Designing Flexible Organizational Structures in Dynamic Innovative Environments: How Organizations Are Replacing Their Old Vertical Hierarchy

INTRODUCTION

In this new environment of innovation and change, one of the primary management challenges is to design more flexible organizational structures. Organizations are replacing their old vertical hierarchical structures with new horizontal or matrix-based structures, linking traditional functions through inter-functional teams, and establishing strategic alliances with suppliers, customers and even competitors. The organization of the future has a structure that can be reconfigured so as to make the best use of teams that are flexible and whose make-up varies over time, in coordination with and as a consequence of the satisfaction of market needs and expectations, the behaviour of competitors and other market factors, the acquisition of essential competencies and the formation of groupings to provide access to capabilities and resources for those who do not possess them.It requires teams whose members are drawn from different departments and disciplines and possess a broad array of knowledge, talent and skills, teams in which open dialogue, acceptance of ideas, trust, cooperation and creativity predominate.
What is a Team?
A team is a group of people who work together to accomplish something beyond their individual self interests. Not all groups are teams. What distinguishes teams from other similar sounding groups is that a team is not a collection of people simply following orders.

Types of teams

Permanent teams These teams perform on a permanent basis and are not dissolved once the task is accomplished. Let us understand the concept with an example.
Mike, Peter, Joe and Ana had a strong inclination towards branding as well as promotions and hence were a part of the branding team with a leading organization. They were primarily responsible for promoting their brand and designing marketing strategies to generate maximum revenue for their organization. They worked extremely hard and always managed to achieve their targets well in advance, but their team was always in place and never dissolved. Their organization never asked them to leave or ever dissolved their team. Such teams are called permanent teams.
Work or no work, the human resources team, operation team, administration team always function effectively through out the year and hence are permanent teams.
Temporary teams
Unlike permanent teams, temporary teams loose their importance, once the task is accomplished. Such teams are usually formed for a shorter duration either to assist the permanent team or work when the members of the permanent team are busy in some other project.
When organizations have excess of work, they generally form temporary teams which work in association with the members of the permanent team for the accomplishment of the task within the stipulated time. Task Force
Such teams are formed for a special purpose of working on any specific project or finding a solution to a very critical problem.
The government generally appoints special teams to investigate critical issues like bomb blasts, terrorist attacks and so on. The task force explores all the possible reasons which led to a severe problem and tries to resolve it within a given deadline. Committee
Committees are generally formed to work on a particular assignment either permanently or on a temporary basis. Individuals with common interests, more or less from the same background, attitude come together on a common platform to form a committee and work on any matter.
To organize any cultural event, organizations generally make committees to raise funds, invite celebrities and all the major tasks involved to successfully organize any event. The committee members work together, design strategies to successfully accomplish the task.
In educational institutes, various committees are formed where students with a common interest join hands to organize cultural events and various other activities required for the all round development of students.
Organization/Work Force
Such groups are formed in organizations where team members work together under the expert guidance of leader. A leader or a supervisor is generally appointed among the members itself and he along with his team works hard to achieve a common goal. The leader all through must stand by his team and extract the best out of each team member. He must not underestimate any of his team members and take his team along to avoid conflicts.
Samuel was working with a leading advertising firm with two members reporting to him. Samuel always believed in his team members and worked together with his team and no doubts his team always did wonders and was way ahead of others. Self Managed Teams
Self Managed Teams consist of individuals who work together again for a common purpose but without the supervision of any leader. Here as the name suggests every individual is accountable for his individual performance. The team members of self managed teams must respect each other and should never loose focus on their target. No leader is appointed and the team members have to take their own responsibility. Individuals take the initiative on their own and are their own guides and mentors. Cross Functional Team
Let us understand this with the help of an example.
Maria and Andy both were part of the branding team. They got an assignment from their superiors to be completed within two days. Unfortunately Andy met with an accident and was advised complete bed rest. To avoid delays, Peter from the operations team was shifted to the marketing team to assist Maria for the time being and form a team. Such teams are called cross functional teams. Ideally the employees should be more or less on the same level to avoid ego hassles. Individuals from different areas come and work together for a common objective to form a cross functional team. In such teams, people from different areas, interests and likings join hands to come out with a unique idea to successfully complete a task. Virtual Teams

Virtual teams consist of individuals who are separated by distances and connected through computer.Here individuals communicate with each other online through internet. Sam at Los Angeles can form a team with Mandy at Mexico and Sara at Denver all working for a common objective but the communication is totally digital through internet. Such teams are helpful when employees need to connect with each other and are located at different places. Individuals supporting any community in social networking sites such as facebook or orkut also form a virtual team as all the members are from different locations but support a common community. They all have a common objective -to support and promote their community.

