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Hire people smarter than you: The VP mindset shift
Table of contents
About this episode
The climb from individual contributor to CIO isn't linear. Noni Azhar, CIO at ProService Hawaii, says each promotion forces you to let go of what made you successful in the last role. At VP and beyond, that means hiring people who know more than you in the areas you used to own.
"You want to then hire people who are smarter than you in those subject areas."
Noni learned some of these lessons the hard way. He spent over a decade in CRM consulting, where clients paid for his expertise and implemented his recommendations. When he moved into internal IT and gave the same advice for free, everyone suddenly had competing opinions.
He didn't fix that with better presentations or more data. Instead, he changed how he thinks about stakeholder problems. Growing up playing chess taught him to see the board from his opponent's side. In IT leadership, that means understanding not just what stakeholders say, but what they're not saying, then guiding them so the solution feels like their idea. When it solves their problem, they advocate for it.
Noni also walks Matt Peters through the tension at the director level between staying technical and building a strategic vision, and why leaders should be compassionate with themselves while they learn entirely new skills. He builds teams that are direct and transparent without people walking on eggshells, where the goal is to make unique mistakes rather than repeat safe failures.
He closes with his view on AI. Unlike the move to the cloud, AI's destination still feels unclear, and he sees it as augmentation rather than automation.
What you'll learn in this episode
- Why hiring people smarter than you is the VP-level mindset shift
- Why consulting advice gets questioned once it's free
- How chess thinking helps you see problems from a stakeholder's side
- How to guide stakeholders so your solution feels like their idea
- How to balance staying technical with building strategic vision as a director
- Why you should be compassionate with yourself on new learning curves
- How to build psychologically safe teams that make unique mistakes
- Why AI is augmentation, not automation
About Noni Azhar
Noni Azhar is CIO at ProService Hawaii. His background includes over a decade in technical consulting in the CRM space and leading applications teams at SugarCRM.
He's fascinated by solving the people-process-technology triangle and brings frameworks from chess and consulting to IT leadership. His approach emphasizes empathy, directness, and building psychologically safe teams where people make unique mistakes rather than repeating safe failures.
Resources mentioned
About the host
Matt Peters is the CEO and Co-Founder of Fixify, where he's redefining the IT help desk for the AI era. Before founding Fixify, he was Chief Product Officer at Expel and held senior leadership roles at FireEye and Mandiant, where he helped pioneer some of the earliest managed detection and response services.
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