Daphne Jones has more personal motivation to succeed than your everyday CIO. She describes how she tries to motivate employees to share that passion.

Few IT leaders have a story as compelling as Daphne Jones. Her success—rising to key IT leadership roles in several multibillion-dollar corporation—seemed unlikely a few decades ago, when she made her way through secretarial school. That was what women were supposed to do, Jones was told.

But with motivation from her mother, she went to college and earned her MBA on her way to successful stints with IBM, Johnson & Johnson, and Hospira, which she joined in October 2009.

Her passion for healthcare IT comes from her mother and sisters, all of whom have worked in the medical field. And when both of her parents passed away from cancer—a disease which she believes could have been spotted and treated earlier, had they had access to the right care—she made a commitment to help expand the healthcare industry’s ability to help patients.

She spoke at length with Workforce News Editor Brian P. Watson about her inspiration in this interview for CIO Insight. In the following transcript, Jones described her strategy for engaging employees—particularly Generation Y workers.

WORKFORCE NEWS: You talked about engaging employees. What’s your feeling about the Millennial generation of IT workers?

JONES: They want to give as well as get. I’m trying to touch the heads, hearts and guts of everyone in IT. You have to make it personal.

We have to treat those employees—and all employees—like they’re volunteers. If you treat your people as if they have to be with you because of the poor job market, then when the economic situation turns around, they will leave you. So I believe in treating people as much as possible like volunteers. Treat them as if they have a choice—when they have a job choice, they’ll stay with you. People don’t leave companies—they leave their bosses, they leave people.

If we can understand that they like a sense of community, and that they get that sense not through meetings, but through social media and collaboration technology. Connecting is important, but because of gaming and communications, it’s easy to think their attention span is limited or that they may want to jump around professionally. Our job is to understand that they have that need. It’s like when you’re playing a game: you pretty much know your score quickly, you know how many lives you have left, and you know how to stay challenged.

In the next several years, growth in consumer markets will be in emerging markets. We should give those younger workers some global opportunities. They don’t have to go to emerging markets—they can be assigned to regional expansion programs that help them do work that’s more global in nature. Generation Y wants to be challenged. We can’t give them the assignments companies gave our parents—they won’t stand for that. We have to use social media, think of a sense of community, and put them on the edge of things and let them be “out there” (in working on interesting projects).

What about teaching them more about the business than just the technology?

I believe that everyone has to be attuned to Hospira’s strategic plan. That starts with the CIO. If the plan is to do more M&A, we need to lead IT to do something like create an M&A playbook or repeatable processes. Then everyone in IT knows we’re going to grow through M&A. Then we’ll need experts in infrastructure, SAP, general ledger and other business transactional systems. They have to then know how the M&A strategy is going to be realized through IT. Not everyone needs to speak the IT language within IT, but most do—and they also need to speak the business language. Depending on who your audience is, you turn one on, or you turn the other one on.

If emerging markets is where growth will come from, the CIO has to think—and teach other people—how can IT do to enable market expansion across different regions? One strategy can be expanding e-commerce. With that, there will be a technology component, but also a business process component. Or we could do cloud computing. Sometimes you can’t run the most expensive client-server-based technologies in those regions, so you have to do Software as a Service, hosted solutions or cloud computing. So you need to know the strategy, say the strategy in business terms, and translate that into the best technological attributes.

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