Leader to Watch Feature: Doug McCollough
Continuing the ReynCon Security Leaders to Watch Series, we highlight security industry leaders who are making a big difference in our community. We’ve asked them to share their leadership, challenges, and growth wisdom. We are honored to feature Doug McCollough.
Doug McCollough has established himself as an advocate for diversity in technology. With over 20 years in technical and leadership roles in State government, Smart Cities, and nonprofits, Doug now serves as CEO of coding bootcamp Color Coded Labs and CIO of the City of Dublin, Ohio, where he is a thought leader on initiatives as varied as Smart Mobility, Broadband Expansion, and Blockchain in government. As a co-founder of Black Tech Columbus, he is passionate about extending the many opportunities of the technology industry to the pool of under-tapped talent sitting under our noses. Doug has also been honored as a “Champion for Women” by EmpoWE-R Women of Information Security.
We asked Doug:
❔What is the #1 lesson you have learned from your journey that has shaped your leadership style and approach to business?
🅰️The number one lesson I have learned is that nearly everything we do to succeed is in the realm of people. On a personal level, this means focusing on mental health and emotional intelligence. If we are not personally prepared to face our challenges and opportunities, we will not be able to approach others, and the world will crush us. In dealing with others, we must cultivate the capacity to engage, listen, and be humble in the face of the diversity of experiences those we interface with, whether team members, clients, or other stakeholders, bring to the table. For technical or market success, we must approach opportunities from the perspective of the personal value we contribute to each opportunity from the perspective of others. The most successful leaders I’ve learned from are almost religiously focused on others. This is a quality I’ve learned to emulate.
❔What do you see as the biggest challenge or opportunity for business leaders today? How can leaders navigate these while fostering innovation and growth?
🅰️Business leaders today can win by doubling down on diversity efforts. In these tumultuous times, while some are backing away from commitments to envelop their organizations in a clear-eyed recognition of our increasingly diverse and global world, we can take their lunch money by building more diverse teams and extracting more creative, flexible, and scalable ideas and innovations from them. Going forward, scalability and the ability to enter and dominate new markets will depend on creative teams, augmented by emerging technologies, focused on value and values we understand because our teams are diverse. Leaders who fail to execute on this highly available opportunity today will find themselves confused and frustrated by the talent, product, and services markets of tomorrow.
❔What is one piece of advice you have for aspiring entrepreneurs and business leaders today?
🅰️ I advise entrepreneurs and business leaders to become future-oriented. Innovation is already happening all around us, and the pace of innovation is likely to continue to accelerate. At a small business level, our greatest opportunities are likely to center around our capitalization on innovations others may be creating today. The capacity and intelligence to pivot, shift, and execute will provide entrepreneurs with the opportunities of the future. Markets will speed up. We do not need to build the skills and focus of yesterday. We need to adopt a clear-eyed vision of what the world is likely to look like and construct diverse teams augmented by technologies capable of lightning-fast execution.
We truly appreciate you sharing your invaluable insights with us, Doug! It's an honor to collaborate alongside you here at ReynCon Security!
