"Leadership training is a must for new managers, and refreshing the outlook and skills of more experienced professionals is one important way to maintain organizational effectiveness."

Opening Statement

The roller coaster of business cycles appears to be headed up and accelerating. The economy is recovering, companies are beginning to hire, the real estate market is improving, and even new housing starts are up. In the past, the economic undulations of business have been shadowed by a boom-and-bust pattern of corporate investment in training, leadership coaching, and team development programs. In my 30-plus years in IT, there have been numerous cycles of intense investment in training and employee development. During these cycles, corporate-speak riffed on variations of the adage, "People are our most important asset." These people-asset times are characterized by competition for good employees and corporate objectives that focus on growth, new product development, new marketing channels, and innovation. The corporate focus shifts to effectiveness. Usually these boom times are spearheaded by marketing, engineering, or sales -- in other words, the corporate entities that actually create business, business relationships, and new opportunities.

Inevitably, expansive business cycles are overtaken by cycles of retraction. Retraction cycles are characterized by corporate-speak that says, "Every employee is a liability." During the employee-as-a-liability phase, hiring stops, layoffs start, and any investment in training is focused on continuous improvement, Six Sigma, and the like. The corporate focus is on efficiency. The finance department, at the direction of the CFO, usually leads these retraction cycles. In other words, retraction cycles are usually led by the entities that report what the corporate business creators did.

In my experience, the expanding investments in people and the retracting investments in people precede the economic business cycle of boom or bust. In other words, when companies begin to reinvest in people, productivity increases, creativity soars, new products appear, and new customers are engaged. When companies pull back on people investments, sales start to sag, productivity declines, product introductions slow to a trickle, and soon the business falters. The faltering of business is usually obfuscated initially by the drive for efficiency and financial engineering of the books, but the employees reflect the dropping corporate barometric pressure. Rumors fly, and people begin to hang out at the water cooler to commiserate and speculate about what is going on. High-value employees flee to other companies or industries, and employee morale and corporate profits tumble.

People in IT are clearly motivated by access to training and skill development programs. Recently, I was talking to a CEO of a small VC-funded software startup. He was seeking additional funding to keep the company moving forward and finishing the product development for an exciting new software product. A top priority for this veteran of several successful startups was getting adequate funding that would allow him to increase spending for training and staff development. His observation from his deep experience in successful product and business creation was that software developers would give it their all tirelessly for months or years if they felt that they were learning, growing, and developing on the job. Training dollars and employee development were sacred ingredients in successful product development. This point of view is strongly backed up by neuroscience research, which reveals that learning is extremely rewarding to the brain. Learning provides a dopamine buzz -- a neurochemical reward that is deeply motivating. The highly respected Gallup Employee Engagement survey dedicates two of its 12 questions to this issue of learning and growth. They are:

• Q6 -- Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

• Q12 -- This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

The Gallup survey is only 12 questions long, but it is highly correlated with employee engagement and corporate performance. I find it to be significant that Gallup devotes one-sixth of its questions to the issue of learning and personal growth. Presumably, we are all seeking the expanding business cycle -- we seek the energy, the thrill, and the profitability that comes with expanding business cycles. So if employee learning, training, and development are so critical to expansion, why would anyone cut these programs?

IT leadership is often faced with extremely tight budgets, very aggressive delivery targets, and projects that are organized as "death marches." Oftentimes, the stressed IT leader believes that people cannot spare the time for training. In other cases, the training budget is cut when the organization faces corporate budget cuts. The net effect on employees is to feel increased stress and a sense of being devalued by the corporation. Cutting training for IT is a strange and curious action. Everyone knows that information technology is constantly changing. Users of technology have ever-rising expectations for what technology can and should do for them. Technical complexity is growing. Cyber security threats are increasing in numbers and sophistication. Given all of this, how can an IT department forgo training and ever think of being successful? To be truly effective as the leader in IT, the IT department must have training as a top priority.

Given that training must be a priority, the savvy IT leader is thoughtful and deliberate in providing training that is effective and improves the performance of the IT department. Leadership training is a must for new managers, and refreshing the outlook and skills of more experienced professionals is one important way to maintain organizational effectiveness.

