Four Surprising Lessons I’ve Learned Leading Tech Teams

Techies. Geeks. Boffins. Whatever your organisation calls its IT department, there’s a well-
worn trope that they’re a different breed – so focused on their core tasks and interests that
they don’t always pull in the same direction as the rest of the workforce or even listen to
what their taskmasters tell them.

As someone who has led and formed part of tech teams my entire career, I agree we can be headstrong and sometimes anti-authority. But in my experience, this also often makes us game-changers – the ones who transform commercial performance and disrupt outdated
business processes.

As GenAI and Large Language Models (LLMs) usher in a new era of AI-enabled working,
businesses can’t afford to underestimate our importance.

Research shows that companies are feeling the pressure to use these new, ever-evolving
technologies but are panicking about how. A recent survey of 200 technology leaders we
carried out with CTO Craft, revealed that 47% felt negative about GenAI, and over half (55%) ranked their company’s current level of AI expertise as 1-5 out of 10. Another survey shows the impact of AI on employees, with 77% of those surveyed saying AI tools had added to their workload.

So, who do you turn to when you need to understand this emerging tech you’re spending
money on? It’s your tech squad – and knowing how to collaborate with and manage them is vital. Businesses across all sectors are increasingly expected to be technology companies. What this means is that data analytics, GenAI, blockchain, the cloud, digital user experience and platformisation are now critical to boardroom decision-making.

Having started as a technologist before moving into management, I’ve always been
passionate about cultivating a culture where tech teams are empowered to do their best
work and achieve collaborative outcomes. Companies need to adopt a different playbook if
they are to empower tech teams to help drive a technology-first approach to business.
With that in mind, here are four lessons I’ve learned from leading tech teams:

AI is really quite stupid.

Despite the show-stopping announcements around multimodal AI models which can see,
hear and interact with people, GenAI and LLMs in particular, are still no match for general-
purpose human intelligence. Recent research tested seven well-known foundational models,
including GPT-4, Claude, Mistral and Llama with 30 questions designed to test their capabilities across areas such as linguistic understanding, relational thinking, spatial and mathematical reasoning and knowledge of basic scientific concepts. The highest score a foundational model achieved was 38%, and the lowest score was 16%, suggesting a considerable gap between foundational models’ current capabilities and human cognitive abilities.

The researchers who conducted the study warned that businesses embracing LLMs should be wary of trusting them with tasks involving high-stakes decision-making, nuanced reasoning, or subtle linguistic tools without a human in the loop.

Even when AI becomes increasingly sophisticated and widespread, human skills – aka your tech team – will become more critical, not less, in order to oversee, train, and augment machine intelligence.

Translating tech is a core skill.

With executive teams struggling to keep up with the pace of technological change, people
who really understand the tech, the job it needs to do, who can translate its benefits and
limitations and manage expectations internally, will play a key role in organisations going
forward. These could be technologists with excellent communications skills or
communications people who deeply understand tech. Either way, they must be objective,
tech-savvy translators who can quantify the benefits and limitations, manage expectations
in both camps and provide a blueprint for the entire organisation. Tech teams are already
adept at this translating tech role: it’s one that will only become more business-critical with
the rise of AI-native business models.

Tech teams don’t follow orders – and that’s good!

One of the frustrations non-tech leaders have with IT teams is that they seem to have their
own agenda and don’t always follow orders. In my experience, this is a good thing. Tech
teams work on detailed and complicated jobs, and because of this, they assess innovations
against their own criteria of what will or won’t work. This independent analysis is borne
from years of immersion in complex technology and is crucial for tech projects to be
successful. Think of them as canaries in the coal mine – the first to spot potential disasters.
With the Horizon Post Office scandal, for example, an empowered tech team could
potentially have identified much more quickly than senior executives that the technology –
not the sub-postmasters – was at fault.

More generally, there needs to be a willingness to listen to tech teams in the first instance
rather than consultants and vendors selling solutions, which are then handed to IT teams to implement. (This sometimes results in us having to graft the solutions onto legacy systems or replace them wholesale).

Tech teams excel at human centred systems thinking.

Tech teams are great at looking at complex problems holistically and mapping out processes and approaches that work well for humans as well as for computers and tech. With technology accelerating at breakneck speed, we know how to continuously adapt these processes to fit the emerging tech landscape.

Tech ways of working such as agile, sprints, and retrospectives aim to blend people,
technology, connectivity, time and places, to deliver fast learning and decision-making in a
way that positively impacts performance and outcomes. The emphasis we place on ensuring systems and processes are people-centred, such as creating a safe psychological space for feedback, are migrating out of the tech department and into wider organisational ways of doing things.

Take the US where the role of agile administrators is becoming increasingly important.
Organisations such as the American Society of Administrative Professionals now offer
courses on how to train administrators to embrace agile ways of working including scrums
and daily stand-ups.

This human centred continuous learning culture is essential for businesses as they seek to
enhance operational efficiency, foster innovation, and improve employee and customer
satisfaction within a context of ever increasing tech developments.

A collaborative, valued tech team is the solution.

Good tech teams are often the guardians of a company’s critical faculties when it comes to
new and emerging technologies. It’s no longer excusable to sideline tech teams because we
don’t respect the rule book or you don’t understand what we’re saying. Instead, reframe our impulse to question anything and understand everything as an essential skill in today’s
complex, ever-changing tech environment. Be grateful for your geeks – you’re going to need them.