by Robert Heller

Excerpts:

Artifical barriers between leaders and led are only one obstacle to true teamwork. Interdepartmental and cross-functional rivalries - what Americans call 'turf wars' - are other serious hurdles, made worse by the fact that they are seldom overcome. They're known in sport, too. Try to persuade rugby forwards that they can learn from backs, or vice versa, and you'll usually get no more change than when persuading marketing to work (as it should) hand-in-glove with production, or either to cooperate willingly with finance.

The skills essential to the modern manager thus include the ability to work with other functional talents in teams - and to lead, not by the authority of command, but that of expertise. Team leadership, paradoxically, includes knowing when to hand over the lead to others, as their expertise moves to the fore. In games, this stems naturally from the functional demands. Only the quarterback can call the plays in American football: in rugby, lineout tactics are equally an expert function.

In the Pearl Harbour movie, Tora! Tora! Tora!, the decision to attack is discussed, in parallel thinking style, by officers giving their opinions one by one, without the to-and-fro of Western debate. Then Admiral Yamamoto sums up the meeting and gives the go-ahead. The task of planning the onslaught, though, is entrusted to the fleet's best strategist, who happens to be a young lieutenant. And his plan then gets a going-over from the best critic, a captain (he finds it perfect).

That's true teamwork in action. We previously mentioned that, when GM Europe was developing its Omega executive car, thirteen teams worked together, each containing all ten functions. A further crucial point is that project leadership changed hands as different stages stressed different needs. Some managers now spend half their time in ad hoc task forces, tackling specific problems or projects, whose success depends on deferring to the right expert at the right moment. Some experts play no greater part than the player who enters the Super Bowl only to kick at goal: but like his, the limited role may be vital.

All managers recognise the need to form small, self-managed, focused teams when a specific task must be completed. To take just one of countless examples, at Ciba, the Swiss chemical giant, a project designed to save millions on purchasing and warehousing costs demanded a core of a dozen full-time executives, taken away from their former jobs for four years, and helped by many part-timers. But why should the principle of horizontal, multi-disciplinary, cross-functional teams apply only to one-off projects? What about the continuing work of the business?

The guru-blessed tendency favours reorganising businesses into smaller sub-units, each given the fullest possible decentralised authority by a small, strategic headquarters. This goes hand-in-hand with removal of unnecessary layers of management; that 'de-layering' is the main cause of the new curse of executive unemployment. De-layering sounds an excellent idea; so it is, provided that management processes (as opposed to the structure) are reorganised round the fewer layers. If processes stay unchanged, the layers may vanish, but the duties don't. As a report from Exeter University's Centre for Management Studies says:

'...the removal of a layer of management which many companies have undertaken has meant that responsibilities from the moved tier have been reallocated to the levels above and below...the staff remaining have more responsibility, in some cases too much, which can lead to stress and inefficiency'.