To function effectively, a team needs the following;

1. Shared vision – What is natural is to have a blurry vision of where the organization is going. The vision is not communicated enough or shared throughout the organization. What is unnatural yet necessary is to create an inspiring vision for the future that is clear and informs all throughout the organization what the future holds and their role in it. It is shared because it is understood and repeated in numerous ways. Leaders usually do share the vision but usually not enough or in multiple methods.

Actions: Leaders have to be deliberate and have a plan on how to communicate the vision

· Leaders need to share the vision and tie it into the daily tasks every day in their conversations. Can they commit to tie it in four times a day. (Kotter, 1996)

· People need to be clear what needs to be done and why.

· Leaders have to include what is in it for the employees, use the word “because”.

· Leaders need to include others for comments, clarifications or additions. This way they get others “fingerprints” are on it.

· Leaders need to remember involvement = commitment.

2. Trust among members- What is natural is to rely on your self or your department and not expect much from others. What is unnatural yet necessary, is to develop an interdependency on others characterized by high trust and risk taking.

Actions: Leaders develop trust by trusting their people.

· Leaders develop trust by being vulnerable and admitting their mistakes.

· Leaders make and keep small promises.

· Leaders set high expectations for their team and encourage risk taking and direct feedback.

3. Established expectations and guidelines – What is natural is to assume that co-workers are on the same page and that they understand the desired results. What is unnatural yet necessary is to be very deliberate in clarifying reciprocal expectations and establish guidelines fro how to work together effectively.

Actions: To be a team the individuals need to co-create expectations for themselves and feel their input was heard and valued.

· Leaders and the team need to decide on how they are going make decisions, i.e. majority, minority a “tell” or content expert, unanimous or consensus.

· Expectations need to be clarified, leader to the team, team to the leader and team of each other.

· Meeting and team guidelines are established that flow out of the expectations, such as “One conversation at a time,” “Stay focused”, and “Defer judgment.”

4. Communication skill and conflict resolution – What is natural is to avoid conflict, jump to rash conclusions and not communicate what you are thinking. What is unnatural yet necessary is to make your thinking visible, fill in the “white space” for people, identify your assumptions and resolve conflicts.

Actions: The team needs to have specific tools to communicate, otherwise the strongest and most senior voice wins out.

· Part of the expectations should involve communication guidelines

· Most teams need some kind of skill training for communication, like how to listen better, inquiry versus advocacy, summarizing what was said, ladder of inference, left hand column.

· Leaders can assign a devil’s advocate role to enliven the conversations and protect against “group think.”

5. Systems thinking-What is natural is to focus on our own team to the exclusion of the big team across departmental boundaries. It is easy to think of your team’s action have limited impact on others across the organization.

What is unnatural yet necessary is to see how departmental actions affect and impact each other. Customers, co-workers, vendors and family are intertwined as stakeholders and can unintended consequences upon each other.

6. Personal leadership- What is natural is to stay in your comfort zone and only take risks that you are assured of success. What is unnatural yet necessary is to take risks that are consistent with your values and become a change leader stretching and encouraging others in spite of your own doubts and fears.

Actions: The team is the playing field for the leader to try out their Emotional Intelligence skills and get feedback on their performance.

· Leaders need to have a developed point of view of their leadership style and know the destination of where they want people to go.

· Leaders need to be aware of the different styles and preferences of their team and vary their style to meet and challenge the individual.

· Leaders can be role models for development by sharing with their team, what are their current areas of focus for development and ask for support and feedback from the team.

· The leader wears many hats on the team and has to know which hat to wear when. Key roles are as an initiator, coach, model, facilitator and negotiator

· Leaders are the glue in the team, reading individuals and the groups emotional states and being able to help regulate it by attention, humor or empathy

7. Appreciation of differences- What is natural is to value team members with similar backgrounds and opinions. What is unnatural yet necessary is to embrace differences and creative tensions to generate better solutions and raise the “Team IQ.”

Actions: The leader is powerful role model to the team for how to deal with differences.

· Leaders need to embrace differences as they lead to breakthrough ideas. In studies on creativity and innovation holding opposite and contrary ideas long enough leads to breakthrough ideas. IDEO one of the leading design firms encourages “wild ideas” and “build on other ideas” as some of their guidelines.

