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Joyce Young
It's the Relationships
Joyce Young, who has been a CIO for 13 years at three companies and is currently the vice president and CIO of Electro-Motive Diesel Inc. of LaGrange, Ill., says she never started looking for a new job just because of an IT strategy change. And she has lived through quite a few of them: bigger budgets, smaller budgets, outsourcing and insourcing. "Budgets come and go," she says.
What inspires Young to stay or go is her relationship with her boss and peers. "When you have the relationship with the people and you want to work together, the money will be found" for important projects, she says. But "when it gets to, 'Gee, I really don't like working for these people' or 'They don't like me for whatever reason,'" then it's time to start looking.
It can take years for a CIO to earn the respect and trust of top management. And unfortunately, it can disappear almost overnight. Young should know. At a previous job with a company she declines to name, she had established a good working relationship with her boss and fellow executives. Then her company was acquired by a company in another state. Suddenly, her teammates quit. Young was given a bonus to stay for at least a year. She accepted, figuring that she could build relationships with the new management team.
There was only one problem: Her new chief and colleagues were all based at the acquiring company's headquarters. They even lived near one another. She flew to their offices once a week for meetings and talked with them constantly over the phone, but that wasn't enough to make her feel like she belonged.
When it came time to discuss business that concerned IT, the other top executives often met without her. She learned about most of the missed meetings through administrative assistants, whom she had made a point of getting to know. "I don't think it was always intentional," Young says. Then she adds, "I don't want it to seem like a big conspiracy. It was probably completely unintentional. They had all worked together for a long time. Here I am the new person, and I'm not right down the hall from them. A lot of it was out of sight, out of mind."
After several missed meetings, Young complained and received profuse apologies in return. "But then they would do it again and again," she says. She knew she could probably improve the situation by relocating, but family obligations kept her from moving. After Young's promised year expired, she began accepting recruiters' phone calls.
In Young's view, all else is fixable. "Can you get more budget? Yes. Can you get a bigger office? Yes. But to go and try and fix how you're viewed, that is really tough to change," she says. "I just got so tired after awhile."
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