Midwest. I did it. We talked about this before the episode started. I make sure I pronounce this right, and I want to do the Northeast thing, which is like the… calling it wasaw but it’s not it’s wasaw supply company wasaw supply company that’s right yeah get that wisconsin that wisconsin statement in here the so you’ve been there a couple years can you tell us a little bit about what you do at

Speaker 1 | 00:45.252

uh at wasaw supply company yeah i uh actually just started about four months ago so pretty new to the role oh yeah but the company moves pretty fast so i’ve i’ve gotten to to see and do quite a bit since joining, which has been a really fun journey so far.

Speaker 0 | 01:04.802

And so you’re new to this role, been there about four months. Prior to this, you spent, you had a pretty long career at a very major firm before that. I’m cheating by using your LinkedIn profile here, but you were at Eaton for a number of years. So tell us a little bit about your leadership journey and how you came to be in the CIO role and what made you want to make the jump from… from being in a larger organization to a more mid-market organization as the CIO?

Speaker 1 | 01:34.649

Yeah. So I had a really long, great career at Eaton, awesome company, and had taken various roles. I’m a mechanical engineer by background and studied mechanical engineering in Spanish. So I’ve had various roles throughout different functions. I think I have a very non-traditional probably IT leadership career journey. So it was an engineering operations supply chain, then joined IT really because I had worked with IT very closely for many years and bringing our data together, our engineering and our supply chain data into a central location where it could be used for continuous improvement.

Speaker 0 | 02:20.129

So we seemed like nice people, so you came to join.

Speaker 1 | 02:24.311

I feel like kind of the… the tech mind jives well with the engineering mind I had. So I could, I’d like to think that I can dig into the technical stuff and come back out. So yeah, it made, I guess, logical sense to join IT after that role in supply chain. But I was really, I didn’t even know it, but I was working as sort of a shadow IT agent, if you will. And I’d never even heard of the term shadow IT until I joined IT day one, actually, that somebody had mentioned shadow IT. And I was like, what’s that? And then I’m like, oh, wow, that’s what I am. I have been. So yeah, I was working for our CIO at Eaton and a phenomenal leader there. At the time, I guess shortly before that transition, I had reached a state where I just pursued a certificate at Harvard, the Harvard Business Analytics Program, and got exposed to digital transformation and how to lead through that and felt like I was ready to make the next leap in my career in terms of learning and impact. So I reached out to people inside and outside my network at Eaton. shared my career journey and shared where I wanted to go long-term. And, um, this kind of leads into kind of future maybe advice. I know that’s a question, but, um, but I had laid out my career profile, kind of who I was, what my interests were, what I got from all the, the non-traditional roles I had taken, the non-traditional path and laid out three long-term goals of where I wanted to land before retirement. And. And CIO was actually one of those roles because I had found, you know, through that Harvard Business Analytics program and my role in supply chain, I really enjoyed being in that digital world and saw it as a huge differentiator for companies. So I shared that with various leaders and said, hey, what advice do you have for my career? And that landed me in that opportunity in IT. And then I got. Not too long after, probably a year and a half into that role, I got called by Wausau Supply, a recruiter, and was very happy at Eaton, but was asked to take on this C-level role and was really excited about the opportunity. It’s been really fun. Totally different company. I knew if I left Eaton, I was a very loyal employee to that company and had a really great career there. So I knew if I was going to leave, it had to be extremely different. Either I’m starting my own company or going to a much different environment where I can grow in a different way and make an impact with my leadership skills in a different way. So, yeah. The employee ownership of Wausau Supply really attracted me. It’s much smaller than Eaton and it’s in Wisconsin, which is where I’m from originally. So closer to home and it’s been a really good leap for me. And yeah, it’s been fun. Great group of people here. Great leadership at this company and I’m happy to be here.

Speaker 0 | 05:55.215

Nice. So I’m going to plumb. your Eaton time, just a little bit.

