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🔗 Connect with Craig: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-hopkins/
🎙 About the episode
Leadership Eclipsers: Leaders who put themselves in the path of their teams, eclipsing their efforts and blocking credit for their input.
If you have ever worked with a team leader like this, you know firsthand the void felt by everyone else standing “behind.”
As the 2023 “Ring of Fire” Solar Eclipse makes its way across a good portion of the US in October, we discovered that the moon is less than 1/400th of the size of the sun, and yet for a brief few minutes, appears to cover the sun in its entirety.
Likewise, a “leadership eclipser” is one person taking credit for, and blocking out, an entire team of dozens, hundreds, or even more team members. So how can you be less of a solar-eclipse leader and become more effective at building up a team culture that is known for reflecting the efforts of one another?
As the solar eclipse gives us a moment to pause, we were reminded about our fantastic talk with Craig Hopkins on his reflections and experiences with both the good and the “needs-improvement” styles of leadership. And how, as an individual, your behavior shapes your character, but within a group, such as a team, the collection of individual characters forms the team's culture. This culture, in turn, becomes the foundation for the larger organization's culture.
So good was our talk, in fact, that we had to come back to record a part two just to get all of Craig’s sage learnings in, including:
* Begin by modeling a heart of Servant Leadership
* The concept of humility and bringing others up is a fundamental aspect of leadership
* How serving in the Coast Guard helped Craig learn how to transition from valuing individual accolades to being part of something greater
* Leveraging the principles from "Team of Teams" to create a collaborative spiderweb structure for effective communication and collaboration
* The role of accountability in building a culture of trust and collaboration
* Why Craig dislikes the term “digital workforce”
* and more!
We can’t wait to hear from Craig again at our upcoming GovTech IT & Leadership Summit in San Antonio! Check out the links above if you haven’t already, as we have some “Ring of Fire”- worthy roundtable discussions lined up that you can only get if you’re there.
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Episode originally recorded, April 2021
Creators & Guests
What is The Public Sector Show by TechTables?
The Podcast & Community for Public Sector CIOs & CISOs.
Welcome to the The Public Sector Show by TechTables, featuring human-centric stories from C-level technology leaders. Hosted by Joe Toste, you'll gain valuable insights on current issues and challenges faced by top leaders.
Through interviews, speaking engagements, and live podcast tour events, we unite public sector CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, and technology leaders in fostering collaboration and meaningful connections in the ever-evolving technology landscape.
What's up, everybody? This is Joe Tassi from techtables.com, and you're listening to the Public Sector Show by Tech Tables. This podcast features human centric stories from public sectors, CIOs, CISOs, and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county, and higher education. You'll gain valuable insights in the current issues and challenges faced by top leaders. Through interviews, speaking engagements, live podcast tour events, we offer you a behind the mic look at the opportunities top leaders are seeing today.
Joe Toste:And to make sure you never miss an episode, head over to Spotify and Apple Podcasts and hit that follow button and leave a quick rating. Just tap the number of stars that you think this show deserves.
Joe Toste:Craig, thanks for jumping on Tech Table this morning. Super excited to have you here.
Craig Hopkins:It's great being here. I love the opportunity to be able to share with the community and learn at the same time. So thanks for having me, Joe.
Joe Toste:Love it. So in our podcast intro call, you had mentioned servant leadership as a key tenant of your leadership style. I'm curious where that motivation to be a servant leader comes from. Now a quick word from 1 of our brand partners. Nagarro is a leading provider of digital government services, partnering with state, local, and federal clients on some of their most strategic technology projects.
Joe Toste:Nagarro offers expertise in digital services, legacy modernization, case management, data and AI, service desk, cybersecurity, and more. Check out negarro.com. That's nagarro.com.
Craig Hopkins:I love that you had asked me that question in advance because it really made me think about the roots of that. I talk a lot about servant leadership in a corporate world, but that thought really made me think about my upbringing and my parents. My parents taught us very strong values of love, family, hard work, humanitarianism, social justice, things like that. We're a community. We're a tight knit family.
Craig Hopkins:I watch them as role models, but the 1 thing that the whole extended family really taught was this concept of humility, and not the humility where you put yourself down. The humility where you bring everybody up with you, that you come together. And so that was a basis of that. I didn't know what servant leadership was at the time, but I knew that concept of I'm actually no better than anybody else, and nobody's better than me. That was the upbringing that we had in my family.
Craig Hopkins:So that was really neat. But then when I joined the coast guard, I have a long sea story about how I got to the coast guard, but just a young kid lost, not sure what to do next, dropped out of college, all that kind of stuff. But when I joined the coast guard, I got this sense of something bigger than myself. I think the military does that for a lot of people, and some corporate cultures do that as well. But being taught that I was part of a team and there was a greater purpose, and what we were there doing every day mattered.
Craig Hopkins:Actually, I would have the opportunity to even save lives, which I did have the opportunity in my career to go forward that, but being part of something bigger than yourself. So you started to see that it wasn't just about you. But the kind of the final part to rolling this out, like, every young kid who gets promoted and gets more responsibility, it's about me. Right? It's about, I'm glad to be part of something bigger, but I'm gonna do really well.
Craig Hopkins:And I wanna get recognized, and I wanna go forward. And 1 thing the military does for young folks is they give you credible amounts of opportunity and accountability at a very young age. I got to run my own boat crew and be coxswain qualified and drive a heavy weather surf boat, and I got to do some really cool thing. But, again, it was about me, and I hadn't really learned the kind of servant leader yet until we had 1 specific case that went really bad, and somebody drowned on that case. And my crew did not respond and react as they were supposed to, and it resulted in the death of a person.
