Breaking Through Your Comfort Zone w/ Michelle Greene

I'm super excited to be here. Thank you so much, Lisa, for the invite.

I appreciate the invite, and I feel the exact same. So for me, if Dan says I need to meet someone, I never question it because he has not been wrong yet.

I was born and raised in Valdosta, Georgia, so it's about three hours south of Atlanta. I tell people all the time, if you've driven to Florida, you have driven right past my hometown because there is no way for you to get there if you are driving without going right down 75 South.

Yeah, so I will tell you the answer is no. I didn't necessarily think about being a technologist, but I did think about being a businesswoman. My mom worked in the business world, my mom worked in the retail world, she was very focused from a career perspective. So for me, that's what I saw, that's what I had exposure to. My grandparents owned a grocery store, my grandfather owned an insurance company, my dad owned an insurance company, my adopted father owned an insurance company. And at the end of the day, you see that many people around you doing business, running businesses, and all you can think about is I'll probably do some similar work. So for me, it wasn't necessarily about technology, but I definitely was clear that I was going to do all I could to be a force within the business world.

I was not given a briefcase. And it's funny, I always talked about being a businesswoman. My mom thought that I would be a school teacher because my aunt, one of my favorite aunts, she is a school teacher. And so I would always play teacher and pretend like I was a teacher. But absolutely that is not my calling, because this girl here still has a lot of work to do with learning patience, and to be a teacher it takes a lot more of that than I probably have.

Amen to that. Shout out to the teachers. They are truly preparing the next generation, and it does take a special person. It really does take a special person.

It was just a great opportunity. When I was at Johnson Controls, I was selected to participate in an accelerated leadership program and they did a partnership with Wharton. That just paid dividends because it was the exposure, the international travel, the connection with other people across the company that you might not have normally engaged with. We had an opportunity to put together a strategy that was actually executed on from a business standpoint, so it wasn't just doing something in theory. These were real business problems that we were helping the organization solve. Just a great opportunity. And since then, I've stayed connected somewhat with Wharton, and I recently spoke to their Chief Technology class, one of the cohorts. So just great opportunities, great connections, and as everybody knows, it's a great institution.

It did. I lived in Sweden. And when you were speaking earlier about taking the opportunities, I think this is a perfect example. I've shared this story with people before. Me and my mom, we are super close, so we'll talk on the phone in the mornings. Now we do a lot of texting, FaceTiming, whatever we need to do. But at the time, I would talk to my mom every morning. The drive from my house to my office was about seven or eight minutes. Every morning we talk on the phone. And I remember getting off the phone with her saying, 'Listen, I have a conversation with my leader this morning. I'm not sure what's happening. He's just back from vacation and said he wanted to meet to ask me about the opportunity to Sweden.' So as soon as he asked, I was like, 'Of course I will.' And I called my mom back like 30, 45 minutes later and I'm like, 'Hey, I'm moving to Sweden.' And she was like, 'What? I just spoke to you. What happened in that short period?' So that was one that I said yes to. And I recall people asking me, 'What are they going to pay you? How are they going to pay you?' I was like, 'I don't know, but in the end, I feel confident they're not going to take any money away from me. So if I'm good with that, then let's just go for it because this is a great opportunity.' So the first time I lived in Sweden, I lived in Sweden for about seven or eight months. I was only supposed to be there for six and they extended me a little bit. I came back to Raleigh, North Carolina at the time. And then I was back in Raleigh maybe about a year and a half, close to two years, and I got asked to go back. I signed up for a year with the option to extend for a year, and I was in Sweden for four years. So again, I felt like the growth opportunity I had in Sweden was bigger than just professional. It was personal. It was very personal for me. I feel it helped me to become even more independent, more focused, and to just learn myself. It forces you to do a lot of internal work. It forces you to do a lot of self-work when you're living on your own in a foreign country. You just have to figure things out. You can't always just pick up a phone and call a girlfriend or pick up a phone and call your mom. You got time difference to deal with. And I don't know, it just really did help me just grow in a great way.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Yes, I was.

