Ep.24 Inspire and Empower: How You Can Lead your IT Teams with Vision and Passion with Doug Lange, Chief Strategy Officer at the State of Arizona

Joe Toste [00:00:00]:
Hey, what's up everybody? This is Joe Toste from techtables.com and you're listening to the public sector show by techtables. This podcast features human centric stories from public sector, cios, cisos and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county and higher education. You'll gain valuable insights into current issues and challenges faced by top leaders through interviews, speaking engagements, live podcast tour events. We offer you a behind the mic look at the opportunities top lead ears are seen today. And to make sure you never miss an episode, head over to Spotify and Apple podcasts. Hit that follow button and leave a quick rating. Just tap the number of stars that you think this show deserves.

Joe Toste [00:00:34]:
I'm super excited today as we shift our focus to all things public sector with the state of Arizona. Huge thank you to Doug Lang for taking time to come on the show and meet with me today. In today's episode, we're going to cover why our governments need to operate at the speed of business, why the state of Arizona stopped acting like a utility, how Doug empowers the agencies in the state of Arizona to bring speed and emerging tech to the forefront, the importance of mindset in it organizations, the power of why and what Doug looks for in hiring at the state of Arizona. Leadership lessons from Simon Sinek that Doug implements, but that's quite enough for me. Without further ado, I'm thrilled to welcome Doug Lang, chief strategy officer in the state of Arizona. Hey Doug, thanks for coming on tech tables today. Super excited you're here.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:01:13]:
Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Joe Toste [00:01:15]:
Awesome. Love it. Kick off today with a little bit about you and your background in the private sector at GoDaddy for around ten and a half years. And why the jump to the public sector?

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:01:25]:
Yes, so as you just mentioned, I spent the first decade of my career at GoDaddy. Like many people that worked in a startup, no idea what the company was going to turn into. When we started it, it was really about how do we get to next week? How do we get to next quarter? How do we get to next year? The beautiful thing that happened was the company exploded. And over the course of a decade, what that allowed me to do is really understand all the constructs of a business, right? And whether you're talking the business side, the product side or the tech side, when you have a company that's just exploding that quickly and you're moving from how do we expand within the state to how do you expand nationally? To then how do you take your brand and how do you expand globally? Those are all very different challenges. And I think for me it was extremely rewarding. That will always be my professional home. But you get to a point where you also want to see, will my playbook really translate outside of this rocket ship or this really successful organization? And I think I hit a point where I wanted to get out and really focus on things that I was passionate about and I wanted to get outside of my comfort zone was very much that company and start to really find ways to make an impact. Take the skills and experience that I had gained and tried to pour them into different things that I wanted to transform and I wanted to change and that I wanted to be a part of.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:02:53]:
And for me, that led my journey to the state of Arizona.

Joe Toste [00:02:57]:
That's great. I really like that question that you said. Will my playbook translate over the course of ten years? I just know you probably had a number of mentors that came along your side. I'm just curious. Over a decade, I'm pretty young. My professional career is nearly a decade. How many mentors? Just spitballing right off, oh, God.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:03:17]:
I have one person that I will professionally call my mentor. He hates it. He tells me that I'm crazy, but I have one that I have learned so much from. I could go two years without talking to him and within 15 minutes he will ground me and get me back to looking at the world in the way that makes sense. But when you talk about just influential leaders and people that I've had the opportunity to work with in a decade, we could spend the whole hour talking about different people. Because when you're going through a company like that, the challenges and struggles of 500 person company are very different than the challenges and struggles of a couple of thousand or when you grow. And what that means is there's different leaders with different leadership styles and different experiences that ultimately are really good at carrying a business in that phase of it and taking it to the next level. And I think if you're talking about people in my network that I rely on or people that I've learned from, I'm going to say, you're probably going to get close to 100 people that I have sat there and really just listen and tried to absorb how they've gotten to where they went and how they view the world.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:04:31]:
I'm so big on perspective. The highest iq in the business setting or in life isn't what I'm looking for or rarely wins. I think the person that wants to learn from someone else wants to listen first and just has diversity of perspective and thought to look at things and break things down differently. That's the person I want to be around. That's the person I want to work with, and that's the person that I'm trying to continue to just evolve to be.

