Senior Vice President & Chief Information Officer, Trane Technologies PLC
Elevate Digital America 2 0 Steve Hagood, CIO Trane Technologies
In this first part of our series by Elevate Digital, America 2.0 focuses on modern, people-centric leadership. We are excited to host Steve Hagood, CIO for Trane Technologies.
https://www.elevate-digital.com/
About M. Hagood
In a November 2020 interview for the Elevate Digital "America 2.0" series, Steve Hagood, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Trane Technologies, discussed how the COVID-19 pandemic had changed his perspective on leadership and remote work. Hagood said he had come to appreciate the importance of family, friends, and colleagues, and described leaning into qualities he already aspired to, such as being an empathetic, servant leader who listens first. He noted that while video conferencing and remote capabilities had been available for years, the pandemic had led his company to embrace them more fully, finding that productivity remained high and prompting a rethinking of the necessity of travel and in-person meetings. Hagood also commented on the broader societal response to the pandemic, expressing admiration for how the world community had come together to take similar actions, even when implemented locally. He emphasized the importance of conducting constructive lessons learned to improve crisis management and risk planning, both for society and within Trane Technologies. Additionally, he highlighted the positive qualities he had observed in people, such as community participation and helping others, and called for those stories to be celebrated.
Transcript (12 segments)
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Adam Morgan0:12
I am your host, Adam Morgan. Here we're going to focus on interviewing community and technology leaders about life and leadership going forward. The world changed in 2020, and we really want to highlight and celebrate strong leadership in our short form web series. I'm pleased to be joined today by Steve Haygood. Steve is the CIO of Trane Technologies and was the CIO of Ingersoll Rand prior to their spinoff. Beyond his extensive leadership experience within the Charlotte technology community, he is a board member of Apparo and NIBCO. He can also count CIO of the Year numerous times to his list of accolades. And more importantly and selfishly, Steve is a good friend of mine. So Steve, thank you for joining us.
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M. Hagood1:10
It's my pleasure. As a parent, as a friend... That's a great question, Adam. You know, the first things that come to my mind are, quite frankly, really appreciating the things that you already would know are most important in your life. You get a moment like this and it just emphasizes what's really important to you and really what should be important in our lives. You know, that's our family, our friends, the people that we do work with who are also our family. And you know, being really empathetic, I feel like it just makes you appreciate the people you have in your life, the people you love. I tell you, simple things like just sitting on our... you know, quite frankly, having a beautiful day like today, it's nice and sunny. Appreciating that, acknowledging that. So I think it's really honing in on family and friends and just kind of going back to appreciating some of the simple things that we might take for granted because we're just moving so fast in our daily lives.
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Adam Morgan2:34
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Absolutely. Do you think this process and what's going on has changed you as a leader? Do you view your role differently now?
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M. Hagood2:43
Adam, I don't know that I view my role different. I would absolutely tell you, at least for me personally, leaning into the leadership qualities that I already aspire to, that I... you know, to listen to them rather than talking to them first. Those types of leadership qualities that I really admire, it feels like those are even more accentuated in a time like this when you can't physically be face to face. So I would tell you I don't know that I've changed my leadership, but it's really accentuated my desire to want to be empathetic to the folks that work with me and work for me. You know, I really want to listen well. I want to be sensitive that they're all working from home now and they might have smaller children running around in the background, crying or needing mom or dad's attention. They've got a lot going on in... senses gets dulled out a little bit, the other four seem to take over a lot of times. I feel like that's what's happening, you know, we're even accentuating more of those types of leadership traits that I think we would value anyway.
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Adam Morgan4:26
That's actually a perfect segue, I guess, to my next question. Would be, are there changes in how you're conducting your business that you think are going to become permanent, even after life kind of reverts back to normal?
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M. Hagood4:37
Yeah, I think that's a great question too, Adam. Look, I think what's interesting is, you know, video conference technology, remote capabilities have been with us for many, many years. But I don't know that as a whole, as a society, we've really embraced those... I think what's really going to change now is the awareness and the understanding and just quite frankly the living practice that working remote is pretty much just fine. We're actually able to be really, really productive using video conference tools. You and I are doing this via video conference, virtual chat. Now certainly, while the experience isn't exactly like us being face to face, what I have found over the last 45 to 60 days, all my company's been working from home, is that by and large we're finding we're still very, very productive. And so we're really rethinking our idea that you have to travel... of connectivity being much more ingrained in the fabric of how we're going to do business going forward.
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Adam Morgan6:17
Yeah, it's funny you say that. There's a number of meetings we historically would have had in person that happened then over a web meeting. I've also found that I've had a series of calls that would have been just conference calls that instead became web meetings, and it's been really enjoyable where we've bonded and I've been able to interact with people visually that otherwise wouldn't have happened because it was just scheduled to be a phone call historically. So completely agreed.
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M. Hagood6:42
You bet, you bet.
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Adam Morgan6:44
Last question, and I'm going to do my best to keep us in a short form format as promised and not eat up too much of your day. The response of governments globally to COVID-19 is unprecedented, right? It's... actually feel like when you consider the global nature of this pandemic and quite frankly how well, I would say, the world as a community has come together to rally around common actions and common responses, even though they're taking those responses maybe country by country or state by state in the United States' case, or even city by city, county by county, the actions we seem to be taking are very similar. We're wanting to shut down areas where lots of people would congregate together.
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M. Hagood7:51
I'm actually, be honest with you, I'm impressed with the way the world community has... you know, I'd sure love, that's just my personal view, I'd love for us to continue to work well together and not so much finger point or look for scapegoats after the fact. 'Why didn't we know things before? Why weren't we better prepared?' Those are fair questions and we should ask those and answer those in a constructive forum, a safe forum if you will. But I actually, by and large, think we've responded to it pretty well considering how quickly it came upon us. I don't know that I would have a lot to offer in terms of... until you actually face an incident and then you get lessons learned from that, it's a little bit hard to know how you would have prepared different or what you do different. Yeah, I saw maybe that's the point. I would like to see us do some really good lessons learned and really bake that into our crisis management and risk management plans going forward, maybe both as a society, federal government, civic governments, but also in our own company. I know we'll do that within our own Trane Technologies company, look at what could we have done to prepare better or what lessons do we learn now and how do we bake that in going forward. I think that's fair.
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Adam Morgan9:52
Yeah, great point. And frankly, to your earlier comments there, in terms of how they've participated in their community, how they've reached out to help people, who've contributed of their time, their lives, their finances, and so on, to participate and do what they can, it's inspiring too. And a lot of those stories we will certainly want to celebrate in the coming weeks and months. I agree, I agree. Listen, thank you so much for your time. This was great to kick this series off with you. Most importantly again, because I appreciate your friendship and think the world of you professionally. So thank you for joining me today and certainly appreciate you sharing time with us.
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M. Hagood10:42
Well Adam, I would tell you I really applaud you for doing something like this, right? A series, a way to communicate and still get some conversation going. The fact that we're remote makes it even more important that we...