So Cardinal Health is pharmaceutical distribution. That is the biggest piece of our business. Also medical devices and supplies is the other piece. So we have a Pharma segment and a Medical segment. Competitors, if you think about competitors, it will be McKesson and ABC, which is now Cencora. So I always have to remember to say the name correctly. But I will tell you, I joined Cardinal in 2021, February, as the CIO and SVP for the Pharma segment. And again, big job. And if you think about Pharma, just the segment alone is bigger than a lot of entire companies. So for me, coming and having the opportunity to work at Cardinal as a CIO for one of their largest divisions was just a huge opportunity. And then at the time, Victor Crawford was here, and I had an opportunity to come and work for a leader of color, which I had not had the opportunity to do. So I had a chance to meet Victor, get to know Victor, learn a lot from him. And our CEO at the time, Mike Kaufman, we had great conversations. And I will tell you, during the interview process, I had the opportunity to interview with several of the executive leaders, and it just felt good to know that people were just as advertised. So you had the conversations. There's a focus around diversity, equity, and inclusion. There was a focus around growth, development, and presenting opportunities when people had earned opportunities within the company. So then you fast forward, and at the time my boss left for another opportunity, and I was asked would I be willing to step into this role, which was huge. And I'm always having people ask me what was my aha moment. And for me, the aha moment is number one, reaching this level. Just as you said, young black female from Valdosta, Georgia, hard worker, have always stayed focused, a strong family connection, and a lot of support for my career and the things I want to do. That was overwhelming in itself. But also thinking about the fact that now I'm more than just the Chief Information Officer. I am a leader and have a responsibility for this organization and the whole. So that for me has been the biggest aha moment, is that you go from being a leader in a specific space to a leader for the company.

My leadership style is definitely I'm a servant leader. For me, I say all the time, if people do not want to work with you, they will never want to work for you. So I am very much the person that we will use the title if we need to get some things done, but for the most part, we are in this together. If I need to make decisions, I do not have a problem making decisions. I don't have a problem letting people know that this is my decision and my responsibility in a particular instance. But for the most part, I just work very closely with my leadership team. I've got a great leadership team. I have a strong leadership team. And when we're working together, I honestly feel like I could put my team up against just about anybody's team because we do have a pretty tight-knit squad.

To your point, I do have some peers and other colleagues that have bigger teams, but I think the six to nine is around the sweet spot for leaders.

That has been very important because for me, it's not about just surrounding myself with people that will always tell me what I want to hear. I need those people that will be my truth tellers. The people that I can lean into because they've had certain experiences that can be beneficial to the season that I'm in right now, or for those people that they just need to kind of shake me up a little bit to say, 'Michelle, you're not looking at this correctly,' or 'Michelle, here's another opportunity for you.' And I have to make sure that people understand when you have your own personal board of directors, this doesn't mean that you go to all of them for everything. Things will ebb and flow. There may be conversations I'm having around compensation, or if you're making a decision to move to another job, or if you're making a decision about taking an opportunity sitting on a board. Those are things I can take to certain people in my board of directors. But sometimes, if I'm honest, I just need somebody to sit and be still with me. I need somebody maybe to pray for me. I need to have a different type of conversation with, and those are the people I can go to. So for me, it's about keeping the circle tight, but at the same time understanding that these are people that understand you, they know you, and they do have your best interest at heart.

Oh, I love that.

Um, if I'm completely honest, at the same time that I was named, maybe about seven, eight days later, we named a new CEO. So we had a little bit of a shakeup within our... which was all very public. So as far as changing CEOs, we had some additions and some changes on our board, we had some changes within our executive team. So for me, it was about figuring out exactly what were the expectations of my new leader and what did I need to do, how could I best contribute to our executive team as well as taking care of what he's hired me to do. So for me, that was probably not even just the first 90 days, but probably first 180 days we were just trying to figure it out. And I remember one day saying to him, 'I got a new job and I got a new boss.' So that's just the way I tried to look at it to keep some perspective about it, because there was so much change happening at that time.