Joe Toste [00:04:58]:
Yeah, I love that. That's so good. Especially really that mentality of growth. And I think you just put it so well. So at Dreamforce, I think shifting to the physical, my heart misses physical conferences locked in my office and at home. And I know you're at your house right now, too. At Dreamforce, you spoke in the trailblazers in government, state of Arizona, and the governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, said, our government needs to operate at the speed of business. And I really love that quote.

Joe Toste [00:05:28]:
Can you talk about the opportunity to think differently in the public sector, which kind of hinges on the growth mindset that you were talking about previously?

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:05:36]:
Yeah, I'll speak to it from the state of Arizona's perspective. So you have roughly 130 agencies encompassing somewhere around 40,000 employees. If you look at it in one way, that's essentially 130 small businesses at some level, all operating a little bit differently. Every one of them needs the benefit of emerging tech in automation and in everything that brings to the table. And when you start to look at government and you fragment it, maybe they all don't have a huge budget, but when you start to look at it from an enterprise perspective, you have the budget that you need to make a real impact. If I'm setting the table with that, I think from a business perspective, the next thing is key. You have every major tech company, every major consulting firm, every major services organization, all trying to find ways to do business with the state. The real question starts to be how do you get them complementing each other and working for you, as opposed to competing against each other and really slowing you down? If you really stop and think about that, the opportunity is huge because you have all the right ingredients for success.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:06:42]:
You just need to be able to look at it from a lens of really scale. And how do you enterprise things and introduce them to the state? The things you're working against, risk tolerance and trust, that's not just a government thing, but it's very prevalent in that environment. And I think when you really get away from it, every organization, public sector, private sector, they're all dealing with the same things. I'm going to focus on operational efficiencies. How do we optimize everything that we do? Customer experience show, do we provide our customers with the best, most impactful experience possible, and then ultimately I hit on it scale. How do you grow your business and how do you grow it efficiently? And that might be different in the public sector versus the private sector, but the constructs of it, if you get down to a nuts and bolts perspective, they're going to be the same. Ultimately, navigating the legislative process is very government oriented and it is important. But from a true tech perspective, how you scale it, it's no different than the same challenges that you're going to find in any industry.

Joe Toste [00:07:49]:
Yeah, that's really great. I think you nailed it on the head with the customer experience, you're dealing with the same problems, whether it's public or private. It's all about the experiEnce, which I think is such a great insight because I think a lot of Times the public sector gets this rap where they're slow moving and no one wants to change. But really in reality, the public sector is just as much as the same as the private sector. It's just what mindset are you going to bring to the organization? What leadership are you going to bring? I didn't have it in the questions today, but on our call we talked before how you rolled out g suite across the state, and it was fantastic. And there's just so much in the show notes I'll link to. He's, Doug's been interviewed like 5 million times on that story, so I won't rehash it here, but it's really great to see just the new mindset and execution that you're bringing. So let's expand on the traditional model that most public sector it orgs operate in.

Joe Toste [00:08:46]:
And one of your goals is to have the state of Arizona stop acting like a utility. Right. And I thought that's such a great insight. Can you unpack what you meant by utility? Sure.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:08:56]:
A simple way to look at it is most organizations that we deal with just as a general consumer are going to fall into two buckets.

Joe Toste [00:09:03]:
Right.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:09:04]:
They're either going to offer US a product or service, or they're going to act more Like a utility, like your electric company. It's not revenue traditional sense. You're not trying to make a profit in government, but those are real dollars. The problem with us is historically we treated it more like a take it or leave it type value prop as opposed to truly trying to earn our customers business. And when you do that, you really don't have customers that they serve, so they don't have to leverage the services we offer. Our goal is to very much earn their business. We want to be an enterprise services provider that is offering great services and not only what we can provide them in house with the expertise we have, but being open to the fact of looking in the mirror and saying we might not do it better, faster and cheaper than an organization in the private sector, and that's okay. How do we partner with them and provide a great service that they can offer and package it up in a way that the state agencies can consume?

Joe Toste [00:10:05]:
Yeah, that's really great. That actually transitions really well into my next question. What are some specific examples of how you and your team are partnering to empower the agencies within the state of Arizona to bring the speed, emerging tech and the best practices to the greater state for us?

