The Secret to Turning a Good Team Into a Great One

Let’s cut to the chase: a good team gets the job done. A great team changes the trajectory of your business. The difference? It’s not free cold brew in the office kitchen or another leadership offsite in a Tuscan villa (though, who’s saying no?). It’s alignment, between vision, tools, and execution.

And here’s the kicker: IT is often the make-or-break factor.

Why "Good" Isn’t Enough Anymore

A good team can muddle through clunky workflows, outdated tech, and the occasional VPN tantrum. But when you’re scaling, especially in high-stakes industries like healthcare, “good enough” becomes dangerous.

• A 2024 study by the Ponemon Institute found that the average healthcare organization loses $9,000 per minute during an IT outage. Suddenly, “good enough” feels like a liability.
• In a Deloitte survey, 72% of executives said digital infrastructure is the biggest barrier to scaling teams effectively.

Translation: you can’t grow a great team on the back of mediocre systems.

The Cleveland Clinic Playbook

Take Cleveland Clinic, a healthcare giant with more than 70,000 employees. They weren’t content with “good”, so they invested in creating a culture of IT-enabled excellence.

They streamlined workflows with cloud-based records, embedded real-time data dashboards into clinical decisions, and built IT partnerships that treated doctors and nurses as collaborators, not “end users.”

The result? Patient satisfaction scores that consistently rank among the highest in the nation and operational efficiency that lets them scale globally.

Notice: it wasn’t just “better doctors” or “smarter leaders.” It was IT making a good team great.

Three Traits of Great Teams (That Your IT Directly Shapes)

1. Clarity That Doesn’t Make You Reach for Aspirin

Great teams know exactly what’s expected of them, and IT is the compass. Clear dashboards, seamless project tracking, zero guesswork.

• Without this? Meetings that should’ve been an email. Emails that should’ve been deleted. Chaos.

2. Collaboration That Doesn’t Feel Like Herding Cats

Your “good” team uses Slack and Teams. Your great team actually integrates them with your EHR, CRM, or ticketing system so workflows don’t die in silos.

• At one regional healthcare provider, IT enabled cross-department collaboration that cut patient intake times by 35%. Translation: fewer angry waiting rooms.

3. Resilience That Laughs in the Face of Chaos

Good teams panic when systems go down. Great teams have disaster recovery baked in, with IT ensuring zero data loss and continuity plans that work.

• Case in point: when Hurricane Ian hit Florida, some practices went dark for weeks. Others—those with IT continuity plans—were back online within hours. Guess which ones patients will remember?

The Leadership Factor

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: leaders often stand in the way. Micromanaging IT, underfunding infrastructure, or assuming “IT is just help desk stuff.” Spoiler: it’s not.

Executives who treat IT as a strategic partner see their good teams evolve into game-changing ones. Those who don’t? Well, they keep Googling “why is my VPN so slow” at 11 PM.

Final Word (and a Gentle Nudge)

The secret to turning a good team into a great one isn’t a secret at all. It’s alignment—driven by leadership, powered by IT, proven in the data.

Your people are already capable. The question is whether your systems, strategy, and leadership are helping them break past “good” and hit “great.”

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