Speaker 1 | 05:59.642

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 06:00.182

More for the purposes of, so a lot of our listeners, you’re now operating in the mid-market. Eaton’s not a mid-market company. Eaton’s a large company. And so a lot of our listeners are also mid-market, either leaders or working through the process of becoming leaders, aspiring leaders. And I think one of the challenges, or maybe one of, I’m trying to think of how to frame this the exact, the right way. You know, there’s two sides to frame it on. Your experience at Eaton availed you to their professional development and training services. A large corporation will oftentimes have a very sophisticated professional leadership development programs and tool sets and things like that. And sometimes at the mid-market, depending on who you’re under, it becomes a little more hit and miss at the mid-market. If you have a great leader who wants to bring those tenets and ideals to the space that they’re in, you might see it. But it’s not usually as uniform because it’s not as well-developed. So my question is, thinking about your experience at Eaton and the training that they gave you, what things were most impactful to you as far as developing as a leader that you would probably think to share, like now that you’re a mid-market leader, to share down to the staff that you see and you’re now leading as a CIO in the mid-market space?

Speaker 1 | 07:20.521

Good question. So I started in our leadership development. program at Eaton. So it was a pretty formalized structure in how to develop early talent. And I actually started as an intern, so had some early exposure to that more formalized training process at a large company. So it was neat. We’d have an annual conference with all the development program participants. So these are people recruited by strategic schools in the network for the first time. the engineering program in my case, but we had the same program for HR and IT. So we would have a conference and during those conferences, we would get to know each other, network with other senior leaders, but also go through formal training. Some of the training that stands out to me that’s been beneficial today yet is, you know, way back when was design thinking, you know, design thinking was a really beneficial training for engineering, but I also see it apply. very readily to IT. Agile is one that later, you know, in my most recent role, we focused on training people more formally around Agile. So those would be some that stand out to me off the cuff. But, you know, a lot of the training that I pursued really came outside of what Eaton provided formally. So I went and I got my MBA at night, part-time. There was, you know, support for that. but it was something I independently decided to do because I can see myself being 90 years old and still going to school at night. It’s just something I enjoy. I like to learn and I appreciate more of the formalized structure of learning, but also YouTube too. And then I did proactively pursue the Harvard Business Analytics program as a part-time program. And I really enjoyed doing those programs. part-time while I could still work so I could readily apply the concepts and the theory to my day-to-day job. And that made a huge impact on my career growth. I think, I mean, for me, that was a huge accelerator, just not only in like applying the theory and the formal training, but also just the confidence that I was able to build, especially being an engineer with the MBA, rounding that out with more business knowledge around finance, how to read a P&L. Today, that’s something I use that I didn’t learn formally anywhere outside of my MBA. And same thing with Harvard Business Analytics program. I mean, that was phenomenal for me to learn how to lead. with, by listening, you know, how to facilitate the professors at Harvard are really good about facilitating a dialogue. And what I learned there, contrary to kind of what I learned in engineering is there’s no one answer to a problem. You know, you, you pose a question and to 60 people from all over the world and various backgrounds and demographics, industries, and you get 60 different answers and they’re all right. You know, they’re all right in their own way. And I learned a lot from that whole process. So, you know, there is, there is, I think, importance for midsize enterprises to think about how to formally train, especially early talent and help them grow their leadership skills. But also, I think it’s up to us as individuals to take on some of that learning on our own.

Speaker 0 | 10:58.011

Yeah. So. You mentioned you’ve done some continued education work and things like that. What are there some specific like I mean, I think you touched on some of them, you know, the ability to read P&L sheets and, you know, kind of like more that like broad based business components that you brought from from just being a leader perspective. What what takeaways were like the biggest like what was the biggest takeaway you had from that experience of gaining additional like like. truly secondary education harvard analytics courses the leadership the leadership training programs and things like that what was the piece that resonated for you the most yeah i think for me it was a lot of the soft

Speaker 1 | 11:44.557

skill servant leadership type of concepts how to um from my mba some of the hr related topics were really interesting to me like tournament theory and how to, you know, promote from within as much as possible to drive incentives in your culture to get to, you know, build your own capabilities to make an impact on the company and make your boss look good, you know, how to inspire that kind of culture. at the company and how that improves your performance as a company. I think that was really interesting to me from the HR courses, giving powerful feedback, you know, being maybe Midwest nice, Wisconsin nice. That’s not always the easiest thing to do. So how to, how to provide feedback. That’s very clear. You know, that people get the message. You’re not trying to couch it or sandwich it in positive, negative, positive. It’s how to deliver it.

