Improve IT Team Effectiveness

Implement the four critical factors required for all high-performing teams.

Analyst Perspective

All teams need to operate effectively; however, IT teams experience unique challenges.

IT often struggles to move from an effective to a high-performing team due to the very nature of their work. They work across multiple disciplines and with multiple stakeholders.

When operating across many disciplines it can become more difficult to identify the connections or points of interactions that define effective teams and separate them from being a working group or focus on their individual performance.

IT employees also work in close partnership with multiple teams outside their IT domain, which can create confusion as to what team are they a primary member of. The tendency is to advocate for or on behalf of the team they primarily work with instead of bringing the IT mindset and alignment to IT roadmap and goals to serve their stakeholders.

Amanda Mathieson
Research Director, People & Leadership Practice
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

The Challenge

Organizations rely on team-based work arrangements to provide organizational benefits and better navigate the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) operating environment.

This is becoming more challenging in a hybrid environment as interactions now rely less on casual encounters and must become more intentional.

A high-performing team is more than productive. They are more resilient and able to recognize opportunities. They are proactive instead of reactive due to the trust and high level of communication and collaboration.

Common Obstacles

IT teams are more unique, which also provides unique challenges other teams don't experience:

• Multiple disciplines that tend to operate in parallel versus within a sequence of events
• Multiple incumbent roles where people operate in parallel versus needing to share information to produce an outcome
• Multiple stakeholders that create a tension with competing priorities

Info-Tech's Approach

Use Info-Tech's phased approach to diagnose your team and use the IDEA model to drive team effectiveness.

The IDEA model includes four factors to identify team challenges and focus on areas for improvement: identity, decision making, exchanges within the team, and atmosphere of team psychological safety.

Info-Tech Insight

IT teams often fail to reach their full potential because teamwork presents unique challenges and complexities due to the work they do across the organization and within their own group. Silos, not working together, and not sharing knowledge are all statements that indicate a problem. As a leader it's difficult to determine what to do first to navigate the different desires and personalities on a team.

How this blueprint will help

Assess, diagnose, and address issues to realize your team's full potential.

This research helps IT support:

• Work Teams: Operate under one organizational unit or function. Their membership is generally stable with well-defined roles.
• Project Teams: Typically, are time-limited teams formed to produce a particular output or project. Their membership and expertise tend to vary over time.
• Management or Leadership Teams: Provide direction and guidance to the organization and are accountable for overall performance. Membership is structured by the hierarchy of the organization and includes a diverse set of skills, experience, and expertise.

Traditionally, organizations have tried to fix ineffective teams by focusing on these four issues: composition, leadership competencies, individual-level performance, and organizational barriers. While these factors are important, our research has shown it is beneficial to focus on the four factors of effective teams addressed in this blueprint first. Then, if additional improvement is needed, shift your focus to the traditional issue areas.

Common obstacles

These barriers make it difficult to address effectiveness for many IT teams:

• Teams do not use one standard set of processes because they may have a wide variety of assignments requiring different sets of processes.
  Source: Freshworks

• There are multiple disciplines within IT that require vastly different skill sets. Finding the connection points can be difficult when on the surface it seems like success doesn't require interconnectivity.
• IT has many people in the same roles that act independently based on the stakeholder or internal customer they are serving. This can lead to duplication of effort if information and solutions aren't shared.
• IT serves many parts of the organization that can bring competing priorities both across the groups they support and with the IT strategy and roadmap itself. Many IT leaders work directly in or for the business, which can see them associate with the internal client team more than their IT team – another layer of conflicting priorities.

IT also experience challenges with maturity and data silos

Current realities require teams to operate effectively

Teams struggle to realize their full potential

Poor Communication

To excel, teams must recognize and adapt to the unique communication styles and preferences of their members.

To find the "just right" amount of communication for your team, communication and collaboration expectations should be set upfront.

85% of tech workers don't feel comfortable speaking in meetings.
Source: Hypercontext, 2022

Decision Making

Decision making is a key component of team effectiveness. Teams are often responsible for decisions without having proper authority.

Establishing a team decision-making process becomes more complicated when appropriate decision-making processes vary according to the level of interdependency between team members and organizational culture.

20% of respondents say their organization excels at decision making.
Source: McKinsey, 2019

Resolving Conflicts

It is common for teams to avoid/ignore conflict – often out of fear. People fail to see how conflict can be healthy for teams if managed properly.

Leaders assume mature adults will resolve conflicts on their own. This is not always the case as people involved in conflicts can lack an objective perspective due to charged emotions.

56% of respondents prioritize restoring harmony in conflict and will push own needs aside.
Source: Niagara Institute, 2022

Teams with a shared purpose are more engaged and have higher performance

Increased Engagement

Effective and high-performing teams exchange information freely. They are clear on the purpose and goals of the organization, which enable empowerment.

Info-Tech Insight

Clear decision-making processes allow employees to focus on getting the work done versus navigating the system.

Case Study

Project Aristotle at Google – What makes a team effective at Google?

INDUSTRY: Technology
SOURCE: reWork

Challenge

Google wanted to clearly define what makes a team effective to drive a consistent meaning among its employees. The challenge was to determine more than quantitative measures, because more is not always better as it can just mean more mistakes to fix, and include the qualitative factors that bring some groups of people together better than others.

Solution

There was no pattern in the data it studied so Google stepped back and defined what a team is before embarking on defining effectiveness. There is a clear difference between a work group (a collection of people with little interdependence) and a team that is highly interdependent and relies on each other to share problems and learn from one another. Defining the different meanings took time and Google found that different levels of the organization were defining effectiveness differently.

Results

Google ended up with clear definitions that were co-created by all employees, which helped drive the meaning behind the behaviors. More importantly it was also able to define factors that had no bearing on effectiveness; one of which is very relevant in today's hybrid world – colocation.

It was discovered that teams need to trust, have clarity around goals, have structure, and know the impact their work has.

Overcoming barriers

Teams often lack the skills or knowledge to increase effectiveness and performance.

• Leaders struggle with team strife and ineffectiveness.
• A leader's ability to connect with and engage team members is vital for driving desired outcomes. However, many team leads struggle to deal with low-performing or conflict-ridden teams.
• Without adequate training on providing feedback, coaching, and managing difficult conversations, team leads often do not have the skills to positively affect team performance – and they do not appreciate the impact their actions have on desired outcomes.
• Team leads often find it difficult to invest time and resources in addressing challenges when the team is working toward deadlines.
• Team leads who are new to a management role within the organization often struggle to transition from independent contributor to leader – especially when they are tasked with managing team members who are former peers.
• Some team leads believe that soliciting help will be viewed as a personal failure, so they are reluctant to seek support for team performance management from more-senior leaders.

It's unrealistic to expect struggling teams to improve without outside help; if they were able to, they would have already done so.
To improve, teams require:

• A clearly defined team identity
• A clearly defined decision-making paradigm
• Consistently productive exchanges within the team
• An atmosphere of psychological safety

BUT these are the very things they are lacking when they're struggling.