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By Lisa Yoon
Last month, Rhonda Winter became the first CIO of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home, most famously, to the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race. The IMS is the world’s largest and highest-capacity sports facility. Here Winter oversees the existing IT organization and the newly created New Media & Consumer Strategies department, linking the technological expertise of the IT team with the IMS’s external reach through new online strategies.
It’s a prodigious undertaking, but not the first in Winter’s career. Her experience includes CIO stints at, most recently, CIK Enterprises and, before that, the Indianapolis Museum of Art. (Fun fact: Winter was the predecessor to the Museum’s current CIO Rob Stein, profiled here.) In both positions, Winter was involved in implementing major technology infrastructure changes. Neither, however, approached the scale of her responsibilities as managing director of IT for the National Collegiate Athletic Association, where she served from 1998 to 2003.
In her role at the NCAA, she moved IT, along with the rest of the association, from Kansas City to its new headquarters in Indianapolis. At the NCAA’s new home, Winter built an entirely new IT staff from scratch. The experience, while successful and rewarding, isn’t one she’d like to repeat, she muses.
Mentoring: Giving and Receiving
One might say Winter was primed early on to approach such gargantuan projects with confidence; she credits her success with the many mentors who guided her at various periods in her career.
Trained in engineering, Winter entered IT with a business background at General Motors. Having just graduated from the General Motors Institute (now Kettering), she took her first job at GM -- in the IT department at GM’s Allison Division, where there was an opening. Her first “great mentor” was then-director of IT Bill Elliott, who welcomed Winter into the fold despite her lack of a technology-specific background. “He believed you could teach technology, but you couldn’t teach how to understand business,” Winter notes.
At the time, about 17 years ago, when the prevailing view of IT was as purely a service function peopled by technologists, Elliott’s was a progressive attitude. He also had what Winter believes is the defining quality in a mentor: “The key to a good mentor is one who reveals thinking process -- someone who thinks out loud.”
This open environment allowed Winter to see the link between her business training and IT. “My interest in IT comes from a business background,” she explains. “Technology can be used intelligently and leveraged to enable business strategies and growth.”
Later, another Allison executive, John Nichols, became Winter’s most effective mentor; his steadfast confidence in her, informed by an awareness of Winter’s abilities that she herself had yet to discover, afforded her opportunities to take on responsibilities beyond her previous experience. Above all, Nichols gave her the freedom to make mistakes, knowing that, with some guidance, Winter could figure out a way back on course.
“He allowed me to manage my way out of a hole,” Winter explains. “That was the most important thing I learned -- you can manage your way out of anything.” And she did manage her way out of problems, in part because “he was almost cavalier in his confidence in me,” but also because that confidence came with the ultimate expectation of success.
Today, Winter inhabits the mentor role for professionals of all ages at various professional stages. As a mentor, she employs that same thinking-out-loud approach. It’s especially helpfulfor those whose career trajectory is on the rise. “As people grow in an organization,” she says, “they need to be seen as an expert in their field by their peers.”
When meeting with mentees, Winter encourages them to “think out loud” through a given situation. “A mentor takes the emotion out of problems,” making way for clarity and problem-solving. She adds that most of the people she mentors are smarter than she is but need confidence. “A lot of my mentoring is serving as a sounding board,” she notes.
For Winter, the mentoring relationship is illuminating for both parties; her mentees often teach her in turn by reacting to her positions from new perspectives. “Thinking out loud goes both ways,” she observes.
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