Yes, so one big thing for us is talent, talent development. And I want to talk about that first because as you know, none of this happens without our talent and without our people. I know it can sound cliche to some folks, but the talent development, re-recruiting, making sure we're engaging with our talent in the right way is going to be so important. The other thing, which is not always so fun, is I'm sure you've heard in the news everything that's happening around all of these cyber incidents and cyber attacks. We are really having to make sure that we're doing everything we can to make sure that we're protecting our assets and we're keeping Cardinal Health safe. Because there are times that a lot of times your worst enemy, if you would, or our biggest threat is right from within our own house. Meaning we were moving too fast, we clicked the link, you were moving too fast and you send an email. It can just be certain things that happen and it comes right from within your own home that now you've got a breach of some sort security-wise. So that's the focus. And then lastly, if you've ever heard any of our analyst calls or town halls or anything, our CEO tells us so many times that we need to focus on our core and we need to prioritize. So ruthless prioritization is a big thing for me and my team. As you can imagine, being in a technology space, everybody wants everything. So the importance of having tight alignment with our business so that we have a firm seat at the table and we can have the conversation around, 'Although you want this, this might not make sense right now because of this, or we have clarity around the other eight things that are happening.' And so prioritization becomes more important.

Yes, so I have a leader that's responsible for all of our portfolio management and all of our strategy activities. So with that, he has people on his team and leaders that have the privilege of focus around the Pharma segment, or privilege of focus around the Medical segment, or our corporate segment. So that they can look at the portfolio and we have things that we call Lighthouse projects. So these are the ones that are kind of guiding us for whatever we're doing for this particular fiscal year. When we look at these projects, this is where people have the opportunity to sit down with the leaders and Pharma leaders, Med leaders, at corporate and have the conversation. Because sometimes it's as simple as there's a project happening in Pharma that can also be leveraged by the team in Med or vice versa, but you don't always have the communication happening so that people know what you're working on. So yes, we have a very pretty strict process. Always opportunities for improvements, but yes, I have a leader that that is what he does. He eats, sleeps, and breathes that. So he wakes up thinking about this and he goes to bed thinking about this. So for other CIOs out there, other technology leaders, having someone who's focused on that I think is really important.

So we do the exact same. And I will tell you, one of the ones that I find is the most fun are the ones that we're doing around our open enrollment period. So people will get emails and think if you click on this you're doing something with your open enrollment, and it was a phishing exercise. So kudos to my team because they come up with some great exercises. And although this means now someone clicks on a link and they get a notice and maybe they failed a phishing attempt, but we would rather that happening and now you're a little bit more hyper-sensitive just in your day-to-day activities. Because again, we've got people traveling in and out of the country. We just really have to be careful because all of the most recent attacks that have been in the news have been things that happened because someone did something from within, and it wasn't even a malicious intent. It's just that we were just moving a little too fast.

Yes, so a lot of times it's not even just about acquiring different digital type skills, whether we're looking at certain application training, certain digital tool training, data and analytics training. All of this training happens, and sometimes it's reskilling and upskilling as well as giving people direct exposure. So that comes at all levels. We'll have people in our Digital U that are new into the workforce or more seasoned people that have been at Cardinal for years, because we're constantly trying to expand this program and keep it at the forefront for us. We do a lot of work now, and you can imagine now with all the conversations around artificial intelligence and generative AI, this is another space that we have an opportunity to put those types of training. So we work very closely with our Learning and Development team so that we can make sure that we're keeping things fresh, keeping things interesting. But absolutely got great opportunities with all of our digital activities. And then again, I want to make sure this is across our organization. This isn't something that's just specific for our IT leaders. We want to make sure that when you talk about digital fluency and technology fluency, if you will, that we're doing that throughout Cardinal, not just within my organization.

