How to build a customer-focused, adaptive, high-performing IT team

Despite AI dominating the headlines, what remains a typical CIO’s current reality?

Speaking candidly, many CIOs will admit that they spend more time solving people problems than technology problems. Digital transformation is an exciting, rewarding and yet messy people business. On any given day, a typical CIO is motivating overstretched IT teams, influencing execs to invest, fixing IT governance, driving vendor performance, managing end-user adoption and delivering to stakeholder and customer expectations. Much of the hard work of IT is still done by actual humans who need to work together effectively to produce outcomes.

The leadership, management and motivation of these IT teams cannot (yet?) be outsourced to AI. These leadership tasks require very real human skills, which means CIOs and senior IT leaders still have a very real job to do.

And organizations’ expectations of these IT teams have skyrocketed. IT teams must adapt quickly to these heightened expectations. IT is no longer simply about keeping the lights on; a highly effective and motivated IT team is now critical for organizational success. To add to this pressure, most seasoned CEOs and senior executives have not-too-distant memories of IT programmes gone bad, and of IT providing slow, siloed, inward-looking, bureaucratic, ineffective and lacklustre IT services and projects.

Many CIOs running legacy IT teams have a big job to do to turn these perceptions around. They know that genuine trust in IT must be built to enable ongoing investment in IT. These CIOs want to be viewed as customer-focused, highly effective, trusted partners with the wider organization and its senior leaders. They also recognise that this requires structured, intentional IT transformation turnaround efforts.

These efforts start with the actions of the CIO and the senior leaders of IT teams – those wholly responsible for shaping and leading the environment, behaviors and capabilities of IT teams to operate at their best. This requires engaging with the difficult people stuff — clarifying purpose, seeking feedback, building skills, resolving conflicts and refocusing the ways of working across the organization. Addressing these people-related challenges is, in some cases, not the natural forte of IT leaders. Many CIOs are technologists at heart, having built their careers on technical skills and not necessarily on people leadership skills. But technical credibility mixed with strong people leadership capability creates a powerful combination. 

Transforming a legacy IT team into a change-ready, adaptive and high-performing unit is an effortful, long-term, leader-led journey. This is not a “once and done” soft skills workshop, staff engagement survey or e-learning training course. Taking the first steps on this journey requires an intentional strategy and executable plan.

How to start navigating this journey?

Drawing on myriad lessons from IT team transformations, each step below outlines the how-tos and essential drivers of success, refined through experimenting, learning and improving, applicable across diverse organizational contexts.

• Step 1. Commit to a bold, customer-focused, service-oriented vision for IT.
• Step 2. Face up to reality by seeking honest feedback on IT’s services, ways of working, relationships and partnerships.
• Step 3. Use this feedback to reset priorities and grow human skills, not just technical skills.
• Step 4. To show the way, build a highly effective, cohesive, service-oriented top IT leadership team.

Step 1. Commit to a bold, customer-focused, service-oriented vision for IT

A siloed, surface-level, tech-centric approach towards IT vision development will not resonate with either IT or the wider organization.

Instead, a truly meaningful vision for IT needs to show the human impact of technology, shaped with people across the organization and with customers.

A strong clarity of purpose and customer impact is at the heart of this. Getting the why crystal clear, targeting the specific experience and service the organization is trying to achieve for its customers and citizens, captures the motivations of IT professionals who come to work every day wanting to have an impact. This direct line of sight between effort and impact is essential. People working in IT must be able to look towards an exciting future and see the positive impact of their work on those they’re trying to help.

How to do this?

Human-centered design provides pragmatic tools and techniques. CIOs who do this well get IT leaders and teams in a workshop setting (physical or virtual) together with business stakeholders. The agenda is to understand their customers’ wants, needs and pain points via direct dialogue with customers in the same room, or by reviewing customer research. Often a combination.

These wants, needs and pain points are then shaped into an aspirational customer experience journey map. This journey illustrates how the customer will experience and use the organization’s products and services, and how it improves their lives. The internal organization story is also mapped out, showing specifically how IT and the business work as a team to deliver this customer experience.

Drawing on the powerful motivational force of what psychologists have called The IKEA effect — “we value what we create” — this is a collaborative design process that establishes authentic, mutual ownership between IT and the wider organization. This journey map becomes the shared vision for IT that both IT and the wider organization own, working in partnership. The why, or purpose, of technology, data and AI is underpinned by the focus on human impact on the customer.

Crafting this vision together sets the foundation for genuine service-orientation and partnership between IT and the wider organization.

Essential success drivers for Step 1:

• A CEO who drives a strong focus on internal cross-team collaboration and service orientation (from all teams, as well as IT).
• A CEO and executive team willing to work with IT in full partnership, versus a traditional master-servant relationship.
• A fundamentally purpose-driven, rather than purely tech-driven CIO.
• A CIO willing to forge strong, trusting relationships with the CEO and the heads of other organizational functions.
• Embed the IT vision and purpose into individual and team performance measures across IT.
• Communicate the aspirational customer experience vision widely and frequently.
• Broadcast wins and progress towards the vision (nobody will do this for you!).