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:10:21]:
I'll go high level. It starts with our strategy. What can we do from an enterprise standpoint to really set the table in terms of what we care about, where our focus is, who we want to be, a couple of those things. We have a heavy investment in cloud based technologies, and that could be at the infrastructure level, that could be at the app level, that could be at the digital level, and what's truly citizen facing. But I think the thing that we really focus on is how do we get out of the business of building custom apps. We simply aren't in a place from a talent perspective where we should be trying to take on a $50 million dev project, 100 million dollar dev project. We need to let the professionals in, these huge billion dollar tech companies handle that and we can focus more on the business side of things, public private partnerships. So that's something that we're really trying to bring to the state.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:11:16]:
Right, and I was just referencing it, but it's the concept of we don't need to do everything and fulfill everything ourselves. There are organizations that are out there that it's their expertise. So why not lean on them and let them bring the best of what they do into state government and allow us to focus in other places? Taking that enterprise approach to our partnerships and our technology decisions is huge, but coming downhill and talking about some of the things that we've been able to accomplish from a statewide perspective, our statewide cyber strategy. So in addition to anything anyone is doing within the agencies, specific to their apps, we have roughly 16 security controls. Some are touching on internal threats, some are touching on external threats that we layer across the state. Those are always evolving. We're always trying to figure out where the biggest threats are, but always looking for ways to mitigate our risk, investment in the cloud, in getting out of our own data centers. So I'll give you an example, we recently were able to decommission our state data center.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:12:20]:
So one of the main ones in the state, we moved almost 1000 workloads to the cloud. We retired about 15% of what was sitting in there, and we transitioned the rest off to a third party location. Well, that was $4.2 million annually in cost avoidance, cost savings just for our organization and what we were able to pass on to our customers. We commissioned a study. If we are able to do the same thing with the other data centers in the state, which we're working on right now, they're in the upwards of $30 million in annual savings. Now, do we actually get there? We'll see. Is that a real number?

Joe Toste [00:12:59]:
Maybe.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:13:00]:
But I'll tell you what, somewhere in between 4.2 that we've already realized, and that's 30, that's a really big win for the state and its agencies. You touched on it with G suite. When I came to the state, we had roughly 30 desperate email platforms across all the agencies. A lot of things that you take for granted when you start a job in the private sector just weren't there, right. You weren't able to just pull up a directory or an.org chart and talk to somebody in another agency. And what we started down the path of two to three years ago was we wanted to get to one platform. The state chose G suite. It has armed us really and positioned us really well for everything that has taken place in terms of the pandemic.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:13:46]:
Just because we have roughly 90 agencies all leveraging the same cloud based productivity and collaboration suite, which has made our transition to working remote almost seamless. The agency that I work in, for an example, we went from almost all employees working on site to a little over 90% of our employees working remote within two weeks. That stuff's huge. The one thing that I want to hit on, and you actually touched on this in a different podcast with Gary Brantley. We can talk about our strategy, we can talk about our tech, we can talk about all these great things. The most important thing that we are trying to drive a focus to is our investment in our people and change management. And if we can keep the focus the, with the people that are actually having to do the work every day, the tech is going to take care of itself.

Joe Toste [00:14:35]:
Yeah, that's so good. That's so good. You hit on a number of really great pieces as far as just really empowering and working with the private sector and those partnerships. And I think as far as coming downhill, I love the next question. Bleeds into. It's talking about the small hedge fund, this portfolio of projects that you have and the wrecking ball. You said wrecking ball that you've been bringing to the IT industry in the state of Arizona as a whole. You just talk more about the wrecking ball and what you're doing there.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:15:04]:
There's no wrecking balls. It's all with partnership handshakes and hugs. We have an oversight team. Easiest way to explain it would be any IT project in the state of Arizona. That's $25,000 or more. And let's be real, that's pretty much every IT project nowadays. It has to go through an oversight process. It's our pitch project investment justification.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:15:29]:
But ultimately, we'll work with the state agencies. They'll submit a business case in terms of where the focus is, where their market assessment was, what technology they're choosing, their implementation plan and wrap budget through it. That oversight team manages a portfolio of roughly, let's say 50 projects at half a billion dollars at any given time, and it'll fluctuate based on what's active and what's deployed until some of the next projects hit. But I don't think anyone outside of the public sector and outside of really even that team understands how big that budget actually is, how big that portfolio is, and how much money that states are investing in technology projects, and how critical it is that they ultimately land. What we've been able to do with this team, and it's this team really in partnership with really a whole business engineering organization that's really focused on how do we partner with the agencies, how do we help them not only attach to the strategy, but work through the challenges that they see day to day. What we've been able to do in four years is this team is at roughly $38 million in cost avoidance in roughly four years, partnering with the agencies on the front end of these projects just to make sure we're doing our due diligence, we're asking great questions, promoting competition, and we're getting the most competitive solution that we can for these agencies, and then trying to help them mitigate as much risk as possible through the entire development process.