Craig Hopkins:And it stuck with me forever, not only the loss, the tragedy of the event, but I remember when I got back afterwards and my chief sat me down and he said, this is your fault. Not because you couldn't do it, but because you didn't train your crew, because you didn't take care of your crew, because you are there to serve your crew, not to serve yourself. That was the very defining moment to me where I was able to bring all that stuff together and say, you know what? Going forward, I really need to realize that my job as a leader is to serve those around me, not for them to make me look good as you go forward. And so I've just stuck with that in my career as we've gone forward.
Joe Toste:That's a really great story. And right before this, off camera, we were talking about military books, and I actually took a couple up here that I would highly recommend. And at the end of this podcast, we'll have you recommend some more military leadership type books also that blend in the corporate world. I was curious. You have this life and death situation.
Joe Toste:You have your leaders sit you down to really explain the gravity that the team failed, and you didn't train those people and those members on your team to execute at the level that they needed to. How do you take that experience, and and I can't even imagine because I've never been in the Coast Guard or the military, how do you take that experience and then translate that now, this is probably 20 or 30 years later for you in the city of San Antonio. Just broad stroke, what does that look like? Kind of the lessons that you took from there to how you're applying it today?
Craig Hopkins:I think it comes back to empowering your team to make decisions and to be out on the battlefield, whatever the battlefield is, and that you trust that they're gonna do what's right and wrong as you go forward. And 1 thing that I'm really proud of my team now, my city role here in the last 15 months in the pandemic, as you can imagine, we've been thrown with all kinds of things to go solve. Stand up a mass vaccination center, respond to a week's worth of snow in Texas, whoever thought of that, and the power failures. And we've just been thrown that thing as nonstop for the last 15 months. And if I had it from the position that I needed to solve all those problems myself, then why do I have 340 people on my IT team?
Craig Hopkins:My job is to make sure that they're empowered, that they're ready, that they're trained, that they know the protocols, they know the principles, they know what to do. And when they need help, they know they can reach out and ask me and my management team at any time what can we do to make this better. And so that is about culture. That really is about building a culture where people feel engaged, empowered, and accountable, not just some command and control, which a lot of people think the military is just about up and down the chain. But when military units work really well, they work at the small team level.
Craig Hopkins:When corporate cultures work really well, they're not the senior people telling you what to do. They're empowering the people at the ground. In the coast guard, we called it the on scene commander model. Whoever was on scene was responsible and accountable because you could see what was going on. And if you happen to be an e 3 or an e 4, which is a very junior person, didn't matter.
Craig Hopkins:You were on scene. So we taught that same thing into our corporate cultures that if you're facing the customer, facing the issue, you're accountable. Now you gotta be well trained. You gotta be prepared. You gotta be resourced, all those things, which becomes management's responsibility to make sure you're ready to go.
Joe Toste:Engaged and accountable. I love the small team piece. So you said 340 people are on your IT team. Obviously, you can't meet with 340 people on a weekly basis or daily basis. What's the tight knit team for you?
Joe Toste:With 6 to 8, what number of folks are directly underneath you?
Craig Hopkins:Or charts are the depth of that conversation. But command and control matters. I don't wanna ever lose that. Because in an emergency, you gotta know where your chain of command is. For discipline reasons, you gotta know who your home we always call it your homeroom teacher.
Craig Hopkins:Right? Who's gonna hire, fire, discipline. All the is responsible. But for good teams to work, I found as a rule of thumb no more than 8. 88 is the biggest team you want.
Craig Hopkins:And I know you've mentioned the 1 mission book behind you, but the team of teams book that comes before that from general McChrystal is really about how do you take really good small teams that work well together? How do you make that a corporate culture? Because I know everybody listening had can say, yeah. I remember I was a team I was on. It was 6 to 8 people.
Craig Hopkins:I bet you had a very specific mission. You knew what your objectives were. People knew what they were accountable for. Everybody knew their roles, and, man, you could knock it out. Didn't mean you didn't have for.
Craig Hopkins:Everybody knew their roles, and, man, you could knock it out. Didn't mean you didn't have a little tension fighting along the way. But No. You knew that you could cover each other's back, and you would get the same done. How do you do that when you have a 100 of those teams?
Craig Hopkins:How do you do that when you have to build a command and control structure to manage those teams? So what I'll tell you is, at times, I manage through my org chain, but most of the time, I manage to the small teams. I understand where the small teams are, and myself and my directs, at any time, can reach into any small team and ask questions or ask for help. So when you talk about flattening the org, I don't even think of it as flattening. It's about creating the spider web where you can actually work across teams and create this collaboration and this communication.
Craig Hopkins:And people feel title doesn't really matter. It's who do I need access to for talent or knowledge in order to move things forward. So I actually meet with my team once a week, all 340 people. We call them Jay That actually came from the 1 mission book. I joined operations form, and we do commander's intent.
Craig Hopkins:We do updates, and we do a little bit of celebration and sharing across the teams. Once a week for 45 minutes, all 340 people are invited to that conversation. And then we have a variety of 1 off huddle structures where you could talk with different teams throughout the week.
