Reference no: EM133015091

MCR003 Management Attributes and Skills Individual - Universal Business School Sydney

Please read the Case Study "Are We A Team"

You are required to submit meaningful responses to the three questions that appear underneath the case study
Please use a minimum of five academic references not older that 2015. Use Harvard Referencing including appropriate in - text citations

CASE FOR CRITICAL ANALYSIS - ARE WE A TEAM?

Suppose that you are the newly appointed CIO of a medium-sized technology company. Your company recruits top graduates from schools of business and engineering. Talent, intellect, creativity - it's all there in your team. If you lined up this crowd for a group photo, credentials in hand, the 'wow' factor would be there.

Your company has offices in every Australian state and territory, with headquarters in Sydney. The talent pool is amazing across the board, both in information technology (IT) and the rest of the company. But when the CEO hires you, he says, 'The company is performing nowhere near its potential. On the surface, we are doing fine. But we should be a Fortune 500 organisation. With this much talent, we should be growing at a much faster rate.'

The CEO also says that you are inheriting 'a super team with disappointing performance'. His task for you is to pull the IT stars into a cohesive team that will meet company needs for new IT systems and services much faster and more effectively.

Without making your superstars feel that they were being critiqued and second-guessed, or indicating that 'there's a real problem here', you want to gather as much information and feedback as possible from the 14 team members (regional CIOs and department heads) who report to you. You hold one-on-one meetings in order to give a voice to each person, allowing each individual to provide an honest assessment of the team as well as areas for improvement and a vision for the future of team efforts.

You are surprised by the consistency of remarks and opinions. For example, a picture emerges of the previous CIO, Bob, who was obviously awed by the talent level of team members. Comments such as, 'Bob pretty much let us do what we wanted', and 'Bob would start the meeting and then just fade into the background, as if he found us intimidating' are typical. The most disturbing comment, 'Bob always agreed with me', is expressed by most of the team members at some point in your conversations. It is as if the regional heads believe that your predecessor wanted them to succeed by doing as they thought best for themselves.

You query team members about the level of cooperation during meetings and uncover areas of concern, including the complaint that others at the table constantly check their iPads and BlackBerrys during meetings. One department head tells you, 'You could turn off the sound while watching one of our meetings and just by the body language and level of attention tell who is aligned with whom and who wishes the speaker would just shut up. It would be comical if it weren't so distressing.

Such remarks are indicative of a lack of trust and respect and a breakdown of genuine communication. One team member tells you, 'I recently encountered a problem that a department head from another region had successfully solved, but the information was never shared, so here I am reinventing the wheel and wasting valuable time.' It is apparent that these so-called 'high performers' are territorial, and that the 'each division for itself' attitude is becoming a cultural norm; unchecked, this has been slowing the team's response to line departments and customers.

You are also struck by the similarity of the regional IT leaders in their backgrounds, comments and attitudes, which presents a whole new dilemma: How do you create diversity, jump-start ideas and reignite passion? This looks like a group of individualists who don't know how to play as a team. You don't want to diminish the individual talent, but you are concerned by the lack of cohesion. You need to find a way to help people think less about themselves and more about sharing work and information and achieving collective results for the good of the company.

Team building is an art, anchored by trust and communication, and committed to mutual success. What you're seeing instead looks like team dysfunction. Now, you have to determine the steps necessary to build a cohesive, visionary team.

QUESTIONS

1 What type of team do you, the new CIO, have? What do you see as the key problem with the team?

2 How do you think the team evolved to this low level of cooperation and cohesiveness?

3. What would you do to help turn this collection of individual regional and department heads into a top-performing team?