Interdepartmental Friction

Stewart (1992) highlighted that employees from different groups within company hate each other, which lead to less productive and inefficient enterprise in general. Instead of traditional hierarchical organization structure, flat and lean structure where decision power is delegated to lower level essentially having them self-managed on a day-to-day basis, lead to high productivity and efficiency. Walmart, General Electric, Proctor & Gamble etc. have all tried and tested flatter organizational structure with fewer layers. resulted in positive performance (Stewart, 1992).

Based on the researcher’s sixteen years plus of experience in telecommunication industry, the statement from Stewart that employees from different functions hate each does carry some weight specially at supervisory roles. For instance, the engineers and subject matter experts are more open and willing to collaborate but it’s the supervisor and their bosses who create some friction between the different departments. The intentions are not evil, but it’s just to prove that their own group is more important or have a heavier say on matters than other groups who at times wanted to help improve processes by lending their expertise and tools. The issue is stemmed from hierarchical structure where operations, research and planning groups are all separate entities. For instance, in a telecommunication company a planning group foresee three to five years into future to allocate some budget and road map for the network and product enhancements. Research group offers their inputs regarding various available options along with cost and benefit breakdown for each solution. Based on finances, technical viability and feasibility, a particular roadmap is locked in by planning, and research is further tasked to start working with vendors to set timelines and testing in lab environment. After passing the lab environment, operations group tested the solution in field. At this point, sometimes static job roles of folks in research blind sided them from field experiences lead to sub-optimal solutions to begin with. Operations are forced to live with sub-optimal solution and tasked to submit improvements to vendor, as part of separate product improvement iterative cycle which unfortunately takes long time. From this simple example, one can establish that all three groups have experts on same subject matter, working in their own close circles but do not collaborate a lot with each other due to silo-ed organizational structure. Supervisors report projects and future roadmaps to their chain above, but not openly to other organizations which sometimes lead to last minute surprise revelations on key products. Every group is gauged based on their goals for the given product, which lead to overlapping roles and goals at departmental head level.

Solution is indeed a flatter, transparent and less overlapping organization structure with fewer layers and less silos. Frequent cross department discussion through representative will ensure that everyone is aware of roadmap and product update. Last but not the least, job rotation is necessary across all groups; folks with decades of experience in one role tend to be less open with the details by thinking of as a job security measure.

References

Stewart, T. A. (1992, May 18). The search for the organization of tomorrow: Are you flat, lean, and ready for a bold new look? Try high-performance teams, redesigned work, and unbridled information. Retrieved from Fortune Web site: http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1992/05/18/76425/index.htm