Joe Toste:Thank you for sharing. I know this will be beneficial for a lot of other technology leaders who also have teams and who are trying to figure out, especially in the post COVID world, how do I lead my team when folks are, a, not in the office, or there's a hybrid model, or maybe they're a 100 percent remote. No more than a I really like that. I think that tight knit group. I have not read Team of Teams.
Joe Toste:I have done both of these, but I am looking forward to getting the audiobook and diving into it. So it'll be fun. I'm a big fan of Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. And in Berkshire Hathaway's 2015 annual letter, I am 1 of those nerds that do read the annual letters. And Warren Buffett said, much of what you become in life depends on whom you choose to admire and copy.
Joe Toste:So, Craig, I'm curious. Who did you choose to admire and copy and why?
Craig Hopkins:I love the concept of role models, and I teach it all the time. Everything doesn't have to be reinvented. So I advocate all the time, find role models. I've had some great role models. I will tell you we could have a whole podcast about the Chiefs in the Navy and the Coast Guard, the east lines, that layer, we would call that mid corporate management.
Craig Hopkins:But in the culture of the navy and the coast guard, they're your daddy. They're your buddy. They're the people who drive people. I have a bunch of role models from the chief corps, as well as US in my church, my local community. But here's what I warn people about role models.
Craig Hopkins:1 is you copy their behavior, not their status or their success. I don't know how many times I've had younger folks come up when I was a senior vice president at USA and say, Craig, how do I get to be a senior vice president? I said, you're looking for my title, or you're assuming some level of success or whatever that may be. That's not what you copy in a role model. You wanna see what you like in a behavior.
Craig Hopkins:I would then say the second rule is only pick role models that you personally know because we're all people. We're all broken. We all have all kinds of issues no matter what you on the face. And when you take a role model and you put them on a pedestal and you don't know that person, you assume they're all good and everything's wonderful, that's not true. So your best role models are people you actually know that are real people who make mistakes and are authentic and don't communicate well at times and say stupid things.
Craig Hopkins:But at the end of the day, you say, but I know that person and that's behaviors in that person that I really want to mimic in my career. But the most important rule is negative role models are a 1000 times more important than positive role models because we all see things in people that we like, and we go, yeah. I wanna be better like that, but then we forget about it. But when you see something you don't wanna be, you never forget it. You never forget it.
Craig Hopkins:And I've got places in my career where I've been near someone and go, when I get to lead, it will not be like that. And it has stuck with me, and then I find myself, actually, if I start to do something like that, I get a little hair on the back of my neck starts to poke up and go. Do you remember you told yourself that 20 years ago you wouldn't do that? It sticks. I would also say use both.
Craig Hopkins:Use your positive and your negative role models, but focus on those behaviors. So 1 of them that I always remembered was somebody who would stand in front of a group and say something, but because I knew that person, I knew he didn't mean it. Now is that unethical? I don't know. But I knew it was a lie because once I saw him in his normal behavior, he would never do the things he said to people.
Craig Hopkins:And I told myself, I will never do that to anybody. I will always say it straight. I will always be as truthful as I can. And if I don't know what to say, I'm gonna tell you I don't know what to say, but I'm not gonna do that. So those are things that I think that as you find role models, just apply them to what works well for your behaviors that you wanna mimic.
Joe Toste:That's really good. I like how you have both the positive and the negative. I have not expressed what you had said about the negative. But when I grew up, I didn't grow with a dad. And so for me, I always said, this is who I will never become, leaving my family, you name the list.
Joe Toste:And so now I have my own kids, the whole thing. It is funny to reflect right now in real time as I think about the type of person that I am. And you think, okay. So I definitely didn't wanna be that. And then I even think about, vocationally, when I was younger, all of the different companies that I worked at previously from the movie theater, we'll just say when I'm 14, all the way up to now and the different leadership styles.
Joe Toste:I think the negative actually really stands out a lot. I don't wanna do that. I don't wanna lead that way. I don't like how that person communicates.
Craig Hopkins:So, Joe, think about that. Because if you look at role models as somebody who they have a lot of money, so I won't have a lot of money. They have a lot of power. I won't have a lot of that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about Right.
Craig Hopkins:People we're talking about building your own personal character. Right? Yep. And so behaviors build character. What you say and what you do builds character.
Craig Hopkins:And so can I promise you that if you find a good role model, you're gonna make a lot of money? No. But if you follow the behaviors of a good role model, will you build your character? Yes. So if you don't wanna build your character, then don't bother.
Craig Hopkins:Right? That's what I tell people. So this role model thing is only if you want to improve yourself. If you wanna be a better person, a better leader, a better manager, all those things, then you aspire positive and negatively to find these things to improve yourself, not just to get the wish list. Very different approach.
Joe Toste:Yeah. And you sum it up perfectly. Behaviors build character, and I'm actually huge on character. Everything will then flow out of that.
Craig Hopkins:And then remember, multiple behaviors of multiple people build culture. So if you're an individual, your behavior builds your character. But when you have a group of people, including your team of 8, the collection of their character is the culture of your team. And then when you build multiple teams, that becomes the culture of your company. So a lot of people think culture is a top down thing.
Craig Hopkins:It's not. It's the collection of all the behaviors and the character of your people that build your culture.
Joe Toste:This is great. I'm gonna give this as a motivational talk tomorrow at our next basketball game before to the 8 guys who are on my team. This is great. So I love this. I'm always looking for a new talk, and this is really good.
