Meet Donnie Berkholz, CWT's Vice President of IT Service Delivery

Name: Donnie Berkholz

Title: Vice President, IT Service Delivery

Company: CWT (formerly Carlson Wagonlit Travel)

Social Link: LinkedIn, Twitter

Tell us a little bit about yourself: your role and job, how you got here, what the role entails, where you reside and some fun information to let folks get to know you a little bit better.

In my role as Vice President of IT Service Delivery, I’m responsible for driving the DevOps transformation at CWT and ensuring we provide high-quality technology services to our customers, to our employees as a whole, and to our Product and Technology organization. That means I both serve as leader of a global organization of technologists in 11 countries, as well as ensure we build a strong DevOps community that spans the Product & Technology organization.

My group includes application platforms & operations (i.e. SRE, DevOps products & engineering, developer experience), IT service management (e.g. observability, ITSM engineering, our employee IT “storefront,” incident management), and IT service desk. In the 3 years since I joined, we’ve likely made a decade’s worth of progress across the board in our culture, technology, and business value, as we contribute to the overall CWT transformation. I’ve brought in new ways of approaching problems like product discovery, design thinking, and value-stream mapping ⁠— which remain quite uncommon in enterprise IT — and we’ve used them to great effect to prioritize and deliver outcomes.

I come from a nontraditional background, involving a PhD in biophysics, drug-discovery research at Mayo Clinic, open-source development & leadership at Gentoo Linux and roles as an industry analyst at RedMonk and 451 Research. Thematically, it’s blended a combination of technology, analysis, communication, and leadership. And that brings us back to the present, where I’ve just begun a 5-month sabbatical as an opportunity to learn new skillsets, strengthen relationships, and pay it forward.

Something fun and unusual about me — I love reading sci-fi and fantasy books, especially small niches called wuxia and xianxia. Think “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” or “Kung Fu Hustle” and you’ll get the idea. Other than that, I’m always up for a great craft beer, if you happen to visit Minneapolis or attend the same conference.

What are you really passionate about? How did this influence your ability or decision to take on an executive role?
My professional passions include vision and strategy, inspiring people to change, creating customer value, and remaining technical despite being a senior leader. That’s led me to look for roles where I could combine as many of those as possible. Those opportunities tend to be more senior and at companies where generalists (or T-shaped skillsets, both broad and deep in an area) are welcomed and successful.

What are one or two really valuable lessons or skills you have learned as you’ve become more senior and promoted into leadership/executive management.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that if you try to be the expert on everything, you’ll fail. Even if you’re capable technically, you become a gatekeeper on progress, and you also prevent others from having opportunities to grow. It’s so critical to decentralize authority and push it as far into your organization as possible, providing them with the “commander’s intent” necessary to move in the right direction.

Another, and this one is even more important, is to have zero tolerance for assholes. They will poison the entire organization, tearing apart collaboration and slowing everything down. No matter how critical and incredible they appear to be in their individual role, once you take action, you’ll always wish you’d done so sooner and more transparently to ensure they’re aware of the impact of their behavior and removing them if necessary.

What are two or three tips you can give to people that are looking to become more senior or take on leadership roles? Be sure to include context (why this is important and why you are providing this advice). 
(1) Look for opportunities to lead via influence rather than authority. This will improve your ability to manage indirectly, communicate well, and make strong arguments. All of those become critical as you move into more senior roles that involve managing indirectly and working cross-functionally.

(2) Aim to get engaged in strategy, and focus on translating it, communicating it, and living it within your team or group. You may be able to succeed as a line manager or mid-level individual contributor as an “order-taker” who does a great job at execution. That will be insufficient, however, to succeed in roles requiring a strategic muscle that you haven’t developed. It’s also valuable in your current role, no matter what it is, to have a clear sense of exactly how your efforts tie into the higher-level strategy. It increases engagement and improves your ability to prioritize the right things.

(3) Keep learning. The moment that you rest upon your laurels is the moment you start to become irrelevant and out of touch. The world’s changing around you, so you can choose to change with it, or gradually become outdated and let natural selection take its course.

Any other wise words you wish to share with our audience?
Every job I’ve held since high school has been a direct consequence of my network and engagement in tech communities. This continues to illustrate how critical it is for everyone to get involved in activities outside of your current employers. This can be in the form of meetups, conferences and events, or engaging virtually on social media like Twitter, LinkedIn, or the Slack organizations that many communities have.

If you walked away from reading this with only one takeaway, engaging in your tech community would be a great one. It will set you up for a long-term future with a strong network and lifelong learning.