In IT, everyone leads, everyone mentors

Crisis can be the order of the day in an IS career filled with high-tension moments and nail-biting sequences of events, says Pete Jorgenson, vice president, is technical operations at PetSmart. Pulling through these events successfully requires leadership, he explained, but it would be wrong to assume that leadership is only top-down. In order for the IS team to deliver mission-critical service to organizations, every IS professional must lead — and mentor others to lead.

By Connor Lovejoy  |  Student Writer

The day that Pete Jorgenson started at PetSmart as vice president of information systems, he learned that the data center was out of power. Across PetSmart , critical projects were halted — unable to access servers and storage for the information they needed to move their projects forward. Despite the monumental challenge, Jorgenson didn’t panic. “My MO when I need to inspire people in a time of crisis is to fall back on Winston Churchill,” Jorgenson said.

With that, he presented a picture of the famous “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster — a motivational piece produced by the British government in the days before the beginning of the Second World War. Crisis, Jorgenson said, can be the order of the day in an IS career filled with high-tension moments and nail-biting sequences of events. Pulling through these events successfully requires leadership, he explained, but it would be wrong to assume that leadership is only top-down. In order for the IS team to deliver mission-critical service to organizations, every IS professional must lead — and mentor others to lead. Jorgenson was the closing speaker at the March 2014 Association for Information Systems Student Chapter Leadership Conference and Competition hosted by the W. P. Carey Department of Information Systems and the DISC student organization.

Lessons on leadership

Students entering the IS field need to be more than proficient at their job function in order to be successful, Jorgenson said. They must also learn to lead. Innovating and problem solving are collective endeavors, so good leaders know how to draw out the best in their co-workers. One way: “Make it a point to not be the smartest person in the room.” Positioning yourself as the smartest dampens discussion. Few will contribute and elaborate on ideas and problem solving, and often answers bubble up from discussion. As an IS professional, he said, you want peers who can match your ideas and propositions with equally clever and intelligent ideas. Leadership loses effectiveness, he added, if you’re explaining yourself to a disengaged collective.

Environmental science

The information management team works with virtually every team and department in an organization, and those interactions will have far-reaching effects. And just as in life, individuals may not realize the impact of their actions and ideas. “How many people have you inspired in the last month?” he asked the group. No matter what number they estimated, Jorgensen said they were wrong. Every person unintentionally inspires others through their decisions and actions, he said. Jorgenson recalled working at a scout camp during the summer when he was in college. Some 15 years later one of the scouts he worked with got in touch with Jorgenson to say that Jorgenson impacted the man’s career choice.

“I had no clue that I was mentoring him,” Jorgenson said. “He was just another scout getting a merit badge from me in environmental science. I certainly didn’t realize that I was inspiring him to pick his lifelong career.” In order for the next generation of IS professionals to accomplish the goals that they lay out and lead IS to more professional levels, students must incorporate leadership into their thoughts and actions, he said.