Leaving a good job is hard. It’s been one year since I left RCIS/Wells Fargo to join CHS. It was a very tough decision. It was a leap of faith from the good thing I had going to the potentially great thing I was going to. There were no guarantees, but I took the risk. In this article I will revisit the reasons I left RCIS, reflect on the last year at CHS, and look forward to the years to come.

In my last blog series, I discussed the fact that sometimes you need to leave to advance. In the spring of 2015, I was feeling that big-time. I was three years into my position as VP of Infrastructure & Operations and seven years into my overall tenure at RCIS. On the surface, most things were going quite well. I had developed a high-performing team with mature processes and modern technologies. Since all of the low-hanging fruit had been plucked, we were focused on cool disruptive technologies and innovations. I had developed a strong reputation across the greater Wells Fargo technology community. These were all great things. However, there were a few things that weren’t working for me. I spent too large a percentage of my time working non-value-adding politically-driven corporate initiatives. My relationship with my direct boss was great, but further up the chain, I struggled to maintain healthy alignment. My biggest struggle was that I didn’t see any opportunities to advance. The business wasn’t growing, so my position wasn’t going to grow organically. I couldn’t see myself in my boss’s role, and leadership roles within corporate Wells Fargo didn’t fit my leadership style. That left me with the conclusion that my next advancement would be outside the company. I wasn’t in a hurry, but that was the inevitable next step.

When I found out about the opportunity at CHS, I was really excited. There was greater scale and complexity than RCIS, no parent company to contend with, and I got to stay in the agriculture industry, which I had grown to love. CHS was growing rapidly, while RCIS had been flat for years. The main down side was that it was triple the commute. It seemed to me that the good outweighed the bad, so when I was offered the job, I took it.

The first three months at CHS were a complete whirlwind. Learning the business, the organization, and people’s names was very overwhelming to me, but over-time, it started to sink-in. One of the first things I noticed about my group is that we weren’t very healthy. I stepped into a leadership vacancy that had been there for some time. Also, my management and team-lead layers had several key vacancies too. My first priority was to build the management and team-lead layers of the department, as I certainly wasn’t going to be able to lead and manage effectively being stretched so thin. We also hired numerous key individual contributor positions to fill key gaps. In addition to organizational health, I noticed that our technology and process health were also in need of attention. We had significant technology debt and our processes were very ad-hoc and interrupt-driven.

One of my first technology debt projects was a major data center migration. We hired an external consulting service to develop the migration strategy and methodology. After several months the effort wasn’t making much progress. I remember looking around the conference room during a project meeting, and noticing that my team members were fairly quiet and seemingly patient through the lack of progress, but I wasn’t. We were wasting our time educating the consultants on our environment instead of doing actual work. Eventually, I pulled my team together without the consultants. I indicated that I was thinking about terminating the contract and wanted their input. Everyone agreed, so that’s what we did. Immediately afterward, without the external consultants, we rebooted the project. I was pleasantly surprised to see a reinvigorated team collaborating and solutioning the right migration strategy and executing on it aggressively. Even though earlier there was consensus that the project was going nowhere, I was new, so my team probably didn’t know or trust me well enough to challenge the decision to hire the consultants. But once I acted, that sent a message: “I believe you are fully capable of doing this with excellence.” The project team rose to the occasion. Looking back, I think this was a significant turning point for the organizational health of my group.

We built on this momentum with several other technology debt and process improvement projects such as our Unified Communication and Collaboration strategy, our Firewall refresh, our WAN assessment, and our ITSM continuous process improvement. I made a strong commitment to the teams that we would engineer and plan these initiatives with strong collaboration and diligence, creating total ownership within the teams for the proposals and delivery.

Looking back on the year, what I’ve recounted barely scratches the surface. We also went live with a major ERP system, implemented deployment automation, refreshed our Citrix environment, automated our server builds, and executed numerous acquisition integrations. We’re a relatively small team compared to our huge enterprise responsibility. We’ve done some pretty amazing things this year. We’re transforming. It’s happening. You can’t see it day-to-day, but when I look back a year ago to today, it is obvious. Three years from now we will look back and it will feel huge. I’m proud of our accomplishments. Our technology and process improvements are significant, but what I’m most proud of is our organizational transformation. We have real leaders at every level stepping up every day. Certainly we have a long way to go, but I have a clear vision of how we need to improve and how we are going to do it. Patience is important. We’re going to get there in a sustainable way, not necessarily the fastest way.

I also had a few firsts. I had my first appearance before a corporate Board of Directors. I witnessed the CHS annual meeting and got to see how the world’s largest farming cooperative makes decisions. I got into the field and toured an agronomy plant in St. Charles, MN and a soybean processing plant in Fairmont, MN (pictured above). I started this blog.

I’m glad I made the jump to CHS. This is the opportunity-rich environment I was looking for. I wanted to build a healthy high-performing organization, and I’ve been empowered and supported by my senior leadership to do just that. There’s no greater professional satisfaction than being surrounded by a talented team of motivated professionals that are aligned toward the common goal of serving our farmer-owners with everything we’ve got.