CIO Darlene Taylor’s formula for success: Listen, drive, care

This Motor City CIO says building and maintaining credibility starts with an empathy-driven approach, which has the potential to render you highly appealing to top talent.

It’s no secret: The best talent wants to work for leaders with the attributes to drive success. And for those leaders, credibility is king.

Darlene Taylor, CIO of Superior Industries, one of the world’s largest suppliers of aluminum wheels, attributes her “street cred” to her past experience, first as an engineer of automotive design and manufacturing, then as an IT leader at several “Motor City” giants, in roles of increasing responsibility.

“I have motor oil in my veins,” Taylor says. A native of Detroit, she studied mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, and since entering the automotive industry, she has led internal teams through complex technology initiatives. She has championed change in the community both as the chief mission officer of the Michigan Council of Women in Technology (MCWT), and as a member of T200. And she has become a favorite among the who’s who of CIOs.

In short, she knows how to establish — and maintain — credibility, leaning on her fundamental management philosophy: Listen. Drive. Care.

Building a followership starts with empathy, and empathy is achieved, first, through listening, Taylor says. “Whether I’m talking to the CEO or to a maintenance worker in the plant, I’m listening intently to figure out where they fit into the ecosystem and how I can leverage technology to help them do their job,” she says.

While observing an operator during a recent visit to a manufacturing site, Taylor noticed that he was struggling to enter data into an application. “His gloves weren’t compatible with the user interface,” she explains. Soon after, she worked with her team and piloted a few solutions, landing on one that improved the experience not only of that one operator, but of other workers on the plant floor.

This is only one example of the types of innovation that can be inspired by merely listening, and Taylor cautions against limiting your interactions to issues that concern the workplace. “There’s so much to learn [about your team], and so much inspiration to draw from them, that you can’t glean from LinkedIn or a resume.”

For Taylor, that team extends beyond the folks on her organizational chart. “Over the years I’ve had the chance to build relationships with hundreds of team members, partners, and customers — maybe more, and globally, I’ve learned what interests them, professionally and personally, and If I come across one of those interests — in an article, a job opportunity, or even a big sports win — I’ll send a personal note,” she says.

She also uses group chats generously. “They’re great places to cheerlead and celebrate each other’s accomplishments, and to share insights about a new technology or ask your peers for advice.”

Finally, she encourages leaders to communicate abundantly with their teams, focusing on strategic, technical, personal development, and event topics that reveal something about their friends, family, or personal lives. She says, “You have to ask and you have to listen, because empathy matters. Full stop. And it can be a major determinant of success when you’re trying to drive in the trenches.”

Taylor drives fast. Life, she says, “is too short to drive a slow car.” She says it in jest, yet the mindset has repeatedly carried her to success and encapsulates the second tenant of her management philosophy: Drive.

In most industries, projects are planned from a start date. Carefully their milestones are laid out until the last one, representing the project’s end, comes into view. “Big auto is the complete opposite,” explains Taylor. Given some immovable end date — the launch of a new vehicle, or the rollout of an associated Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) to a new customer — you work backwards, placing the milestones to seem as if they would have landed just the same were you not bound to some non-negotiable end.

Yet the end is non-negotiable, and so Taylor favors action and all the tools that enable it, especially those that help to alleviate analysis paralysis, one of which is agile ways of working. With it she tries to instill in her teams a test-and-learn mindset. “Agile is great,” she explains, “but it falls down without the right mindset. Nike got it right: ‘Just do it.’”

This isn’t to say that you should be reckless. Taylor stresses that. Her own teams manage risk vigorously. But it is to encourage a spirit of momentum and positivity. As she puts it, “At the end of the day, if we break something, we have each other’s backs. We’ll work it out together. This has to be the case, because we don’t have the luxury of thinking linearly. We have to drive fast because time flies.”

Taylor’s third tenant is care — to her not a nicety or an afterthought, as it is to so many leaders, but a necessity, a long-game of gives-and-takes, the linchpin of her entire philosophy, and applicable to all audiences: customers, colleagues, community, shareholders, and the industry at large. What does it look like?

Recently, it looked like a cyber challenge at the MCWT, where Taylor promoted the challenge as an opportunity for young girls to hone their skills in cybersecurity, and to encourage their pursuit of careers in that domain. “Many of the participants connected with me on LinkedIn after the fact,” she says, “and I take great pride in mentoring them and helping them through their studies. And I had the opportunity to enhance my cyber skills in the process.”

Acts of care, even small ones, go an especially long way, says Taylor. Using her teammates as an example, she explains: “Of course we have a job to do, but it takes little effort to check in on the status of a sick child or parent. We’re all human. We all have things going on outside of work.”

And timing is often vital. An active networker, Taylor explains that few periods of time offer a better chance to show care than those during which a peer is between roles. “I do all I can to help make introductions and pull them into philanthropic efforts,” says Taylor. She notes that, coincidentally, such an effort landed her a job early in her career.

“Without care, the whole philosophy collapses,” she says. “So what if you know all there is to know about someone? So what if they listen and drive fast? If they don’t actually care, would you trust them?”

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