Mark Bojeun serves as Chief Information Officer at Seward County Community College in southwest Kansas. In addition to leading the institution’s technology strategy, he is also the author of Awakening Leadership: The Journey to Conscious Influence, a book focused on leadership awareness, personal growth, and the development of stronger organizational cultures. His career blends higher education technology leadership with a deep interest in leadership psychology and human development. 

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• How community colleges are evolving their technology infrastructure to support modern learning environments
• Why leadership awareness is a critical skill for CIOs and IT executives
• How personal development impacts technology leadership and decision making
• Why communication and influence are often more important than technical authority
• How higher education institutions balance innovation with limited resources
• Why strong leadership culture improves the success of IT initiatives
• The connection between conscious leadership and long term organizational impact

In this episode…

Matthew Connor on LinkedIn
CyberLynx Website
Dr. Mark Bojeun on LinkedIn
Seward County Community College Website

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by CyberLynx.com  

CyberL-Y-N-X.com.

CyberLynx is a complete technology solution provider to ensure your business has the most reliable and professional IT service.

The bottom line is we help protect you from cyber attacks, malware attacks, and the dreaded Dark Web.

Our professional support includes managed IT services, IT help desk services, cybersecurity services, data backup and recovery, and VoIP services. Our reputable and experienced team, quick response time, and hassle-free process ensures that clients are 100% satisfied. 

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Transcript:

Cyber Business Podcast – Dr. Mark Bojeun, CIO at Seward County Community College

Matthew: Matthew Connor here, host of the Cyber Business Podcast. Today we're joined by Dr. Mark Bojeun, CIO at Seward County Community College and author of Awakening Leadership: The Journey to Conscious Influence. Mark, welcome to the show.

Mark: Thank you. Appreciate it.

Matthew: Appreciate you joining us. Before we get too far in, a quick word from our sponsors.

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And now back to our show. Mark, for those who aren't familiar, can you tell us about Seward County Community College and your role there as CIO?

Mark: Sure. Seward County Community College is one of the fastest-growing community colleges in Southwest Kansas. Great little area. We're best known for Dorothy's House just up the road, and other than that, about 150 miles from nowhere — but genuinely some of the nicest people I've ever encountered. It's a small town, but Seward County is a fast-growing community college. I came down here a couple of years ago to turn their IT around — just in time for the federal government to redirect Department of Education funding and put school budgets into critical care.

Matthew: Let's explore that a little. How does that work for institutions like yours? I get Harvard — they've got a massive endowment and they haven't wanted for funds in quite some time. But a community college is a whole other story. Every dollar counts. How do you make ends meet and keep up with security needs in this modern environment?

Mark: It's twofold. What happened with the elimination of the Department of Education is that federal funding went to the states, and states are now dispersing it — with new requirements and new compliance areas to navigate. As for how we dealt with it: when I got here about two years ago, the goal was to get from 2002 technology to 2022, maybe 2023 technology. I wasn't trying to be too aggressive. We got rid of internal capital expenditures and moved to the cloud — what we call a strategic rightsizing from a technical perspective. We made a lot of advances, increased efficiency and effectiveness. But a big part of it was eliminating those capital expenditures, which can kill just about any department when your technology is that outdated.

Matthew: Yeah, things like old Exchange servers — that's brutal.

Mark: It's tough. We actually traced one switch back to an original purchase date of 2002.

Matthew: No surprise it went down.

Mark: Still working, actually — up until we replaced it. A true geriatric piece of equipment. But yes, we got rid of all that. Now we're running on a solid enterprise-level backbone — 25-gig throughput across campus and 10-gig student network access. With 300 students living on campus, throughput — especially after 8:00 PM — is a critical success factor.

Matthew: That's interesting. You don't normally hear about community colleges with on-campus residents. Is that relatively rare?