Joe Toste:So to to keep going deeper, there's a leadership expert. I don't know if you've heard of him or not. I really like him. Craig Groeschel. He has a podcast, the Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone listening.
Joe Toste:Craig has talked in past episodes about leading, and you've talked about it a little bit on this podcast. And I think other CIOs would be interested to hear from you, Craig, how you lead up to who you report to. And then maybe also as a second part, not to make this question so long, but how do you see people on your team leading up?
Craig Hopkins:When I worked in US, very large organization, very defined structure, it was a little bit narrow in the sense that you knew who your boss was. It was very kinda command and control at that level just to keep that structure. But in the city, which I think is a little bit more like a lot of other organizations, I have a boss. I have a homeroom boss who happens to be the chief financial officer. I know that for those of you who are in technology, there's pros and cons of working for the CFO.
Craig Hopkins:It worked very well in the city here. But I also have lots of other bosses, to your point. I actually worked indirectly for the city manager, who's, like, our CEO. So I have to manage up to many people, I guess, is what I'm trying to get to. When I was a young executive, somebody told me, no matter what, make your boss happy.
Craig Hopkins:That's how you'll get performance. That's how you'll get promotion. That's how you'll get recognized. Worst advice I ever got. So anybody who tells you that just make your boss happy is a lazy mentor.
Craig Hopkins:So please, if somebody's told you that, question it. What I found is you gotta build a relationship with your boss first. So when I came to the city and the CFO hired me and we had sat down, the first thing I asked him was, what do you wanna solve? And he was like, this and that. And I'm like, no.
Craig Hopkins:Give me some very specific things that you think need to be solved. And then what I would find in that conversation was there were things that would personally affected him in his role, and then there were things he knew that would make the city better, the city organization better, and our residents better if we did that. So I got this list of things that were important to him. I didn't know any better. I'm new, so I need my boss to explain that to me.
Craig Hopkins:But what we were really doing wasn't building a task list, it's we were building trust. Did I trust him? Was he setting me up for something? Was he just giving me junk work to go do? Was this really what he said in the interview process when I came in about joining?
Craig Hopkins:Did I trust him, and could he trust me? What did he need from me in order for me to show that he could trust me? Not I wasn't gonna be trustworthy after the first meeting, but he was laying out for me if these things happen, I'm gonna trust you. And then that builds credibility. So trust comes from credibility.
Craig Hopkins:Am I credible? Can I say I'm gonna do something and actually do it? Or am I just gonna blow smoke to make you happy? So what I've learned with all my bosses, and everybody's different, everybody has a different style, you have to know your audience, but at its core, can you build trust with them? Can they build trust with you?
Craig Hopkins:And once you establish that trust, now it's about managing expectations. So after trust was built, I will tell you most of the time between me and my bosses right now are just me being able to explain the what's and the whys and setting expectations of when things will be done or how we will do them. I never commit to something my team can't do, and I never commit to something I wouldn't do myself, which means sometimes my bosses aren't happy with what I tell them. But because they trust me and I think I've proven credibility, they may not like it, but they know it's true, and they know we're gonna work through it. It doesn't mean they'll tell me, hey.
Craig Hopkins:I still want you to do something, right, and we'll keep working through that. But it's an open relationship we can do that. I've been in some relationships where I've been task managed by my boss, and I bet you many of your listeners are feeling that right now. My boss just tells me what to do, and my job is to get it done based on their timeline. That is not a good leadership model.
Craig Hopkins:We all have tasks to do, but we gotta do them within a kind of a shared expectation setting.
Joe Toste:Again, you're hitting home on a lot of really great stuff. I like the worst advice piece a lot, how to make your boss happy. I think there's a certain level of emotional intelligence that leaders have to exude and have in order to actively be an effective leader. 1 of the most recent examples I have, it wasn't actually in the workplace, but it was with my wife. It was her birthday, and she had said, hey, this is what I would like for my birthday.
Joe Toste:But because I built that relationship with her over time. When she told me what she wanted, I thought about it, and I said, no. That's not what you want. You're not happy. It doesn't give you that spark.
Joe Toste:You just threw something randomly off the top of your head. So I actually told her, no. I'm not gonna get you that birthday gift. So she comes back, and she goes, okay. I'm actually really excited about this 1.
Joe Toste:I think the same thing leaders have to have, when you have that relationship, you can really understand going past the surface level. And you mentioned that too. Once you build that trust and you have that credibility, you can push back a little bit or nudge a little bit more to really figure out, hey, what's important to him or her, what's important to the city, and really being able to dive in. And then that way, on the receiving end, they're just not gonna hand you a bunch of tasks. They're gonna see how valuable you are also to their team.
Craig Hopkins:But you gotta prove credibility first. Right? Because if you're not credible, it's a very hard conversation to have. So whatever that's right to do in your job or relationship, you prove your credibility, you build trust, and then it opens up that conversation. And if someone will say, my boss only cares about themselves.
Craig Hopkins:It's probably not true. I'm not saying it can't be true, but your boss may have a tough time articulating why those things are important to the organization, not only themselves in that sense. But you can have that dialogue with them if you're in there. Now I know your listeners are gonna say, Craig, that's crap. Not in my organization.
Craig Hopkins:My boss doesn't treat me like that. My culture is not built like that. Blah blah blah. I've been in that situation too, and I have walked away from positions and jobs because of that as well or gone to somebody else and said, this isn't gonna work. So at some point, you've gotta say, am I just doing what my boss has told me to do, and I'm just trying to make them happy?
