Early on in her career, Kathleen Kay never pictured herself in the C-suite. She went to a public high school in Detroit and initially started on a pre-med track in her ungraduated studies. But she discovered computer science instead. She started her career at General Motors, where a mentor recognized her potential. Today, she is executive vice president and CIO of Principal Financial Group, an investment management and insurance company.
In a conversation with InformationWeek, Kay traces her career trajectory, sharing how she grew into CTO and CIO leadership roles at multiple companies.
The Path to the C-Suite
Kay has come a long way since her high school days. “It would never have occurred to me I would be in a position like this,” she shares.
She wasn’t even sure if she was going to go to college, but an organization that worked with kids at her high school helped her recognize that opportunity. She got a scholarship and initially decided to pursue a pre-med track, only to discover she hated biology.
“In Detroit … we were always looking for good, stable, well-paying careers. Computer science was paying well. So I thought, ‘I’m going to take a computer science class and see if I like it,’” she shares. “And I ended up loving it.”
Like many of her peers in Detroit at the time, Kay got her start in the automotive industry. Her first job was in a research laboratory at GM. She worked alongside various researchers in specialties like social sciences, anthropology, psychology, and operations science. The role afforded her a great deal of flexibility to explore her interests, and there she was drawn to learning systems.
Kay then worked with Chevrolet division of the company, where she caught the eye of an internal leadership program that selected high-potential employees.
“For me, just getting through college and into a company like General Motors was the dream,” Kay recalls. “I became a part of that group and that’s when I started realizing I could be in leadership positions, that I could do bigger things.”
GM hired Ralph Szygenda, its first CIO, in the 1990s.
“That’s when I thought, ‘Wow, I would love to be in a role like that,’ because it’s a combination of having to understand business as well as technology. And it was what I really liked doing,” says Kay.
Leadership in Different Industries
Kay worked with Maryann Goebel, who was the CIO at GM North America between 2003 and 2006. And Goebel became a lifetime mentor and the first person to recommend Kay for roles outside of GM.
Kay’s first role outside of GM and the automotive industry was as senior vice president and CTO at Comerica Bank. The next steppingstone in her career was as enterprise CTO at SunTrust Bank. From there, she moved to Pacific Gas and Electric Company, where she worked her way up to senior vice president and CIO.
In each successive role, Kay’s responsibilities grew and broadened. As her career unfolded, she learned how to be a good technologist and business leader.
“I think [for] many of us, and I did it early in my career, we get enamored with a technology and then try and hunt for a place to put it,” says Kay. “What would often happen is you’d have this mismatch of technology that wouldn’t really solve the business problem at hand.”
In each of her different roles, Kay found that she needed the ability to empower people and remove blockers with technology, but she needed a keen understanding of the business and its specific industry to accomplish that. “Being a good technologist is really understanding the business problem at hand,” she explains.
The CIO Role at Principal Financial Group
Principal Financial Group approached Kay during its hunt for a new CIO.
“This company at the time … had recognized that what got them here to 140 years wasn’t going to be what gets them to another 140 years. So, having this humility to recognize that and willingness to address it and pivot was really appealing to me,” Kay shares.
She accepted the job and started in May 2020, just a few months into the global COVID pandemic. Kay aspires to be an accessible leader, a management style challenged by a 100% remote workforce. Stopping by someone’s desk or leaving her door open wasn’t an option. Even informal meetings would need to be scheduled via a virtual meeting platform.
She started hosting a weekly, open virtual meeting, Coffee with Kathy, as an experiment. Anybody in her organization could join for an unstructured conversation about work or anything else happening in the wider world. That meeting drew hundreds of participants, and it has outlived the pandemic. Today, it is a monthly meeting that remains virtual so team members working remotely and in other offices can still join.
“It’s really broken down barriers. I have so many people on my team who say, ‘I would have never thought I would be talking directly with the CIO of a company. I never thought I would feel comfortable sending a message or getting time on the calendar,’” says Kay.
Today, this meeting is one among many in Kay’s busy schedule.
“In the CIO role, I am front and center facing off with my business colleagues really understanding strategy, helping define it, challenging ways of doing things,” she says.
On any given day, she could be having financial discussions, checking on the progress of different initiatives, and spending time mentoring people on her team.
Kay notes her pride in how well-aligned technology and strategy have become at Principal Financial Group. When she first started, each of the company’s lines of business had a strategy and related technology plans. But there were a lot of shared technologies that weren’t necessarily coordinated across these different lines of business.
Kay and her team took a step back to look for ways to integrate technology into strategies across the entire business. “As a result, there are capabilities that we’re delivering much more quickly and iteratively than we could in the past because of how we’ve designed this. So, we’ve built things that have really improved the customer experience,” Kay explains.
Over the course of her career, Kay has found that technology leadership can transcend industry lines.
“Being a technologist gives you an opportunity to really go across different industries,” says Kay. “I’ve had that luxury. You’ll often find that what you learned in one industry can be leveraged in another industry. And then you learn even new things. You bring new ideas, and I think having this background and the ability to move to different industries has been super gratifying.”