Speaker 0 | 12:50.124

This is clear as kind, right? I don’t know if you’ve read Brene Brown, but that’s one of the short and sweet ones. Clear as kind. So being clear is being kind.

Speaker 1 | 13:00.646

Yeah, it’s in everybody’s best interest to improve. So helping each other improve. And then the thing that stands out to me from the Harvard Business Analytics program around leadership was really mostly around change management. how to drive change, how to effectively manage change. If digital transformation is a big cultural change for an organization, how do you manage through that? How do you get buy-in? So those are some of the big concepts I think have really helped me in my career since learning that. And sometimes it was, oh, this is what I was going through. I’m learning the theory and this is how it applied to my prior roles too and seeing that every role I really have. been in has been about change management.

Speaker 0 | 13:52.465

So now in your prior roles, you’ve had some in large organizations, I guess this will be a qualifying question before we start. In a large organization, you oftentimes get into these matrix setups where you’re not necessarily the leader of the people, but you’re the leader of the process, if you will. So in what point in your career did you… Would you look back and recognize and say, you know what, that’s the time that I recognized that I was a leader as opposed to being the staff, if you will?

Speaker 1 | 14:28.236

Oh, that’s an interesting question. Yeah, it was part of a very flat organization early in my career. It was our R&D organization. And so, you know, one manager managing, I want to say it was like. 20 some people and most of them were PhDs with decades of experience and here I come in you know as part of this leadership development program I’m the youngest one one of the few. females, you know, less credentialed than everybody else. I wasn’t published. So still in that role, if I look back, I see myself, I was in front of these people facilitating an innovation workshop, training them on, at the time I was our environmental expert on product sustainability. So training large groups of people at various levels. from C-suite to individual contributor, facilitating conversations, brainstorming events, innovation events. So I don’t know if I realized it at the time. The question was, when did you realize? Maybe at that time I realized, okay, I can help command this room a bit and I can influence people. So maybe around that time, I guess. And actually at that time, I… two was on the side starting a small business with some of the same people these these phds and brilliant minds and here i was uh you know little c level in the making ceo in the making um building this this startup company on the side at night so yeah i think around that time probably my mid-20s i was realizing i maybe was exhibiting some leadership potential um And two, it was interesting. I had pursued, I just found a passion and I fully exploited it. And with that success just suddenly crawled out of the woodwork from all over the place. I got asked to do consulting. I got asked to be a peer reviewer on published papers. I got asked to be an adjunct professor at Marquette University. taught a course to, there was a professor in my class, there was a PhD in my class, there were master’s students in my class and bachelors. So I built the curriculum and delivered the class to these people of all, you know, degrees. So yeah, I think that was the point in my career where I really started to accelerate my leadership capacity.

Speaker 0 | 17:25.382

Now you mentioned, hey, you. You brought it up, so now I’m going to have to pull it out a little bit. You dabbled in the startup world a little bit. A little bit. Tell us a little bit about that. What lessons did you take away from that?

Speaker 1 | 17:38.966

It was extremely brief. And what I took away from that is, it was fun. It was a fun little project. We actually started to get some interest in investors and got to a point where we… were requesting funding. I think it was through a grant. I can’t remember exactly, but we were putting together a business case. And the point came where I was asked by my peers in this small company we were meeting, maybe I wouldn’t, I want to say it was like five months, we would meet every week at night and just brainstorm. And I was asked by two guys on the… the team, how much money are you willing to put into this? And I had, you know, at that point, I realized like, oh, that makes a lot of sense. I got to have skin in the game, right? How much skin in the game am I going to have? And I realized that I’d done enough due diligence. I’d visited similar startup companies doing the same or similar things that we were trying to accomplish. And I was worried about their financial sustainability. So it made me pause on investing my own money in that company. And we essentially like quietly parted ways from there. And I mean, so yeah, I think that’s what I learned from that. And it’s cool now being an employee-owned company where it’s a similar stake, right? I’ve got a personal stake in this company financially. And the company’s money is my money. So I act in that way. And I feel strong about the mission of the company. Yeah, I think that translates to today. Are you willing to put your own money into the company? Would you make these investments with your own money? Do you feel that confident about it?