· Leaders can help by encouraging the team to stay with the ambiguity, creative tension and dialogue as long as possible versus rushing to a decision.

· The team IQ is a great metric for the group to evaluate themselves on. The IQ should be higher than the IQ of nay one individual.

· The differences need to be understood and integrated into new innovations.

8. Accountability and consequences – What is natural is to be disappointed with the efforts of others on your team, but never hold anyone accountable for the missed “deliverables.” What is unnatural yet necessary is to discuss accountabilities and consequences upfront, before a project gets underway and review them throughout the project.

9. Ongoing learning and recognition- What is natural is to complete a task, take a sigh of relief, possibly congratulate each other and move on to the next item on the “to do list.” What is unnatural yet necessary is to take some reflection time to discover what worked to be used again, learn what not to do next time, decide who needs to know this information, disseminate it, and design formal and informal celebrations for the win.

Actions: Leaders are looking for every opportunity to learn and improve.

· Holding lessons learned sessions, will help leaders and their teams to crystallize learning and spread the news to appropriate people.

· Recognizing individual’s efforts and contributions increases discretionary effort and raise morale.

· Giving timely and specific feedback keeps performance focused.

· Leaders take time to develop their team and their team processes.

10. Mentoring others – What is natural is to get caught up with urgent crises of the day and do little mentoring or training of key employees or colleagues. What is unnatural yet necessary is to take time to train and mentor others to be better performers. Career development, learning and succession planning, keeps skills and motivation high on the team.

Actions: Leaders help others enhance their strengths and develop plans to improve their weaknesses.

· Leaders hold one on one meetings with their direct reports to coach and mentor them.

· Leaders help their team share core competencies by cross training.

· Leaders are sharing their knowledge and developing their successors.

These key ingredients make up the strategy for developing high performing teams. Leaders have specific actions to help their team develop. Each ingredient needs to become a discipline that gets practiced, reinforced and refined. Only then will the unnatural become a habit and the foundation for superior teamwork.

Indicators of poor team work

There are many factors to show why people do not work in a team and complete with each other. As a result of this there is poor team work. Some of the indicators of poor team work are:

⎝ Symptom of frustration
⎝ Unhealthy competition
⎝ Rigid group norms & procedures
⎝ Quality of relationship is poor
⎝ Absence of trust
⎝ People not developing
⎝ Dearth of new ideas & creativity
⎝ Domination by the leader
⎝ Warring cliques or sub-groups
⎝ Avoidance approach to potential conflicts
⎝ High turnover, more absenteeism, more grievances and more transfer requests
⎝ Work schedule delays

Why Organizations Need Teams
Most organizations introduce teamwork because of the perceived benefits of motivation of staff and reduced costs from more effective working practices or decisions. Where a group of individuals could share the same purpose, a team with individuals will reach the target faster and more effectively. Teamwork occurs when the members work together to improve performance through sharing core values, all of which promote the use of skills to accomplish common goals. Teamwork is most likely to be successful when it operates in a supportive environment. The atmosphere within the organization therefore, needs to support cooperation and trust.

When to Deploy Teams
Teams offer an effective alternative in many situations. Examples of situations for which using teams instead of individuals is particularly useful include:

• Building houses or other construction projects. • Organization of ceremonies (values, rituals, symbols). • Weeding or cultivating farms (clear assignments & tasks). • Sports and athletics (code of ethics and performance). • Administration and HR (supportive and communities of practice). • Marketing and Sales teams (increase performance and goals). • In a production environment (clear goals and output).

Creating a Team Environment
Effective teams follow a proven pattern with respect to organization and operation of the team. This typically would include:

• A (multifunctional) problem or project is identified. • Roles are distributed in terms of existing team relationships and expertise. • Team members work together to gather data relating to the problems or opportunities. • Group members collaboratively analyze data and create a plan for improvement. • The action plan is tested and implemented by the group. • The group collaboratively evaluates the impact of the new solutions. • The process is improved.

The process is related to vision, commitment is related to motivation. Team members must be committed to undertake the task to see the purpose of the team through completion.

Choice of Team Members and Team Cohesiveness
A high-performance team will exhibit a high degree of team cohesiveness. Team cohesiveness tends to be higher when:

• The team consists of members with similar attitudes, ages, backgrounds, and needs. • The members respect and use each others abilities. • They support and share common objectives. • Team tasks require interdependent efforts. • Team size is relatively small. • The team is physically isolated from other groups. • The team is able to share performance success. • The team is able to cope successfully with temporary setbacks and failures.

