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