Speaker 0 | 19:35.435

Nice. Yeah, that’s a cool lesson to have taken away from that. I feel like if I was repeating what I understood back to you, I would say that you got this clarity of purpose out of it. They said, okay, I want, will you do this? And you’re like, wait a minute. No, I won’t. So the answer is no. I guess that means I should.

Speaker 1 | 19:57.620

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 19:59.124

You know,

Speaker 1 | 19:59.545

I was in my twenties.

Speaker 0 | 20:00.807

That’s right. I mean, I might be broke, but even if I wasn’t, the answer was Coming to your current role with Wausau Supply Company, so tell us a little bit about what Wausau Supply Company does.

Speaker 1 | 20:15.537

So we are a unique player in the industry in that we’re vertically integrated. We do manufacturing and distribution. So we supply, we manufacture siding and doors, custom doors, you know, high-end entry doors. And we also distribute a lot of… building supply products that cover mostly the exterior of the home. So, you know, windows, doors, roofing, decking, siding.

Speaker 0 | 20:49.599

So you’re like, I’ve now, there’s certain parts of this that are clicking for me here. You have an engineering background and, you know, mechanical engineering. Not that that’s, you know, there’s no mechanical engineering in doors, but they are kind of a, they’ve long since been designed. Yes. But you have a factory floor. So you’re going through with industrial machinery and your team is working on a variety of how are we most efficiently putting this stuff together? We’ve got robotics here and we’ve got to support that. How are we building the network to do that in the best way possible?

Speaker 1 | 21:26.707

Yeah, it’s really interesting from an engineering perspective. You know, I’d still say this company feels kind of like a startup, but the. value that’s placed on innovation. Innovation is one of the core values. And during my interview, I had the opportunity to walk the shop floor where our siding and doors are made, and it’s configured to order. So from an engineering perspective, yeah, it’s a door, maybe doesn’t seem that complex, but to configure a door is actually a pretty sizable engineering feat. And then it’s automated on the shop floor. It’s a beautiful process, actually. That was something that… Really, one of the main reasons why I chose to come here is just the investment in automation and innovation at this company is extremely clear when you walk the shop floor. And having a continuous improvement background with Lean, everybody is hands-on. Nobody’s standing around, looking around, waiting for what’s next. Everybody is working hard to get the product out the door, and it’s beautifully automated.

Speaker 0 | 22:33.047

So that’s… That’s pretty cool to think about. It’s making me think about, as you’re talking about it, you’re right. A door, if you’re custom building it, is way more complicated than it sounds. Yes, there’s the four sides and a bottom, and you’ve got the panel of the door, and it swings open. But does it have a deadbolt? Where’s the window? A transom.

Speaker 1 | 22:56.537

What is a transom?

Speaker 0 | 22:57.457

Is there a transom window? Is it a side lights? You know, there’s all these secondary questions that come up where you have all these options. And so if you’re going to do this configured order but still have it automated, you have to think ahead about all the contingencies that can happen before you even start. Yeah. Because as soon as you hit an exception, it’s like, what do I do with this? Exactly. And then it’s a manual process and you’ve defeated all the automation you put in place.

Speaker 1 | 23:26.299

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 23:27.740

So, yeah. So, I mean, that sounds super cool. And I can think. I’m envisioning a very, I would say, a clean floor here.

Speaker 1 | 23:36.386

It’s extremely clean. I won’t try, but I think you could eat off the floor pretty easily in our shop floor, in our distribution centers.

Speaker 0 | 23:46.211

Yeah. So here where I live in upstate New York, the gentleman was a friend of mine, but he also was a client of mine, where he owned a chair manufacturing company that manufactured these folding chairs. Their name was Stackmore. There’s still a business. There’s another company owns them now. He sold it and retired. But their shop here was a factory built in like, I don’t know, the 1920s or 30s or something like that. And, you know, it was like wood machines and like there’s dust all over the floor and sawdust. And it was like it was like an old factory. It was very cool, but it was not it was definitely not clean. And not because they were messy people. It is what it was. It wasn’t built like a robotics factory. It was built like a wood factory. It was built like a wood shop, I should say.