Mark: A two-year college can have a small set of dorms for students coming from a distance. We have a very rural population here, a few international students, and a great athletics program — strong basketball team and solid sports overall. Most community colleges in this region do have some on-campus residents. It's just not the full dorm-life experience you'd associate with a four-year university.

Matthew: Makes sense. Out in Kansas, people might have a serious commute — living on campus is just practical.

Mark: We are literally six hours from every civilized town.

Matthew: That's tough living. So — one of my favorite topics is AI. When it comes to universities, two-year colleges, higher education in general, it's a really interesting area. I'm curious about your thoughts on AI as it relates to cybersecurity. The bad guys are using AI. The way I see it, it's an arms race — and now we've gone from small arms to something closer to nuclear-level firepower. Bad actors are using agentic AI to move fast and automate attacks. It's not like the old days where a good, up-to-date firewall probably had you covered. How does this play out at the community college level?

Mark: That's a truly loaded question with many dimensions. Starting with cybersecurity — at any college or higher ed institution, we've seen a 25% increase in cyberattacks. Many of my colleagues are dealing with ransomware attacks at state colleges and similar institutions. The data we hold is inherently valuable — primarily students' PII, which gets used in identity attacks. AI is a powerful and useful tool, and we know it's increasing the attack surface. We shore up our defenses, and we also use AI offensively against ourselves — for simulations, internal analysis, scenario planning, and attack simulations to see how our defenses hold up.

We recently switched to Trend Micro for endpoint protection, which I honestly hate a little because I teach Python here and every time I try to compile my code, Trend Micro calls it malicious, quarantines it, and makes it disappear — which is exactly how it's supposed to work. But it's still annoying. Endpoint protection is where we're finding the most value right now. Denial of service attacks are kind of falling by the wayside as we see more sophisticated compromise attempts. I know of one school where one student clicked a spam link, which sent 5,000 emails out. Then a hundred people clicked on that, which sent 50,000 out — and within a week they were fully compromised. That's the kind of threat we're dealing with.

We also recently moved from AWS to Microsoft Azure, primarily because of the AI Ops and AI integration in that cloud space and its ability to help us continuously re-evaluate our configuration.

Matthew: That's fantastic. What gets me excited is seeing how companies like CrowdStrike and SentinelOne have implemented AI to help cybersecurity technicians assess what an alert actually means — essentially having a ChatGPT-style breakdown right there. And then you have vendors like Darktrace using machine learning in their products in exactly the right way, rather than just bolting on an LLM — which opens up a whole different set of issues. With something like Darktrace Email, AI is securing your email the way you'd actually want it done, without the risks that come with a raw LLM integration. It reminds me of the self-driving car experience — going from a drunk toddler driving to "I don't fully trust this yet, but they're doing a great job." I see Darktrace as a glimpse of the future of AI in cybersecurity.

And it's especially interesting in higher ed because, unlike a normal business with clearly defined borders to protect, you've got students whose devices you don't own but whose security you still care about. That's where AI could really come in handy — recognizing that this is a student device, that this isn't a threat, and responding intelligently. What's your take on where that's all heading?

Mark: That's where the true power lies — the intuitive capacity of AI, the ability to derive the next step or identify a predictable pattern. And I will say, at a CIO conference in Denver recently, some of the most misguided responses I've heard were from school administrators saying, "We just tell everyone — don't use AI." And I had to ask: where exactly do you draw the line? Because AI is now fully integrated into Office, into Grammarly, into Outlook. You have to jump through hoops to decouple AI from your daily workflow. Even the grammar squiggles in Word are being enhanced through AI tied into Copilot or Grammarly. In the DC area recently, local schools made the mistake of outright restricting AI — and they've been stepping on rakes ever since. False positives, false negatives, accusing students of cheating when the student has proof they wrote the paper themselves. That line of demarcation is constantly moving. It's a very gray area.

It raises the question: how long are we going to resist this? One of my favorite stories is that Aristotle was furious with the invention of the written word. He believed it would create walking idiots. We have to decide — are we going to embrace what is right in front of us, or are we going to resist it out of a systemic desire to protect the status quo?

