Interview with Michael Whitt, November 23, 2018

Michael Whitt, transcript, November 23, 2018

Samantha Whitt: This is the Oral History Leadership Profile Interview of Michael Whitt. Thank you for letting me interview you today, will you please state your name, the date, and your position at your place of work?

Michael Whitt: Sure. My name is Michael Whitt, and it is November 23, 2018 and I am the Chief Information Security Officer at Iberia Bank.

SW: Awesome. What part of your personal biography or background led you to this position?

MW: Well, so I have been working for almost thirty years now, but when I was at college—I went to college at Auburn University, and I got a degree in Management Information Systems, which led me down the technology path and about nineteen years ago I moved over and started working in information security full time and over those nineteen years I’ve eventually made my way to the Chief Information Security Officer job.

SW: That is so cool! What cultural identities or experiences are most salient for you?

MW: I’ll try to answer that question for you. Before I was the CISO for Iberia Bank, I was the CISO at another bank, BBVA Compass. BBVA Compass gave me an opportunity to understand more cultures than just what is inside the Southeastern United States because BBVA is a global entity that is actually headquartered in Madrid, Spain. I actually, while I worked there, spent a lot of time in Madrid and Barcelona, Spain, and I also spent a good bit of time in Mexico City, and Monterrey, Mexico, which gave me an appreciation for other cultures trying to do the same job. There are many people around the world trying to do the same job that I am, but I’d only ever done that job in Alabama. So being able to see how my peers in other countries were trying to do this job, trying to be successful and excel, and sharing those experiences with them was really helpful.

SW: Did you see them using a different leadership style than you? Do you think that that was effective for them or would your style have been more effective?

MW: That is a really good question, because the one thing that is really evident is cultural differences and how people interact with each other. I think in some ways, we learned from each other. So, I think in some ways they may have seen over time that my management style, or the management style that is more relative to our culture here in the Southeastern United States, was better sometimes to get things done but on the other side I think we learned a lot from them too, that we may not know the best way to do things sometimes. Especially from some of the people that I got to know very well, in both Mexico City and Spain, they definitely did things different than me sometimes and actually it was actually the better way to do it, so I learned a lot from it.

SW: So, you would say that a cross-cultural leadership connection is beneficial?

MW: I would absolutely say that. From my time working within that group and being able to travel around the world a little bit, but also from some other traveling that I’ve done. I’ve been to Tanzania, I’ve been to Ecuador, and I have been to some other places, and what I have learned from all of my travel is understanding other cultures and learning from other cultures is vitally important to anything that we want to do and be successful at. We tend think in the United states sometimes that we have all of the answers about everything that there ever was to know, and the reality is that when you travel and you meet other people, and learn from other people, and see about how they go about their daily jobs, then you realize you don’t have all the answers, and a lot of times you can learn a whole lot from those folks.

SW: What experiences have shaped you most as a leader?

MW: I would tell you that—and I feel pretty strongly about this—I would tell you that what has shaped me most as a leader are the times when I have failed. Why I think that that is important is I because I really and truly believe that that is how we learn. We learn from failure. We all want to be successful all the time, we all want to be right all the time, we all want to do everything perfect all the time, but the reality is, is that is just not life and that is just not how the real world works. Back to what I was saying earlier, although we like to think we know everything there is to know, sometimes the reality is we don’t. For me, I think the times where I learned the most about leadership, about how to manage people, problems and technology, are in those times where I either made a decision that was wrong for the situation, or I handled an interpersonal conversation in a wrong way, or I just didn’t do things the way they needed to be done. In the end, certainly that was a failure and we had to regroup, start over, and get back on track, but I just think that those are the times that you learn the most; When you’ve tried, and you’ve done your best, and you’ve worked very hard, but you didn’t come out exactly like you wanted to and you had to step back and reassess and decide a better path to take. I will tell you, I grew up playing sports and I think that sports teaches you that. I certainly think there are other things, other extra curricular activities that would teach you that too, but I think that I learned a good bit of that from playing sports as well.

SW: Do you feel that you were called into leadership, or did you seek it out?

MW: That’s a really interesting question, because how I ended up in leadership roles in the first leadership roles I had, all the way up until now, I actually sought those roles out. I was looking to move up, I was looking to get more responsibility and more authority, and be challenged more. But now looking back almost thirty years into my career, I really feel like in some ways, through all of my life experiences, I was somewhat prepared to be in the leadership role that I am now. You would call the position that I am in now, certainly a Senior Executive management position, and like I said, earlier in my career I certainly sought the path that led me to this place, and I was striving all the time to do that. But again, looking back, I really feel like, that although I was seeking, all of my life experiences coming up to that point were actually preparing me to be in that role.

