I started writing this week’s post on Friday night in the airport lounge, waiting for my redeye from Phoenix back to NY. I spent Thanksgiving weekend with my son, who is in his third year studying aerospace engineering at The University of Arizona “UofA” in Tucson. Referrals for internships are welcome!

Two known facts about me. I got my MSEE from UofA back in the 1990s. Tucson is also where I finished writing Digital Trailblazer, and in fact, I selected and stayed in the same hotel room where I finished the epilogue.

Digital Trailblazer has ten chapters of transformational leadership stories, each ending with five lessons learned for fifty total in the book. To commemorate my return, I thought I would comment on three lessons worth repeating that have added meaning today.

Take real breaks away from operations and find your stress-release valves

These are two lessons in the book and are worth reviewing together. Even though I’ve written about reducing stress on DevSecOps teams and avoiding tech burnout, I have elevated concerns for everyone working in IT and security going into 2025.

The word “burnout” appears 42 times in the 2024 Accelerate State of DevOps report, and it has many findings about stressed-out teams and the elevated risks around burnout. “Overall, our findings show small but meaningful decreases in productivity and substantial increases in burnout when organizations have unstable priorities.”

The report has an important remedy for CIOs and other C-level roles. “Increasing transformational leadership by 25% leads to a 9% increase in employee productivity. Having good leaders can also lead to decreases in employee burnout, increases in job satisfaction, increases in team performance, improved product performance, and improved organizational performance.”

Digital Trailblazers and others not in C-level roles must find approaches to reduce stress and burnout. In Digital Trailblazer, I write about taking long walks and finding solace in a bowl of Japanese noodle soup to reduce stress. Nowadays, I cherish my days hiking and biking in Tucson.

Please consider burnout and medical health seriously. Signs of burnout include being cynical at work, impatience with coworkers, or finding it hard to concentrate. Please seek help if you are struggling.

Cultivate diverse teams to boost innovation and performance

In a recent post on what every innovative CIO must focus on in their 2025 Budgets beyond AI, I shared recent reports on corporations downsizing DEI initiatives and how they’ve been under attack.

Reading about how our progress on diversity and empathetic leadership is meeting resistance is disheartening.

In Chapter 6, I shared how Digital Trailblazers deliver transformational experiences by working with global teams, and in Chapter 8, I discussed the importance of driving leadership diversification at the organizational and team levels. AI makes diversity even more important as innovative IT teams shift from doing the work to knowing what work needs to be done and how to evaluate AI-generated code quality and automation robustness.

Organizations with diverse leadership will excel in our next era of innovation because

• Product managers will view market trends and customer needs from diverse perspectives.
• Delivery leaders will apply agile continuous planning techniques – reviewing feedback and evaluating quality through diverse lenses based on skills and experiences.
• Change agents will accelerate adoption by recognizing different end-user personas and workflow needs from a five-gen workforce.

We discussed evolving DEI, hybrid working, and global collaboration at a recent Coffee With StarCIO Digital Trailblazers, where Jennifer Krevitt, CHRO, executive coach, and board member shared four DEI opportunities heading into 2025: (i) intersectionality and the complexity of human identities, (ii) inclusive leadership at all levels, (iii) systematic equity with policy adjustments on career development and (iv) belonging and psychological safety.

Promote team culture

The full lesson from Chapter 4 reads, “Promote team culture by listening, reserving judgment, asking questions, managing culture, and just being nice.” This lesson is from Chapter 4, where I write about how product managers and solution architects must lead through influence when guiding agile teams on commitment and engineering standards.

 Most digital and data organizations are overwhelmed with business priorities, platforms to evaluate, technical debt to address, operational incidents to resolve, and security risks needing remediation. With all this work, it can be challenging for product managers to steer teams toward their product visions and stay on track with the product roadmap. Architects may face even greater challenges getting teams to support self-organizing standards as they race to complete sprint and release commitments.

My advice to product managers, architects, and delivery leaders – i.e., StarCIO Digital Trailblazers – is to promote team culture by listening, reserving judgment, asking questions, managing culture, and just being nice. Command and control behaviors, demanding productivity, cramming too much work in tight deadlines, or becoming Dr. No on architectural compliance don’t work.

I’m hopeful, but not optimistic, that 2025 will be a year in which organizational leaders will focus on their people and leadership.