Leadership Team Series
“When you quiet your mind, you can enter a world of clarity, peace and understanding.” — Alice Coltrane, American jazz musician, composer, bandleader, and Hindu spiritual leader
Serve Relentlessly: A Core Value for All People
“We are all people. Forget the labels, forget the talking points. We can hide our vulnerabilities or embrace them. I choose to embrace,” said Pace Director of Enterprise Systems and Business Intelligence Patrick McCarty. “Every instance in our life is an opportunity to learn — mostly, to learn about ourselves.” That humanistic view of his relationships with team members, customers, partners, and contractors offers an important insight into how Patrick approaches being of service to others.
“I have a phrase that guides me when I get frustrated or lose sight of the target,” Patrick said. “My job as a leader at Pace is to be two things: glue and grease. When there is friction, when processes get jammed, I grease the wheels. That could be a tech solution; it could be new processes; it could be eliminating communication bottlenecks. When there is splintering or discord, I glue us back together. That is almost always an exercise in better communication.”
By greasing the wheels and glueing us back together, Patrick recognizes that we are, indeed, all people. People who deserve to be heard and acknowledged. People who deserve respect. People who can teach, and people who can learn and improve. The result is better service to every Pace constituency.
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
“In my role, I have line of sight on a lot of things at Pace,” said Patrick. “In the data-gathering world, it’s necessary to also understand the real world. I regularly find myself, having asked what was supposed to be a simple question, needing to shut up and listen.”
“The drama that plays out at Pace every day is captured in the teamwork that gets the job done. In this fast-moving industry, where Pace has overcome immense odds by being faster, it is the teams making that happen. There are pockets of amazing talent punching way above their weight class. We have individuals making a difference — turning a team into a family, and a family into a tribe. Each one is doing their very best to solve problems and keep moving forward. These actions in the micro are incredible; they just happen to cause friction in the macro sometimes. That’s where our decisions to apply glue or grease result in real wins for Pace teams, and therefore for our customers, partners, and contractors.”
Doing the Right Thing: Give All You Can
“I am in total agreement with ‘you get what you give,'” Patrick said. “So, I give all that I can. From that foundation, the question of doing the right thing is redundant; doing the right thing is inescapable. Sometimes it is not easy. Being present and mindful is a fight, but a necessary fight.”
Providing Clarity: Where the Data Comes From
Patrick comments, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that “Business Intelligence is a paradoxical phrase. If you look at it too closely, it seems there is nothing intelligent about business.” Some in the field describe the work as curating information to guide leadership with closely guarded industry secrets. Patrick thinks differently.
“For me, the approach is to provide clarity about where the data comes from, and how that data was gathered and presented,” he said. “The ‘what’ is important, but without the ‘where’ and ‘how,’ it doesn’t help leaders make proper, mindful decisions.”
Growth: A Key Contributor to Success
Patrick loves watching people grow. “Professional life is like fishing. There is a lot of waiting, but we all must commit to the grind. Time does its thing, and we get furious activity in bursts, right around the time we are making our moves,” he said.
“I enjoyed watching one of our younger team members, fresh out of college, jump in to help us with a problem, not knowing what he was getting into. He came to me with a solution nobody was really talking about, and it worked. That is always a great experience, and a great example of how we always improve.”
A Unique Outlook on Self-Improvement
Patrick takes his own approach to getting better each day. “I would call it an adaptive, or cross-application, of solutions. Right now, I am working with a coach. It’s a business coach, to be clear, but those business lessons can and should be applied at home, in my community, and in myself,” he said.
“I think of improving like a skill tree in a video game. You can stack things like extra power but have no defenses — a ‘glass cannon,’ I think the kids call it. That would be me chasing intelligence and having no heart. No good. Neat, but not applicable. For every skill I gain, I generalize it and analyze why it worked, its limitations, and its cross-applicability. Can I use this new method in another aspect of my life? The answer is almost always yes.”
He also reads widely to stay close to industry standards and changes. “The disruption of new, shiny things every day is like what one of my best friends describes as ‘watching a freight train take the dirt path,'” Patrick said. “I’m not a gamer, and I don’t like downloading apps on my phone. I have an awkward relationship with technology — probably a ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer’ kind of thing.”
There is one exception. “Right now, I am in love with an app called Brilliant. It’s a STEM learning tool, and I am geeking out going back through fundamental and intermediate math. It’s interesting to learn different ways of solving problems. I didn’t have much higher education; I am self-taught and mentored in most everything I do. So, seeing how I am ‘supposed to’ solve a problem is fascinating. Anyone who knows me knows I’m not one to recommend an app, especially a mobile app. This is the exception, I suppose.”
Finding Clarity Climbing Rocks
True to form, when he isn’t leading Pace’s Enterprise Systems and Business Intelligence team, Patrick loves to rock climb. “Lead or sport climbing is great fun, but I mostly train by bouldering,” he said. “Less equipment, less height most of the time, and just bursts of intense physical and mental exertion. My wife and children have all joined me at one time or another. My middle child, who is 16 and wants to get strong, is currently my favorite partner. I am here for it. Several Pace employees have joined me on occasion, too.”
“I could go on about how climbing parallels tech and problem solving — unique solutions for individual problems. The truth is, you can’t think about much else when you’re hanging onto a rock, trying not to fall, while planning how to get your body into position to grab the next hold. There is a purity in the pursuit. I’m not competing with anyone else. There are no bad conditions, just weak climbing.”
“I was big into martial arts for the first 20 or so years of my life. That is a solo endeavor as well; you can only compare yourself to the guy in the mirror. When you compete, it is only you who wins or loses. The blame and the accolades are yours alone, and climbing is very much like that, too. The mottos that drive me in those sports apply to everything else in my life: Embrace the grind. Be better tomorrow. Commit.”
Ten Years of Reflection
Patrick is celebrating his 10-year anniversary at Pace, and his contributions are many. Over that decade, he has learned that in all things, reflection is important. “Reflection without judgment is the hard part,” he said. “Big things, small things, all things. Reflecting without judging allows the space to learn and grow. As the old marketing saying goes, ‘There’s no such thing as bad PR.’ And there is no such thing as a bad experience, once it’s been mindfully reviewed.”
Patrick McCarty is proof that the clearest answers come from understanding where things come from — the data, the people, and ourselves. Look for the next Leadership Team spotlight soon.
