CHAPTER ONE
Collaboration and Teamwork
Robert Slepin
IMAGINE FOR A MOMENT a professional sports team walking onto the field of an athletic competition. Its team members are confused about the strategy for the game and who is playing what role. During the game, communication and coordination errors occur. Not surprisingly, the team loses. Now consider this same team suffers from a systemic failure to effectively learn from its mistakes. It consistently fails to recognize the root causes of its performance problems and invest adequately in improvements necessary to achieve better outcomes. This chronically losing team, unable to effectively and efficiently harness its individual talents as a cohesive unit, loses again and again to far better prepared competitors. Not a pretty picture—and yet this scenario can be observed in businesses and information technology (IT) organizations where words such as collaboration and teamwork are inscribed onto corporate values cards but do not consistently come alive in day-to-day actions. The good news is there are actions a chief information officer (CIO) can take to help the company and the information technology (IT) organization achieve higher performance by creating a culture of collaboration and teamwork.
In this chapter, we discuss warning signs and underlying causes, issues, risks, and opportunities for cultivating a culture of teamwork and collaboration consistent with a high-performing IT organization, including:
- Signs, symptoms, and root causes of teamwork and collaboration problems
- The role and importance of the CIO in modeling the way
- How the entire IT leadership team is critical to teamwork
- How to develop effective teamwork skills throughout IT
- How to recruit for people skills
- How to set clear direction
- How to communicate effectively
SIGNS, SYMPTOMS, AND ROOT CAUSES
Problems with collaboration and teamwork reveal themselves in various ways. But a major red flag is an infestation of organizational silos. These are individual functional areas, or departments, operating too independently—to the detriment of critical business processes that, by their nature, must cross functional boundaries. Well-intended but isolated employees operating in silos focus on achieving their individual unit’s goals at the expense of other internal groups and ultimately the company’s customers and shareholders. As the functions consume people’s time and other corporate resources to accomplish the tasks du jour, not necessarily in alignment with the priorities of other areas, tensions inevitably arise. When these tensions erupt in an unhealthy way, such as overheated arguments, passive-aggressive avoidance, or other inappropriate behavior, the spirit of collaboration across groups suffers. This can easily send the organization into a dysfunctional cycle, eroding the capability of functional units to work together as a cross-functional team in an optimally productive way.
Silos can exist within IT and across the organization at companies large and small, for-profit and not-for-profit, at the local, regional, and headquarters levels. Amid these silos, teamwork still can exist—and when it does, it is great—but it might be present only in pockets or for fleeting moments. For example, it might be evident within the software development team but not the operations group. It might exist for a period of time during a company crisis or during a mission-critical project bringing together people of different disciplines to achieve a clearly defined goal by a given date.
Detecting the presence of silos is simple. Listen to what IT employees say about their work environment. They might complain about constantly being bombarded by an endless stream of projects, requests, and issues thrown over the wall by business customers or colleagues from other IT areas. Employees also might point to conflicting priorities and not having enough resources to get all their work done. Poor requirements or constantly changing requirements are frequent complaints of IT organizations but can also be a sign of chronic issues in IT’s ability to partner with the business. Territorial behavior—us versus them—and absence of trust across team boundaries are other signs of silos.
Issues with collaboration and teamwork may be caused by having the wrong people on the team or the right people in the wrong positions. Other possible root causes include leadership, skills development, recruiting, clarity, and communication.
MODELING THE WAY
As a CIO, you set an example for the IT organization. In fact, you are a role model for the whole company, because your influence extends far beyond the boundaries of the organization chart. Every word you speak in public or private, every action taken, every message written in e-mail, and every blog entry will be scrutinized closely by others not only on the IT team but also around the company and even possibly by external stakeholders such as suppliers, auditors, and customers. Facing intense scrutiny is common for leaders from all walks of life, whether corporate executives, politicians, religious leaders, or star athletes.
Given an ever-present corporate magnifying glass, CIOs should consider what example they are setting in interactions with bosses, peers, direct reports, customers, and employees. Reflect on your day-to-day behaviors and their consistency with values of teamwork and collaboration. Look in the mirror, and solicit candid, unvarnished feedback from trusted colleagues. Participate in a 360-degree review. Objectively compare your leadership skills with those of a respected peer or other executive within the company or elsewhere. Examine your strengths and weaknesses of character, leadership style, and interpersonal communications, and identify one or several personal improvement goals for the next 12 months. Determine specific, time-phased actions to drive improvement, and follow through: Take the planned actions, achieve results, evaluate outcomes, and consider the value from further improvement in a particular dimension of performance.
An orientation to continual self-improvement is well worth the investment of time and energy. The example you set is among the most powerful tools in influencing the IT organization to achieve peak performance in satisfying IT’s customers. Conversely, if your actions do not mirror the values and principles of a collaborative culture, your performance as a leader is, simply put, unacceptable—and the efficiency and effectiveness of the IT team will suffer.
THE IT LEADERSHIP TEAM IS CRITICAL TO SUCCESS
Besides modeling teamwork and collaboration themselves, CIOs ultimately are accountable also for the outcomes, actions, and behavior of the IT management team. If a CIO’s direct reports behave badly, this can have a negative ripple effect down through the ranks of their respective organizations as well as across functions. Given the scope and magnitude of the influence of these senior leaders, among the most important tasks of the CIO is selecting the right people for these key positions. These heads of such functional areas as applications, infrastructure, and project management office (PMO) will make—or break—the success of the overall IT operation.
If the senior IT leaders cannot get along with each other and their customers, then Houston, we have a problem. The majority of IT work in most companies demands that people work together toward a common goal, whether it is sustaining day-to-day operational processes or executing projects large and small. For many activities, IT employees must possess more than sharp technical and business skills; interpersonal communications skills also are critical to lubricate relationships and achieve efficient coordination within and across teams.
Newly hired or promoted CIOs who have inherited senior managers behaving badly would be wise not to let these behavioral issues fester. They must confront the situation head-on. These senior managers must either step up their performance or move on to some other, more suitable role.
As a CIO, you should hold each manager accountable to the values, principles, and standards of the organization and their job role. Where there are gaps between actual and desired performance, openly bu...