Craig Hopkins:Or do I believe in what I'm doing? And I like the people I work with, and we're gonna work together.
Joe Toste:Yeah. That's fantastic. Craig, as a technology leader in a forward thinking city, how do you imagine the future of the digital workforce in San Antonio?
Craig Hopkins:Alright. So can we start with something that's a little bit of a pet peeve? I don't like to call it the digital workforce. When did we when do we remember not being digital as workers at some level? So this thought that we're moving to a digital work force or becoming more of, I just I feel like we've gone past it.
Craig Hopkins:And nothing else the pandemic has made people who weren't digital be digital in order to in order to get their work done. So to me, what I'm really focusing on is a distributed workforce. It's a little different in kind of the way you think about it. But the concept of how do you lead with trust, engagement, building morale, and creating autonomy with your workers, no matter where they are or when they work. That's where I think I've been pushing in conversations in the city.
Craig Hopkins:We've got about 11, 500 employees in the city. Many of them are first responders, fire and police, as you can imagine. About 6, 000 people who do office work, if you wanna think, variety of different jobs. And when the pandemic started, we actually moved about 3, 000 of those people home immediately as a safety, just like every other company did. But what I found out in that was there were only several 100 of those 3, 000 that really had worked from home before.
Craig Hopkins:Right? Now that didn't mean they weren't in digital workforce, but they did it in their office. So we got very focused on where people work and when they work. Are they at their home or in the office? Are they working 9 to 5 or they work in a different shift?
Craig Hopkins:And what has really tweaked in the last several months as we've come back to a return to work strategy, how do we bring these people back because it's safe for them to come back, is do they have to come back? And so now this concept of a distributed workforce has really taken root. What environment, where, and when is the best for that person to be most productive? And let them decide. Oh my gosh.
Craig Hopkins:That's never happened before. Managers don't let people decide when and where they're gonna work. We expect them to be in their chair at 9 o'clock, and I wanna be able to see them and when they go on coffee break. We gotta break that. We gotta break that to if you believe that your people are smart and have autonomy, then our job as leaders is to make sure they clearly understand the objectives and outcomes of their job and let them go and figure it out.
Craig Hopkins:Now, that's really hard if your job is a customer service window and your job is to meet the customer there and take an order and do something. I get it, but there's some still ability in there. But for most technology workers, for most knowledge workers, for most professionals, the days of tell me when and where to work are gone. So now, the onus is on the supervisors and the managers. Do we know how to mentor, coach, performance manage, discipline, all those things to people when we can't see them or at least don't see them all the time.
Craig Hopkins:And it's our job to make sure that we build engagement and autonomy and make sure they're productive and the outcomes are being achieved. It's a very different model going forward. And as we're bringing people, quote unquote, return to work back into we're giving them the option. Do you wanna go back to the desk you used to sit at? No.
Craig Hopkins:Okay. Do you wanna work in a different way? Do you wanna work in a different time? What is the best way for you to achieve the goals of your job for the city while giving you flexibility and autonomy and making you more engaged at the same time. I don't have a formula for that yet, but I know that's the direction we need to go.
Joe Toste:Oh, I love that you said distributed. That is a that is a really great term. I mean, yeah, the technology has been around for years or decades being able to work. And I think figuring out the distributed workforce, I think, is really a game changer for organizations, and it allows city of San Antonio to compete with the private sector as far as labor force, hiring, and that whole piece of it. So I like what you said, and their most productive hours, I think, really figuring that out, especially for, yeah, the knowledge workers.
Joe Toste:Some people are really productive at 4 AM. I'm probably a weirdo in that sense where I'm very productive early in the morning, and I often will not podcast after 1 o'clock because I'll fall asleep. And but I have a window where I am hyper productive, and I try and leverage that period and then just understanding that. And so I think workers, especially knowledge workers, figuring that out and having the leaders have that trust and autonomy with their team
Craig Hopkins:But is gonna be a game changer. Think of the difference, Joe. The Joe shifts from a worker is supposed to do a, b, and c and show up between 9 to 5. And from an HR perspective, are you doing your job? To the onus becomes the supervisor.
Craig Hopkins:Right?
Joe Toste:Yep.
Craig Hopkins:That's the big shift I see in this model is that as senior leaders, we need to be better training our supervisors to be better mentors and coaches and set expectations so they can help their teams actually achieve and be more productive. So we're gonna go back to the book, but Team of Teams is actually doing that. When you get a really good performing team, how do you actually create that same culture that you had on a small team across your organization? And you get that not from creating command and control, not from telling them what to do top down. You get them from creating these intersections, these collisions between teams.
Craig Hopkins:And that's where managers and supervisors have to say, you know what? My job's not to do the work myself. My job is to serve that team. My job is to make sure that team has the doesn't matter where, when, how, they understand the goals and objectives. They're engaged, they feel autonomous, and they can go, and they won't work.
Craig Hopkins:It's a very different teaching model as we go through it.
Joe Toste:Yeah. And I remember even I I'd worked at this property management software company called Yardi Systems. I don't know if you've
Craig Hopkins:heard of it or not. I know the name.
Joe Toste:Oh, okay. Yeah. In Southern because they're based here in Santa Barbara. And when I first started, and I was very I was junior, and and it was 9 to 5, sit in the chair, which I think there's in the beginning, there's probably some good benefits to that, especially, like, when you're right out of college. But, eventually, you get to a point where you start to question and I worked as, I think, what they call, like, a technical account manager.