And when people say AI is killing critical thinking, my immediate response is: no, your ego is. If AI can complete your assignments, your assignments never taught critical thinking in the first place. If AI is killing critical thinking, you're using AI wrong. I use it every day — not to answer questions, but to have a dialogue. What am I missing? What didn't I include? What question haven't I asked? Challenge my assumptions. Tell me where I'm wrong. AI is kind of like a twelve-year-old girl — brutally and bluntly honest, delivered in a caring way, but it can sting. And when you step back, it's often the best assessment available.

Matthew: I couldn't agree more. And I love the Aristotle reference. That resistance has been systemic throughout history. I've had the luxury of watching PCs come out, then cell phones, then the internet — all life-changing — but all of that is dwarfed by what AI has brought to the table.

This ties in beautifully to your book. Hearing how you use AI — not as a task-completion tool, but as something that challenges you, surfaces blind spots, and helps you grow — you're treating it like a valued assistant. There's actually an interesting parallel to the Microsoft Copilot study. When they deployed it internally, they found that about 15% of people became heavy users and stayed that way. The rest dropped off after a couple of weeks. The difference? The heavy users weren't using it as a tool. They were managing it — treating it like an intern. Teaching it the context, guiding it, getting better results over time. The others tried it like they'd try Google, hit some mistakes, and gave up. I think your approach illustrates exactly that emotional intelligence difference. Which is a great segue into your book.

Mark: Thank you. Awakening Leadership is written about how leadership breaks down under pressure — not because leaders lack intelligence or vision, but because human systems regress when safety, relationships, or identity are threatened. When we fail, we regress. It's going to happen. Leadership isn't about being right — it's about being responsible for the conditions that other people have to work in.

And what better partner do you have than AI for evaluating how you're impacting the world around you? How you're speaking, how you're evaluating solutions, how you're taking on problems. I use AI constantly to question myself — operating from the premise that it's not about being a motivational leader, but understanding how my emotional state becomes the operating system of the organization. How ownership, accountability, and psychological safety determine whether teams stagnate or perform at their best.

I don't mind being wrong. I hate proving it. My team's responsibility is to keep me from proving how wrong I am — and I use AI regularly to keep evaluating, to keep asking what I didn't think of.

Matthew: That's fantastic. And I think a lot of people take for granted just how impactful that emotional state is on the organization. There's this idea that someone can be an effective leader while being a difficult person — just because results are coming in. But is that really great leadership? I think it's actually a sign of limited emotional intelligence — not understanding what people truly need. The whip can't be the only tool.

Mark: Absolutely. One of the most undermining forces we have is fear — fear of failure, fear of making a mistake. Innovation is killed by fear. We don't advance. The first premise we have to internalize in leadership is that it's not about being right, it's about being responsible. When we get there, we can say success belongs to the team and failure belongs to the leader. That accountability buys the team the freedom to grow.

One of my favorite stories: I was doing change management for a high-profile client and we made a mistake — I made a mistake. I called the managing director and the board together and walked in and said, "Look, I screwed up. How do we fix it, and how do we make sure it doesn't happen again?" One of the guys there — feeling a bit pointed — said, "But you screwed up." And I said, "Yeah, Bill, we covered that." And I realized in that moment how that response just sucked all the energy out of the room. We weren't focused on the mistake anymore — that was a foregone conclusion. We were focused on how to fix it and prevent it from happening again. That is the power a leader can bring when they're emotionally intelligent — self-aware, mindful, and purposeful. They create a safe environment for teams to grow, to take chances, to make mistakes.

Safety isn't about coddling. It's about unlocking the courage to try, to fail, and to try again. Agile says: fail fast. If we're not failing, we're not trying. If we're not trying, we're definitely not innovating. Around here, I walked in from day one and said: single throat to choke — anything that goes wrong is my fault. Whether I made the decision, approved the direction, or failed to intervene, at the end of the day it's mine. And in doing so, it frees the team up to invest in learning. Blame is nothing more than fear. With leadership, we're talking about owning the responsibility to stabilize a team — and that works far faster than control ever could.