Speaker 1 | 24:34.374

Yeah, I’ve visited probably over 100 factories in my career, at least being in operations and supply chain. And this one stands out. Our facilities definitely stand out. It’s neat.

Speaker 0 | 24:49.402

That’s pretty cool. So you mentioned. Now we’re going way back in time. You mentioned you have a degree in mechanical engineering and Spanish. Yes. So I’m assuming that means you speak fluent Spanish. Yeah, I did. Or you did at one point.

Speaker 1 | 25:07.097

Yeah, I don’t dream in Spanish anymore. I actually just visited Costa Rica over the holiday break, which was fun to dust off some of the Spanish skills. But yeah, I think I always struggled a little bit early on before going to college. Like, what do I want to be when I grow up? And I’d say I still struggle with that. Like, let’s be honest, we probably all struggle with that interview question of where you want to be in five years. But yeah, I really enjoyed Spanish growing up. And. traveling. So it was a goal of mine to study abroad. So I studied abroad in Spain and lived with a 75-year-old Andalusian lady. It was a great experience. I wouldn’t say that we were able to communicate extremely well even by the time I exited in five months, just because she spoke this really thick Andalusian. Where they like swallow the syllables. It’s probably like sometimes you have a hard time understanding my Scani accent. If you’re from Texas or something. But yeah, I just enjoy language. I’ve also lived in China for a stint and studied Mandarin while I was there. I lived in Montreal, Canada and studied French. Although because everybody’s bilingual there, they were kind of like nuts. the most efficient way is to speak English. Like, let’s forget about your French. So, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 26:33.313

Because they’ll judge you. Just to be clear, they’ll judge you if you don’t speak it well.

Speaker 1 | 26:38.975

I would like to think it was all about efficiency, but yeah, they’re probably judging me as an American. But yeah, I really like taking those liberal arts classes as part of that major. I’d come in with a lot of credits too. So it was… it was not too difficult to do Spanish. And I think it helped me also balance with the heavy technical studies and, you know, have, have sort of an outlet for my creative mind in those liberal arts classes. So.

Speaker 0 | 27:09.309

So now when you’re choosing to go to college, you know, so this is what they say way back, you went to college for that stuff. Did you, when you were growing up, was that like, were you mechanically inclined kid? Were you always where people like, like Callan is going to be like building stuff. when, when she’s, when she’s an adult, like, I don’t know what it’s going to be, but it’s going to be involved in building stuff or where was it, was it like totally something else? And you get to high school and you’re like, you know what? I want to, I want to go for mechanical engineering. And everybody’s like, what?

Speaker 1 | 27:36.080

Yeah, this is such a, I got to clear the cobwebs for this, but you know, my mom said recently that I was somebody that kind of tinkered and asked questions about how things work. And I actually have a six-year-old daughter now who’s very inclined to deep. questions about how things operate and why. And so, you know, I don’t know if she gets that from me or my husband, who’s also an engineer, but apparently, according to my mom, I was that way. So that surprised me a little bit, because honestly, a very uninspiring story probably is how I got to land in engineering. I just, I always excelled in science and math and was taking college courses in high school. I was… bust. In middle school, I was bused from the middle school to high school for math. And then in high school, I was one of six kids that went from high school to college for math. So I was taking linear algebra in high school. I had a lot of the credits. Yeah, I love that stuff. I don’t use any of it. I haven’t used it since I graduated. But linear algebra,

Speaker 0 | 28:49.031

I thought was… I enjoyed linear algebra. I did not like discrete math. That was, that was a challenge, which that’s more of a computer science-y math realm, but, but like, yeah, like computer science folks have tons of math too, so.

Speaker 1 | 29:00.655

Yeah, I, computer science, I put the semicolon in the wrong spot and I get frustrated with that. But yeah, so I think I remember I was, I sat down with my mom thinking, okay, what’s the, what’s the degree? And I knew I wanted. probably to have open doors in business. My dad was a CFO. He was an executive later in his career. So I’d kind of always watched him and admired his career. So I knew I wanted to be in business, but having, you know, I guess the appetite to do the challenging classes in math and science and then having all these college credits already made sense to look at engineering. I had a friend who was… a freshman in industrial engineering. So that was originally where I started until I took stats. So yeah, just, you know, my mom and I actually, I think it was probably the Google equivalent. I don’t know what it was then. What was it in Carta? We used in Carta and all that stuff. Um,

Speaker 0 | 30:02.536

is it the step between having a set of encyclopedias in, on the bookshelf to Wikipedia on the internet? Yeah. Like Microsoft and Carta.