Joe Toste:So I was doing technical basically, technical customer service, writing SQL scripts, and talking to the folks across the various agencies in in cities. And so but I always remember asking my supervisor, so we we have, GoToMeeting or whatever. This is, I think, 7 years ago, 8 years ago, 9 years ago. And why do I have to sit in my chair and do this? And it was kinda 1 of those answers where it's, this is just the way it is.
Joe Toste:And now you I can kind of laugh because I work home for the last couple years, but I do remember this, and I love that how you put it does put the onus on the supervisors to provide the leadership necessary to grow and trust in that whole team aspect. So I really like that.
Craig Hopkins:And so now you're back to culture. Does the supervisor feel empowered to make decisions in your situation? What if the supervisor said, of course, you should be able to work from home, but my boss will kill kick my butt if I let you do that. That's not the culture you want. So it's the same autonomy you wanna put to the supervisor that they can work with their team to say, what is the best way for us to get things done?
Craig Hopkins:And 1 of the things I teach is, if your first 90 days on the job, I really want you to be in the office because you gotta meet people. Right? And you've also gotta understand how it works. So to your point, so during your probation period, maybe that's not the right thing. If you're a performance issue, you know what?
Craig Hopkins:I'm not gonna let you work at home either. Right? Or on shifts. I wanna have a little bit more control, but you've proven you need someone to help manage your performance. That's a little different model.
Craig Hopkins:So what you get back to is the supervisor starts to say, what's the right way to work with this employee to give them the maximum flexibility, to get them engaged, but still to meet the operational needs and productivity of the team. And then if they say, you're allowed to go home, that's good, I, as their boss, can't go, that was a bad decision, because then I squash all that. So I gotta let them work through that as well. I have to hold them to team objectives. So if your team doesn't meet your objectives, now I come back and go, what's going on your team?
Craig Hopkins:I meet your objectives. It becomes very clear about the outcomes we want, not telling them how to do it.
Joe Toste:Yeah. Nope. That you nailed it. I love that. And shout out to Yardi Systems.
Joe Toste:I actually really enjoyed my time there. I I think perspective 8 years ago, nobody was really working from home and not too many people were. That wasn't a thing. So just having that perspective. But I really enjoyed my time there, and I I remember the first time walking in in Santa Barbara and Goleta to to the office, and the team lead was drawing a web server and a database, and I looked like a baby lamb.
Joe Toste:I didn't know what that was. I knew some accounting, but it now I was a technology podcast. So the it's really funny. So I'm kinda curious. What advice do you have for senior type folks or directors of IT who aspire to be CIO someday?
Craig Hopkins:So let's be clear. I never aspired to be a CIO, and I just kind of I, in my own career, have just kinda moved into different places where the team needed me. I've been a chief strategy officer. I've been a chief procurement officer. I've now been a CIO.
Craig Hopkins:I was a head of digital for several years. So I've done different roles. So in for me to answer that question, it's not like I sat back 1 day and said, I wanna be a CIO. How do I get there? Not my style.
Craig Hopkins:My style has been, hey, take me where you need me, give me problems to solve, let's go work on that. But to that point, I wanna make sure I give advice because a lot of people do want a very specific career path that is different in the technology. So my first piece of advice is, first of all, define what kind of CIO you wanna be. Because what I found is there's a that's a very broad term for a lot of different roles in the industry. Some CIOs are really CTOs.
Craig Hopkins:They are technical experts. I have the luxury on my team of having a CTO report to me, so he is responsible for technical architecture. He's he is the technical expert. I don't have to be that. But some CIOs, that's the expectation, is you're really good at that.
Craig Hopkins:So understand that's what if that's where you wanna be. Some CIOs are more like POO. And I would say, in my role in the city, I tend to play more of that role. I have a horizontal responsibility as an integrator governance strategy across 42 different departments in the city, and their technology needs, their operational process needs. So sometimes I feel like a c and then other times I feel like more of a vertical CIO, and I'm a department director of IT and everything that goes with that as well.
Craig Hopkins:So all I'm saying is you may not be able to pick what kind of CIO you wanna be. I just want you to be aware that not all CIOs are the same when you go and you talk to different corporate environments. But what I tend to do is ask people to align their skills, look at their skills, where do they see their skills growing over time. And when you say that to somebody, especially in IT, you go to their technical skills, and they pull out their resume and tell you every certification, every college course, all those different things. I think of 3 pieces of a pie when I talk about skills.
Craig Hopkins:And the first 1 is your technical skills, which you gotta be solid. If you wanna be a database administrator, you better be able to know how to do that. If you wanna be a CTO type person, you better have very strong architecture technical skills as you go forward. But what I tend to find is a a CEO, that's only 1 third of the pie. The second part of the pie is your grit and perseverance, your individual contribution that you bring to the table.
Craig Hopkins:Can you get knocked down and get back up again? Can you take calls 24 by 7 in a 5 day event and be okay with it? Can you speak truth to power, stand up in front of people of title and say, respectfully and professionally, this is what my team can do. This is what my team can't do. Can you solve for a breach when breaches happen?
Craig Hopkins:Because a big part of our role is physical data and cybersecurity as well. You don't have to be the expert, but you gotta be the 1st place where everybody's gonna poke you in the eye and say what's going on. That to me is grit and perseverance, and I look for that at a CIO level, but I also look forward for everybody in my team. Are they gonna come to work, and are they gonna fight the fight when you need to? That's the second piece of the pie.
