5 Steps To A Healthy IT Culture
Those of us in the technology business traditionally focus on measurable results -- sometimes to a fault -- because that's what we were taught in school: the power of reasoning, the scientific method, and rational thought.
Many IT managers and data scientists like to think they are guided by logic rather than emotion, kind of like Dr. Spock in Star Trek. If we can't quantify an outcome with hard numbers, we tend to distrust the process.
As a result, IT leaders generally downplay behavioral and political concerns such as organizational health, which can be tough to measure. Yet what gets in the way of most large enterprise technology implementations is not the technology or even the budget. It's usually a social problem between people who feel threatened by organizational politics, or simply by the status quo of "the way things have always been done around here."
Don't get me wrong -- companies need to be smart about their strategy, marketing, finances, and especially about technology. But the most overlooked element for success involves organizational health. The road back to health requires minimizing internal politics and confusion, while maximizing morale and teamwork. That kind of internal alignment will generate lower turnover rates, and more importantly, it will significantly increase focus and productivity among your employees.
To strengthen your leadership focus, you need to nurture a healthier culture in your organization. Here are five tips to get your IT implementations back on track:
1. Invest in your talent in good times and in bad times.
The first area of focus is to resolve any duplication of responsibilities within the team and integrate disparate silos of the business so they work better together. These types of lingering management issues often get downplayed when sales are booming, but they can become magnified once revenues decline or when the market swoons.
Read the rest of this article on InformationWeek
Sandy Salty spearheads transformation services for Trace3 in Irvine, Calif. She is working on an initiative to completely up-level the skills and culture of Trace3's entire engineering organization in order to keep up with the accelerated pace of innovation in IT. View Full Bio
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