Peter Johnston

Step 2. Face up to reality by seeking honest feedback on IT’s services, ways of working, relationships and partnerships

It is rare for internal services teams, not just IT but HR, legal, procurement and finance, to seek honest feedback on the quality of their services and how effectively they operate. We humans tend to lean towards the good news and avoid the bad news. Critique is difficult to hear and can spark defensiveness and negative reactions.

But in my experience, IT teams in particular are disadvantaged if they don’t proactively seek out feedback and critique. In the absence of thorough customer and stakeholder feedback, a typical IT team remains unaware of critical areas for improvement.

Blind spots create problems, leading to criticisms such as:

• IT is not spending enough time understanding the needs and nuances of the wider organization — “IT does not understand us.”
• IT focuses on the tech rather than on user and customer impact — “They forget about why we’re doing this in the first place.”
• IT is not communicating nearly enough about projects, products and services — “Projects go into a black hole.”
• IT uses technical jargon and acronyms — “IT speaks a different language to us; it’s hard to get on the same page.”
• IT is not learning from mistakes, for example, from failed IT projects — “IT keeps doing things in the same way that causes the same problems.”
• IT not being aligned internally, poor IT governance and decision making — “The architecture team makes this decision, the delivery team makes a decision that contradicts this — who should we believe?”

I find that once CIOs and IT leaders understand and genuinely accept responsibility for these issues, it is a short leap to start to resolve them. Yes, it is frustrating to hear what sounds like a long list of complaints. But the reality is that often these issues are spoken about in the corridors anyway. And what is spoken about in the corridors is the true internal brand of IT. Unaddressed, trust continues to erode. So why not proactively address the issues?

How to do this?

Gathering the feedback is the easy part, usually via surveys, workshops and interviews. Most organizations are eager to help improve how IT does things and so are forthcoming with feedback! The questions need to be open-ended and designed to seek constructive critique.

Essential success drivers for Step 2:

• A CIO and senior IT leadership team willing to show a strong growth mindset to their stakeholders and to the rest of IT — “we want the feedback so we can get better.”
• A CIO ready to challenge and correct defensive, fixed-mindset reactions across IT (“they just don’t understand tech” or “they’re just being negative and blaming IT again”).
• Full commitment from the CEO, CIO and executive team to invest in making the necessary improvements in IT capability.

Step 3. Use this feedback to reset priorities and grow human skills, not just technical skills

While gathering feedback is the easy part, identifying and taking concrete action to improve is the hard part. 

When reviewing the feedback, the penny drops with most CIOs I’ve worked with, that many of the problems revealed are not technical. Rather, gaps are more often revealed in leadership, influencing, relationships, emotional intelligence, teamwork, communications and other so-called soft skills. In other words, human skills. These human skills are actually the hard skills for many! And trying to improve these unpredictable and messy people-related capabilities is outside of the comfort zones of many IT leaders.

In my experience, though, to achieve leaps forward in both performance and reputation, IT leadership teams need to reset their priorities by addressing these human-skills-related capability gaps head-on.

How to do this?

Everyone in IT needs to read and digest the feedback and understand what it means to them. I’ve seen CIOs kick-start this process by getting everyone together (physically or virtually) to communicate the feedback and openly share what it means to the CIO personally. How do they individually need to step up as a leader in their human skills?

When doing this, the more confident CIOs express their personal commitment towards growth. I’ve heard “I need to engage with my CEO and executive team more frequently” and “I need to spend more 1:1 time with my direct reports so that they have the support they need to help you succeed.” Showing this willingness to improve at the top, by sharing tangible actions the CIO commits to, sets the tone and expectation that everyone in IT needs to be willing to improve as well. The CIO role modelling this growth mindset, by revealing their “I’m not perfect” side, is vital.

With the expectation and tone for improvement clearly set, each senior IT leadership team member then engages with their teams, via 1:1s and interactive workshops, to set concrete goals and actions to address the capability gaps. Again, role modelling is essential. If the senior IT leaders show commitment to the improvements they must make as individual leaders, the wider IT teams are more likely to do the same.

Essential success drivers for Step 3:

• Link the human impact needed (vision, purpose, journey map) directly to the human skills needed by IT professionals and their leaders; embed this into performance and development plans.
• Senior IT leaders personally commit to and show improvement to pave the way for their wider teams.

Step 4. To show the way, build a highly effective, cohesive, service-oriented top IT leadership team

Building a truly high-performing IT leadership team is a major challenge for most CIOs I’ve worked with. It is rare to find a CIO with an innate ability to do this.

Instead, this ability is earned through trying, failing (often a lot), learning and making incremental progress. Over time and after several iterations, CIOs who show organizational grit, persevering through the challenges, become increasingly aware of what a highly effective, service-oriented IT leadership team looks like.

What are the success drivers of high-performing IT leadership teams?