Craig Hopkins:But the third piece of the pie is teamwork. And so now we're gonna go to a book you're gonna ask me about later. Right? But the ideal team player, Patrick Lencioni. Right?
Craig Hopkins:Are you humble? Are you hungry? Are you smart? Can you work with others? Do you wanna serve the team?
Craig Hopkins:Do you wanna be part of a team? Do you want the team to win, or do you only want yourself to win? So in that sense, I've seen CIOs that are fantastic, that can do all 3 of those things. But then I apply that same model to my individuals of my management team as well, and I ask them, can they manage that way? So once you've kinda assessed yourself in those 3 buckets, then the last thing to do is just have the courage to call the CIO and say, how do I get your job in a very professional way?
Craig Hopkins:Craig, I'm interested in your position. What can we do? I said, then let's talk about it, but I'm gonna talk about you in those 3 buckets, not just your technical skills. Because now I'm gonna give you some advice, mentoring, coaching about where I think in those 3 buckets you need to grow. And now, baby, I'll assign you some role models to look at.
Craig Hopkins:I'll give you some places to go experiment. I'll put you on a project team I need to see you demonstrate. But if you have the courage to come to me and say, Craig, I'd like to have your job or something like that in my career, I'm immediately gonna say, alright, let's talk about your skills, and let's see how we can apply that as we go forward.
Joe Toste:I love it. You mentioned grit. Did you ever read Angela Duckworth's book, grit? Okay. So she's got a really great book out there.
Joe Toste:I'll also link to that in the show notes. She's a professor, I think, at University of Penn, and she wrote a fantastic book. And so on grit, which I think sometimes people think is just a natural talent, but, actually, how you can grow grit. And I'll attest having ran the LA marathon. I grew my grit in the training process in order to get to there.
Joe Toste:So and I love what you said about perseverance. I actually have a I think maybe on our podcast intro call, but because we have viewers, I actually have this over here. Let me see if I can reach it. Persistence. I always love this now, not giving up until you succeed.
Joe Toste:So, normally, this is actually hanging on a wall, but the I had to move it. My toddler climbs in into my office many times, so it wasn't high enough. So now it's on the floor till I figure out where he's not gonna go.
Craig Hopkins:And, Joe, there's a list of attributes. Right? If you think of that 1 piece of the pie as teamwork, 1 as technical skills and domain, and then that last pie, it's very personal, right, in my mind. So I always use grit and perseverance kind of at the top, but there's a there's a list of attributes in there that people look for in in not only a good leader, but somebody because it's not just about leading people. Right?
Craig Hopkins:But also, it's about your own personal balance and about your own ability to say, yeah, if you want me to take a wall, I'll take a wall, but I'm not gonna leave bodies along the way. And so that is an individual somebody say, that's a good team player. No. Those are characteristics of you as an individual. That's how you choose to lead.
Craig Hopkins:It's how you choose to execute. At the end of the day, all the stuff is really cool, but if you're in a corporate culture, you gotta get things done. Right? So credibility comes from execution. So it's about how you execute it with your teammates around you.
Joe Toste:Oh, it's great. Credibility comes from execution. I know in the podcast, I can edit out the pauses, but for those who are listening, I'm on 3 pages of notes right now. So and I'm the 1 doing the interview. So if you're listening back or watching this, you should definitely get a notebook out because Craig is dropping a lot of really valuable stuff.
Joe Toste:Okay. So I know we're running out of time. Let's I wanna give you a moment, though. Can you brag on your team in the city of San Antonio? What's your favorite win?
Joe Toste:What are you most proud about?
Craig Hopkins:So what I'm most most proud about is I mean and you're gonna be able to talk to lots of people about the world in the last 15 months. I I remember January of 2020, we were a little advanced in the pandemic here because some of the folks that were that came from China had come to Lackland Air Force Base as part of the first quarantine folks with COVID. And none of us knew what that was. We just knew they were coming to San Antonio. They were quarantined.
Craig Hopkins:We're gonna figure out they'd come off a cruise ship. We're gonna figure out what this thing was. But at that moment, like, our whole team started going, hey, we probably need to put a little bit of our business continuity plans in place. What if kind of discussion. So your IT professionals will clearly know that.
Craig Hopkins:We're we are trained to respond to these outages and incidents. We know what to do. But none of us saw this as a 15 month event. We all we had no idea what it was gonna be. So what I'm most proud of is I turned to my not just my IT team, my extended management team, 200 people across the city.
Craig Hopkins:And we said, if this goes bad, what would it look like? And we actually built a scenario that we said, best we can tell is our employees will get sick and they won't come to work. Now none of us knew the extent of deaths or any of that kind of thing that we had at the time. What we just knew was employees were gonna get sick. And if employees couldn't come to work, how are we gonna run the city?
Craig Hopkins:There are 2, 000, 000 people in the city of San Antonio. 500 square 500 square miles of load of facility over 550 physical facilities, services that we provide. And so what we did is we built the scenario that half of our employees would be sick. And so what would we have to do to shut down services? What would we do to mothball things?
