Keeping your staff at peak performance

One of the toughest challenges IT leaders face today is sustaining a high-level of performance over the long term. As the number of projects hitting the table continues to increase, resource constrained IT organizations need more than just a burst of extra effort over a few weeks to keep up. They need to be able to ratchet up to a higher level of sustainable performance over the long-term.

Unfortunately, many of the management techniques employed today were inherited from the industrial age and are not effective in maintaining peak performance among teams of today s knowledge workers. As a result, according to experts such as Gallup, on average only 20% of the people in your team are fully engaged and passionate about their work. That represents a huge opportunity in potential productive power waiting to be harnessed. So, how can you tap into this 80% of potential? What can you do to ratchet up performance in the short-term and, more importantly, sustain it over the long-term? Here are five areas you can immediately focus on in order to create an environment that supports high performance: As the leader, make sure you provide clear goals that link to your team. Having alignment is undisputedly a good thing. It keeps your most scarce resource, your team, focused on the things that will make the most impact for the business and your IT. Pick people to manage others that are singularly good at identifying the talents and passions of others and leveraging them to the maximum. In IT, as in many other specialized professions, it is often the best individual contributors that get tapped for management roles. Hire individual contributors that are naturally gifted at doing what you need done. As in promoting managers, whenever you hire someone look for an innate talent and passion for the work at hand. Don t de-motivate your people. According to studies, managers can stop worrying about motivating people since 95% of the people you hire already come with built-in motivation. Promote work/life balance. This may seem advice that is out of place on a piece about sustaining peak performance, but that is far from the truth. Source and full article: www.cioupdate.coma>