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Managing Tech Teams: New Study Identifies Four Culture Challenges Unique to Tech that Strongly Affect PerformancePROVO, Utah, June 14, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- A new study released today identifies four culture challenges in tech companies that substantially affect a tech organization's ability to execute and innovate. And yet, tech leaders receive little-to-no training or coaching on how to successfully manage these challenges. According to the study conducted by Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield and Chase McMillan, cofounders and researchers at VitalSmarts, a TwentyEighty Inc. company, these unique cultural traits can act as either accelerants or drags on performance depending on the competence of leaders. Tech managers who master these four culture challenges can significantly boost the performance of their organization. The four include:
While the workplace culture of tech companies like Amazon, Google and Apple has been heavily scrutinized anecdotally in the past few years, Grenny, Maxfield and McMillan wondered two things: 1) are these cultural idiosyncrasies real and 2) do they matter? The researchers conducted in-depth interviews with senior and mid-level managers in large to medium-sized tech companies—companies that create technology as a product or service. Leaders discussed challenges they felt were most important and unique to tech. Seven challenges emerged as trends and Grenny, Maxfield and McMillan surveyed 827 tech employees and 2,800 non-tech employees to measure the frequency, severity and solvability of these challenges. By creating a performance scale and then using a regression analysis, they found four of the seven challenges (listed above) did an extraordinary job of predicting performance (R=.51, p < .0001). "These inherent aspects of tech life can be either assets or pathologies—depending on the competence of leaders," Grenny says. "For example, the fact that star players in tech tend to recycle through different companies can cause them to avoid confronting mission-critical problems. Building your network trumps getting things done." "What we found is that these challenges are elephants in the room that everyone sees, but no one directly confronts," Maxfield says. "Our interviews suggest they go unaddressed for two reasons: first, leaders don't have the skill to address them; and second, there is a heroic cultural norm in tech that suggests real players are too smart or too motivated to be daunted by these realities. Ultimately, they grow from manageable concerns to harmful undiscussables." And yet, the data confirms managers who successfully lead through these challenges see significant improvement in performance across their team. "Far too many tech leaders think product is all that matters—get to market and all the cultural issues disappear. Our research shows those who thrive in the long-term give equal attention to building product today and a culture that can sustain results tomorrow," Grenny says. Grenny, Maxfield and McMillan combined the results of their interviews with their thirty years of experience leading culture change initiatives in Fortune 500 companies to uncover management strategies tech leaders can use to address the four culture challenges and improve performance.
Grenny and Maxfield, authors of the business bestsellers Crucial Conversations and Influencer, will share the results of this study in a live webinar on June 15. To register for the complimentary webinar visit: http://www.telenect.com/u/9bqrho1mui/. The full research report is available at vitalsmarts.com/managingtech. About VitalSmarts: Named one of the Top 20 Leadership Training Companies, VitalSmarts, a TwentyEighty, Inc. company, is home to the award-winning Crucial Conversations®, Crucial Accountability®, Change Anything®, and Influencer Training® and New York Times bestselling books of the same titles. VitalSmarts has consulted with more than 300 of the Fortune 500 companies and trained more than 1.5 million people worldwide. vitalsmarts.com About TwentyEighty: TwentyEighty is one of the largest workforce development companies in the world and is powered by some of the premier brands in the industry, such as Miller Heiman, MHI Global, VitalSmarts, AchieveForum, TwentyEighty Strategy Execution and Omega Performance. Our solutions are designed to help companies improve business results through the areas of Leadership Performance, Sales Performance, Credit Performance and Strategic Execution. twentyeighty.com Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160307/341354LOGO
To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/managing-tech-teams-new-study-identifies-four-culture-challenges-unique-to-tech-that-strongly-affect-performance-300284024.html SOURCE VitalSmarts |