Joe Toste [00:17:10]:
That's so good. That's so good. Yeah, I think the process of submitting the business case is just really powerful instead of coming with the technology piece, and it's definitely saved the state of Arizona a lot of money for sure.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:17:24]:
And here's the big thing with it. When we started this team and the pitch process wasn't new, the constructs of our business engineering organization was absolutely new and something that I built out in my time at the state, but we used to get these submissions through word docs or every year there's an annual strategic planning process and every state agency is required to submit an IT strategic plan. And it was also through single documents. Well, the problem is there was no way to connect all this stuff together. There was no way to get ahead of it and glean insights and ultimately see where the commonalities were, where the challenges were, and start to make any sense of the information that we were given. One of the first things we did once we built the organization that we wanted and formed the teams was we actually implemented our solution. We implemented a Salesforce solution in portal for these agencies to submit everything through. All of the pidges, which are the projects that are happening within a given year are coming through the portal, and then all the strategic plans are also coming through the portal and they're all hitting a dashboard immediately so we can make sense of all of this stuff on the fly.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:18:39]:
And I can't tell you how powerful those insights have been to the team and just helping us get in front of everything that we're trying to deal with.

Joe Toste [00:18:46]:
One of the pieces that I think about often just across, whether it's like it or just business or whatever in general, is diving deep on mindset, which I think is really underrated in it. I've heard almost no one really talk about it except for Gary Brantley and Brian Ben, who are two CIOs out in Atlanta. When we were talking earlier on our podcast prep call, you said, letting go of antiquated ideas. I thought that phrase was so good. I believe what stops organizations and people are the antiquated ideas and mindset of this is just how we've always done it. Can you talk about the new mindset that you've brought for the last four plus years to the state of Arizona?

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:19:22]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think I'll start with an example. When I came to the state the very first day, super excited, ready to make an impact, pulled in all the teams I was responsible for, had a team meeting and just shared a little bit about my background, what I was excited about, wanting to get to know them, and what I hoped that we would be able to accomplish together. Coming from GoDaddy and really the tech space, you talk about being great, changing the world. That's every day. That's breakfast, lunch and dinner. You get very used to people just with that mindset. I didn't realize just because I grew up in that environment was.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:19:59]:
That can be really scary. I get through this speech and everyone's hair is blown back, blood has left their face, and I got two questions. One was, have you ever managed someone before? Which I laughed. I thought it was funny, but very appropriate question. It's where they were at. And the other one was, why the heck did you come to the state in the next three weeks? I kid you not. I had a different notice on my desk from an employee that was the same exact narrative every time. Love where you're going.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:20:32]:
Sounds really exciting. Don't think it's for me. I'm going to move to one of the other agencies. And the reality was my appetite for change and transformation in staying outside the comfort zone and really pushing the envelope and in the team's appetite weren't necessarily in alignment yet. And that isn't a bad thing, right? I'm a firm believer you need to meet people where they're at. But it took us a while, really, to continue to just. We had to stay consistent with our messaging, we had to stay consistent with where we wanted to go. We had to show them we had a very real path, but we also had to show them that they could trust us and that we were going to be there for them.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:21:10]:
And I think, funny thing was, we got a couple of months in and the teams collectively, we were still struggling. We were getting all sorts of feedback of where we could do better. We weren't really efficient and effective in how we were helping the agencies. So we had a team meeting, and I think the biggest thing for me is always the why. Any conversation I'm having, I'm going to ask as many questions as humanly possible. I'm probably going to ask you why over and over again. It's what my brain needs ultimately, to make sense of things, to feel like, okay, I can get behind this and run at it. And we had a team meeting where our sole focus.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:21:46]:
I had everyone on the team craft a wise statement. We all watched Simon Sinek's video, which everyone in the world is very familiar with, and I shared mine and I got really emotional about it just from a personal level. And part of it is just because I'm highly competitive and I don't like to lose. And I was sick of us getting our butts kicked. But the other part was I needed to find a way for the team to finally just let their guard down and look at the person next to them and start to build that trust. And from there, day by day, we started to get a little better. Week by week, we started to see some wins. And now you have an organization that's on this rocket ship, right? And Sky's the limit.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:22:27]:
And I think so. For me, the more you talk to me, you're going to hear some things that are pretty consistent. I truly believe everyone can be great, whether they choose to tap into it or not. That's going to be a personal decision, but everyone has the ability to shoot for the stars and anything is possible. And when you start to hear government is different, I just feel like that's an excuse to drive away from change. We talked about the business constructs and how they really aren't that different at a core level. But we're very consistent in that messaging of asking why and making sure people understand why we're doing something and then just continuing to check in and show them the results and show them ultimately we can achieve what we didn't think was possible. And we just keep on pushing the envelope further and further.

