The importance of technology in modern business has put increased pressure on leaders to become more tech savvy. So far so good. But what being “tech savvy” actually means for today’s business leaders is hard to define. Neesha Hathi, managing director and head of Wealth & Advice Solutions at Charles Schwab and its former chief digital officer, didn’t begin her career as a techie. She started on the finance side but quickly realized the need for a firm grasp of technology to solve important business problems and address client needs.
Hathi recently spoke to McKinsey editorial director Barr Seitz about her journey to tech savviness by moving beyond conceptual understandings of technology to its practical applications. In this interview, Hathi details the process of continuous learning, not being afraid to ask questions, and the importance of having sufficient knowledge of technology to have credibility both with engineering teams and board members. Above all, Hathi stresses, it means realizing that tackling tech questions is something business leaders need to take on, and not simply pass off to IT.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What it means to be tech savvy
Barr Seitz: What does tech savviness mean to you?
Neesha Hathi: To me, being tech savvy means having comfort with, and a practical understanding of, tech.
It’s about how to apply technology to your subject matter, industry, or business problem. It’s someone who can confidently say, “I understand how this tech works and how we can use it to solve this client problem.” More specifically, tech savviness means having an understanding of the broader landscape of technology, which I think is one of the things that separates people who really understand technology and the opportunities it affords from the people who are just learning.
These days, you definitely don’t need to know how to code. But as a business leader, you do need to understand how to use technology to solve a business problem or address a client opportunity.
Staying close to the details
Barr Seitz: It’s easy to be overwhelmed by technology, so how do you figure out what to focus on? What sort of habits have you built that help you to keep abreast and remain knowledgeable?
Neesha Hathi: What we’re going through with AI right now is probably a great example. First, I am really intentional about using AI in my personal life, because you don’t necessarily know what it can do until you start to use it and understand how it can be applied, and then you begin to see how you can use it for all sorts of business problems.
Second, it’s important to find opportunities to deepen my understanding. For example, I serve on the board of a large healthcare company and am a member of the National Association of Corporate Directors. As I was considering topics to earn my continuing-education credits, I decided to take a 30-hour course on cybersecurity. While this area wasn’t new to me, I felt like this was a great opportunity to go deeper on it.
Another important habit is just not being afraid to ask questions and learn from others. Some leaders, especially those further along in their careers, are afraid to admit what they don’t know. But you’re not going to learn unless you ask.
Perhaps the most important habit is having the discipline to get into the details of technology. There is an important difference between conceptual understanding and practical understanding, so I stay close to projects and initiatives. I make sure I spend time on steering-committee calls when they’re talking about what’s going on with team sprints. I can’t do that all the time, so I have to pick and choose where I dive in. But it’s important to stay engaged in the details, so I try to spend at least two hours per week on just this kind of involvement.
Another reason for staying close to the details and being involved with team-level work is that it strengthens your instincts so you can quickly tell if a technology program or issue is big or small, complex or straightforward. These instincts are a great asset when it comes to assessing new ideas or ongoing projects. Leaders lacking this savviness don’t know how to calibrate or judge whether a project is on target or not.
Understanding how tech could help Schwab’s customers
Barr Seitz: Can you provide an example of how you applied a technology insight to a business problem or opportunity?
Neesha Hathi: I’ll give you two. One was from earlier in my career. Schwab had developed a platform many years ago that sent data to its registered investment advisor (RIA) clients to help them run their businesses.
When I was in that part of the business, we were looking at opportunities to enable RIAs to scale even more. We recognized that they were spending a lot of time taking data out of our systems and entering it into others and vice versa. Oftentimes, these processes involved manual data entry and were paper laden and error prone. Overall, the process lacked scale.
So the team and I worked to create APIs as part of a program we called OpenView Gateway. It became the way advisors could get data points from us and, eventually, submit transactions to us. It was an opportunity we were able to capitalize on, in part, because I had a deep understanding of our business and our clients’ businesses and also an understanding of how technology could help create this major efficiency and new value.