SW: That goes back to talking about being able to fail, and letting that grow us as a leader, and that leads us into the next question: How have you learned from obstacles and challenges you’ve faced? So the moments that you have failed, where has that growth pushed you in terms of leadership ability?

MW: One of the hardest things I think we have to learn to deal with is failure as human beings. That is in everything we do, whether it’s leadership in a position at work, or it’s on an athletic team, or it’s in the band, it’s whatever, we all have to be able to learn from failure. The biggest thing that I learned was that, a lot of times we see failure as the end. “Oh well, I’ve failed, and that’s terrible, and I’m terrible, we’re terrible…” but what you have to do, is see those points where you haven’t done what you wanted to do, you’ve failed at something, you didn’t handle a situation correctly—whether it’s interpersonal with somebody else, or it’s a task that you were trying to complete—you should actually see that as the beginning. So, “Okay, I didn’t handle this correctly, but this is not the end, this is the beginning. I am going to reassess the situation, I am going to realign my understanding of the situation, I’m going to go talk to people and sit down and understand people, I’m going to learn this task that maybe I don’t know enough about.” Seeing as the beginning of something great, as opposed to the end of something bad.

SW: Right, always coming with a plan.

MW: Yes, always having a plan. That is something that is very important to me and I try to tell folks. I tell folks two things, whether it’s coaching basketball—because I coach basketball—or I tell this to my folks that work for me as well, is two things. One: Always have a plan. Life is hard, you’re going to fail, things are not going to go your way, but what’s your plan? What is the next thing you’re going to do, and the next and the next, so that you can be successful even if we had a failure. So have a plan. Then the second thing is—and people kid me about it because I say it all the time—but what’s next? I tell my basketball team, don’t worry about the previous possession, don’t worry about the next possession, play the possession you’re in, it is the only one that matters. If we’re worried about the last one, something bad is going to happen and then we’ll have another bad possession. If we’re worried about the next one, same thing. And that goes, too, if the last possession was really successful, well let’s don’t celebrate because we have to play this one. I talk about that with my team at work a lot too. During the day, there’s a million things going on, there’s a lot of white noise, there’s a lot of stress, so we have to stay in the moment. We have to have this “what’s next?” mentality of “Okay, something bad happened, or I failed, or I had a disagreement, or whatever…” well that can’t then lead into the next conversation you have, because then you’re going to have another failure and so you always have to have this “what’s next” mentality of “it doesn’t matter what happened previously, whether it was really good or really bad. I need to focus in the present, in the here and now. How can I be successful at what I’m doing right now?”

SW: And being a leader, you can help those that would be your followers or your subordinates with maintaining that mentality?

MW: Yeah that’s really what I do all day, as a matter of fact. Try to make sure that they are maintaining focus on the present, on the here and now. That we’re not getting worried, or upset, or concerned, or even over-celebrating a situation that happened previously and we’re not getting overly worried and concerned about things that are going to happen a week from now. We have to be really focused, especially with what we’re doing in information security, we have to be really focused on the here and now, and really truly have that what’s next attitude. For my leadership role, I really spend a lot of my time during the day just trying to foster that kind of process with how they think about what they’re going through during the day. Also, a big part of my job is making sure that they have a plan. What’s our plan? How are we going to get done what we want to get done so that we can be successful?

SW: I agree with all of that. In the realm of what you do on a day-to-day basis, what do you think, in your own words, leadership means to you, and to those that work for you?

MW: For me, as the leader of my team, my role is to support them. I tell them all the time, if you think about an organization chart, it looks like a triangle. If you look at my org chart, I’m at the top of the triangle, and it comes down as the organization fills out, it makes the triangle. So what I tell my team all the time is, I want them to turn that triangle upside down. So that what normally would be the lowest level of employees are now at the top of the org chart, and I am at the very bottom. My job every day is to support them. That’s my sole job. They’re the ones doing all the work every day, not me. They’re the ones getting their hands dirty, they’re the ones doing the hard work, they’re the ones having to—in our case—protect our brand and our bank and our customers. My job is to support them, just like we’ve talked about. [My job is] To make sure they have everything they need to be able to do their job, to make sure they’re staying focused in the present, to make sure they have a plan, to help them cut red tape, to help them if there’s a difficult conversation to have with somebody—I’ll have that conversation because they don’t need to be worried about that. So that’s leadership for me. Leadership for me is having a servant attitude, supporting your team, making sure your team has everything they need to be successful.

SW: That leads us right into the next question, how would you characterize your leadership style? You said as a servant?

MW: Right, so I really try every day to think of my leadership responsibilities as: me serving my team. How can I best serve my team so that they can be successful?

SW: What do you think are your professional strengths and weaknesses?

