Renu Thomas’ Tech Tactic: Lead By Listening

Engineers don’t often have a reputation for their empathy skills.

They’re sharp, analytical, hyper-technical, sure. But patient, attentive listeners? Skillful negotiators with anxious, skeptical people on the edge of major work upheavals? We’re talking about therapists now, right?

Yet in Renu Thomas, senior vice president of technology and operations for the Disney ABC Network Group, there is the rare coexistence of all those qualities. The recipient of TVNewsCheck’s 2014 Women in Technology Leadership Award, Thomas, 45, has navigated some of the most difficult and frustrating shoals in television engineering, among them converting ABC News’ traditional control room to an automated one and shepherding a major overhaul in her company’s asset, marketing resource and work order management systems.

Part of her success can be ascribed to her education and the lens it has given her on her work. Thomas holds both undergraduate and graduate degrees from Cornell University, the latter in operations research and industrial engineering. “I look at everything as a process,” she says.

Thomas started her career in manufacturing, not broadcasting, for General Electric in 1991, where she worked first as a technical associate and then moved to the company’s audit staff, largely working on mergers and acquisitions. It was a job that took her to all corners of the company and the world.

Tired of existing out of a suitcase and eager to live in Manhattan, however, Thomas became internal control director for Estee Lauder, then a manager of mergers and acquisitions risk services for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC. She rejoined GE through its Six Sigma division in 2000 before being tapped as director of network studio operations in late 2001.

“I kind of fell upon TV,” she says, noting that her years at GE taught her the rhythm of going in, learning a new side of the business and then starting to work on projects. TV veterans were more skeptical that she could pick up their own rhythm.  “People would say: ‘You don’t understand TV. TV’s different,’ ” she says.

But many other colleagues — including production designers, audio technicians and production managers — helped her, and she shadowed them as she learned her way around control rooms, picking up the cultural currents as she went along, running studios for shows including Today and Saturday Night Live.

Wanting to cut back on the 24/7 intensity at NBC, Thomas moved to Washington to join MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. That experience in particular instilled the values of versatility in her working life.

“Doing television in a nonprofit environment, you learn everything,” Thomas says. “You become every role. I was responsible for editing, graphics, the HD transition. You have to deal with less, and you also write proposals for grants.

“That was probably where I learned TV better than anything.”

Spotting a job opening on the Disney company’s website, Thomas applied and was hired as executive director of program operations for ABC News in 2007. She came on board just as the network was in the throes of a major restructuring effort with news digitization.

At ABC, she led the move to an automated control room for all of the ABC News programs except Good Morning America. It was a transition with no small amount of controversy as it also led to the downsizing of roughly nine control room personnel to three, a number that varied slightly between shows.

Thomas began the process with overnight news, where she solicited producers’ involvement and walked them carefully through the steps. “I showed them how it empowers them more,” she says. “They don’t have to wait for someone in graphics to put that Chyron in. They put it in themselves and that gets rid of a non-value-added step so that more can be added to their creative process.”

Thomas frames the transition as one that was fundamentally about reducing back-office costs (she saved more than $1 million in creating scheduling efficiencies) in order to reinvest in the creative product. Getting buy-in was a question of active, engaged communication. “It was really including people in the process and the change,” she says. “That’s how I approach every project.”

But some in the newsroom never bought in, she says, preferring to hide away and hope for a proclamation that the change was a bad idea.

“You see that in every change, especially in the industry that we’re in,” she says. “But then you saw people who really were embracing it, seeing this as an opportunity and the future.”

Thomas’ work in that difficult transition put her squarely on the radar of Vince Roberts, EVP, global operations and CTO at the Disney ABC Network Group, who she first met in late 2010. He says his first encounter with Thomas was like a page out of Malcolm Gladwell’s seminal book Blink.

“Within 30 seconds, you knew that she was somebody who gets it, understands that culture,” he says.

He also came to sense she would be an ideal fit to handle Disney’s global operations out of Burbank, Calif. “You find your change agents, and those are the people that give you the opportunity to really change culture,” Roberts says. “They are the built-in innovators and are willing to take risks.”

Bringing Thomas over to a team that had largely been together for 15-20 years was yet another steep challenge, as were her greatly expanded responsibilities. Among them is overseeing content delivery to both the company’s broadcasting environment and its channels and distribution partners worldwide.

And then there’s the asset management piece of her job, which has translated into a massive internal project called Route 66. The year-and-a-half long endeavor has linked all of the company’s systems and organizations in asset, marketing resource and work order management together in a more efficient manner.

“We’ve grown so rapidly over the last 30-plus years that we’ve built a lot of home-grown systems and we’ve done a lot of manual work-arounds,” Thomas says. “This is eliminating many of those old systems, automating when we can and, once again, helping put more information, metrics and automation in the hands of our creative process.”

Compelling people to give up long-held — and sometimes cherished — workflows and habits is, once again, an unenviable burden, but one that Thomas has embraced with equanimity, taking the agile development approach to the new organization.

“We don’t just wait until the product is done and then hand it over the fence,” she says. “We’re including them on the way. They give us feedback as things are built.”

That inclusion has loosened many long-entangled strings that, in less patient hands, might easily have tightened into a Gordian knot. And again, it has all come down to Thomas’ inherent skill for actually listening to colleagues, subordinates, vendors and clients.

“If you include them and understand their points of view and what their pain points are, everyone wants to do a good job,” Thomas says.

That capacity is one of Thomas’ most important qualities to Todd Donovan, SVP of broadcast operations and engineering for the ABC Television Network, and one of her closest peers.

“She works extremely hard to build those bridges, establish that credibility, understand the business objectives and internalize that,” Donovan says.

Having known Thomas since 2000 when they were both at NBC together, Donovan has long been a friend as well as a colleague.

“Integrity, trustworthiness, respect — these really are the core beliefs she holds,” he says. “They not only make her successful professionally; they make her successful personally.”

That personal side has been long nurtured by what she describes as an extremely supportive family with whom she grew up in tiny Wellsville, N.Y., a suburb of Buffalo. She says her parents, émigrés from India, chose the town to give Thomas and her older brother and sister the best possible education. 

Now, Thomas is passionate about enlisting more women in her chosen field, where her niece is already following. “You have to start early with girls and show them it’s not a geeky boy career,” she says. “There are still too few, and women have to help other women.”

Her relocation to Los Angeles after many years in New York City has also exposed one limit to Thomas’ otherwise seemingly boundless capacities. “I’m not a good driver,” she confesses.

In all other respects, Thomas seems to have a steady hand wherever she places it. That surety — and her oft-proven flexibility — will be indispensible as television engineering continues its rapid and difficult-to-predict evolution.

“How do I keep reinventing myself in a digital world and build teams to be successful and make Disney and ABC successful?” she asks herself.

With her uncommon ability to lead by listening, there’s little doubt she’ll keep finding the answers.

This story originally appeared in TVNewsCheck’s Executive Outlook, a quarterly print publication devoted to the future of broadcasting. Subscribe here.