Matthew: I think the approach you described — walking in and saying "I screwed up, here's what we're going to do about it" — the key is that you weren't mortified. You weren't terrified. You just owned it and moved forward. I think so many people choke in that moment because they're so conditioned to be perfect — through school, through upbringing — that they can't process a mistake without it becoming a crisis. And the real skill is stepping back and realizing: to err is human. It's how you deal with it that matters. Owning it, laying out the path forward, being open to input — that actually makes you a stronger leader.

Mark: It really is more about maturity — moving from being right to being responsible. In my career, I've never had a client who was upset with me for saying, "I screwed up. How do we fix it?" What clients don't want is the spinning, the minimizing, the hiding. All that time spent trying to contain an issue is time not spent communicating honestly with the stakeholders who are significantly impacted.

We had a major system outage. I took full accountability. What turned out to have happened was a blown laser in one of our connectors — it took down everything from the SFPs to the fiber connections to the firewall. Unheard of, but it happened. And still, I took full accountability, because the only thing that matters in that moment is how do we fix it and how do we get back up. When we spend energy spinning or minimizing, we're not only wasting time — we're not learning. We're not focusing on the true value, which is: what's the next step?

Bill Gates once said he never learned anything from success. And there's an arrogance that can come early in a career — people start believing in their title. In IT, we check our egos and titles at the door and we talk tech. But as long as people aren't self-aware, as long as they're not constantly re-evaluating the impact they have on those around them, they're posturing. Because at the end of the day, leadership isn't a mask. It's not a uniform you put on. It's a mirror. It's how those around you see you. What is your impact on the world around you?

For many years, I refused to admit I was wrong. My favorite line used to be, "I was wrong once — it was 1998. I said it was going to rain and instead it drizzled." But the reality is we have to give that up. We have to mature past it — through mindfulness, through being present in the moment, and through that emotional intelligence where we're aware of the impact we have on those around us.

I recently published a paper on the Responsibility Matrix, which is similar in structure to Maslow's Hierarchy. We talk about how we can achieve these levels — but as things go wrong, we revert. And the reality is that when a leader reverts, the team beats them to the bottom. As a leader reverts, morale decreases, the negative impact amplifies — and only someone who is emotionally aware can stop that before it falls too far.

Matthew: That makes perfect sense. I like to say that arrogance is a chief substitute for ownership. And I think what's grossly lacking in a lot of leadership — and honestly in society broadly — is empathy. It's so easy to demonize the other side, to not try to understand where someone is coming from. And if you're not understanding the people in your organization, how are you really leading it?

Mark: Completely agree. Contrary to what the trolls out there might say, empathy is not a soft social construct. It is a reality. It makes us stronger, not weaker. And you'll notice that the people who bash that approach — the ones who say it's not tough enough or not who they are — the minute they become a victim of something, they're the first to ask for the empathy of others.

All of this ties into mindfulness. We still teach communication the same way we did when I got my master's degree — sender, transmitter, receiver, encrypt and decrypt. But there's a truth I think about: 85% of people listen not for what is being said, but for how they will respond. If I'm still mentally processing a frustrating conversation I had earlier and I'm sitting across from you trying to discuss something important, I'm not actually here. Communication can't take place. In leadership, in crisis — whatever the situation — we have to be constantly present. Not planning how to spin something. Not worrying about the future. Present, right now, so we can see our impact and have genuine empathy for those around us.

Jamie Dimon is famously known for that same principle — he won't bring his phone into meetings and expects others to do the same. If he can be fully present, so can everyone else. I take it a step further though — it's also about taking that mindful moment before reacting.

