T Shaped Managers

Expertise and knowledge lies within the organisation without visibility to the management.

knowledge within or a combination of knowledges across different departments can help management derive innovations or help address crucial challenges.

companies invest in state of art knowledge management tools & technology; but it just helps to enable sharing of documents between people; but the real

outcome is when ideas are shared ( brainstorming ) and when people collaborate.

That gives the need of a T Shaped Manager: Enabler of knowledge sharing ( Horizontal ) & Focussed on Business goals ( Vertical )

Its basically a combination of Promoting a free knowledge sharing environment but at the same time having discipline towards business goals.

BP - Success Story - Start to begin:
1) BU’s had their own targets : Failed because each was behind his own BU performance forgetting about overall org success
2) Introduced Peer Groups - For people to share ideas within BU’s : Failed because eventually people spent time in just sharing ideas and not achiveing BU

goals; creating learning loops.
3) Introduced Unit performance targets along with peer grouping policy - Intially there was a friction, but eventually with some processes in place, everone

saw benefits of this collaborative approach.
4) Eventually this gave rise to lots of smaller networks and peer groups and people started spending time and money in meetings rather than business goals.

So company again pulled the veins and implemented technology to enable collaboration ( video / conferencing ..etc )
5) With Time BP evolved into creating newer strategically focussed groups with collaborations from the earlier peer group strategy.

 

Five distict ways to create Horizontal value ( collaboration )

1) Increase effeciency through transfer of best practices: ( performance of service station improved by seeking expert opinion of retail advisors - stock less / decrease working capital / increase sales )

2) Improve quality of decisions through peer advice ( new area of responsibility - No shipping knowledge - took collaborative help of peers to take decisions by taking expert recommendations and challenging the thoughts with opinions )

3) Growing revenue through shared expertise ( huge project - involved people from different sectors - tax / leagal / technical - and made project successful within time and budget )

4) Developing new business opportunities through  cross polination of ideas ( flightneeds.com was one initiative which was derived out of collaborative meetings across different BU’s… Its during such meetings were ideas generate to derive new business opportunities )

5) Making bold strategic moves through promise of well coordinated implementation ( Merger of two companies was a huge task.. but bold strategic moves were successful because of different BU heads integrating well with collaboration and enabling merger and staffing issues )
How to Design the right organisation which could make the best benefit of a T-shaped Manager policy.
1) Create clear incentives
2) Develop Economic transperancy
3) Formalize cross unit interactions
4) Curb Cross unit interactions ( when you cannot add value )
5) Replace bloated Rolodexes with Human Portals.
A behavioral overlay : Its always good  to have a decentralised knowledge system but with a flexible overlay of behavioral net on the de-centralised knowledge systeme.. meaning enabling collaboration / peer groups / cross pollination policies over decentralised knowledge systems there by achieving required business targets & overall business objectives while retaining core expertise to the specific units.