Executive Spotlight: John Sankovich, President of SMX’s Cloud Business

John Sankovich, president of the cloud business at SMX, formerly Smartronix, recently spoke with the Potomac Officers Club for an exclusive Executive Spotlight interview on his company’s mission goals, his leadership values and his strategies for delivering value to SMX customers. Sankovich has more than three decades of experience in leading cloud, technology, consulting and sales operations for public and private sector organizations including ECS, InfoReliance and Truestone.

How would you describe your management style and core values towards building a winning culture?

“At SMX we’re focused on putting quality and integrity first for our clients and employees. Our core values include investing in our people and their professional growth within a positive culture that communicates transparently, cultivates belonging and adapts deliberately. For us it’s all about collaboration, teamwork and growth, and our goal is to leverage technology to achieve mission success and accelerate positive impacts for our customers every day.”

How would you advise someone entering our industry to build their resume and advance their careers to be in the best position in the years to come?

“We often talk about being ‘lifelong learners’ where you try to approach each situation as an opportunity to learn, grow and develop yourself and your team. Often, this means making a change when you get too comfortable in a role or have reached a plateau where you no longer feel challenged. I’ve been very fortunate over the years to have great mentors – like our CEO Peter LaMontagne – who share this philosophy. We try to create a culture that supports and incentivizes people to keep reaching for that next level of personal and professional development with a focus on learning and growth at every step.”

With emerging technology influencing the federal government and industry more by the day, what are some of the challenges on the business side of innovation that aren’t always discussed as often as they should be?

“We see one of our primary missions as bringing innovation to our customers. We’ve heard from them repeatedly that it’s not about cloud or on premise, or one software platform versus another – it’s more about working with trusted partners to deliver outcomes with the greatest value to their mission. So our focus continues to be on innovation where we work together across a broad ecosystem to bring together the right tools into scalable, secure, compliant platforms that meet the requirements of today and can also be leveraged and adapted as those needs change and evolve in the future.

We often find one of the biggest challenges has nothing to do with technology but rather just making sure that we’re communicating effectively across all stakeholders and having a well-designed change management approach. We really encourage our customers and our organization to take a 360-degree view of innovation and change from all stakeholder perspectives and then keep an open communication dialogue for feedback so that everyone really buys in on the process and our mutual success.”