Tag Archives: IT

Sarah Tenisi: Supporting Employee Growth

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Sarah Tenisi is the CEO of TenisiTech, an IT Service provider firm. They to help companies build the IT foundation to support their business goals and manage the IT as the business evolves to ensure that the IT continues to be a tool not a hindrance. Sarah also hosts a podcast for people interested in technology and leadership called Tech Me Seriously. She is used to interviewing people but has agreed for today to be the guest and be interviewed.

Highlights:

Q: How did you become interested in IT?

Sarah describes how she was actually discouraged from studying computer science and engineering in college, and how she held true to herself and made her way in.

Q: What is your work experience?

Sarah describes how she started out as an administrative assistant at Hewlett Packard and Adobe, but her managers knew she had studied computer science and supported her growth to move into an IT role.

Q: How did you transition to starting your own IT company?

Sarah talks about how she developed skills in the area of organizational growth in one of her IT jobs and how that gave her the confidence to start Tenisi Tech. She talks about what she learned about IT from the business perspective and how to produce seamless IT transitions for her clients.

Listen to the episode to hear Sarah describe how she supports her team so they can have lives in addition to work, how she overcame a tendency toward perfectionism, listen to her team, and support their growth. She also discusses her experience as a woman in tech and how to get more women in technology.

Words of Wisdom:

IT is about being resourceful.

Perfectionism will ruin your team.

We all have an interesting story.

Leadership teams don’t want to talk about technology; they want to talk about productivity, service, security, and scalability.

Contact Sarah Tenisi:

Tech Me Seriously podcast

Sarah Tenisi on LinkedIn

Tenisi Tech company website

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Kristeen Barth: Creating a Healthy Relationship with Work

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Joanie has a conversation with an IT-manager-turned-coach, Kristeen Barth. Kristeen works with people and teams to challenge their current thinking, and she is committed to their growth experience. Kristeen also has a nerdy background. She has worked in IT project and product management as well as cultural integration. Her current work focuses on team culture and individual growth. Kristeen Barth believes that a healthy relationship with your work is key to a healthy life. That’s what we talk about in this episode.

Highlights:

Q: How did you become interested in technology management and what roles did you have in IT?

Kristeen holds a BS in Technology Management and MBA from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She worked in the telecom and toy industries as a business analyst, then moved into IT program management in the finance industry. It was in this role that she discovered the field of learning and development.

Q: What inspired you to transition from IT to learning & development?

Kristeen said that, working in IT, she had focused on improving systems and using Agile methodologies to improve productivity, but she found it even more rewarding to be able to focus on the people. She was interested in how people work together, why they work the way they work, and so on.

Q: How do you define a person’s relationship with work? What kinds of unhealthy work relationships have you seen, particularly in the tech fields and what does a healthy relationship with work look like?

Kristeen describes three components of a relationship with work: meaning, growth, and shared goals. The extent to which these factors are positive and balanced indicates the health of the relationship. Listen to the podcast to learn more about these factors, how they appear in tech jobs, and tips to develop healthier relationships with work.

Words of Wisdom:

If you are depleted, you won’t be fresh and ready for an urgent situation, like an outage.

Customer service can be healthy or unhealthy, depending on what is driving it.

Fear of making a mistake can lead to an unhealthy relationship with work.

A healthy work relationship is when you are standing up tall and strong and are ready to take on a challenge.

Contact Kristeen Barth for a free 30-minute coaching session:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristeenbarth/

Saboteur Assessment & Coaching Offer: https://www.kristeenbarth.com/saboteur-assessment

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Bob Salomon: Learning Disabilities, Computers, and Communicating

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Joanie has a conversation with Bob Salomon, president of CIO Systems.  One of the coolest things about Bob is his willingness to talk about how he’s dealt with dyslexia and ADD and how that actually motivated him to get into tech. Bob also talks about how they “make IT boring” at CIO Systems.  They do IT security and support and help employees more be more productive.  In addition, Bob talks about how to network and ways to get involved in community service.

Highlights:

Q: Tell us your story of how having dyslexia and ADD drew you into IT work.

“It’s been a major stumbling block and also a path for me.  I grew up in the 60s and 70s.  At the time, it wasn’t quite understood.  I did terrible in school.  I was a C-D student for most of elementary and high school.  I only got into college because, at the time, it was very easy to get into state university.  All you had to do was score a certain level on the SAT.  My SAT scores were very high and, even though my grades were very low, I automatically got into State.

I went to Cal State Long Beach.  There it was the second time I’d ever had to touch a computer.  Back then, it was virtually impossible for the average person to get close to a computer.  There was an Apple II in the library, and I started programming on that.  One of my nerd friends, he was in the mathematics department, and he gave me an account on school mainframe, the PDP-11/70.

There wasn’t a good word processing program at that time.  There were text programs, but you had to keep switching between modes and there was no visible cursor.  You had to remember where you were and type commands to move forward or back to a document.  So it was very cumbersome.  I actually wrote my own word processing program with a dictionary.  That’s a major accomplishment to be able to create a dictionary when you’re dyslexic.  I was actually the first person to hand in computer-generated homework for a liberal arts class.  The teacher had to go to the academic senate to get approval to accept my homework.

They had a program for adults with learning disabilities at California State.  It was an excellent program and I was very happy to get into that.  With that support, I was able to graduate on the President’s Honor Roll.  I went from being a C student to the President’s Honor Roll.  Just by doing my work on the computer and handing it in that way made all the difference in the world.

For so long, it was impossible to communicate by writing.  I would think of words and I would think of them phonetically and there was no easy way of looking them up in a dictionary.  I would have to think of synonyms and it was very hard to edit and I would mess up the edits.  Basically, all of my life I had a very negative view of myself because everything I did was terrible.”

Bob’s story continues to be riveting.  To hear how he turned himself around, managed through his frustrations, and empowered himself to start his own company, as well as how he developed his people skills and how he delights customers, listen to the podcast.

Words of Wisdom:

It’s very common for people with ADD to run their own company.

As an IT expert, I’ve monetized my paranoia.

Computers are there to be tools and they need to be up and running.

If we do it right, nothing should happen and selling nothing is sometimes a little harder than it should be.

Shout Out:

Brian Jackson at Sandler Training for sales training.

Contact Bob Salomon:

Call: 619-293-8600

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bob-salomon-675872b/

Website: ciosys.com

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