Hill College

Empowering Teams through Trust and Accountability

I believe my number one responsibility as a leader is to hire good people, give them the tools and support they need to do their jobs, and then stay out of their way. Good people need to feel trusted and empowered to make decisions. They also need to know that it’s okay to make mistakes. Now, if we’re making the same mistakes repeatedly, then we have a problem, but I never want someone to be afraid to make a decision because they’re worried about making a mistake.

My goal is to get to a point where my team understands my general philosophy and how I’m likely to approach an issue, but they don’t need me to make every decision for them. They are the subject matter experts, and I hired them for their knowledge and expertise. At the same time, as CIO, I ultimately have responsibility for the technology decisions made within my organization, so it does become a balancing act. I’ve always told my team that when a decision produces a good outcome, they get the credit. When it produces a bad outcome, I take responsibility. That’s part of leadership.

Aligning IT with Learning Innovation

Information Technology and Learning Innovation need to have a truly symbiotic relationship. IT provides the foundation—the infrastructure, systems, security, connectivity, and tools—but learning Innovation helps turn those tools into meaningful experiences for our faculty and students. You can deploy the best technology in the world, but if faculties don’t understand how to use it effectively, or it doesn’t improve teaching and learning, then you really haven’t accomplished much.

I believe IT and Learning Innovation work best when they see themselves as partners rather than separate operations. Both sides of the house need to communicate regularly, understand the challenges the other is facing, and work toward common goals. IT needs to understand what’s happening in the classroom, and learning Innovation needs to understand the technology environment that makes those experiences possible. When those two areas move together, we are much better positioned to improve the student experience.

Adopting Technology with Purpose and Impact

Technology should always move the needle forward. It should add value rather than become another obstacle that students or faculty have to overcome. Before adopting a new technology, we need to be able to answer a fairly simple question: What problem are we solving?

If a technology makes it easier for students to learn, access services, communicate with the institution, or be successful, then it deserves our attention. I’m not interested in adopting technology simply because it’s new or the latest buzzword. There needs to be a clear purpose behind it and a measurable benefit to the people we serve.

Preparing Higher Education for an AI-Driven Future

I believe higher education is facing an existential challenge with the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence. In many ways, higher education was caught flat-footed, and now we’re being asked to evolve almost overnight, something we traditionally don’t do particularly well.

The difficult truth is that, with some notable exceptions, we aren’t yet providing students with the AI skills they need to be successful after graduation. AI is already changing how people work, how organizations operate and what employers expect. That change is happening much faster than our traditional curriculum and institutional processes were designed to accommodate. If we continue teaching students exactly the way we did five or ten years ago, we risk preparing them for a world that no longer exists.

“I’ve always told my team that when a decision produces a good outcome, they get the credit. When it produces a bad outcome, I take responsibility.”

That doesn’t mean abandoning critical thinking, foundational knowledge or academic integrity. In fact, those things become even more important in an AI-enabled world. We have to teach students how to use these tools responsibly, evaluate the information they produce, and combine AI capabilities with their own knowledge and judgment. Our responsibility isn’t simply to prepare students to graduate. It’s to prepare them to succeed in the world they are actually going to enter.

Advice for Emerging Technology Professionals

I would give them two pieces of advice. First, listen. Listen to your students, your faculty and your staff. They’ll tell you what they need to be successful if you’re willing to hear them. Most importantly, listen to the people you’ve been entrusted to lead. Get to know them, understand what they do and build relationships with them. People need to know that their opinions matter and that you value what they bring to the organization.

Second, have fun. Technology support can be incredibly stressful. The people calling are often already frustrated before we ever pick up the phone. Systems go down, projects don’t always go according to plan and problems have a way of happening at the worst possible time.

Your team needs to know that you care about them as people and respect the fact that they have lives and families outside of work. Eventually, there will be an outage, deadline or crisis where you have to ask them to stay late, work through the night or go above and beyond. If you’ve built that relationship and they know you don’t make those requests lightly, they’ll be there when you need them.

To me, that’s one of the most important parts of leadership. Building a team that trusts each other, enjoys working together and knows that when things get difficult, everyone has each other’s back.