MW: There’s a couple of things. From a strength standpoint, I think that there’s a couple of things, one we just talked about. I think I do a pretty good job of enabling our folks to be successful every day, and stay focused/maintain their focus where focus needs to be. I think one of the things that I do well sometimes is that I can read situations, I think I’ve been gifted with discernment, as one of my spiritual gifts. So, I can read situations and sort of read people very well and use that to try to resolve problems quickly and try to mitigate risk and issues that may come up. Sometimes though that hinders me as well. From a weakness standpoint, I think that one of the things that I tend to get caught up in sometimes is when we have these things we have to do, we know we have to do them, why aren’t we doing them? Sometimes I have to step back and understand that everybody works at different levels and everybody works in kind of different ways. Some people are really very task-oriented, and some people are really more idea-oriented and focused. So a lot of times I have to step back and look at each individual and try to understand really how the function and how they work, and they try to support them and serve them individually in the best way possible. But sometimes I get caught up in, “Hey we’ve got a hundred things to do, why aren’t we doing those hundred things?”, and that’s really not the best way to lead because that is a very generic, broad-brush way, and you really have to focus on each individual.

SW: Do you feel it is important to delegate? If so, why? When and how do you delegate?

MW: Yes. The answer to that is 100% yes. It goes back to what I said a minute ago, when you think about my org chart, and turning it upside down, putting what would be the lowest people in the organization actually at the top, it’s because they’re the ones working every day. In reality, they’re the ones doing all the work every day that has to get done within our organization. I’m not really doing that. A big part of that is because we really don’t want me doing that. Right? What I think is really important, and maybe the most important whether you are coaching a team or leading an organization is that you have to find, hire, and put to work very, very smart people that are smarter than you, that know how to do things that you don’t know how to do, and then you have to let them go do those things. If you try to do it all yourself, you don’t know how to do those things, you don’t have some of those skill sets that they have, and quite honestly at my age I’m not going to get those skillsets that they have—and I don’t even really want to. But, they’re younger, they’re into those things, they want to be able to do those things, and they’re excited about those things. It is so important, maybe one of the most important aspects of running a team or an organization, you have to fine people who are smarter than you. You have to find people who have different ideas than you. You have to find people who culturally are different than you. You have to find folks who can different ideas to the table, who are very smart and very wise, and then you have to let them do their jobs. Even sometimes when you don’t necessarily agree with where they are coming from, what I’ve learned a lot over thirty years is if you will just listen to folks and understand kind of where they are coming from and why they are wanting to do something the way they’re wanting to do it, you’ll actually learn that that is really a good way to do things, and it is probably better that way, and its why you hired that really smart person in the first place. I think delegation is critically important to being able to grow. If you think of your organization as kind of a living thing, its growing, and its learning, and its expanding, and getting better every day at what it does, I don’t think you can do that without delegating to really smart people.

SW: Right, and it definitely helps to have a leader that is able to strengthen and empower those that work under them. What do you think are two or three action steps you think are essential to enable your teams to be successful?

MW: Well I think there’s a couple of things. One is: you have to communicate very clearly to them that they are empowered. Now, you want to be careful and not just say “you’re empowered!” That doesn’t mean a lot. What you have to do is understand each individual, and how they work, how they think, how they process, and what they’re good at, what they like, what they want to be good at, and what they want to work on. Then, you have some conversations with them about “these are the things that we have to get done, this is where you skill set lies, this is how I think you can really be great doing this.” So instead of “you are empowered,” you’re saying “here are the things that you are empowered with. I mean, you can take it and run with it, you know what the endgame is, here are some parameters on either side that we need to stay inside of, because at the bank we’re heavily regulated” or whatever. That’s the first thing, you have to empower folks, give them authority, and responsibility for the things that they like and the things that they want to work on and want to be good at and want to be excited about. The second thing is, you have to listen to folks. If you are going to delegate, empower folks, and give them that authority, you’re going to let them work, then you’ve got to listen. You’ve got to understand where they’re coming from. You got to be willing to hear things that you don’t agree with. You’ve got to be willing to listen to ideas and arguments that aren’t your own. Sometimes you have to be willing to say, “you know what, that’s right, I wasn’t thinking that way but after hearing the argument and thinking through it I think it’s right.” Sometimes you gave to be able to say, “How can we mesh all those ideas together? How can we take what you’re thinking and wanting to do, and my thought process about it, and how do we mesh those together? Does that make sense to you?” I think that that is a part of it too, is they that they need to know and feel like they own it. That way it is not just the leader coming and saying “I header what you said but this what I want to do, so you need to go figure that out.” No, it is enabling them to then take that, maybe mash it together, and come back with something better that neither of us even thought about. I think you really have to listen to them. The last piece is, I really think it is important to get out of the way sometimes. I really, really think it’s important. I learned this more from coaching basketball. I had a group of really good, strong, tough players. It was really easy for me sometimes to over-coach them. What I learned from the five years that I had them, by the fifth year when they were all about to go to college and play in college, was that a lot of times I really just need to stay out of the way and let them solve problems. They could solve the problems, they could figure it out, and they didn’t need me all the time solving their problems. That has helped me in my professional life at work, understanding that I have a good team, they will figure it out. They can solve their own problems, they don’t need me solving all of their problems for them. I think that that has been very beneficial.

