Fed CIO Ghada Ijam on the balancing act of leadership

I also remind myself that there’s no challenge that’s impossible to overcome. If you look at the challenge as an opportunity to learn, to grow, to evolve, then you will see it from a different perspective. That changes your mindset from chaos and paranoia to calm so you can say, okay, what can I do about the situation? What can I do differently? What can I do the same? What can I learn? Even if I fell on my face and had a misstep, how do I correct it and learn from it, and grow and develop from it?

This applies to both work life and personal life. On a personal level, we all face challenges. Some of those challenges are painful, but they can help us grow. On a work level, there are challenges, but we can lean on the team and we can lean on each other. We can lean on processes and systems and facts and data to help us overcome those challenges. And we can learn from them to make the organization better, to make ourselves as leaders better, and to make ourselves as human beings better.

Another big balancing act leaders are dealing with today is the ability to drive innovation while protecting and securing the organization. Can you talk a bit about how you’re doing that at the Fed?

The big mantra that we have right now, and it’s thanks to Tammy Hornsby Fink, who is our CISO, is that the risk of doing nothing can be higher than the risk of innovating. With that lens in mind, we started to look at innovation with a different perspective. We started looking at some of those tech trends, hype cycles, and new technologies or capabilities that are hitting the market with the lens of, let’s step back and decide: Is the risk of not introducing the emerging technology into this space higher than the risk of taking a leap and understanding and evaluating that technology, and considering some use cases that are relevant for us and for our mission?

On the podcast, I gave an example involving gen AI. The natural tendency from a risk perspective is to say shut it down — because it’s risky, we don’t understand it, we don’t know enough about the technology. But then we looked at it and decided that the risk of shutting it down is higher than the risk of putting it in the environment responsibly. Therefore, we took the path of putting it in the environment responsibly and evaluating the potential use cases, the pros, the cons, the security issues, the implications from a data loss, IP loss, legal, and overall risk posture for the Fed.

It’s really helping us mature all of those practices from a legal perspective, from a policy perspective, from a risk management perspective, and from a technology perspective as we adopt this technology responsibly.

Another person who knows you very well, Bill DeLeo, was curious about the strategies the Federal Reserve uses to attract and retain the people necessary to fulfill your important mission. Could you talk about some of your workforce strategies that are helping you win with talent?

When people look at the Fed, they don’t realize that the Fed has a lot of really interesting technology work and that a third of the Federal Reserve organization is technology professionals. If you look at the landscape of technology leaders across the Fed and the type of roles they take, it is a really rich career path for technology professionals. And, with the transformation strategy that we are advancing, we are introducing a lot of new technologies and innovations to help support and achieve the Fed’s mission.

So it’s a combination of an amazing organization that has a national footprint, a great profile of careers and leaders, and a diverse cadre of talent and skills that we need to achieve our public service mission. There’s also the opportunity to be part of a digital transformation strategy that is combining some of the important legacy technology that’s necessary to run the Fed’s critical systems while also transitioning into modern technologies and agile ways of working. On top of that, only the Fed does what we do. Only the Fed runs Treasury auctions. Only the Fed runs critical payment systems. Being part of an organization that provides those unique solutions for the Central Bank of the United States with a critical mission is another exciting aspect of it, and that’s part of our employee value proposition — to highlight some of the important work we do as an organization.

All of that combined forms the package that we use to market ourselves as a great technology organization within the Federal Reserve System and to attract the talent that we need.

For more insights from Ijam’s leadership journey and playbook, tune in to the Tech Whisperers podcast.