There's no way. And I will tell you, if you think about it, there's been a long debate around if CIOs or technology leaders should be more technical or more leadership focused. I think at this level you need to have a balance, but I think it starts to change. Earlier in my career, it was more about understanding the technology more. So let's just use percentages. Maybe I'm 70% technical, I'm 30% leadership. As you continue to move up in an organization or move out in an organization, I think then that percentage has to change. It becomes more of that 80/20. 80% of my time is spent with my organizational effectiveness, talent development, making sure that I'm growing leader succession planning, all of this that we have to do. And the other 20% is making sure that I'm staying up on the latest technologies or how can I best support my organization. Because if not, what you will find yourself doing is getting down into the weeds. And when I have to go and have a conversation with the board or have a conversation with my CEO or other executives on the team, they have no desire to hear me talking about that level of technology. They want to understand from a high level, I understand the business objectives and we're able to deliver as promised. So I try to tell people, I'm a business leader with a technology focus.

And my culture, I would argue, is by design. And it's by design for my culture. Number one, we will give one another grace. We will be kind. And we're building a culture of kindness and being gracious. Because again, if we are able to allow the person sitting across from me, next to me, grace, then we will work better together and we will have each other's back. I do my best to remind myself of this on a daily basis. So I also want to remind my team, we will be and are a high performing culture. We are a high performing team. We are raising up leaders because I want people to be able to look and see the people around my leadership table. So if that's what you aspire to do, you're now thinking about ways that you will bring value when that opportunity presents itself, not question why do I even have these people around my table. So it is important for us to lead by example, and I think that's the biggest piece. And we say so much about authentic leadership. We talk about living and leading intentionally. All of those things become very, very important when you're trying to build a culture. Because I told people, I don't care what you do, no one wants to get up and just go to work every day. We would love to do something fun every single day, but we have to go to work sometimes. But at the end of the day, can we make it that you don't dread coming to work, that you don't dread working in a job? I want it to be that we enjoy some time, work hard, but we also play hard.

So what I will tell you is that I absolutely believe that there's importance around the DEI and the B. I appreciate that I have not heard that, so the belonging becomes quite important along with being inclusive and equality and the diversity. What I will tell you sometimes is that it makes me sad that we have to place so much emphasis on something that I feel should just boil down to being a decent human being. If we do not place these types of focus or shine a light on these types of things, sometimes they just will not get done. I had a conversation this week with a colleague and I talked about the fact that we have a culture here at Cardinal that is focused and we're very intentional about our focus around DEI and the B. However, we also recognize that it's just not possible for everyone to be on the same page or everyone to be at the same point in their journey. So for me, I've tried to be open that when people ask me questions or they truly don't understand, let's have a conversation about that. Let's talk about it. Because it is very real. When you talk about my engagement in the Senior Management Forum, which is ITSMF, it is an organization that's specifically focused on Black and African Americans in the IT space. When you talk about our BOLD ERG, that is our Black and African American Employee Resource Group here at Cardinal Health, and I have the honor of being one of the executive sponsors. All of this is important, but I'm also learning a lot from our other ERGs or from other organizations. I have to be mindful that as a Black and African American leader, I have to have an ear for educating as well as one for understanding. And that's where you have to try to strike the balance, because it is very easy to get angry about some things. I think balance in and managing the frustration that you might feel at times is where it becomes important. Because I'm learning some people just don't know what you don't know. It depends on how you were raised, what you've been exposed to. And I think as human beings, sometimes we're too quick to put everybody in the same bucket, and everybody just is not coming from the same position. So when people talk about meeting people where they are, I may not always get it right, but I do my best to let that be my starting point.