The team cohesiveness can be further enhanced by:

• Rewarding effective team performance. • Improving the quality of interactions between team members. • Creating competition and rivalry against other teams and keeping the team together for fairly lengthy period of time.

Conditions for Teamwork
Elements which courage strong team cohesion are a group language, leadership through role model or exemplary behavior, play for both relaxation and the stimulation of creativity, and the development of a group culture through rituals and ceremonies. Managers who are trying to get their teams to work better, but who ignore the structural, HR, political and symbolic conditions often find that their efforts come to nothing.

Teams can deliver high performance levels for a long time as long as a number of prior conditions have been met.

They include:

• Structural conditions (clear task and assignment of authority), • Human resource conditions, quantitatively and qualitatively (people who like to work in teams, sufficient staffing and reasonable rewards), • Resources and time (sufficient means and time to complete the tasks), • The right political conditions (sufficient power and influence); and • Symbolic conditions, especially with regard to bringing in and maintaining of a common culture and language (jargon).

One such symbolic condition is the creation of barriers restricting entry to a group whose performance level has to be very high. Preventing the group from becoming too homogeneous is another.

The Role of the Facilitator is Key

Do not underestimate facilitating tasks in teams. When people work together in a team, they adopt particular roles. For example, one person may be responsible for monitoring progress, checking the time keeping or acting as the leader. There is a tendency for one member to take on the task functions and for the others to adopt the maintenance functional role.

Facilitating task functions are those which help the group to get task done as effectively and efficiently as possible, including:

• Proposing objectives, clarifying goals. • Seeking information and opinions. • Keeping the group on track. • Summarizing ideas. • Suggesting ways forward. • Evaluating contributions. • Coordinating the efforts of the team to ensure that it makes best use of its resources in achieving its goals. • Setting objectives and priorities and driving the team towards successful completion of the task. • Coming up with new ideas and strategies. • Evaluating and analyzing problems and progress. • Exploring and reporting on ideas and developments from outside the group.

Further Team Development
Today there are a variety of approaches to team development other than activities during work. This may involve meetings to discuss insight into non-work related issues or alternatively, putting the team in a fresh context, e.g., outdoor activities, weekend-based activities on team collaboration, team development activities with experienced facilitators to give insight into team dynamics, decision making in teams, etc.

There are a number of aspects of team development, including:

• Helping team members to identify shared objectives and purposes. • Developing interpersonal skills between team members, e.g., listening skills, supporting skills, encouragement skills. • Developing team rewards for supportive behavior. • Developing collective problem-solving skills. • Building up a store of personal goodwill to overcome problems. • Developing team confidence and competence. • Recognizing personal strengths and weaknesses, functional and personal.

Team building learning methods
Each group with which we work has its own unique needs and interests, so each team building session is different; the insights, learning, lessons, and outcomes will vary with each group. To help each team accomplish its goals, we use an "experience-based" approach, meaning that a lot of the knowledge that participants gain will be rooted in the "hands-on" tasks and exercises in which participants will be involved. Key concepts will then be presented to reinforce and clarify what they have learned. Participants will discover the skills and methods that work best for them and how to continue to implement these effective practices once they leave the learning environment.

Why consider teamwork and teambuilding for your people?

• The need to quickly respond to change and to respond with agility and flexibility. • Increased need to produce products/services at the highest quality, lowest cost, and using the most efficient method possible. • Demands for continuous improvement for leadership. • People need a sense of belonging, and high performing teams offer that need. • Decision-making and problem-solving is better handled by teams that are work together. • Skilled team members need to be constantly improving and growing in order to stay competitive and serve the organization. • Teamwork allows resources to be used more effectively.

Teams and high performance workplace

A productive team environment contains an atmosphere of trust and its members are completely accountable for the group 's bottom line results. Its individual team members invest in the team through their actions and attitudes. They are respectful, caring, and cooperative. These high functioning teams are the mechanism by which organizations can unlock world-class results.
Authors Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith have an interesting perspective on high performance teams. The authors studied team work across several companies and base their findings on case studies spanning tough business environments and work challenges. Their findings expose the factors that stimulate high performance in teams.

‘High performance teams typically reflect strong extensions of the basic characteristics of teams’ .