Joe Toste [00:23:15]:
Wow, there's a lot of really great stuff you said there, everything from Simon Sinek to his why video. Highly competitive. I love that you don't like to toste. I'm also highly competitive. I'm also an assistant high school JV basketball coach at work. People at work, they only get a small glimpse of, they're like, oh, Joe's got a lot of energy. You should see me on the basketball court yelling at a bunch of high schoolers. You can't really do that in the work environment, but it's the one place where you can clap and yell during a basketball game, marching up and down the sideline.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:23:44]:
Here's the thing. You hit a point in your career, you hit a point in life. I don't even think this is necessarily your career where you realize that the one thing that you can't get back is time. You can't buy it. You can't reach back into the past and get it back and do something different with it. It's just so valuable. I want to look at my career and just life and feel like I'm making the most of that time and what time I have. And more importantly, if I'm going to be in a leadership role, if I'm going to be responsible for even one individual and one role within a team, I want them to look back on their time in that role and feel like I went for it, right.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:24:26]:
We swung the bat, we swung for the fences. Maybe we got there, maybe we didn't. But I feel really good about that chapter in my story.

Joe Toste [00:24:33]:
That's exactly how I feel with this podcast that wasn't even supposed to exist. And then I just started shooting the episodes earlier this year. And then I came to my boss and said, hey, I created a podcast, and here's some of the feedback. And next thing you know, now I've got two podcasts. I'm going to plug tech time right now. If I can do that, can I plug my own? My second podcast. I'm going to plug my second podcast right now.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:24:54]:
Tech time.

Joe Toste [00:24:54]:
I got a daily podcast out, came out four days ago. Four or five days ago. Daily tech. What you need to know in the world of tech in three minutes or less. And yeah, I love that. Just wanting to be great and swinging for the fences and time is really valuable. And I think when you sit down and really great forcing function, if you just set a timer for yourself and just commit to that one task, you can get a lot done really fast. You can accomplish a lot in a day.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:25:19]:
And you have so many state employees that they've never looked at their job that way. And it doesn't mean that they don't have the capacity for it or the potential for it. It just means that they came into an environment at a certain point in life, and they were looking at it a certain way, and they were looking at it from, this is where I'm going to be for the next 20 to 40 years, and I'll work in a couple of agencies, I'll make an impact, and I'll move on. We have had so many success stories with our employees where that might have been their mindset, and we've worked through some of these projects, and we've worked through just living and breathing our culture. You have so many success stories where now we have people that started in public sector, had no ambition to leave at all. They're now in national roles, they're in national roles back in the private sector, and they're sharing their expertise across the country with executives in different things that they were able to accomplish. And that's huge because their career is already on a whole different trajectory than they ever thought was possible. And I don't know how that's not what it's all about.

