Rackspace’s Brian Lillie on the importance of leadership principles

Who are you as a leader? Not only is that a standard interview question, for which any self-respecting CIO should have a clear, detailed, and structured answer, it also challenges you to build a set of leadership principles and become a stronger executive.

Brian Lillie is president of Private Cloud at Rackspace and had previous technology leadership roles at Equinix, Verisign, SGI, and the United States Air Force, so he’s worked hard to define his leadership style. The first step was to define his purpose. After leaving Equinix in 2019, he hiked the Camino de Santiago in Spain, became a life coach through UC Davis Extension, and in 2020, took a Stanford philosophy course on the meaning of life. “These thoughtful and reflective experiences allowed me to develop a statement of purpose about the life that I’d like to live, namely, to live a full and authentic life by personally and continually striving, learning, and growing, and by helping others flourish,” he says.

Looking back, Lillie realized that as a father of four and 20 years spent coaching youth sports, this purpose statement has been central from early on. So he decided to take it further and define a set of core values to support a purpose statement: live with purpose, positivity, and passion; to help others; to continually learn and grow; and to be authentic.

With these values clearly defined, Lillie had a new question: “How do I apply these values to leadership?” And to help develop an answer, he enrolled in Pepperdine University’s Doctorate Program for Global Leadership and Change in 2022. “I’ve been leading people from the Air Force through my business career, but I wanted to understand the theory behind leadership,” he says.

Through this program, Lillie defined a full set of leadership principles, with a quote to anchor each.

Guide using a North Star: “Without vision, the people perish.” – Proverbs 29:18

When Lillie was a commander in the Air Force, he had 130 people under him performing mission-critical communications support to space assets during Desert Storm. The troops represented four different organizations, brought together for the first time, and they had four different visions of success. “We had an inconsistency in the vision of what good looks like, and the only way we could come together was to have a North Star,” he says. “I had the authority to mandate certain behaviors, but I knew using that authority wouldn’t have been as effective as bringing the teams’ leaders together and establishing a North Star that would motivate their troops.”

Set, expect, and communicate high standards: “Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.” – Theodore Roosevelt

Lillie joined Silicon Graphics (SGI) as head of the Mountain View Site IT Network Services group when he got out of the Air Force “The engineering organization despised the Site IT group because they didn’t think we had the technical chops, and to be fair, when I got there, we didn’t,” he says. “We had three employees, 50 contractors from five different companies, and no credibility.”

The CAO of SGI asked Lillie for his 45-day assessment, and Lillie reported that the Site IT group was a disaster, and they wouldn’t be able to successfully design the network infrastructure for the new campus. The CAO asked him how he was going to fix it. “I told him I’d set, expect, and communicate high standards as I converted 50 contractors into an in-house team,” says Lillie.

He then hired an IT leader who was as technically sharp as any of his product engineers, he says, and subsequently brought the engineers and the IT team together to collectively choose a new network platform. “Many of the old school IT team hated the exercise, because I included and listened to the product engineers,” says Lillie. “But I told them that until they can raise the team’s standards of technical knowledge, we wouldn’t earn the respect of the engineers.”

The IT team wasn’t happy with Lillie, but in the end, the team grew into the company’s networking experts, and successfully built a new campus for SGI, which eventually was sold to Google and became the Googleplex.

Encourage creativity and innovative thinking: “Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.” – George Lois

When Lillie became CIO of Equinix, a leading global colocation data center business, he decided to move the CIO role out of the back-office and become a front-office CIO. “I knew I could add the most value in driving products, sales support, and customer experience,” he says. “I had to carve out a CIO seat on the executive leadership team, which was not the norm back in 2008.”

Lillie partnered with his friend, CIO Dave Smoley, to create The Innovative CIO program at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business’ Executive Education department. The first message he gave to the class: “IT operations is job one. You don’t earn the right to innovate if you can’t keep the trains running on time.”

At Equinix, Lillie decided against the current convention of building out a separate innovation team, because he wanted to make innovation a part of the overall culture. “Thanks to the software engineering team, we developed a program called ‘Sparkathon,’ where ideas were sparks that could became solutions, products, and infrastructure enhancements.”

One night, while Lillie was still in the office, an engineer asked him to look at something he was working on. “He had a little window on his computer that showed cars driving by,” says Lillie. “He told me he spent 87 cents on a sensor he put in the street, and built a solution using Raspberry Pi. He said that if we put a sensor in every cage at Equinix, we could offer an extremely cost-effective video monitoring solution to our data center customers. This was innovation at its best.”

For Lillie, this experience showed the importance not only of creating an environment for innovation, but caring about what they work on. “When an engineer wants to show you a spark, you have to listen,” he says.

Demonstrate genuine care and a safe environment: “Leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure.” – Stanley McChrystal

Here, Lillie cites a book by Harvard professor Amy Edmundson called The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Edmundson defines psychological safety as a belief that no one will be punished or humiliated for their ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. She goes on to say the leader must frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem, and acknowledge personal fallibility.

For Lillie, psychological safety is critical to allow all voices to be heard, for learning to occur, and for innovation to flourish.

Establish goals and reward results: “If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.” – Zig Ziglar.

When Lillie was in the Air Force, he found he was somewhat limited in how he could reward his troops when they achieved their goals. “We couldn’t give them a promotion or more money, so all we could do was give recognition,” he says. As a result, Lillie and his fellow officers set up recognition programs: NCO of the Quarter, NCO of the Year, Airmen of the Quarter, Airman of the Year. “We’d have celebrations where everybody would wear their “dress blues,” invite family members of the award winners, and celebrate their accomplishments as a formal ceremony. We were proud of what we all did together.”

So, why spend time and energy detailing such an outline? “My purpose, core values, and leadership principles have kept me grounded throughout my career and have helped me stay in alignment whether I was leading troops or teams,” says Lillie. “When I lead, I’m doing so with intent: setting a North Star, striving for high standards of performance, encouraging creativity and innovation, creating a caring and psychologically safe environment, and establishing clear goals and results.”

Having a clear purpose and implementing core values to live by allows an executive to lead strategically and in accordance with who they are, what they care about, and what they value — and not by situation, circumstances, or reaction. “The importance of knowing who you are is at the very core of authentic leadership.”

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