There is no room for failure when supporting national defense missions. Every system must perform flawlessly to ensure the field’s warfighter has what they need to achieve mission outcomes. However, while technology provides powerful tools, the human operator ultimately determines mission success or failure. In mission-critical IT operations, human performance is the lynchpin. In our experience, building high-performing teams is not just a competitive advantage – it is a national imperative.

The Cost of Excellence

Fielding a top-tier team supporting enterprise IT infrastructure requires significant investment in human capital. Research from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) shows that the actual costs of replacing highly skilled personnel can range from 90% to 200% of their annual salary. For senior technicians and leaders, this could equate to half a million dollars or more in recruiting, onboarding, and training costs – not to mention lost productivity. Developing internal talent is more than just the most effective solution; it is also the most cost-efficient.

Six Pillars of High-Performance Teams

At ICS, we build teams around six key pillars:

1. Vision: Ensure every team member is aligned around a compelling vision of operational excellence. This shared vision provides meaning and motivation. We train our contract leadership teams to align the team’s vision with the customer’s and continuously reinforce that vision.

2. People: Rigorous screening is essential to identify candidates with the right combination of technical aptitude, emotional intelligence, and mission orientation. Get the right people in the right seats.

3. Data: Establish clear metrics and dashboards to monitor team performance against key priorities. Use data to drive continuous improvement.

4. Process: Document and ruthlessly enforce core processes, from how to execute world class meetings, to performance reviews, to accountability and more. Build a culture of discipline.

5. Issues: We maintain an issues list throughout contract performance. The issues list contains not just problems or potential problems identified by the team but also great ideas, opportunities, or future goals we always want to keep track of. We have a robust issues-solving process that ensures we get to the root cause of the issues and develop solutions that ensure the issues don’t arise in the future.

6. Traction: Maintain focus and alignment with regular team meetings to review data, identify issues, and coordinate action. Adapt in real-time.

Upon these six pillars, we work with our contract leadership team to collaboratively build our Vision/Action Tracker (VAT) . We don’t dictate the VAT; rather, we facilitate building the VAT through planning sessions with our leadership teams. This is a single piece of paper that succinctly captures how the team will manage the contract for exceptional performance. The VAT catalogs:

• Who we are (Core Values). Our core values ensure we have the right people in the right seats on the bus”, a concept popularized by Jim Collins in his best-selling 2001 business book, “Good to Great”.

• What we do (Core Focus). We clearly articulate our purpose (for instance, “Sustaining the Warfighter so they can Sustain the Mission!”) and our niche – what we do better than anyone else (e.g. “Delivering reliable C3 services with predictable results.”).

• Goals: We set 3-year, 2-year, and 1-year goals for the program, with clear metrics and goals that show what “success” looks like. Again, this is the concept of the BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), another concept popularized by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in their 1994 book, “Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies.”

• Engagement Strategy: Who our customers are, what they value, how they communicate. We capture their needs, wants, and desires. We also clearly identify what makes our team unique, codifying our guarantee to our customers, and documenting our proven processes for contract execution.

• Quarterly objectives: The 3-10 most important objectives that the team needs to achieve this quarter to stay on track to achieve the 1, 2 and 3-year goals.

Every member of the leadership team reviews the VAT daily to ensure everyone is fresh on what we’re trying to achieve, how we’re going to achieve it, and what success looks like.

Now that we have team alignment to the mission, shared values, a common vocabulary, tools for execution, and standard processes, we are ready to build mission-ready teams down to the lowest level of contract execution.

Building Mission-Ready Teams

We emphasize three core components for building teams that consistently perform at the highest level:

1. Technical Proficiency: Ensure every team member has deep expertise in their operational domain and stays current with emerging tools and threats. Cross-train to build resiliency.

2. Shared Mental Models: Align the team around a common understanding of mission objectives, operational context, and individual roles. Conduct regular exercises to refine team cognition. The VAT is at the core of implementing these shared mental models.

3. Implicit Coordination: Foster the ability to anticipate needs and adapt in real-time without extensive communication. This is built through experience operating under stress. We continuously upskill every team member’s ability to predict and execute. When we come up short, we collectively perform root cause analysis (RCA) to determine why we failed, and implement improvements to prevent those failures from happening again.

At ICS, we’ve operationalized these principles through our ICS University program. This comprehensive training framework aligns our workforce with the specific demands of our government contracts, from technical skills to compliance standards like ISO 9001, CMMI-SVC Maturity Level 3, NIST 800-53, and Risk Management Framework (RMF). Customized learning paths ensure each employee is prepared for the unique challenges of their role, or future roles our people want to move into.

But ICS University goes beyond technical training. We also focus on developing the leadership and management skills necessary to build high-performing teams. Through mentorship, hands-on learning, and targeted development programs, we prepare our people to take on increasing levels of responsibility. The results speak for themselves – ICS maintains a 95% employee retention rate, providing exceptional workforce stability and contract performance for our government customers.

Common Challenges and Solutions

Even the most skilled teams face obstacles. We’ve learned over the past nearly three decades that there is a recurring pattern of challenges, and we have implemented proven solutions to them:

• Burnout: Intense operational tempos can lead to mental and physical fatigue. We mitigate with mandatory downtime, cross-training, and surge staffing.

• Skill Gaps: Rapidly evolving tools and threats create a constant need for new skills. ICS University and a robust recruiting capability is our solution to this challenge.

• Silos: Lack of cross-functional coordination creates vulnerabilities. We overcome this challenge by building strong relationships across all contract teams and working problems jointly. We believe we are smarter together than we are individually.

• Creating a Culture of Excellence: We encourage our people to be so unusually great that they stand out. We under promise, over deliver, on time, and under budget. We empower our people to be a leader – others will follow because they want to, not because they have to. We challenge everyone to be a continuous learner – 40 hours a year.

Technical skills alone are not enough. The human element is the most important factor in providing robust and resilient IT operations. We believe that leaders must foster a culture founded upon:

• Mission Orientation: Align every team member to the “Commander’s Intent.” Consistently reinforce the critical nature of the mission.

• Continuous Learning: Build time and incentives for skills development into operational rhythms. Embrace lessons learned.

• Empowerment: Create an environment where personnel feel empowered to voice concerns and ideas. Encourage risk-taking and tolerate failure in training. Train everyone in open and honest communication skills.

• Accountability: Establish clear roles and responsibilities. Hold personnel accountable for results, not just activity.

People First, Technology Second

Military missions are critically dependent upon the quality and health of their government and contractor support personnel. By making our people a priority, we can solve any technical challenges that we may face now or in the future. The growing complexity of our enterprise IT environments demands operations teams that can adapt and overcome any challenge. By prioritizing the human factor – aligning around a shared vision, selecting the right people, training them to excel, and building a culture of discipline – leaders can forge teams that don’t fail.

The mission depends on it.