Ep. 85: Russell Porter - Adapting Leadership and Management Strategies in a Crisis

Contact Russell Porter:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/russporter42/


FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam: (00:05)
Welcome back for episode 85 of Count Me In I'm your host, Adam
Larson and today's conversation features IBM's Vice President of
Finance and Global Business Services, Russell Porter. Russell has
been with IBM for over 20 years, serving in roles spanning most
financial disciplines in business units. He is a strong leader
with a high aptitude for merging strategy and operations. In this
episode, he really focuses his insights on how to lead and manage
remote teams during these ongoing times of uncertainty. Russell
explains IBM's current status and upcoming plans, as well as what
he has done along the way to keep his team motivated and
achieving. Keep listening, as we head over to this very timely
and valuable conversation.

Mitch: (00:55)
Many leaders were faced with a task of quickly adapting their
management strategies to remote work following the coronavirus
pandemic. What were some of the strategies that you implemented
in the beginning of this for the whole work from home
environment, and how did you go about keeping your team
together?

Russell: (01:13)
Mitch, in any situation, you know, one of the best things we can
do is provide some clarity for our people. Discussing what we
expect to happen, what we know, what we don't know and, and how
we're going to make decisions as we all work through the issues
that face us. In addition, one of the things we did was
reinforced clarity around our organization's mission, and tried
to make sure that each person continually understood their role
in that overall mission. That helps people to stay connected and
engaged, as we went through, you know, the, the vast uncertainty
of those early days of the pandemic. We also noted that we needed
a greater focus on empathy. You know, our team members all face
different situations from those who are suddenly homeschooling
their children to others who are concerned about aging parents
and some who were cut off from the bulk of the social engagement
that they had by not being able to go to work. You know, there's
a saying that everyone's fighting a battle that we know nothing
about, and we need to keep that in mind as leaders when we're
working with our people, especially when we can't be physically
with them, as much as we're used to.  That led us to realize
we also had to be more flexible. You know, the work getting done
is more important than exactly how it gets done. So at IBM we've
got existing flex time programs that we just leveraged across the
board. You know it allows people to attend to their daily needs
while getting work done at what some would consider off shift
hours. Now, not everything can happen that way, but to a great
extent, our teams could modify their workdays to be early in the
morning, late at night, or even split into pieces based upon all
the other priorities they had to address. That took some
creativity at times, and we had to change some structures like
the workday times or some job design. And it was a great time
actually to tap into our team's creativity, because they helped
us develop some of those solutions to address the individual’s
responsibilities and the individual's requirements and the job
environment. The biggest thing we did though was communication,
communication, communication. We were fortunate in IBM, we we've
implemented agile methodologies in a lot of our work within
finance and operations. So one of those, one of those methods is
a daily standup meeting, and that really provided us a great
check-in opportunity for our leaders and our teams to share those
experiences and their concerns, and to make sure that our teams
remained engaged in the work, but also that we could talk to them
about what was going on outside of the work environment. That
regular communication has really helped us to communicate both
vertically and laterally across the organization. So a regular
checkpoint with the team is key. But also as, as I've seen lots
of people talking about the one thing that's missing in this
virtual environment is the impromptu run into the hallways
connection. That time when you're just walking down the hall and
you see somebody and you think, oh, I meant to talk to them about
an idea. So reaching out and keeping up networking and your
contacts within your organization and outside, and being able to
communicate across the small teams that we work in, that was also
a big thing. And that was enabled by the technology and tools
that we had adopted already. We were already doing video
conferencing with WebEx and instant messaging, which we adopted
with Slack earlier this year. Cloud based file repositories. All
of these went from being ancillary to becoming like the primary
mode of communication around the, around the organization, and I
think the fact that we are already progressed with those tools,
or at least had started with them, helped us adopt and adapt
very, very quickly to what became a full time virtual
environment.

Mitch: (05:14)
That's great that you had so much prepared and were able to
implement so quickly, you know, I'm sure during this rapid
change, and it was certainly a lot of uncertainty for everybody,
even with plans in place like this, there must've still been a
lot of questions from the team members, right? So what were some
of the main concerns that you were hearing from your team while
all this was going on, and how did you as a leader, go about
addressing them?

Russell: (05:40)
So I'll tell you the number one question I kept getting was when
are we going back to back to the office? And here again, knowing
individual circumstances, I've got extroverts and introverts on
my team, and the extroverts, you know, when they heard that we
are going to be working virtually for a while., they wanted to
get back to the office as quickly as possible. And, and working
from home, working from bedrooms or living rooms on their own was
really driving them a little nuts. So a lot of people thought it
was going to be a one or two week closure of the offices to get
past a peak period. But as the days turned into weeks, that
question of when are we going back to the office became more and
more insistent. You know, again, the best we could do was provide
the clarity that we didn't know. And, and I'm in the Northeast.
So, you know, in the Connecticut, New York area, and we had to
tell our people, we didn't know. It was dependent first firstly,
upon state regulations, but then also upon, the company's way
that they wanted to approach coming back to the office, given
that we've never had a time when the virus wasn't somewhere in
the IBM office offices, or in the environments, I should say the
States where, IBM operates. So, number one question was when are
we gonna get back to the office? And we gave as much clarity as
we could. Number two, job was, well, how are we going to get our
jobs done the way we're used to doing them? And the answer was,
we're not. We’re simply we needed to adapt to this new virtual
environment there, wasn't going to be, you know, printing of
documents, and, and there wasn't going to be the huddling in a
physical conference room to go over charts, to go over analysis,
to, to present ideas. Suddenly we all had to go virtual and that
required a little bit of change, and the way we did things and
the way we shared. It wasn't marking up and standing in front of
a screen. It was, you know, trying to point at something with
your, with your mouse and a little arrow on WebEx. but here
again, it was adoption of the technology that helped us adapt
and, and continue to be productive as a finance and operations
organization. And what we actually found was within FNO, we
really didn't skip a beat. We were able to modify the way we did
th...