The helix organization

Separating people-leadership tasks from day-to-day business leadership can help organizations strike a better balance between centralization and decentralization, reduce complexity, and embrace agility.

The CEO of a major global business, deeply frustrated, took time out recently as a large company-wide reorganization was stumbling toward its conclusion. Hard as he and his top team had tried, he told us, attempts to make collaboration and empowerment an enterprise-wide reality were foundering. Although he had been determined to ensure resources were reallocated across the group more dynamically, people and money remained doggedly stuck in slightly revamped silos. Tensions between the group’s central functions—such as finance, HR, and IT—and the group’s decentralized businesses were continuing to rumble. As he gazed at a new organization chart on his laptop, he scratched his head while trying to make sense of the complex collection of solid- and dotted-line reporting relationships floating across the screen.

The CEO in question is actually a composite of several with whom we’ve had different versions of this same conversation. Their frustrations, in turn, are similar in spirit to concerns we hear almost daily from many other senior executives. As our business environment has become more complex and interconnected, we seem to be replicating that in our organizations, creating complex matrix structures that simply don’t work anymore. We are overreliant on the same management tools for organization structure that we’ve been using for decades, namely hierarchical org charts with solid- and dotted-line reporting relationships.

 
Συνέχεια ανάγνωσης εδώ: www.mckinsey.com