As a more recent example, I currently lead our wealth management business, and within it, Schwab Wealth Advisory, our premier advisory offer for clients who come to Schwab for more holistic wealth management. Traditionally, Schwab Wealth Advisory has been a nondiscretionary offer, which means if you’re my client, I will always engage you to get your approval before taking any action on your portfolio—for example, placing a trade. Historically, that approval has been garnered during a recorded phone conversation between the client and their advisor.
But over the last couple of years, as demand has grown substantially, we’ve been investing to scale and modernize the experience for our clients and professionals. So when it comes to trade approvals, especially for recurring transactions, we are leveraging technology to, over time, replace phone calls with push notifications to a desktop or cell phone.
By understanding how the tech could be pieced together, we were able to preserve what so many clients love about the offer—its nondiscretionary nature—while creating a simpler experience that saves our wealth professionals and clients time in the process. It’s a pretty simple example, but it reflects how a strong technology grounding and deep business knowledge can work together to help identify new opportunities to innovate on behalf of clients.
Building up your tech credibility
Barr Seitz: How have you used your technology understanding to better interact with your peers and senior leadership?
Neesha Hathi: I’ll point to a few things on this front. I don’t know if I realized this early on, but one of the things I’ve learned is the importance of being the “tech translator.” That means avoiding speaking like a CIO or CTO and more like a COO or CEO when discussing potential business opportunities related to technology.
I have learned to be really thoughtful about the way I bring these ideas or big investment opportunities to audiences that are less tech savvy. I lead with a business problem and the impact of a new approach, while bringing in enough depth around the technology to establish credibility.
But there is a fine balance. Sometimes when leaders are translating tech for the CEO or COO, they speak in generalities or at too high a level. This can make them sound a little superficial if they don’t bring enough tech credibility into the conversation. And that’s hard to fake.
What I find interesting is that many business leaders who are less tech savvy will simply turn technology challenges or opportunities over to IT. Back when our CEO gave me the mandate to become Schwab’s first chief digital officer, there was no road map—it was a blank sheet of paper. I collaborated with my peers to identify our biggest business opportunities, but I also felt the need to more deeply understand design and engineering in order to exercise good judgment. So, I got deeply involved. I participated in design workshops, really digging into the issues and figuring them out. I spent time with the engineering team and being present in our accelerator spaces working with the user experience, engineering, and data and product teams.
I needed to spend time with these teams on the ground to understand what they were doing and, in turn, to prepare me for the boardroom. Then, when I spoke with the board, I could not only speak with confidence and credibility about our broader digital transformation goals and opportunities but also provide insights about how certain investments would help our teams build the products and services we needed, for example. It gave me much more credibility to be able to provide specific examples of what the teams were doing.
Whether it’s the CEO or the board, at some point they need to feel confident that the investment they’re making or supporting is going to be successful. And your ability to bolster their confidence is so much greater if you’ve actually spent some time diving in and learning about the technology issues yourself.
Learning early on to become tech savvy
Barr Seitz: What was the turning point for you when you realized that the ability to understand tech and answer tech questions was an unlock for business value?
Neesha Hathi: When I graduated from business school, I was working for a technology start-up that was developing the first GPS algorithms for cell phones. I was not in a technology role; I was actually hired to lead finance.
But it became obvious to me very quickly that I needed to understand the product, since I didn’t really know much about GPS or cellular. When the CEO moved me into a strategy and marketing role, I really had to be able to talk about these technologies we were developing. So that’s how I started becoming more tech savvy and decided I needed to learn how technology worked.
When I joined Schwab, I was first part of the strategy team and then became the general manager of a Schwab-owned subsidiary, which happened to be a software company. Once I was put in a general manager position, I knew I needed to understand our software, and not only in terms of client needs and the problems we were solving for them; I also wanted to learn how we built it, how we supported it, how we evolved it, and what infrastructure it required.
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