Joe Toste [00:26:26]:
I'm actually really curious. When you find someone on your team, or maybe they're new, and they've just thought, hey, this is just the life path that I'm on for the next 20 or 30 years. I'm just working. Do you send them the video? Do you say, hey, do you watch the live video? And then we're going to sit down and write it out. What's the process? I'd love to take this.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:26:49]:
I'll interview every single person in my organization before they're actually hired in. I freak them out every single time, and I had to actually start prefacing it at the front of the interview because you have people coming in and they're thinking, okay, I'm going to get ten really hard questions related to this job in my experience, and it's the last thing that I talk to them about. I don't pick at their resume at all. We just talk about goals, aspirations, dreams, what type of environments that they like to work in. And ultimately what I'm looking for is just someone that's really fired up about the opportunity, whatever that role is, in the constructs of the team and in our greater strategy. Someone who likes to be around other people that they can learn from and someone that believes in the concept of a team. We have a really diverse team, which I'm huge on, just from diversity of thought, but they understand coming through that interview process before they walk through our front doors what the expectation is, just in terms of what they bring to the table as a human being and a person, not the expectations of the job and whether they're writing code or they're working in some business or tech function, but just really how do they engage in the culture and help take us to the next level? Once they get through the doors, they just get to listen to me talk about being great in what we've been able to accomplish, in trying to highlight as much of our team's accomplishments as possible, and we just keep going with it. So I have a career journey series that we launched in our organization where we have internal people talk about their career journeys and not the good stuff, but the real stuff.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:28:30]:
Right? Where did you fail? Where did you struggle? What did you learn from it? How do you keep on growing from it? We have people external coming in because I want them to see someone can be a CEO and look really polished. They're a human being. Chances are they've had some pretty big failures in their careers while they just stayed focused. They learned from them, they kept on moving forward. It's really the whole environment that we try to just continue to promote, continue to stay consistent with, and it's all about building that trust and letting them know it's about them.

Joe Toste [00:29:01]:
You should have me come in. I give really great motivational talks. We should just ask the high schoolers. Pregame speech. I give it to them no, I love it.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:29:10]:
I'm going to hold that.

Joe Toste [00:29:12]:
Yeah, yeah, no, I love it. And I love Arizona. I'm trying to leave California. I keep telling my wife I'm trying to leave fast. So one area actually piggyback on the employee engagement scores. I thought this was pretty interesting because I never actually heard of anyone in the public sector measuring this. How you were talking to me about it. I think in the private sector, especially like with SaaS companies, you see the mps.

Joe Toste [00:29:36]:
But can you talk about from the public sector, employee engagement? And how do you keep those scores so high without giving out free food and beer on a daily basis?

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:29:47]:
And you started with just asking me about my mentors and influential people. There are probably ten leaders that I can think of off the top of my head that just really understood this in show. You transform an organization's culture and really take all the energies and all the winds of the company and try to pour them back into your people. You hit on two big metrics. One is engagement average and engagement ratio. And this is something the state of Arizona measures across the board. It's not just the organization that I'm responsible for, but we have two really cool metrics. So when you look at engagement average, if you go across all industries, don't quote me on this, but you're going to get to the tech space leading the charge at about an average of 78% overall engagement average.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:30:38]:
In terms of how happy or satisfied are you with every question on your survey, that doesn't mean that a tech company isn't higher. That's just where the average is. This organization is averaged 90% three years running. You get into engagement ratio, which you just talked about, which is basically a true NPS score. So you're taking the promoters, you're taking in consideration the detractors, and then you're pulling out the middle. It's a pretty brutal calculation if you don't have your stuff together. So if you consider roughly nine to be an outstanding organization in what you're trying to do, this organization has been over 23 years running as well. We don't have free coffee, we don't have free food, we don't have bikes to offer employees.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:31:23]:
The nap pod used to be the little area that was right under your desk. Now that can mean something different in a remote world, but for us, it's just investing in each other. I can't stress that enough. It's making sure that the employees realize that if you take the servant leadership concept, when the pyramid and the hierarchy of how an organization works. We're turning it on its head, right? And we're saying, I might be the chief strategy officer, but I'm the least impactful person in making this strategy go and doing the day to day work. We're trying to find ways to make it fun, trying to find ways to let them know we're going to invest in you more than just the role that you're in. But we want to create some space and time in there just for you to feel like you're growing and learning something new. And we're highlighting their wins, right? Letting them know you are important.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:32:14]:
You do matter and your results should be noted and highlighted when they come across. And I think one thing that resonates with me, we've all had a boss that they thought our career path was exactly one step beneath them for our entire career. That's never a great feeling as an individual. And we really promote the idea of, we want to be supportive of our employees goals and where they want to go and where they want to take their careers. And they shouldn't be afraid to have that conversation. What we really focus on is how do we make it the best chapter possible while you are here?