Safety and trust

To be a truly high-performing IT leadership team, high levels of psychological safety and trust must be demonstrated across relationships in the team. It needs to be safe for leaders to step outside of their comfort zones, take a personal risk and tackle people-related capability challenges. In a high-performance team environment, team and 1:1 relationships are strong enough so that everyone can openly surface issues and challenge the status quo. Team members can give each other peer-to-peer feedback and constructive critique. Problems regarding relationships, communications and ways of working across the organization are not hidden; rather, these problems are proactively discussed and addressed. This safe, transparent and trusting environment is critical for all IT improvement efforts.

Focus on results, impact and the ‘why’

Delivering results that positively impact both organizational performance and customer experience is a constant priority. Time at the top table is spent focusing on the why — the vision, the customer experience benefits of IT, and the underlying meaning and impact of the work to IT professionals — rather than only the technology. This focus is reflected in the language used by the CIO during IT leadership team meetings and in communications to staff and stakeholders.

Communicate clearly, in terms the organization understands

The CIO and each member of the leadership team communicate in clear, jargon-free language that the wider organization can understand. They ask if their communications resonate with different audiences, correcting and refining where necessary.

Measure, track and reinforce the importance of service and partnerships

Service-orientation and the quality of partnerships with the wider organization is measured and tracked as core to the effective running of IT, rather than as a nice-to-have. These measures and insights drive the focus of leadership. Stakeholder and customer feedback is gathered regularly and used to fuel IT improvement efforts, at least every quarter.

Commit to and role model continuous adaptation and improvement

Adaptability, underpinned by the related and essential attributes of vulnerability and learnability (concepts described brilliantly in Rich Divihney’s book, The Attributes), in an IT leadership team, is paramount. The IT leadership team commits to a measurable improvement plan to address the capability gaps in IT. These improvements are measured and reported on via the core IT leadership and governance processes, rather than as a “nice-to-have.” The CIO and each leadership team member role models these improvements, showing their teams that change is expected and important.

Provide structure and clarity via an executable IT strategy

The most highly performing IT leadership teams provide their teams with a targeted, concise, executable IT strategy. The executable part is key – this moves the strategy beyond the typical focus on the Where and What (vision, purpose, goals), through to a sharp focus on the ‘how’ — clear ways of working, behavioral standards, accountabilities and roles. How teams are expected to work together to deliver outcomes is often missed in an IT strategy. The best IT leadership teams make how collaboration works around here crystal clear.

How to do this?

I’ve seen many CIOs build high-performing leadership teams. These CIOs are the first to acknowledge that they personally need to adapt both what they focus on and how they do things. They embrace the opportunity for personal and professional growth.

And I’ve seen CIOs who do it not-so-well. The CIOs who struggle to build high-performing leadership teams treat it as a sidebar to the “real work” of IT. Often, this masks a fear of failure. If nothing changes at the senior level — if meeting topics, language and the focus of conversations stay the same amongst the key leaders of IT — nothing will change across the rest of IT. This change must be catalysed by the senior IT leaders, and it must be visible.

The CIOs who do this well:

• Carve out time with their leadership teams, clarifying what high performance and service-orientation mean and look like to them.
• Critically evaluate their current state as a leadership team against the high-performance drivers outlined above; clearly articulate the gaps — brutal honesty is required!
• Drill down into the specific qualities, behaviors and practices that will be required by the leadership team, to close these gaps; develop an executable plan to close these gaps; proactively adapt the plan as needed.
• Ensure regular time (at least quarterly) as a team to track plan achievement, build stronger relationships, review and celebrate progress, learn from lessons and continuously improve as a leadership team.

The playbook — bringing it all together

Solving messy people-problems takes up much of the day-to-day working of a typical CIO. These CIOs face mounting pressure to be faster, increasingly impactful and more effective in working with their stakeholders and the wider organization. Legacy impressions of IT teams as bureaucratic, slow and out-of-touch with their organizations’ needs to be shaken. A reputation as a truly trusted partner must be built to ensure continued, essential investment in IT.

Most CIOs and IT leaders do not find this an easy task, as this is often about growing human skills rather than just technical skills across IT. This is not comfortable territory for many leaders. 

The following steps can help.

• Step 1. Commit to a bold, customer-focused, service-oriented vision for IT.
• Step 2. Face up to reality by seeking honest feedback on IT’s services, ways of working, relationships and partnerships.
• Step 3. Use this feedback to reset priorities and grow human skills, not just technical skills.
• Step 4. To show the way, build a highly effective, cohesive, service-oriented top IT leadership team. 

CIOs who tackle these messy people problems head-on will accelerate their professional growth and career trajectory. The role of CIO is fundamentally about leadership, and leadership is about influencing outcomes through people. Technology exists to provide a positive human impact, and to achieve this impact, IT leaders and teams need to bring their best human skills to the job.

Navigating this journey takes energy and a fair degree of pain and difficulty, but it can be enormously rewarding. Even for those CIOs who are technologists at heart.

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