Speaker 1 | 30:11.942

Yeah. I think we learned, we looked up engineer. I think we were like, what does an engineer do? And I was like, I don’t know. Okay. Let’s figure it out. Um, but I, you know, I was always somebody that enjoyed. taking things apart. Around that time, I was taking apart my parents’ record player and fixing it and getting it up and running. And so even my first job out of high school was an internship at Briggs & Stratton where I was tearing down engines and putting in new parts and testing them, then tearing them back down to figure out what happened when it went end of life. So yeah, I’m… I think I’ve always been pretty mechanically inclined, but I have little patience, I will say. So, you know, I maybe don’t have the traditional patience that comes in the IT world and the engineering world. So maybe that’s why I wound up more in business. I just struggle with that patience to get things solved. When a semicolon is in the wrong spot, that drives me absolutely nuts.

Speaker 0 | 31:20.407

I feel that. I think about… You mentioned about tearing down an engine. So I think about this. There’s a neighbor across the street from me, and she had moved away. And the way she’s moving away, there’s different stuff. She had a different house. She retired and was moving to her mom’s house that was on a lake somewhere else in New York State. So then she’s got two houses and a bunch of extra stuff. So I end up with a snowblower. But she’s like, oh, it’s totally serviced. Start it up. It dies. Start it up. It dies. And I’m like, what’s going on with this? And she’s like, oh, it’s totally serviced. you know, like other folks are like, no, no, you just get rid of it. It’s not worth it. It’s not worth it. You know, and ultimately it turned out to be like, um, the, the, the valves were not adjusted appropriately. They come out of adjustment. So you end up all of that, like grinding them down a little bit. Um, but, but, you know, you mentioned about patients, like, like I, I share this same, like feeling, like if I, if I can see the path to fixing it, then I’m satisfied. But if the path is like, I’m going to sit and stare at a pile of parts for like three hours, I’m like, the heck with this. I’m just going to go to the store, right? Yeah. Like, I want to deal with it. So, you know, like there’s a, there’s like a mental balance. I’ll do, I do like this mental math to figure out like how much I’m willing to invest in the moment. And if I feel that the end result is more, more like advantageous, I’ll pursue it and I’ll stick with it. But as soon as I think that I’m going to be staring at like a pile of junk and I won’t, I won’t be, I’ll be frustrated with myself. I’d like, I’m done with this.

Speaker 1 | 32:46.750

Yes, totally. Yeah, it cracks me up now. We bought one of those Costco play sets. It’s like three stories, you know, 3,000 parts. I’m not even exaggerating.

Speaker 0 | 33:02.974

It’s like pirates look out at the top for the kids and everything else.

Speaker 1 | 33:06.115

Yeah, it takes like three weeks to put together. You’re doing the mental math of like, okay, what do I charge per hour? How much did this actually cost, you know, for the Ikea? Oh, this is $15, but it took me six hours to put together. That ultimately is a very expensive little piece of furniture.

Speaker 0 | 33:24.926

Yeah, absolutely. So you had some mechanical aptitude, you know, inclination, I should say, not aptitude is the right word, but inclination all along. And you really translated that into a lot of different success in a lot of different career areas. But now you’re in a CIO role. Yeah. even though I know you have a, there’s a factory floor you’re supporting and your team is supporting what is five months in what’s, what has come up that you didn’t expect, I guess, as a CIO versus being in all these other, you know, leadership roles in large organizations, much more focused on either manufacturing or continuous improvement and that type of stuff. And it’s not like you don’t have those in your current role, but, but like, I just, I know from experience. being a CIO comes with a whole new set of responsibilities. So there’s always something that somebody is like, I didn’t, I didn’t think of that was coming.

Speaker 1 | 34:21.655

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 34:25.517

Cause you’re kind of like everything at the same time. You know, that’s, that’s, I think that’s almost one of the things that people end up learning. Yeah. Become a CIO. It’s like all problems that plug into a wall become your problem. A lot of times, or your problem.

