How do you get large groups of people to perform and achieve results? This is one of the most prevalent and persistent challenge that leaders face in virtually all disciplines of a business enterprise.

The classic essentials of leading teams requires setting clear goals, ensuring they have the training and the tools to perform, providing periodic guidance and feedback, and establishing an effective reward system. Business leaders and management experts will probably add the need for strong leadership and a talented team to get great results. Despite this time tested knowledge of what works, there is a continual dissatisfaction with our ability to get any team to perform to achieve desired results.

As a consequence of the unpredictability of teams to deliver results consistently and repeatedly, there is wide range of proposed solutions offered by experts, and thinkers. Over the last few years, the trend has been to attempt to rethink ‘performance management’. Most of the initiatives by companies have focused on how to evaluate and incentivize performance. Like an oscillating pendulum between alternative solutions, the debate centers on how to assess, rate, or rank the performance of employees. Regardless of the merits of these alternative solutions, the missing focus is: what does it take for individuals in teams to give their best performance, and deliver sustainable results consistently? Can digital technology provide a solution?

In my experience, the challenge is to ensure individuals choose to engage and contribute their best performance to deliver specific goal. All the traditional methods to motivate performance can only create optimal conditions for performance – but then leave it entirely up to the individual to figure out how to make it work. This approach works – sometimes. More often, it doesn't work as expected.

In today’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world, we know that digital technologies are disrupting the way work gets done. More recently, I have seen that digital technology, powered by insights from the behavioral sciences; provide a method to shape the behavior of individuals so that they take the actions to deliver superior performance. I’ve been fortunate to advise a start up called worxogo, and they have experienced remarkable success with their methodology. Until recently, I had not seen any methodology as effective in getting things done. Here is what I have learned:

There is a clear pattern of what works in applying digital technology to change behavior for better performance.

In my experience, the challenge is to ensure individuals choose to engage and contribute their best performance to deliver specific goal

To be clear, this approach works best when it complements the team leader’s efforts to manage the team. There is real evidence from several cases, of tangible and specific improvements in business results when key principles are applied.

1. The absolutely essential requirement is the establishment of a clear and specific business goal that must be achieved within a certain period. This can range from increasing sales revenue, reducing costs, to adding value through creative ideas. Communicating the team goal, and individual goals, clearly to the team members, both in person and through the digital technology platform is an essential step.

2. The next action is to understand the work preferences for individuals in the team. Some prefer to compete, others collaborate, and a few focus on the rewards while others on the results. Each of us have a dominant style of approaching work. Understanding the work preferences of team members creates the opportunity to engage with each person in a different way. This is is hardest to replicate without the ease of use of a technology application.

3. The essence of this technology powered behavior change is a well-timed and continual stream of attention and personalized engagement to each team member. Through their mobile application, each team members gets a customized flow of nudges, reminders, guidance, feedback, progress information, and motivating messages. All of these nudges are based on real time data of progress, and all are directed at improving their performance. It’s like having a real time, non-threatening coach who’s continually paying attention to how you are doing, and advising you on what to do to perform better, and do this consistent with how you prefer to work. In addition, this ‘virtual coach’ is guiding you based on well-established principles and insights of behavioral economics, psychology and game theory. This extent of reach and intensity of data-based engagement with all team members becomes practical and possible only with the use of digital technology.

4. Making it social adds greater amplification to this method. We know that all of us are influenced by our peer group. Depending on the individual’s work preferences, they get access to how the rest of their team is performing. Guidance flows on how to collaborate or compete to achieve their goals, and also help their team. This is a unique aspect of many technology applications that can be used for maximum impact.

5. Another key element of this approach is the ability to inform and remind the team manager to engage with a specific individual – either to recognize, reward, guide, or intervene – depending on how they are performing. The net result is a very well informed team manager who is equipped in a timely manner to communicate directly with team members and reinforce or correct their actions. The other advantage of a digital application is that it keeps the manager in the loop.

6. The engine of this application learns which approach works best for each team player. It continually adjusts the stream of engagement with each individual based on performance data. The net result is a customized and continually renewed engagement with each individual.

In the final analysis, most of these elements may not be unique in isolation. However, it is their effective combination, their seamless integration, and their timing that makes the difference. Real time business data, guided by proven insights from behavioral sciences makes this methodology a powerful way to change behavior. This approach has worked successfully with 15,000 individual us-ers, in 20 companies, and across 7 industries.