Madhuri Andrews on people-first technology leadership

At a moment when technology is changing faster than most organizations can absorb, tech leadership is more important than ever. Madhuri reminds us that people-first leadership remains at the core of what makes CIOs effective, explains what that looks like when it moves from philosophy to practice, shares her view on what boards should be looking for in a CIO hire, and draws on her experience as both a CIO and a board director to lay out what it takes to set a CIO up to succeed.

Madhuri Andrews is EVP and CIO at MKS, where she leads the company’s technology strategy, enabling growth and operational excellence across a global organization. A technology and business executive with experience spanning aerospace and defense, industrials, high tech, infrastructure, and professional services, she also serves as a board director at Applied Industrial Technologies, Inc. (AIT). She has been recognized as a Global CIO 100 winner, inducted into the CIO Hall of Fame, BostonCIO ORBIE Global Award recipient, and named among the Asian American Top 100 Hall of Fame, among other industry honors.

To start, we all know technology is changing at a remarkable pace right now, but I want to be a bit counterintuitive and ask about the other side of that story. What do you think are the keys to success as a CIO that remain constant, no matter what is changing in the technology landscape or what industry you are serving in?

It is a fair challenge, because the pace of change does dominate the conversation. But when I look at what makes CIOs effective right now, four things keep coming up, and none of them are new.

Business impact is the first and most constant. To me, technology is typically a means to an end, not the end itself. The question is always how do we help the organization grow, operate more effectively, serve customers better, manage risk more intelligently. That orientation does not shift with the technology landscape.

Closely tied to that is trust. Organizations need leaders who can deal with complexity, make sound decisions, and be transparent about trade-offs. And to do that, to get the credibility that makes it possible, you need trust. That has always been true, and I do not see it changing.

Then there is execution discipline, which I think gets taken for granted. You can have the best strategy and vision, but if you cannot deliver consistently and in ways that bring real value, it does not matter. That holds whether you are talking about operations, cybersecurity, Generative AI, or following through on business initiatives.

And the one I feel most strongly about is people leadership. It does not matter what the technology is doing. Ultimately, it is people that make it happen. Building strong teams, developing talent, leading through change — those have always been core to this role. Technology changes. The leadership fundamentals really do not.

You describe yourself as a people-first leader and have said that people are the heart of every organization. That is maybe something of an unusual posture for someone in a role so often reduced to systems and infrastructure. But what I want to know is, in practical terms, how do you operate as a people-first CIO? What do you do?

To me, people-first is not a slogan and it is not a philosophy. It is an operating principle. It is about how you show up every day.

And it starts, every time, with listening. Not listening to respond, but listening to understand, and then to help. You have to know where your teams are, where they are having issues, where the friction is, where priorities are missing. You cannot get there by assumption. That is the foundation everything else is built on.

From there, it is about creating the right environment. And I know that can sound like a cliché, but to me it means something specific. It means being clear about what people are working toward, giving them ownership over how they get there, and holding them accountable for their charge. When people know what they are responsible for and feel trusted to do it, the quality of the work changes. You feel that difference. Everyone does.

Talent development is a leadership priority and a cornerstone of people-first leadership. While external hires bring new skills and perspectives, existing employees provide invaluable business knowledge, context, and institutional experience that cannot be easily replaced. The strongest organizations balance both: investing in the growth of internal talent while strategically adding external expertise. By developing current employees and helping new hires quickly integrate and contribute, organizations build stronger teams and a more sustainable talent pipeline.

And then there is the human dimension, which I think gets underweighted in conversations about technology leadership. When you go into an organization and you have to be disruptive, and in this environment you almost always do, you can still do it in a way that is empathetic, that is transparent, that helps people understand why. Because at the end of the day, people perform at their best when they feel respected, when they feel supported, when they feel connected to the purpose. We all know what that feels like, and we all know when it is missing.

Given everything that is happening right now with AI, agentic systems, and the pace of change more broadly, what are you doing differently as a leader today than you were five years ago?