Speaker 1 | 34:38.625

It’s interesting. One day it can be kind of like plant manager. role where you’re firefighting. All of a sudden, oh, this report everybody depends on and all the data is wrong. And you got to quickly resolve, find the root cause, communicate. I don’t know if I didn’t expect that, but definitely it’s been an exercise of all of my experience and skills coming into one single situation. The Six Sigma problem-solving mindset together with change management and communication and managing people and how to keep them motivated. So these little fires, I guess, are… that are unexpected present really good opportunities to coalesce all the skills and experience. And it’s been that that’s what makes it fun. You’re exercising all these parts of your leadership competencies. Yeah, I think that’s something maybe I didn’t expect or it’s every day there’s something that can come up that’s unexpected or every couple days, some days, five things all at once. So that’s the fun part. And then the other days are, okay, how do I now proactively plan for the future? How do I take this time and effectively manage it so I can be proactive? So when I do have those firefighting moments, it’s not going to bring me to my knees or my team to our knees.

Speaker 0 | 36:17.708

Yeah, I always think about, I think about the practical versus the, well, the need to be, when you just have to get practical, you know, you mentioned about firefighting problems. And then you’d be like, okay, the business process that we’ve established says we need to do this. But at the same time, I’m staring at a production line that’s not functional. And I know that if we just like yank this pole, we pull this emergency cord, it’ll run today. And we can worry about the problem later. You know, like. Like I’ve always engaged a philosophy where I try hard not to make decisions or have teams make decisions under duress. So if we have a problem, my first step is to get something moving enough that you’re not under the gun of, say, it’s not working. Come up with a solution now. So like, OK, we’ll get you functional. We’ll get you moving along. And we’ll use that as the opportunity to say we must make a decision about what the what the permanent future looks like. But we won’t make that decision. With everybody being like running around like, oh, my God, it’s everything’s broken.

Speaker 1 | 37:22.890

Yeah, I think that’s a constant balance that you’ve got to strike as an IT leader and a leader in general is how do you continue to incrementally add value or solve problems for the short term to keep positive momentum or keep the production line moving while also building the long term future, building a solid foundation. foundation for the future. Yeah, I think that’s finding that balance is probably a daily struggle. It’s something I think about a lot is, you know, Agile is a really helpful approach in that way too, is incrementally, you know, MVP, but also keep that long-term perfect vision, the more elegant solution in mind.

Speaker 0 | 38:13.007

So I turned to… I guess I discussed this as the fun part of the interview where we talk a little bit about just maybe some more lighthearted things. So I love asking folks if there’s something that you want to share, you could share about yourself that maybe would be unexpected or people would be like, what? I never thought about that. I usually try to lead by giving an example to break the ice a little bit. So I’ll start and say. uh i was once in the macy’s day parade in a marching band when i was a kid yeah what what so what was your role uh i played trumpet and uh so when i was a kid here in town there was like a um it was like the last couple years of like some marching band that existed in town and so i it happened to me next door to the apartment that i lived in and so i participated in like as an after-school activity and then they needed a couple people to go to this like they kind of they called it the pride of drum corps uh marching band so like they picked like two people from all these known marching bands from around the country and they all converged and marched in the basis they prayed so i was one of like uh there might have been 250 300 of us in the band uh and yeah so we showed up what a great opportunity yeah it was a really cool experience but uh yeah so some people would know about me you still have the videotape Uh, I’m sure somebody could dig up that. I mean, we were on national TV for like all of the seconds, you know, here’s the prior to drop course marching band. Aren’t they awesome. Okay. Moving on next. Oh, look, it’s Snoopy, you know? Yeah. Uh, but I do, we do have a, I do have like a cool picture. Like they took a group photo of all everybody, you know? So there’s like a big wide angle photo from like 1990, you know, when I, when I went there.

Speaker 1 | 40:04.359

Very cool. Well, with that as the prompt, I was going to say something different.

Speaker 0 | 40:10.792

You can stick with what you said. It could be totally off topic from what I mentioned.

