We throw the word “team” around a lot in the business world. Are you on the team? Is he a team player? Building the right team is important, but there is no blueprint that shows you how to do it.

Business leaders like the team concept of people working together for a common goal. But good teams are rarely made up of nameless, faceless participants. Great teams have to have a few star players to achieve success.

Occasionally people trumpet the idea of an all-star team, but stars in every position—many with big egos—rarely succeed. Do you expect to see good baseball played in this week's Major League Baseball All-Star Game? Of course, not.

Good teams have role players; ones who consistently do the little things that make everyone look good. We've heard a lot the last few years about the difficulty in attracting IT people to the insurance industry because it is perceived to be behind other industries and a little bi boring.

Justin Manley, CIO of Torus, doesn't believe it has to be that way, though. He went out to other industries to find the right combination of players who were looking to do sharp things in what Manley believes is a changing landscape.

“One of the things I tried to do is not constrain myself by focusing only on this [insurance] sector,” says Manley. “I looked for people in adjacent markets—financial services—where certain technical experiences could map well to what we were doing.”

For IT departments, every good team needs a CIO that understands the direction the enterprise is headed and how IT can provide the tools to achieve those goals. Those people, for lack of a better term, are the stars of the team.

Stars dream about great concepts, role players turn those concepts into reality. But they can't do that themselves. They need the programmers, the data base managers, and the help desk to keep the powerful machine that runs their company in gear. To use another baseball term, they need a LOOGY (Lefthanded One-Out Guy), to get out the tough lefthanded batter in a key situation.

Research continues to show the challenges insurers are facing in the job market. Developing aggressive ideas around hiring and finding people who will fill particular roles shouldn't be the challenge it has turned into if the stars of the team have an eye on the future of technology.

Special Reports /

Every Good IT Teams Needs a LOOGY

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