Leadership Team Researches Reveals Surprises
How do technology leadership teams define and achieve success? What are their main challenges, and how they think about their work? What I found surprised me – in order to operate with the agility needed in their complex environments, the 17 team leaders I interviewed were as focused on organizational culture and empowering others as they were on solutions, process and metrics.
Operational KPIs and business alignment remain critical, in fact many technology leaders align their goals to customers (responsiveness and customer satisfaction) and internal stakeholders (contribution to strategy, cross-functional collaboration, and broader business metrics). And they put significant effort into aligning their leadership teams around a common purpose.
But the success of these teams also hinged on fostering trust, psychological safety and empowerment through distributed decision-making. Leaders described how they think about success across four dimensions: achieving operational excellence through metrics like deployment speed and system reliability; aligning with organizational strategy; responding to customer needs; and building a positive team culture that emphasizes collaboration and growth.
One common strategy for maintaining agility was team composition – leaders addressed the complexity of their environment by balancing business domain and technical expertise with cultural fit and strategic alignment. They empowered their teams through distributed authority, insisting decisions be made close to the point of impact while ensuring clear accountability. Culture played an important role, with leaders cultivating psychological safety by framing conflicts around shared goals, fostering open dialogue, learning from failure, and celebrating contributions.
Ultimately, these leaders believe that leadership style and team dynamics are as critical to success as tools or processes. By fostering alignment, trust, and adaptability, these technology leadership teams become more agile and are better equipped to navigate today’s complexity.