Kirstin Slepicka has some advice for her 18-year-old self.
The new chief technology officer of Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield, who’s been in Des Moines for six months, said she would tell herself to stop and smell the roses more often.
“One of the things I would have told myself is to travel abroad, take a semester off, do something interesting along the way, because I have always been sort of milestone-oriented,” she said. “When I think about my life … even as an 18-year-old, I was probably mostly like this.”
Before becoming Wellmark’s CTO, Slepicka was vice president of technology – technology enablement, global tech and corporate systems at H&R Block in Kansas City, Mo.
Slepicka recently sat down with Technology Association of Iowa President Brian Waller during TechBrew, a TAI event series, for a conversation about her new role. Here are five takeaways from the conversation.
Work in a high-trust environment
Slepicka said trust isn’t just about whether you think someone is lying.
“It’s, ‘Are they credible? Are they reliable? Are they authentic in their interactions?’” she said. “I really try to create systems and cultures that empower individuals while maintaining a high level of accountability and autonomy and delivery across the teams.”
Seek out advocates
When Slepicka thinks about the word mentor, she thinks about one person who may have helped her get where she is or influenced her career. Instead of thinking about mentors, she said she thinks about leaders “who’ve taken a chance on me.” For example, leaders took a chance on her when she came out of consulting into industry. Others promoted her into positions she didn’t feel qualified for.
“So I think there’s been many people on my journey that I have relied on,” she said. “I think one of the most important pivots from mentor is to advocate. So who are the people in your life that are talking nicely about you behind closed doors? Who is that person that’s going to pound the table and say this is the person that we need on this project or on this initiative or running this team?”
Find problems to solve together
Slepicka said the best way to create cross-team collaboration is to “find problems to solve together,” she said.
“So when you’re in the trenches with someone, you build relationships that are much more durable than just meeting somebody for a happy hour,” she said.
She said several of the interactions she’s tried to lead over the last six months include conversations on how to move to a modern cloud structure.
“How do we solve some of our hardest technology problems together and creating maybe unnatural groupings, but bringing diverse thought to solve a common problem?”
Create daily routines for innovation
Creating a culture of innovation involves action, Slepicka said.
“Let’s stop talking about talking about it,” she said. “Start doing it. So we’ve said innovation is important, and now we’re starting to act like innovation is really important.”
She said Wellmark has invested internally in hackathons and was a sponsor of dsmHack externally.
“We are trying to create space for innovation, and those big ideas come through opportunities like that,” she said. “But it isn’t just the occasional event and spark where innovation comes to life. We’re also trying to create daily routines … that give individual product teams space for innovation. We have innovation and planning sprints … that is dedicated time for teams to innovate, to solve problems, to solve those local problems that the product team sees that they don’t maybe have time for day to day.”
She said she tries to emphasize not just “Big I” innovation, but “little i” innovation too. Sometimes, people feel like innovation means inventing the iPhone and nothing less counts, she said.
“That’s not true. If you were able to automate all your test cases and be able to go to production faster because you used a new testing framework, that’s also innovation,” she said. “And so we’re trying to identify those “little i” innovations and celebrate those as well.”
She said it’s also important to celebrate failures.
“When somebody takes a big, bold swing and it doesn’t work like, what have we learned?” she said. “Celebrating those opportunities that people go after is part of creating that culture as well, so people aren’t afraid.”
Seek expertise: You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room
“I used to think I needed to know everything,” Slepicka said. “You just need to know who is the most important or who knows the most on that subject in the room. … Then you nod your head. So I think being OK and confident in what you do know, and being very curious and asking the questions for the stuff that you don’t know.”