According to their book The Wisdom of Teams, these strong extensions grow out of an intense commitment to the team’s mutual purpose. The qualities that distinguish a high performance team from other ordinary teams can be summed up as follows:

High performance teams have:

• A deeper sense of purpose. • Relatively more ambitious performance goals compared to the average teams. • Better work approaches or complete approaches as the authors term it. • Mutual accountability; acknowledgement of their joint accountability towards a common purpose in addition to individual obligations to their specific roles. • Complementary skill set, and at times interchangeable skills.

The above points capture the qualities found in high performance teams and these qualities are indeed stronger extensions of the factors that are usually necessary and ideal for team work, some of which follow:

• All teams need a sense of purpose and a clear cut mission. • All teams need the mission to be broken down into meaningful performance goals for each team member to pursue. • All teams need to develop certain work approaches, procedures and processes to ensure that they accomplish a task efficiently and effectively. • All teams have to support the common mission and take their individual responsibility seriously to do their part in accomplishing a task. • All teams need a mix of skills, experience and expertise, in order to meet the challenges of the team task.

In a high performance team, there seems to be a more advanced and full blown application of all the qualities that teams need to have in a general sense. But, the unique quality in a high performance team is that the team members have an inbuilt need and ambition to go after bigger challenges and they bring with them a work attitude and work ethic that creates a deeper commitment to the collective mission.

Let’s study the qualities in high performance teams in greater detail. In the context of ‘a deeper sense of purpose’ and ‘relatively more ambitious performance goals’ as mentioned above, an analogy can explain better the difference between a high performance team and an average team:

Work approaches are another determinant in team performance. Work approaches comprise a whole host of team work processes such as:

• Decision making norms within the team. • Approach to creativity in problem solving. • Work standards that conform to accepted industry norms and practices. • Methods for using team meetings effectively. • The team process for completing a task from start to finish, and so on.

When a team is able to crack this aspect of team work and successfully integrate various aspects of its functioning, it paves the way for a far better team performance than a team where they struggle to find mutually acceptable methods to move the team work forward. For example, better work approaches can ensure better planning and scheduling of activities, quicker decisions, rapid response to customers, meeting deadlines, etc.

Mutual accountability is the collective responsibility of the team towards generating results and achieving success. Mutual accountability implies an implicit acknowledgement of the joint accountability of all team members towards a common purpose, in addition to the individual obligations in their specific roles. This creates a supportive environment within the team and the performance of the team improves in the presence of this type of mutual support and cohesion.

Complementary skills are a necessity in most teams. Most team tasks require multiple skills and the when the team members have complementary skills that are well balanced and congruent to the task, it is bound to raise the team performance. Interchangeable skills can be asset in some businesses, since the team members can depend on one another to jointly accomplish a task.

Besides these qualities, ‘Shared leadership’ is another factor highlighted by Katzenbach and Smith. It is a fairly recent concept that is gaining ground and is seen as important to facilitate high performance in teams. It calls for a great deal of personal initiative from individual team members. Read this related article to understand this concept better:
To sum up, the qualities that seem to foster high team performance are primarily a cut above that of an average team. It is certainly not easy to create a high performance team with all these qualities, but an organisation can provide the building blocks with a few necessary measures such as the following-

1. Make the attempt to set challenging and inspiring performance goals especially when you come across teams that are achievement driven 2. Encourage personal initiative and develop individual leadership qualities 3. Create the most appropriate team mix with the right combination of skills 4. Pay heed to the team’s training needs to help them develop better work approaches so that they accomplish their tasks in better ways

Conclusion

It is not an easy task to change a company 's institutional culture, preserve and consolidate worthwhile values and instil new values among the staff. The group responsible for following up on this cultural change, which is something any organization must have, has a hard and never-ending task.However, this is an issue that affects us all, and so we all must be concerned with seeing the transformation carried out in the best way possible. WE CAN ALL HELP by doing our bit. If we set an example, we can have an influence on the rest.Let us do what we can to ensure that our organization is the best place in the world to work, for the benefit of the organization itself, for our own sake and for our country. We can do it if we all pull together!

References:

Kotter, J.P. (1996) Leading Change, Boston Massachusetts: Harvard Business School Press.

Nadler, R.S. (1998) Teamwork is an Unnatural Act, PIHRA Scope, June, Vol.XLXI, No.6

Senge, P.M. (1990) Fifth Discipline, New York: Doubleday

References: Kotter, J.P. (1996) Leading Change, Boston Massachusetts: Harvard Business School Press. Nadler, R.S. (1998) Teamwork is an Unnatural Act, PIHRA Scope, June, Vol.XLXI, No.6 Senge, P.M. (1990) Fifth Discipline, New York: Doubleday