Craig Hopkins:What would be our highest critical priority? How would we continue to respond to the pandemic, which, again, we didn't know what to do at the time, while recovering and rebuilding things as we are going forward? So we kinda built this model really fast off business continuity planning, which is a great practice in our in there. And then we shut down the city in basically 8 days once we had our first kind of community spread in San Antonio. And for the next 14 months, we have been on this incredibly high tempo where every problem has been thrown at us, stand up a service, help people who are being evicted, what what are you gonna do about homeless people, how do we do mass vaccines.
Craig Hopkins:Anything you can imagine has been thrown at my IT team and my executive team across the city. And I mean my in the sense that we are just so bonded together. We all call ourself my because we're so tight together now. And the answer was, just give us a few minutes to think about it and we'll figure out a way. And so what we're back to is these young people on the front line, and I don't mean young just in the age, but a lot of times in their job position.
Craig Hopkins:They're just maybe the junior people who just say, I'll take an extra shift. Send me somewhere I've never gone before, put me in a different job because you need it, I'll work 7 days a week if I have to. And just watching these city employees, which if if you take a stereotype, government employees have gotta be lazy. Government employees are can't be working that hard. I have witnessed 11, 500 people who have worked from home, worked from the office, worked wherever they need to work, stand up and solve problems on a daily basis.
Craig Hopkins:And here we are today feeling like, okay, maybe we're finally past it, and the tempo is just as fast as it was 15 months ago. So what I worry about in there, not only do I brag on them, is as a leader, there's a fatigue that sets in at some point where you just say I can't do this anymore. Or the effects of this, of what we have put our people through and what they have risen up to do 3 years from now, we have no idea what those effects are gonna be on people's performance, on on their on their mental health, on all those other things that we're going through. So it's not war. I don't wanna make it sound like that in a combat military sense, but it is service over self.
Craig Hopkins:It is doing anything that's required to solve for the residents of our city when they need it. And I think what we then owe as our as the management team here is to make sure we can see the downstream effects on their families, on their performance, on their teams that they've been working on as we come out of this and go back to a sense of, I'm not calling it normal, but back to a regular tempo. And if you go back to team of teams, you'll learn a lot about tempo, and you can't live at a high tempo for a long period of time, and that's what we've been doing. So I've seen some pretty extraordinary things.
Joe Toste:That is fantastic. I'm really excited. I know Team of Teams is now gonna be on top of my list, but the tempo piece really resonates. Favorite book, as we wrap this up, favorite book, favorite podcast?
Craig Hopkins:So I'm gonna my wife might she just walked in, so she might hear me say this. I'm not a big podcast guy, but when she and I drive, she loves to put on podcasts. So I listen to anything she put on. And she put 1 on yesterday, which is Renegades born in the USA, which is president Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen. Excuse me.
Craig Hopkins:You recognize the voice? I'm like, wow, that's Bruce Springsteen. So and the 2 of them talking about being fathers and husbands. And I guess as I went and read a little bit about it this morning, because I was very impressed with the podcast, they were really trying to talk about topics that unify us back to the American story, things that bring us back together as individuals in America, not break us apart. And so 2 very different people, but was, I'm so impressed just to hear their views on fatherhood and being great husbands.
Joe Toste:That's great. Favorite book? I know you've said Team of Teams, but is that the favorite?
Craig Hopkins:No. I actually I love it because it's been a great platform to launch off of. But I think the 1 I'll keep coming back to, I told you I was gonna bring up, was The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Olincione. I really like that concept of that piece of the pie that that we talked about, which is teamwork, this kind of focus on humble, hungry, and smart, and what are those attributes that make you a great team player? Not an individual, not a technical expert, but now you can start to see who is gonna be good on a team and where you can work to be a better teammate.
Joe Toste:That's fantastic. That's gonna wrap up that's gonna wrap up our time together. I will actually be in Texas pretty soon in June, in the Waco area. So I know that's, I think, probably between San Antonio and Austin. So somewhere between.
Craig Hopkins:Joe, have you seen how big Texas is?
Joe Toste:Yeah. I live in California, so it's pretty big too. So I've done some road trips. But, Craig, if you wanted me, I'm willing to meet you in San Antonio. Okay.
Joe Toste:Alright. Maybe we can make that happen. We'll find out. Thanks for the time, Craig. I really appreciate it.
Joe Toste:And you can find Craig on LinkedIn and Twitter, and looking forward to releasing this episode. I appreciate the time, Craig.
Craig Hopkins:Thank you, Joe. This is great.
Joe Toste:Craig, where do you hang out? LinkedIn, Twitter? What what's your spot?
Craig Hopkins:I only on Twitter because my wife sends me stuff. But, actually, I do love to share a lot of city stuff from Twitter. So I am cg_guardian on Twitter, and you'll see you'll see a lot of coast guard and city stuff on there. But I do spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, craig dash Hopkins on LinkedIn. You'll see a lot of leadership stories.
Craig Hopkins:You'll see a lot of mentoring and coaching and sharing and trying to build other people up along the way. I think this is a big part of what we, we try to do on social media there.
Joe Toste:That's great. Love it. You head over to LinkedIn or Twitter to connect with Craig. And if you're not following me on LinkedIn or Twitter, please connect with me. I love sharing content and lessons that I'm learning all the time from CIOs and other industry leaders.
Joe Toste:Hey. What's up, everybody? This is Joe Tassie from techtables.com, and you're listening to the Public Sector Show by Tech Tables. This podcast features human centric stories from public sector CIOs, CISOs, and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county, and higher education. You'll gain valuable insights into current issues and challenges faced by top leaders through interviews, speaking engagements, live podcast tour events.
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