In this issue of Cutter IT Journal, our contributors provide insight into effective programs for developing leaders and training for the IT department. The first article takes on one of the most difficult challenges faced in IT today -- how to create a high-performance team when team members are distributed across the country or the globe and may not even have the opportunity to meet. Most leaders will simply try to muddle along with a virtual team by hyper-specifying the requirements. In this well-reasoned article, Richard Brenner gives us a rich set of recommendations for creating high-performance virtual teams that are durable and can be leveraged by a corporation. I was truly impressed with the recommendations Brenner gives and have little doubt that implementing the training and methods outlined in his article would produce a sustainable productivity advantage in building software on a global basis. My only concern is the probable investment and the need for a durable advantage in software development. Certainly, large software organizations like IBM, Google, SAP, or Microsoft could utilize these training and organizational development approaches and reap the benefits. In small organizations or for single project situations, the investment to create high-performing virtual teams would seem excessive. Certainly, I never worked for a company that would have allowed such a rich investment in training for a single project. Setting aside my concern that the investment required would be too much for most companies, I applaud the thoroughness and insight Brenner provides for creating high-performance virtual teams. Anyone managing virtual teams would be well advised to incorporate his recommendations.

Whether a team is colocated or globally distributed, creating high-performance teams is a competitive advantage and a necessity for success. In our second article, Jason Stradley tells us that high-performance teams do not happen by chance. He provides excellent advice on eliminating chance and ensuring the performance of IT with a well-thought-out training and development approach.

Numerous studies on job satisfaction and stress have named IT as one of the most stressful career choices. Ronald Woerner and Timothy Sweeney discuss the many constraints and paradoxes that make IT such a challenging job. They show us how leadership can be the answer to overcoming the difficulties faced in IT. Many IT leaders rise from the technical ranks and lack the people skills necessary for effective leadership. In their article, Woerner and Sweeney offer "definitive steps anyone in IT (or any other position for that matter) can take to dramatically improve their effectiveness."

In our next article, by Cutter Senior Consultant Hillel Glazer, we learn that there is an unexpected source of knowledge and structure that can be applied to create high-performance teams and effective leadership. The source of this model is our much-hated -- and much-loved -- CMM®. In this case, Glazer is talking about the lesser-known People Capability Maturity Model®, or People CMM. Certainly it would be hard to argue with the view of a mature people organization. The People CMM model should be thought-provoking for all IT leaders and organizations, but Glazer's philosophy may be a bigger gem of wisdom. The Be-Do-Have model he proposes is a Zen-like approach to leadership and life -- almost a tao of leadership. Glazer's article is worth both a read and serious contemplation.

After you've digested the leadership Zen offered in the previous article, you might wish for a more practical and colorful approach to determining the training needs of the organization. The Prism View model offered by our next author, Debabrata Pruseth, is a color-coded analysis that "will help CIOs create a clear picture of the current IT training landscape, define the target desired state, analyze the gaps, and build effective training programs for the organization." This is just the sort of easy-to-understand-and-communicate model that can be made into posters for the conference room. Every organization has staff members that live for PowerPoints and wall art. Here we have a model and a method that will keep the graphic art group busy and provide a structure that will make training requirements clear and actionable.

Our last article brings a perspective of how leadership training is being done in challenging environments in the Middle East. Developing countries face unique difficulties, and the environment in Egypt is particularly unstable. Sherif Kamel of the American University in Cairo (AUC) offers an encouraging look at how AUC is focusing on leadership education to broaden the entrepreneurial capabilities of students attending its business school. Kamel's focus on education as an investment in human capital is applicable to any area of business, but is particularly pertinent to IT.

As the economy continues to recover globally, IT leadership will certainly turn its attention to staff development, leadership development, and training. The articles in this issue provide perspective for leaders trying to be effective with distributed or colocated teams. Our contributors have provided a comprehensive view that includes all aspects of the challenge, from philosophies underlining leadership to practical frameworks that can facilitate common understanding of all team training objectives. There's no time like now to upgrade your leadership development and staff training programs.

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