What I am seeing shift most is the premium on adaptability and learning velocity, and I see it at every level. Not so long ago, there was more emphasis on whether you had the right technology stack, whether you could execute against a plan. That made sense when the landscape was more stable. What matters more now is whether your leaders are curious, whether they are willing to learn, whether they can adjust, because very little is fixed anymore. The assumption that you could design a technology architecture and largely stick to it has eroded.

There is also a lot of noise in the channel right now, and that creates a real leadership challenge. What is real, what is not? Cutting through it requires focus. You have to know where it is worth going deep and where it is not, and you have to build some structure around experimentation, because testing, scaling, and learning are all critical, but only if there is a framework holding them together. You need space for innovation without losing the discipline that makes it actionable.

The shift I have welcomed is the broader seriousness around data quality and governance. Those conversations used to land very differently. You would bring up data governance and people’s eyes would glaze over. Now when you raise it, people understand immediately why it matters, and that is a direct consequence of where AI has taken us. Because here is the thing, and I will be honest about it. Without good data, AI is not going to do anything meaningful for you. The organizations that invested in data quality are the ones that can put these capabilities to work. Garbage in, garbage out, and no amount of sophisticated tooling changes that equation.

Boards are appointing more CIOs with CS degrees and deep technical backgrounds and fewer with traditional MBA profiles. Is that the right move, or are boards potentially making a mistake?

I have thought about this quite a bit, including from my own experience on boards at both public and private companies. And to me, it is not really a choice.

Yes, a CIO needs technical depth. They need fluency in cybersecurity, data architecture, platform strategy, where emerging technology is headed. Those are all table stakes. But technical fluency alone does not earn a CIO a seat at the executive table or in the boardroom. You also have to be a business leader. You have to speak the language of the business, and you have to be able to translate, to make the connection between what you are doing technically and what it means for the organization.

The frame I keep coming back to is the T-shaped leader. The vertical is your technical discipline, and yes, the CIO needs real depth there. But for a CIO, the horizontal, the ability to work across the organization and connect technology to enterprise value, is the larger and more demanding part of the role. If you only have the vertical, you are going to struggle to be effective at the level this role demands. You have to be bilingual. Technical and business. And if you do not have both, I think it is going to be very hard to have the impact the role calls for.

If you were sitting in front of a room full of CEOs and board members, what would you tell them about how to set a CIO up to succeed once they have been chosen?

A lot of CIOs walk into roles where the mandate is too vague or too broad to act on. The organizations that get this right have already worked through it during the selection process, before an offer is ever made. Be clear about why you brought this person in. Is it to stabilize operations? Lead a transformation? Modernize the core? Drive AI adoption? Strengthen cyber resilience? CIOs almost always inherit a wide agenda, and that is fine, but if there is no clarity about what success looks like from day one, you have already made the job harder than it needs to be. And if you are not sure what the mandate is, be open about that. The best CIOs I know would rather come in and do their own assessment than be handed a set of priorities that turns out not to reflect reality.

Beyond the mandate, think hard about whether you are treating the CIO as a strategic partner in the C-suite or as someone who keeps the lights on. Those are very different relationships. Bringing the CIO into the room early, when you are thinking about M&A, when operating model decisions are being made, when strategy is still forming, is completely different from handing them something to react to after the fact. If you want them to help shape outcomes, they need to be in the conversation before the outcomes are decided.

There is also the question of authority, and I think this one gets underestimated. If you want the CIO to improve data quality, modernize platforms, drive AI readiness across the business, you have to give them the standing to go do it. A CIO does not operate in a silo. The role is cross-functional, and in a lot of ways the CIO is the “connective tissue” across the organization, the person who sees how everything fits together. If you want that person to be effective, they need the ability to drive change across functions, not just within the technology organization.

And if I could leave the room with one reframe, it would be that technology is only about twenty percent of what a CIO does. The other eighty percent is executive leadership, driving cross-functional change, earning buy-in, aligning with people across the business to ensure that what you are doing matters. The technology gets done. The harder work is the human work. Boards and CEOs who understand that will set their CIOs up to succeed. The ones who treat it as a purely technical appointment will keep wondering why they are not getting the results they hired for.