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Team-Building and Teamwork

April 30, 2006 — CIO —

By N. Dean Meyer

When Randy was hired as CIO, he inherited a leadership team populated with seasoned executives who were technically qualified, generally liked by their staff, and pleasant people.

One little detail: They didn’t team.

Sure, they talked with one another and cooperated on organizational decisions like policies and plans. But each ran his/her own shop as an independent department—a “stovepipe”—with minimal collaboration on projects and services.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this was costing the company money. Many skills were replicated across departments and people were spread thin, which hurt their productivity.

Another consequence was that people managed functions outside their primary expertise. For example, applications developers ran their own development server (without much in the way of security, continuity planning or even backups). Meanwhile, the infrastructure group (adept at running servers) had its own applications development team for its billing system.

Each department had its own support functions, like procurement, budgeting and administration. There were two infrastructure control centers: one for the computers, and another for the network. There were even three different help desks: one for desktop computers and infrastructure, another for applications and still another for telecommunications. How was a client supposed to know which to call when his or her PC couldn’t access an application via the network?

For lack of teamwork, handoffs were rough. When an application was ready for production, there were often delays due to poor coordination between the developers and the infrastructure staff who managed change control.

Perhaps most embarrassing to Randy, each department had its own client liaison function. IT looked foolish when clients got different, sometimes conflicting answers from different “single points of contact,” and when one hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing.

Just one month after taking the job, Randy was mortified when clients were exposed to internal finger-pointing after a project missed its deadline. This was the last straw. Randy took on teamwork as one of his primary challenges on the job.

Team-building
First, Randy hired a consultant to do a seminar on teamwork. She took the leadership team off campus for a day and talked about the importance of teamwork, team problem-solving techniques and effective communication.

Everyone agreed with everything the consultant said, but on the job, nothing changed.

Next, Randy hired another consultant to do a team-building process. This time, the leadership team spent three days at a resort playing team games that required mutual trust, talking about how they felt about one another and their interdependencies, and playing golf.

 

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