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Opinion: Building and Keeping an Effective IT Department

To avoid losing staff to the private sector over competitive salaries and flexibility, IT department managers should cultivate an environment of trust, honesty and accountability to get the most out of top performers.

A man in a suit jumping over a gap filled with a ruler.
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As the IT profession breaks out of the worst American pandemic in 100 years, a new work landscape exists for both employer and employee. Some departments have migrated to entirely remote operations, some have created a hybrid arrangement, and still others have reverted to face-to-face technology support. Meanwhile, corporate America is actively recruiting IT talent with attractive salaries, telework and life-work balance flexibility. The challenge for both public and private institutions is to find the correct strategies to create and maintain a strong IT team. And while there can be a great deal of excitement and opportunity in building an effective IT department from scratch, it can be equally difficult to watch a dysfunctional department lose its once-strong foundation, block by block.

So how can IT managers first build an effective department and, once they’ve achieved this goal, retain their top employees? To begin with, creating a successful team is much more than just hiring the best people. As Jim Collins, author of business books such as Good to Great and Built to Last, says, “If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.” Collins means that having too many priorities, without a specific road map for success, complicates efforts to create a productive team. Building an effective team requires a specific, streamlined plan that is clearly and consistently communicated. This is important for creating and maintaining a positive team culture that ensures each member clearly understands their specific roles.

In pulling together a new IT team, you need to build trust and gain employee respect. This cannot, and will not, happen overnight, but it happens when you model honesty for your team. Ensuring your staff know and understand your departmental goals and objectives, and the road map to achieve them, will help create an environment of trust, which in turn helps retain and recruit employees.

If your existing team has become dysfunctional, it is critically important to determine the root cause. Patrick Lencioni, business writer and founder of the consulting firm The Table Group, identified five elements of dysfunctional teams: at the base is a lack of trust, followed by fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoiding accountability, and finally, inattention to results. Each of these elements contributes to an environment that negatively affects communications, morale and productivity. Poor organizational health will also affect your end users, creating an endless loop of ineffective support and poor customer service.

If your department has identified poor or ineffective performers, you must deal with the problem as soon as possible. The longer it takes for corrective action, the greater the chances the top performers will become unmotivated, disillusioned, or simply leave the team or their job. If a team has an underperforming employee, the manager must identify the negative behavior and its causes, then provide clear direction for resolution. While conflict can be difficult to address, having employee and group interventions is important and can solve a wide variety of issues.

Erika Andersen, founding partner of the business management consultant Proteus International, wrote in Forbes in 2013, “Nearly every manager I’ve ever consulted to or coached has told me about having at least one employee who’s not so great. I’ve come to think of it as an almost inevitable part of the manager’s professional landscape.” One challenge for an IT manager building a new team is to not spend extra time on a problem employee that would be better spent with those who thrive on teamwork, collaboration and cooperation.

In her Forbes column, Andersen emphasizes this point by saying, “most managers get held hostage to these folks, spending a disproportionate amount of time, thought and emotional energy on them. Often hovering on the verge of letting them go for years, but never quite being able (for a variety of reasons) to pull the trigger.”

Another challenge of managing an IT staff can be the significant, constant change that is inseparable from the profession. Two key words in the IT vocabulary are “agile” and “nimble,” describing the process of improving software over time through small, iterative changes, as opposed to delivering a final product all at once. In the 2016 Harvard Business Review article “Embracing Agile,” authors Darrell Rigby, Jeff Sutherland and Hirotaka Takeuchi point out: “agile innovation methods have greatly increased success rates in software development, improved quality and speed to market, and boosted the motivation and productivity of IT teams.”

For IT management, ensuring the department is “agile” — able to improve and adapt to circumstance — requires buy-in at the administrative and operational levels. It pays off in innovation, collaboration and teams that flourish.

How does this all translate into building blocks for a new IT department, or keeping an existing one? The answer is easy to distill, and it does not require a high degree of IT technical acumen. Quite simply, the manager needs to develop an atmosphere of trust, have a clear vision, and accurately and succinctly communicate it to the team. If ineffective employees are part of the team, immediately identify them and engage in corrective, positive action.

Managers must articulate a set of consequences if positive change is not realized, work in conjunction with human resources and their processes, and move on to a more effective resolution. This is not an easy process, but weeding out negative behavior in the workplace will improve the environment. It will demonstrate to your top performers that you value excellence, and to lower-performing employees that their work needs to improve. That said, with any employee, it is important to be fair and empathetic. When hiring or retaining IT staff, always consider if they are a good match for the institution, and if the institution is a good match for the employee.

The foundation and essential building block for an effective IT department is trust. As Colin Powell once reminded us, “Trust is the essence of leadership.” Start with trust and you will ensure your IT team is successful.
Jim Jorstad is Senior Fellow for the Center for Digital Education and the Center for Digital Government. He is a retired emeritus interim CIO and Cyber Security Designee for the Chancellor’s Office at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. He served in leadership roles as director of IT client services, academic technologies and media services, providing services to over 1,500 staff and 10,000 students. Jim has experience in IT operations, teaching and learning, and social media strategy. His work has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Forbes and NPR, and he is a recipient of the 2013 CNN iReport Spirit Award. Jim is an EDUCAUSE Leading Change Fellow and was chosen as one of the Top 30 Media Producers in the U.S.