The Characteristics of High Performance IT Team

High performance teams are high-effective, high-innovative, and high-disciplined.

Digital organization is complex, to improve its performance, the highly complex and dynamic business system needs to be elaborated in a well-organized effort. IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. The priority for CIOs is to build high performance IT teams and genuinely position IT as an integral and inseparable part of the business. Here is a set of characteristics of high performance IT team.


Realistically ambitious goal-setting: IT strategy is an integral component of the business strategy. It’s important to align IT functional goals with the strategic goals of the entire company and from there determine the team’s goals to meet the strategic goals of IT organization. This also ensures the alignment and cascading of organizational goals to individual goals. Organizations need to pay more attention to creating shared and admirable goals and then, develop a highly effective team to compete and collaborate as they deem fit. A goal is a driving factor, an ambitious goal setting stretches up the team and boosts employees' morality, comport a vision for a better state. A goal should also well define the timeline, resources, benefits, and beneficiary and there should always be deliverable associated with each goal.  Digital leadership encourages growth mindset. The manager's role is to ensure the plans are in line with the corporate direction to achieve the well-defined goals. Either individually or collectively, high driven IT staffs develop their own individual career goals, and aligned them with the strategic goals of their organization. Thus, realistically ambitious goal setting at either individual or organizational level inspire change and catalyze innovation.

Focus forward: With overwhelming growth of information and continuous digital disruptions, today’s IT organizations are so easy to get distracted, very often say yes to all the initiatives, with the consequence of getting lost or keeping spinning but going nowhere. Focus forward becomes an important factor to manage a high performance team and run a successful IT organization. It’s important to set the right priority, focus on a few initiatives and prioritize them well. When the team loses the focus or only focuses on the transactional side of the business, it will cause ineffectiveness and decelerate the speed of strategic execution. It’s important to focus on things that really matter for the business’s long-term perspective, such as working closely with customers to solve their critical issues; focusing on the information aspect of the role in the context of the business to unlock business performance and potential; focusing on building core business competency to catalyze growth.

Autonomy and alignment: High level of autonomy is the symbol of digital maturity at individual, team, or organizational level. Running an autonomous organization is about building a work atmosphere to encourage creativity, discovery, and mastery. The high performance team is well disciplined enough to do their work well in a dynamic business environment. You know the team will deliver the best outcome and give them the freedom to do it on their way. Autonomy helps individuals in taking ownership, responsibility and keeps focused, to improve the team performance and manageability. The management should assess the responsibilities and competencies required to achieve strategic goals, and ensure they have the right people, in the right place, at the right time, and for the right cost to achieve strategic goals smoothly.

Learning agility: The professional competencies for adapting to unpredictable or riding above the learning curve are critical to shape a high performance team and make continuous improvement. Learning agility becomes one of the most important capabilities for digital professionals to compete for the future. Even the top seasoned digital professionals become aware some conventional wisdom or long-acquired knowledge is no longer applicable in certain situations, and feel the pain when they keep making poor judgement or ineffective decisions. To improve leadership effectiveness and digital professionalism, they have to adapt themselves and their organization via learning, collaborating, and improving. The emergent digital technologies such as social platforms provide a flexible way to learn, share and collaborate, with the very goals to groom future leaders, build high performance teams, and foster employee engagement and development.

Continuous performance deliveries: High effective IT leaders encourages the staff to improve their proficiency in work by managing iterative thinking, learning, and acting continuum, and make continuous deliveries. In these high-performance and high mature teams, the selection of roles is done automatically and naturally, focus on creating the right atmosphere in which people can take ownership of their processes and participate in various activities to boost performance or catalyze innovation. Either individually or collectively as the team, real-time appraisals take place consistently and can be tracked accordingly, with the goal to map performance and potential with the dynamic business strategy execution more closely and seamlessly.

Digital organizations are like the living systems that can self-renew in thriving as high-performance businesses. High performance teams are high-effective, high-innovative, and high-disciplined. Due to fierce competition and rapid changes, it is important to understand that digital business development is multifaceted and take cohesive effort to build high performance teams, make a continuous improvement and enable organizations thriving,

Posted in: CIO Leadership,IT Performance Management,IT Transformation,Performance Master,Talent Master