Absolutely. And we talked earlier about aha moments and me moving into this role and the big deal. And I've had a conversation, of course I have somebody that supports me externally for all of my calls and all of my speaking engagements, etc. And we've had conversations around maybe it's not always about Michelle the black female. Many times it's Michelle the CIO, the strong leader, the impactful leader that happens to be a black female. How do you line that up? Sometimes being the black female is the more important piece, but sometimes it's not. And we want to make sure that people understand, don't let that override the fact that someone is talented, they're skilled, and they got something because they earned it, not just because of the color of their skin or their gender. And so it's about finding balance in that and being focused on that and not afraid to have the conversation in an open but respectful manner. And that's where I feel like sometimes people just will not talk. We'll run from the conversation. And I just think it's very important that we continue to have this dialogue. And not just having the dialogue when something major happens, when there's some major event. Let's not let that be the reason we start having this conversation. Because this is happening and there's a level of pushing things down and sweeping things under the rug many times, and then we just don't talk about it until something kind of blows up in our face. It is very important for us to just have this conversation all of the time.

Yes, yes. So Werner Enterprises, I was just appointed to their board back in November. And yes, I have some nonprofit work that I do as well. Great opportunity. And for me, I look at this as if I go in, I do what I'm supposed to do, it just opens the door for the next person. You know, I've always said I would just want to be in a position and stay in a position that if I mention Lisa's name, someone would come and talk to you just on the strength that I said Lisa was good. I want it to be that. Sitting on these boards, because many times that's how it happens. You're sitting on boards, you're getting to know a company, you're getting to know an organization. And then when I say to the CEO or my fellow board members, here's somebody I think is worthy of sitting on this board, at least having a conversation, people listen. And that's the reason that I appreciate being in the position that I'm in, whether it's successor for a role that I'm in, whether it's an old company I used to work for that reaches out, or the board seat that I recently was granted.

So I will tell you for one, when I think about my mindset, it's limitless. Like I don't have a ceiling. I don't have a glass ceiling. I don't have a cap for me. Wherever this will take me, I'm willing to go. I mean, there are no bounds here, no boundaries for me. And my mindset has just always been that either I know something and I'm very clear about what I know and what I don't know, and where I can achieve and where I might need a little support. I have not been afraid to ask for that support. But I think the biggest piece for me is conscious decision making. Too many times I just feel like we get ourselves in situations and we're just like, 'I don't know how I got here.' If you think about it, you know exactly how you got here. So whether it's me, you know, I've always been very open and I found, Lisa, you know this about me, I'm not married and I don't have any kids. I've made very conscious choices. But it's amazing that many times people will meet you and not having children, they assume that something had to happen that you didn't decide to have children. I made conscious choices because I knew the type of career I had and I wanted to minimize as much as possible the compromise and the sacrifice that I may need to make at my home. Someone once asked me, 'Do you think you can have it all?' And I believe you can have it all, but you may not have it all at the same time. Amen. And I think that's the most important piece. Is that for me, I put no boundaries on myself. I put no limits on myself. And if I'm asked to do something, I'm strong enough to understand why I'm saying yes, and more importantly, I can understand why I'm saying no.

So I am passionate about Michelle. That is one thing, girl, you are not lacking in that category. You are so passionate not just about your career, you're passionate about... I am passionate about life. And I am very extremely grounded in my faith. And I'm a firm believer that what's meant for me will be for me. So if it's placed before me and I've got peace around it, then I know that it's time for me to go. And that's where I feel like the fear, is it real? Do we let things get in our head? Do we convince ourselves that we can't do something? I turn that into 'Why not me?' So it's never the 'Why me?' It's the 'Why not me?' In the same token, try to practice that. I feel like we're so quick to want to jump when somebody wants you to go somewhere or somebody wants you to do something. I even recall when I was offered this role, I asked a question about anyone else that was considered for the job. And then I wanted someone to be able to articulate to me why you feel that I'm the best fit for this job. Because we are quick to ask when we don't get something, but then sometimes we get caught up in the hype of it all that we don't ask, 'Why did you choose me?' And I feel like asking that question, you have balance. And then you understand if the reason they chose you aligns with the expectations that you have from them and from the opportunity. Yeah, so passion over fear every day, all day.

The something extra is your ability to be vulnerable and to grant people grace.

All right, thank you so much for having me. And I absolutely agree. 2024, we will figure out how to spend some more time together.