SW: I agree with all of that. You talked a little bit about making sure that your team knows that you’re listening to them. What advice do you have for building relationships and trust in an organization, so that they know that you are listening to them?

MW: Yeah, I think that that is really important. I do a couple of things. One is that I make sure that I have face-to-face time with everybody on my team. That is not just the people who report directly to me, but that’s the people who work throughout my organization who report to other people that end up reporting to me. They need to be able to see you and talk to you. You can’t be just a name on an org chart. There needs to be personal, face-to-face time with them, where they get to talk. You are not talking to them or at them, they get to talk and they get to speak. There’s got to be one-on-one time throughout the organization. The other thing is, I have multiple standard, set meetings where we bring the entire group together, and I let them talk. I don’t talk. I have, with my direct reports, one-on-one meetings with them every month where they talk, I don’t talk. I think it is really, really important, because if they never see me, they certainly know I’m not listening to them. If they see me a lot, but I’m always the one regurgitating information/throwing information at them, I’m always talking at them, then I’m certainly not listening to them either. The only way to really have them buy in and understand that they are very important to what we’re doing, and I want to listen to what they’re doing, is you’ve got to go sit down with them, and you’ve got to listen. You’ve just got to be quiet, and let them talk, and then interact with them, ask question, get them going and talking about the things they’re interested in and want to talk about. Otherwise, if you’re not doing that, you’re really not listening, and you can walk around and say that you’re listening to your folks all the time, but you’re not and they know you’re not. It takes personal, focused, person-to-person interaction where I am literally sitting and not talking.

SW: Putting a face to a name.

MW: Yep, all the time.

SW: Alright, well moving away from your work and your organization a little bit, what are other areas in your life where you see yourself being a leader?

MW: We’ve talked about basketball. I coach basketball, and I’ve learned a lot of leadership responsibilities through basketball. Then, of course at home. I take very seriously that I have a responsibility from God and scripture that I should be the spiritual leader in the home for my family, and I think that is maybe the most important leadership position that I have, because one day I’m going to answer for that. There is leadership in everything you do, but certainly I think it starts in your home, but it is also in other places. For instance, I have in the past led a small group, and in our current small group at church I teach sometimes and lead in that way. All of those situations though? All of the principles are the same. You have really smart folks around you, you just listen, you try to keep them living in the moment and pursuing their plan, them always knowing that you love them, you’re there to support them, and your whole job is to be a servant. A lot of people see leadership as someone telling you what to do. I really see it as completely opposite. I don’t ever really—and I have to sometimes—but I don’t every really want to tell somebody what to do, I want to support and serve them as they do what they do.

SW: Right. If you could tell future leaders any one, specific piece of advice, what would you want them to know?

MW: Be a servant. Focus on serving your people. Whoever they are. Whether you’re leading a large organization in a fortune five-hundred company, or you are coaching a team, or you are trying to lead at home, or you are teaching a class, or whatever you are doing, be a servant. Have a servant’s mindset. “How can I help the people that I’m responsible for leading do what they need to do?” That’s the one thing I would tell anybody.

SW: What or who has been your greatest influence?

MW: That’s a really good question. I think there have been a lot of them. From a real leadership perspective, my father is really probably my biggest influence. He is from the greatest generation, he grew up in the depression, he grew up on a farm where if you didn’t grow it or kill it you just didn’t eat. He spent time in the military, he fought a war, came home and got an education, went to work in the space program and just lived a life that the majority of us will never be able to live again in this country. But it was always very important for him that all of his kids understood what leadership really meant, and it was about having a servant heart and doing things the right way. I would say it was probably my dad.

SW: I like that a lot. Last question: What do you want your legacy to be?

MW: I don’t know, I haven’t thought a lot about that. What I hope it is, is that whether it was at work or in sport, or at home, is that folks truly saw me as someone who wanted to serve them, wanted to help them in any way possible, wanted to provide whatever was necessary so that they could reach their goals, meet their goals, do whatever they wanted to do, be successful at whatever they were trying to be successful at. I really don’t care that somebody remembers me as some great manager, or great this, or great that, what I really care is if I had legacy that people would look back and say he was just a really good servant.

SW: Alright, well thank you so much!

MW: Well, you’re welcome!