Joe Toste [00:32:50]:
That's a great way to end this. Making it the best chapter possible, best season possible while you are wherever you're just. That's so great. That's how I view where I'm at today with Nagarro. And actually they rehired me. And so this is the second time I've worked for them. Sometimes when you leave you. Oh, man.

Joe Toste [00:33:08]:
I actually really liked what was over here. The grass wasn't greener. That was a 29. What am I, 31? That was a 29 year old, 28 year old mistake. And then I came running back and thankfully I got rehired. And now here's the podcast today. So we're going to end with this last question. It's my wrap up question that I've been asking for season two.

Joe Toste [00:33:27]:
I think you'll have a pretty great answer to it. What's the nicest thing someone has done for you, Doug?

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:33:32]:
That's a tough question for me. So I'm from Wisconsin. Initially, everyone is pretty nice and wired to show you that midwestern hospitality. I'll go with one recent just this past week, my brother actually surprised me and flew myself and my daughter home for my 40th birthday in this quarantined world. That was huge because I have a lot of family and friends that I really care about that have stayed in the midwest, in Wisconsin, and that's where they've raised their families. It was pretty cool to get my three and a half year old daughter on the airplane and do that whole thing with her, but then just to get back and spend the time with.

Joe Toste [00:34:11]:
My family, I love it. That's a great story. So are you like a diehard Aaron Rodgers fan?

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:34:17]:
I am not. So I'll root for the packers unless they are playing the Bears. But I start to look at it now more like it's just the burden that I have to carry because no one's going to let me off the hook at this age in my life. I can't just say I'm now a Packers fan, but all things equal, I'm a huge sports fan. So as long as it's a good game and there's a lot of stuff going on, I'm pretty happy.

Joe Toste [00:34:41]:
I'm also a huge sports fan. Go Bears. I'm going to put that out there, too.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:34:45]:
Please do. Not enough people say that on a daily basis.

Joe Toste [00:34:49]:
Yeah, I had a little bit of a stint in Chicago, if you don't.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:34:54]:
Mind frigid cold weather for part of the year. Chicago is a great city.

Joe Toste [00:35:00]:
Yeah. My wife will never do it, but before I met her, I lived in Lincoln park, and I remember going to Wrigley Field, which is basically two stops off the red line for me and off the l and, oh, man, it was so cold. I know there's different sports, but you're sitting in the stands regardless, and that's a sports element.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:35:21]:
I have shown people pictures of what Lake Michigan looks like along the coast in the summer and haven't shown them the backdrop of the city, and everyone thinks it's the ocean. No one has any idea of some of the different things that the midwest or Chicago in this case has to offer.

Joe Toste [00:35:37]:
Yeah, they have a lot to offer. It's a little tough. Spoiled when you come from Southern California and it was still snowing into June the year I was there, and I was like, I got to call it.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:35:51]:
That's why I'm in Arizona now. I didn't want to deal with the cold.

Joe Toste [00:35:56]:
It. I love it. Awesome. Well, thank you for coming on tech tables today. And where can everyone find you? Do you hang out on LinkedIn, Twitter? Where's your spot?

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:36:03]:
Definitely on LinkedIn.

Joe Toste [00:36:04]:
Okay. LinkedIn.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:36:06]:
That is my spot right now.

Joe Toste [00:36:08]:
Love it. Awesome. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate it.

Doug Lange, fmr Chief Strategy Officer, State of Arizona & VP of IT Strategy at Choice Hotels [00:36:10]:
Yeah, thank you for having me.

Joe Toste [00:36:12]:
Hey, what's up, everybody? This is Joe Topsey from Techtables.com, and you're listening to the public sector show by techtables. This podcast features human centric stories from public sector, cios, cisos, and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county, and higher education. You'll gain valuable insights into current issues and challenges faced by top leaders through interviews, speaking engagements, live podcast tour events. We offer you a behind the mic look at the opportunities top leaders are seeing today. And to make sure you never miss an episode, head over to Spotify and Apple podcasts. Hit that follow button and leave a quick rating. Just tap the number of stars that you think this show deserves.