Ep.155 The Solar-Eclipse Leader: 5 CIO Tips to Boost Team Efforts & Morale Featuring Craig Hopkins, CIO, City of San Antonio

Sep 21, 2023

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🔗 Connect with Craig: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-hopkins/

🎙 About the episode

Leadership Eclipsers: Leaders who put themselves in the path of their teams, eclipsing their efforts and blocking credit for their input.

If you have ever worked with a team leader like this, you know firsthand the void felt by everyone else standing “behind.”

As the 2023 “Ring of Fire” Solar Eclipse makes its way across a good portion of the US in October, we discovered that the moon is less than 1/400th of the size of the sun, and yet for a brief few minutes, appears to cover the sun in its entirety.

Likewise, a “leadership eclipser” is one person taking credit for, and blocking out, an entire team of dozens, hundreds, or even more team members. So how can you be less of a solar-eclipse leader and become more effective at building up a team culture that is known for reflecting the efforts of one another?

As the solar eclipse gives us a moment to pause, we were reminded about our fantastic talk with Craig Hopkins on his reflections and experiences with both the good and the “needs-improvement” styles of leadership. And how, as an individual, your behavior shapes your character, but within a group, such as a team, the collection of individual characters forms the team's culture. This culture, in turn, becomes the foundation for the larger organization's culture.

So good was our talk, in fact, that we had to come back to record a part two just to get all of Craig’s sage learnings in, including:

* Begin by modeling a heart of Servant Leadership

* The concept of humility and bringing others up is a fundamental aspect of leadership

* How serving in the Coast Guard helped Craig learn how to transition from valuing individual accolades to being part of something greater

* Leveraging the principles from "Team of Teams" to create a collaborative spiderweb structure for effective communication and collaboration

* The role of accountability in building a culture of trust and collaboration

* Why Craig dislikes the term “digital workforce”

* and more!

We can’t wait to hear from Craig again at our upcoming GovTech IT & Leadership Summit in San Antonio! Check out the links above if you haven’t already, as we have some “Ring of Fire”- worthy roundtable discussions lined up that you can only get if you’re there.

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Episode originally recorded, April 2021

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