My CIO Career: Shannon Johnston, CIO at Global Payments, on the Payoffs of a Diverse Career for IT Leaders

Shannon Johnston’s climb to her current position as chief information officer and senior executive vice president at Global Payments has not been a straight-ahead ascension through IT.

Instead, it has put Johnston into a less-than-common advancement pathway for an IT professional, taking her on what might seem like detours – such as when she became a chief operating officer or when she moved from a CIO to a VP of application delivery role.

Johnston, however, embraced those career moves, saying they fed her intellectual curiosity, her love of learning and her professional ambitions.

That approach has served Johnston well. She has moved from an associate director of relationship management at payment processing company TSYS, a job she landed as a newly minted college graduate with an English degree, through successively more senior positions (including several at the C-level) at multiple companies.

Johnston talked about her professional success in a July 2024 interview for the My CIO Career series, during which she detailed why career advancement is like rock-climbing, why volunteering when no one else steps forward is important, and how a liberal arts education helps her as an IT leader.

Mary K. Pratt: You were a CIO just prior to joining Global Payments as vice president of application delivery. Why move from the top IT role to a VP position?

Shannon Johnston: First, I do not see my career as a ladder. I see it as a rock-climbing wall, where you can go back to go forward or go sideways to go up.

Second, I am not overly concerned with titles. For me, it is really about the work. Global Payments is a much bigger company than the company I was at, it has a very cohesive leadership team, and I saw an opportunity to come in as a VP so I could prove myself and create the relationships that I needed in order to grow and be promoted. It was beneficial to learn the business, learn the teams, have an opportunity to show success and then get promoted as a result of my achievements.

Also, I am a constant learner and am intellectually curious. So for me if there is a role where I can learn something new and grow, I want to do it. That was the case with the VP position.

How did you advance your career at Global Payments?

My promotional path at Global Payments was because I demonstrated capability and I volunteered where there was a new rock to climb. I was the first person to say, “Would you give me the opportunity to do that?”

I started at Global Payments in 2016 as a vice president and ran software engineering. I gradually increased responsibilities over the course of eight years, becoming CTO and then chief digital officer and deputy CIO in June 2023. That position was the precursor to me being elevated into the global CIO role when the previous CIO, who had been a sponsor of mine, retired.

Are you an actual rock-climber?

I am a hiker, so nothing as dangerous as rock climbing. A nice hike is good for me. My husband is a hiker as well.

How do you know you will get the learning and challenges you seek when accepting a new position?

I think you can make anything an opportunity. I think you can challenge yourself. I have never felt like, “This is your role and this is what you do and you are not allowed to draw outside the lines.” So I can whip something into an opportunity with no problem.

I'm typically attracted to roles where there's a challenge or problem to solve. If everything is going well, I will tell somebody that they do not want me, because I will be bored quickly and then I will be looking for something else. I really look for problems or something that needs to be solved or areas primed for explosive growth or places where there is lots of work to do where I can get in there and help figure it out.

You talked about volunteering to take on tasks. How do you seize on such opportunities without ruffling feathers or stepping on toes?

Sometimes I am raising my hand because nobody else has, and honestly some of those have been the most amazing opportunities in my career.

But volunteering to take on a task when you have not been asked requires you to have very strong relationships. Because if you see a problem and you offer to help, you have to work with the person or organization or group which is having the problem. In that case you cannot just go to your boss and say, “I noticed this big mess over here and I want to go fix it.” You have to have a very ground-up way of getting involved that is not self-serving, where you are genuinely trying to make something better and to help others.

It also requires influencing people when you do not have authority over them. Then people are like, “Yes, we would love to have you help. What do you think? How can we do this together?”

What other activities do you pursue to satisfy your curiosity and ensure you are constantly learning?

I am technology committee chair with the supervisory board at Deutsche Börse, which is a German multinational corporation that offers a marketplace for organizing the trading of shares and other securities.

I also am on the Google and AWS client advisory boards. I am engaged with partner CIO groups, where we come together to talk about challenges and how to solve them. I read a ton and take training classes. And I take on all sorts of hobbies all the time because I want to learn how to do something new. I am not someone who thinks, “I do not have formal training in that so I cannot do that.” Growing vegetables and painting are two good examples of places where I had no formal training but took up those hobbies anyway. It probably took me about six years to grow a really good tomato, but challenging yourself is how to stay sharp.

What are you reading now?

To be very transparent, I am spending the summer reading a lot of beach reads. But I recently finished The Wisdom of the Bullfrog: Leadership Made Simple (But Not Easy) by Admiral William H. McRaven, and I am in the middle of Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell for the second time.

Speaking of reading, I see you have an English degree. How did you move from that course of studies into technology?

My degree is actually a B.G.S., which is a bachelor’s of general studies degree with a focus on English.

I am impressed by people who come out of high school knowing exactly what they want to do and go to college and study for that and then go off and do it for their career. That was not me. I did not know what I wanted to do when I was in college. So I went to Armstrong State University in Savannah, Georgia, which offered a liberal arts degree where students had to take all levels of all classes. So I took 100- through 400-level classes in every discipline in order to graduate, which sounds easy but is not; 400-level classes in history or math when those are not your major is really difficult.

The idea of a B.G.S. is that you earn that and then get a master’s degree in a specialized area. However, I ended up working at TSYS. And although I started an MBA, I did not finish it, because I got so excited about working for a technology company. I realized that technology was what I wanted to do.

What value did your liberal arts education add to your career that a tech education may not offer?

I think the benefit of that education is that you have to learn about subjects that you may not be great at, or are not as interesting to you, or are harder for you to learn. Having had that type of education, and discipline, I feel I can learn about anything.

Also, because I did not advance through a specific technology education or discipline, everything is not a nail to my technology hammer.

You mentioned the skill of influencing without authority. What is your approach to this task?

For me, influencing without authority boils down, again, to relationships. It requires you to really walk a mile in somebody else’s shoes so you understand where they are coming from. Because if you do not understand the context of what they are up against or why they feel a certain way, you will never be successful in influencing decisions or getting them to go in a certain direction.

Can you give me an example of how you used this approach to influence others?

We had a major program to move services into the cloud, but we had people who were very concerned that the program might fail. So we sat down with them to understand their concerns and the associated risks and why they were worried about those risks. And then we made sure we were addressing and tracking them.

That showed them we were not rushing into something with our eyes shut, and it also let people know that their voices were being heard and that we recognized they had important contributions to make. That got them to buy into the program, because they saw themselves as owners of the solution, which is very powerful.

You will not get buy-in if you just tell people: “This is the problem and here is how you should solve it.”

You held the COO position at ShopVisible, a SaaS e-commerce startup. How did that role fit into your IT career path?

In that role, which I held from 2011 to 2013, I had responsibility for our product and really had to focus on what the customer wanted as we built our platform. That alignment with the customer has been transformational for me throughout the rest of my career because it is so important to ensuring the business delivers value to its customer.

The role also appealed to me because it was with a start-up, and I had never worked at a startup before. I took a few career risks in my 30s, because I could. I also worked at a nonprofit and then was hired by a private equity company to be CIO for one of their companies. These roles were really about getting experience with these other business types, and those experiences were really informative to me and my career.

What lessons did you take away from working at a nonprofit?

The most notable benefit to working in a nonprofit is really understanding that every dollar you spend has been contributed and so it is hugely important to get the spending right and to be a good steward of money.

Also, nonprofits have a “thank you culture,” where nearly every conversation starts with somebody saying thank you for something. I was blown away by how powerful “thank you” is, and I have kept that in mind as I moved forward in my career. It is so important to recognize and thank people for their contributions.

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