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Effective IT leaders pay attention to four core organizational effectiveness “levers”: Business integration, process maturity, technical architecture, and human performance.

Ranked in order of importance, human performance comes first. Next comes human performance. Human performance comes after that, followed by human performance.

As evidence: Outstanding employees can overcome poor business/IT integration, while even the best-integrated IT organization won’t withstand poorly performing employees.

Top-notch employees can also overcome badly designed and implemented processes. The reverse is not true: No matter how good your process designs and management are, inept employees will cause them to fail.

The best technical architecture can, perhaps, limit the damage incompetent employees can wreak, but even that weak outcome is optimistic; meanwhile, “code gods” can overcome technical architecture that’s a complete mess.

No matter what your goals, strategies, hopes and vision, are, when it comes to getting the results you’re responsible for nothing comes close to the importance of how well the humans you’ve recruited, encouraged, coached, retained, and promoted perform.

As a leader and manager, it’s up to you to create an environment that fosters strong performance. Fostering it entails:

Leadership: In this context, leadership includes such techniques as listening (and especially organizational listening), followership, persuasion, and facilitation. Never fear – it also includes setting direction, but in this IT effectiveness model that’s covered under the IT/Business Integration banner.

Staffing and skills management: You need the right people, with the right skills. This entails effective recruiting, and treating employees as well after you’ve recruited them as you do while recruiting them. It also calls for training and education so staff bring the skills you need to the work they do.

Oh, and, by the way, “recruiting” really means “sourcing” – if you need a particular skill in the short term, but expect that need to go away, bringing contractors on board should be part of staffing as well.

Compensation and rewards: Designing compensation so it encourages strong performance and not perniciously embedded dysfunction isn’t easy. Here’s a link to get you started: “Poor Joe,” 10/22/2007.” To put a bow on it, constantly remind yourself of the role money plays in business communication. It isn’t an incentive, or a reward. It’s the company’s loudest voice, explaining what the company values most far more effectively than the best speechifying and executive charisma have to offer.

Organizational structure: The org chart, but not only the org chart. Beyond this are such elements as corporate infrastructure, key performance indicators and other corporate metrics, and accounting systems and what they inhibit or encourage.

Team dynamics: It’s rare for any employee to work in isolation. More often, employees work in teams, which is to say interdependence is the norm. Which is also to say business processes and practices are vulnerable to distrust among the team members who have to make them work.

Culture: We keep coming back to culture, and for good reason. Culture is how we do things around here, making some courses of action implicitly approved and others intrinsically unacceptable. Culture defines the social landscapes within which employees operate.

Beyond this, culture defines affinities and group memberships. In that guise, culture defines which teams are automatically trustworthy and which ones to view with suspicion no matter what they do.

Bob’s last word: The logic in favor of viewing human performance as the most important factor in driving organizational success is compelling. As stated earlier, it’s that great employees can overcome everything else, while poor ones can make failure unavoidable.

There’s been a lot of discussion as to whether generative AI can replace human beings, much of it little more than whistling in the dark. Example: “Artificial intelligence cannot replace human talent and creativity, it can only mimic the human brain.”

Putting on my Captain Obvious hat, if generative AI can mimic the human brain then by definition if can replace what human brains can do.

The better news is something discussed less often – whether generative AI can mimic human initiative. Eventually it will; I’m hoping I won’t be around to see it when it does.

Bob’s sales pitch: Speaking of not being around when it does, it’s time. Looking at the level of correspondence, comments, and declining subscriptions, I’m declaring 2023 to be my victory lap. So if there’s a topic you’d like me to cover in KJR, let me know via the Contact form.

This week on CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: “7 IT consultant tricks CIOs should never fall for.” It’s about how many consultants fix what’s broken by breaking what’s fixed, plus 6 other common consulting misdeeds.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Yes, it’s another re-run. I have a great excuse for this, but I’m not going to tell you what it is.

Anyway, I think you’ll like this one, and it’s old enough there’s good chance you weren’t a subscriber when it first ran (June 24, 2013).

Please enjoy the article while I enjoy my excuse.

– Bob      

We need more engineers.

Not just in IT, bridge design, and electronics. We need them everywhere decisions are being made.

I’m not limiting engineers to those who know the niceties of load and stress computations, CPU design, gear ratios and such. No, to me, an engineer is anyone who understands you can’t cool down the kitchen by leaving the refrigerator door open.

Many business executives aren’t engineers, but they should be. Here’s what I mean:

Cooling off the kitchen is a metaphor for across-the-board cost-cutting.

The hot air blowing out of the back of the refrigerator is parallel to the impact of the all-too-common across-the-board cost-cutting that impairs the business more than it saves anything.

Any engineer knows all refrigerators do is pump heat out of an enclosed space and into a larger space. Leave the door open and the larger space and enclosed space become one and the same: The cooled air just mixes with the heat being pumped into the same space – even with perfect efficiency the net effect is zilch.

This describes most cost-cutting exercises pretty well, and especially cuts to the IT budget, because when costs are already too high, less automation probably won’t help. More might not help either, depending on what exactly is causing costs to be too high. But unless what’s being cut out of the IT budget are stupid ideas that shouldn’t have been approved in the first place, forcing employees to operate either manually or with obsolete technology just isn’t going to increase efficiency.

Which gets to the heart of why we need more engineers: Engineers generally think in terms of fixing problems rather than symptoms. So should business decision-makers.

So if a business is in trouble … if costs are too high … decision-makers need to first ask themselves some basic questions, like, are costs really too high? Or is revenue too low? Or is risk what’s too high, it isn’t being managed well, and as a result expensive problems that could have been prevented haven’t been?

Too many business executives act as if “our costs aren’t in line with our revenues” is a proper root cause analysis when profits are unsatisfactory. An engineer would insist on knowing how the business is supposed to work; then on identifying which of its moving parts aren’t moving as they should; and then on fixing the parts that are broken.

So if the problem is actually revenue, an engineer would determine whether the root cause is uncompetitive products, customer disservice, unappealing marketing and advertising, or a sales force that isn’t very good at selling. And fix it.

If the problem really is excessive cost, an engineer would figure out whether the root cause is cumbersome and inefficient processes, obsolete tools and technology that force employees into cumbersome and inefficient processes, poorly trained and unmotivated employees, or something else. And then the engineer would fix the actual problem.

Understand, this might sound simple. Conceptually, it is simple.

But it’s nothing like simple, because underneath it is the need for a clear understanding of how the business works … of the buttons and levers company management can push and pull that lead customers to buy products and services in acceptable volumes and margins.

This isn’t always complicated, but it can be complicated enough to tempt decision-makers to cut out a step or two. For example, one day in the distant past, the executives leading a not-entirely mythical automobile manufacturer discovered they could bump up the company’s profits by financing the purchase of their cars instead of leaving that business to the local banks.

Then they discovered they could sell more cars by discounting them, making up the slack by making more loans. And then they “discovered” the company was really in the financing business, and cars became just a means to an end.

Which led to its executives no longer caring whether their cars were desirable products. Instead it designed and built cars some people were willing to buy if they were cheap enough.

Which led to round after round of pointless cost-cutting, because cost wasn’t the company’s problem.

What was? It had forgotten how its business worked: With no cars to sell that people wanted to buy it ground to a halt, even though its profits no longer came from car sales.

The company’s execs outsmarted themselves.

It’s why we need engineers.

So maybe you should add an interview question for managerial candidates: “If you open the refrigerator door, how much will it cool off your kitchen?”

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