Chris Pacifico is Director of IT and infrastructure strategist at a healthcare company focused on mobility devices. He's spent 30 years in IT, moving from programming to hardware to security, and he's learned some hard truths about team leadership that contradict popular wisdom.

Chris walked into a six-person team that wasn't actually a team. It was six individuals doing six separate jobs with zero coordination. Think baseball played by individuals instead of football where everyone works together. Sound familiar?

The leadership gurus all say the same thing: there are no bad teams, only bad managers. Chris used to believe that. Until reality hit. "You can be the best manager in the world with a team of five. Four guys willing to bust their hump. And that one bad apple will still take a good team down." That's the truth nobody wants to admit.

We get into his customer mindset shift. How he stopped his team from calling people "end users" and started treating them like actual customers with real business problems. "Your wife went into labor and they had to redirect her to a different hospital. You're going to get mad if you don't get that answer quick, right? Well, that sales guy's got a big deal on the line. His email is down. That's huge for him too."

We cover the boring project that changed everything. Active Directory cleanup sounds terrible, but it became the foundation for everything else. Better team collaboration, faster ticket resolution, clearer communication with the business. Sometimes the unglamorous work creates the biggest wins.

Chris talks about technology that actually works versus shiny objects that don't solve real problems. Microsoft To Do eliminated his post-it note chaos and helped entire departments stop missing deadlines. Power Automate reduced email overload for customer service teams. Simple tools that solve real problems beat complex solutions nobody uses.

The biggest struggle? Getting executives to stop seeing IT as "little gnomes sitting under the stairs running around with turkey legs." They want cutting-edge AI but won't fund basic security. They dismiss IT input until there's a ransomware attack. Then suddenly money flows, but only until the pain fades. Chris has lived through companies where someone said "we make cardboard boxes, nobody's going to hack us." Three weeks later? Ransomware attack.