An IT Director said something to me recently that I have not been able to shake.
"We talk about technology products and new technology. But it is our people that make the most difference."
He was not being sentimental. He was being accurate. And I think most IT leaders know it is true even when their budgets and their attention do not reflect it.
I have been thinking about a project from my own career that keeps coming back to me when this topic comes up.
We were planning for a significant acquisition integration. Over 45 days my team led the planning, asked the hard questions, communicated across every stakeholder, and adjusted as new information came in. When cutover week arrived we were bringing 350 new team members across six locations onto our systems. The kind of project where everything that could go wrong is somewhere on a list and some things that are not on the list go wrong anyway.
The cutover was a success. Not because the technology was perfect. Because the people were ready.
When issues came up during the live cutover, and they always do, my team adjusted. They made decisions in real time without waiting to be told what to do. They communicated clearly under pressure. They celebrated together when it was done.
That did not happen because of the platform we were implementing. It happened because of 45 days of preparation by people who had been built to perform in exactly that moment.
Here is what I want to sit with for a minute. The investment that made that cutover successful was not made in the week before go-live. It was made long before the project started. It was made in every conversation where I let a team member make a decision and live with the outcome. In every mistake I did not fix for them but helped them understand. In every planning session where I asked for their thinking instead of giving them mine.
I developed my teams to be comfortable making decisions and to know when to bring me in. They were active participants in the planning, not recipients of it. The environment we built together meant that when the pressure was highest, their instincts were sound and their confidence was real.
Something I believed then and still believe now is that the time to make mistakes is before the critical moment, not during it. A team that has never been allowed to fail in a low stakes situation will not know how to recover in a high stakes one. Confidence under pressure is not a personality trait. It is something that gets built through experience, and it only gets built if the leader creates the conditions for it.
One decision I made on that acquisition project was to include newer team members alongside the more experienced ones. It would have been easier and lower risk to keep the critical work with the veterans. But easier is not always better.
Those newer team members had specific skills that were still developing. Pairing them with experienced colleagues meant they contributed real work to a significant effort. They were not observers. They were participants. And what they walked away with was something no training program can fully replicate. They saw what it looks like to be confident in a stressful situation. They saw experienced people be themselves under pressure, make decisions, and keep moving. They built a model for how to show up that will serve them for the rest of their careers.
The team gets the credit for that success. Not me. They did the hard work with specialized skills and abilities that I could coordinate and support but not replace. My job was to put people in positions where they could succeed and then get out of their way.
That is the investment most technology budgets do not account for.
Organizations will spend significant money on a new platform, a new security tool, or a new infrastructure upgrade without much debate. Those are visible line items with vendor proposals and ROI calculations attached. But ask for budget to develop the people who will implement, manage, and maximize that technology and the conversation gets harder. Ask to hire the additional staff needed to drive growth and the hesitation is immediate.
The technology does not implement itself. It does not adjust when something goes wrong at 2am during a cutover. It does not make the judgment call that keeps 350 people working on a Monday morning. The people do.
Investing in your team is not a soft initiative. It is the highest return investment an IT leader can make. The team member you develop today is the one who leads the next acquisition. The newer hire you include in a stretch project becomes the experienced voice in the room three years from now. That compounds in ways that a software license never will.
The IT Director who made that comment to me was not saying technology does not matter. He was saying that technology without the right people behind it is just expensive infrastructure. The people are the difference.
He is right. And most of our budgets have not caught up to that truth yet.
Reflection for this issue:
Think about the last significant technology investment your organization made. What was the corresponding investment in the people who would implement and sustain it? If the answer is not much, what would it look like to change that ratio?
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