A friend of mine, Ruth Pierce, wrote a book on mindfulness. I was working with someone who was condescending and dismissive toward me in meetings, and I called Ruth for advice. She asked if I always carry a pen and paper. I said yes. She said: write everything down and read it back before you react. I did that in the very next meeting with this person — and I didn't find any reason to respond at all. It was laughable. It wasn't worth the time.

There's a personal story I like to tell about this. A woman I was seeing once asked me to see The Notebook and I immediately said, "I don't do chick flicks." Gut reaction. She asked, "How do you know?" And I said, "I'm a guy — we don't do chick flicks." She let it go. That night I flew to London, saw the book at Dulles airport, bought it for the six-hour flight. When I got back I told her: "Nicholas Sparks is way too flowery for me, but yeah — the story was pretty good. I enjoyed it." And she said, "You've got to start questioning those knee-jerk reactions. Was that your programming? Is that how you were raised? Is that your ego stepping in?" And she was right.

Those reactions come from conditioning — from a father saying "walk it off, rub some dirt in it, be a man." That wasn't who I was. It's not who I've evolved to be. So why was I reacting that way — using that kind of label, applying that kind of stigma — when I'm someone who takes time to consider things carefully?

When we just race from one minute to the next, we miss moments like that one. And that's really what Awakening Leadership is about. You can be the most talented person in the room. You can have the greatest mind. But if you're not emotionally mature — if you're not taking the time to understand your impact on the people around you — you're not going to be an effective leader. And that's not a moral claim. That is systems reality. If I come in and scream at my team, they stop talking. And when they stop talking, I lose the most valuable thing about working in a team: input.

Matthew: I couldn't agree more. And I think part of the challenge is that a large portion of people are still very limited in their emotional intelligence — and it doesn't help when you see poor leadership modeled at a national level, because it signals to people that this is what works. It sets us back further as a society. And regardless of where anyone stands on the political spectrum, what I'm talking about is leadership that clearly operates without emotional intelligence — making decisions that affect defense, institutions, people's lives, in ways that seem driven by ego rather than sound judgment. That concerns me deeply, having served in the Army. And I think the impact of that kind of organizational toxicity will be felt for a long time.

Mark: Completely agree. Organizational toxicity creates fear, and fear kills innovation. We know that fear hides mistakes. Leadership's job is to turn mistakes into growth. And organizational capability is a direct function of the leader's behavior — not strategy, not process, not optimization, not talent. The leader's behavior. Competence without humility builds brittle systems. And when a leader operates entirely through fear and intimidation, the whole system is dependent on that one person. It isn't replicated. It doesn't survive without them. There are a lot of people who have compromised their integrity in service of that dynamic, and the long-term consequences — for them, for their families, for the society we all still have to live in — will be real.

But setting aside politics entirely: do you want to go to work where your boss calls you a moron? Where you're berated and diminished? Or do you want to go to work where you're empowered? In high-performing teams, going to work is as satisfying as going home. You're working with people who care about you and who you care about. That's why psychological safety matters — because in that environment, I can be myself, I can interact authentically, and I can contribute fully.

Around here, I make clear very quickly: prima donnas are not allowed. It's all about empowering, not silencing. The most arrogant and incompetent people love operating in the dark because the world can't see who they are. But here, we check our egos and titles at the door. We rip apart ideas, not people. That's where the real power comes from.

Matthew: I love it. Well said. I think we could go on for hours, but before we go — can you tell everybody where they can find out more about you, about Seward County Community College, and about Awakening Leadership?

Mark: The book is on Amazon — search Awakening Leadership — and also on my website. You can find me on LinkedIn at Mark Bojeun. Thankfully my name is unique, so I'm pretty easy to find. Seward County Community College is located in Southwest Kansas — a fantastic place surrounded by amazing people. The quality of life here is so much higher than anywhere I lived on the East Coast. People are genuinely kind. It is a valuable place to be.

Matthew: That's fantastic, Mark. Thanks again for coming on. Until next time.

Mark: Thanks, Matthew.