Speaker 1 | 40:16.638

So I think I said this in a recent interview. It’s a common question. Like you go around the room and what’s one fun fact about you? I’m a redneck grandma. I’m not an actual grandma, but I do a lot of grandma-ish activities and really always have. So I like to sew. I’ve taken a lot of sewing classes. I just picked up knitting a few weeks ago and knitted a couple of scarves for Christmas presents. So I like crafty stuff. You build things still. Yeah, I guess it is a form of building. Yes. And then I also like outdoorsy things that you might associate with more of the Wisconsin redneck, like hunting, fishing.

Speaker 0 | 41:11.935

Ice fishing? Ice fishing.

Speaker 1 | 41:13.456

Ice fishing, yeah. I have not successfully caught a fish on the ice, though. I mean, it’s also pretty brutal, but I’ve spent countless hours waiting to catch one. I don’t have the ticket. There’s a lot of ice fishermen outside of our…

Speaker 0 | 41:28.032

where we live now it’s fun to watch um and i fly fish too so yeah i kind of maybe i i don’t have an identity when it comes to my hobbies i’m all over the place oh that’s that’s awesome yeah so like like all these like outdoorsy just just getting engaged in different things activities uh that’s pretty cool so yeah that’s definitely so like again things people wouldn’t know or fun facts about about somebody uh let’s see the We’re coming to the end of our interview here. One of the things, the other things that I always ask our guests on the show is, what advice would you give to other leaders, whether they’re coming up in the market, you know, and they’re looking for those roles and leadership and developing their skills or other leaders, you know, what’s been successful for you?

Speaker 1 | 42:20.210

Yeah, I, maybe this is pretty cliche and I acknowledge that, but I really believe it to be true. And I’ve found success in this. When I’ve followed my passion, good things came. Good opportunities came with that. And it didn’t come with a ton of effort. It just came with really exploiting that passion and tying that to an impact I can make on the business. So, and where I found myself in my career at like a dead end was when… I pursued more of the guidance, the formal guidance of how to, you know, grow your career. You know, you got to do this role before you do this. That’s definitely not how I’ve navigated my career. And I think hearing that earlier on would have been beneficial to me because, yeah, I did go down a couple of dead-end paths where I found myself unhappy. And it was because I was… I wasn’t following my heart in a cliche way. I mean, really, and it’s hard sometimes. Maybe passions change too, which is okay. You may be really passionate about a certain subject, maybe something very creative, and you exploit that. And then the next day, you’re not feeling that anymore. And you might go through periods where you don’t know what your passions are. So then if you monitor your day and figure out where you’re getting energy. Where does energy come to you? Where do you get excited? That may be a seed of passion. So that’s something when people ask me, I share because it’s helped me a lot. And it’s a very non-traditional, it’s led for me a very non-traditional path, but I could have never envisioned myself in a CIO position when I was 20 some years old. But I’m glad for the most part I’ve trusted. to follow the passion versus the traditional ladder structure of a, you know, especially a large enterprise.

Speaker 0 | 44:34.274

That’s awesome. So you mentioned about you went down these paths and sometimes you felt they were dead ends. I’m going to qualify that and say that I would frame that, the way I hear it and the way I’m going to frame it is you’re willing to try a path out, but course correct. And that’s a skill. So being willing to course correct is a valuable skill in leadership. Like, I’m not going to stick to this. I’ll change my path and I’ll figure out what does work.

Speaker 1 | 45:05.583

Yeah, that’s a great point. I mean, being aware of how you feel at the end of the day. okay, if you’re unhappy, you can make a change. You’re not stuck here.

Speaker 0 | 45:14.516

Yeah. Now, you mentioned how you said in your 20s, you would never have envisioned yourself. Now, I contrast that with me. If you asked me when I was 23, what would I want to do? I would have been like, I want to be a director of IT or a CIO. That was literally my… So many different people have so many different ways to get to the same places, which is always cool because then those experiences really lead to… to really different viewpoints, different leadership styles, different, you know, the viewpoints that you bring as a leader are now influenced by that different path that you brought to the table.

Speaker 1 | 45:51.915

Yeah. Awesome.

Speaker 0 | 45:54.996

So, Callan, thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.

Speaker 1 | 46:01.219

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure. I’m honored to be a nerd.

Speaker 0 | 46:06.834

That’s a wrap on today’s episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m Doug Kameen, and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode.