Popular press/personal example: Read the newspaper, Business
Week, Inc. or think through your own experiences and find a story that
relates to the week's readings.
Effective or (shall we say) ineffective management, the trials and
tribulations of distributed teams, and the nut island effect...
Unfortunately, these are three themes that I have become all too
familiar with in my 14 months so far at McKesson Corporation.
I was hired in January 2011 as part of a new seven person national
functional team (SPS team) of specialists, working as a horizontal linkage
between marketing and the geographical sales teams (Daft, 2007) that was
deployed to fuel business development in a few key product lines.
Suffice it to say, this “experiment” has not worked out thus
far. Much of the blame can be placed on
the bureaucratic hierarchical structure (Wren & Bedeian, 2009); the SPS
team has been inserted into a traditional sales structure and although the
formal org. chart illustrates an “integration” of 7 SPS sales professionals,
the informal structure has been resilient and sales managers and
representatives have been protective of their accounts and opportunities. Overall, my experiences have been great for
my career, but let’s just say the authors of this week’s articles have been “preaching
to the choir.”
The Northeast Vice President (NVP) has led a team that has
underperformed for the last three years.
One of the issues with this 8 person team is the lack of collaboration
and knowledge transfer between the territory representatives. The NVP manages each territory representative
with a concentration on one-on-one coaching while neglecting team-building
responsibilities (Hill, 1995). As a
result, each representative repeats mistakes already made by another
representative; for example, if Michael lost a deal a month ago due to his
failure to recognize a tactic of a competitor, Thompson might be in danger of
making the same mistake a month later.
To improve, the NVP could encourage (acting as a conductor) active and
confrontational communication and knowledge sharing between the reps on the weekly
conference calls.
I’ve seen an exemplary management approach from the Southeast
VP. His team operates under “doubles
tennis” conditions, as illustrated by Hill (1995): there is constant
communication and “best practice” sharing between the reps in his region. Whenever a rep has a big deal in their
funnel, there is a ‘RIP’ call scheduled for the deal. In this RIP call, the assigned rep will
explain the details of the deal and the rest of the team will ask critical
questions and give informative suggestions.
Not only does this improve the sales close rate, it also builds strong
ties, improves collective expertise, and transfers tacit knowledge (Levin &
Cross, 2004).
My manager (“John,” for the sake of this journal entry) has been
tasked with managing a seven person distributed team that covers North
America. He does this from his home
office in Dallas, TX. Despite our team
being full of successful experienced sales professionals, we have struggled in
the areas of shared identity, shared context, and spontaneous communication
(Hinds & Mortenson, 2005). Because
each of us operates within geographic specific contexts, effective
communication has been lacking. Every
now and then one of us will ‘spontaneously’ send an email asking for help or
guidance on a topic and usually this email will go unanswered for days on end
because everyone is focused on the events in their specific region. I’d recommend my company change the
organizational structure to assist with this process. Instead of the 7 of us reporting to a
national manager, I think we should each report to our regional VP; this would
build collaboration and knowledge transfer between the SPS’s and the regional
teams.
Lastly, there has been a macro Nut Island Effect (Levy, 2001)
taking place in my business unit. Our corporation
has invested significant sums of money in the last 16 months (including the
hiring of the SPS team), but this investment has coincided with a series of
leadership changes. Due to the lack of
continuity, many divisions (marketing, sales, etc.) have utilized the money to
achieve short term goals, without a focus on the long-term collaboration
between divisions needed to win business in the near and long term future.
References
Wren, D., & Bedeian, A.G. (2009). Chapter 10, The Emergence of the Management
Process and Organization Theory, pp. 212-234
Hill, L. (1995)
Managing Your Team, Harvard Business School, pp. 1-22 (full article)
Hinds, P. H., and
Mortensen, M. (2005) Understanding Conflict in
Geographically Distributed Teams: The Moderating Effects of Shared Identity,
Shared Context, and Spontaneous Communication. Organization
Science, 16, pp. 290-307
Levy, Paul.
(2001) The Nut Island Effect: When Good Teams Go Wrong, Harvard Business
Review, pp. 5-12 (full article)
Interesting example, Casey. Besides weekly calls, what else do you think could facilitate more communication and the formation of a shared identity? Do you think an internal database or intranet could be beneficial? What about a platform for spontaneous communication, like instant messenger? In terms of the Nut Island effect, do you feel that senior management has taken the team’s self-sufficiency for granted (Levy, 2001)? It seems that your team lacks the cohesiveness to make any poor decisions like the one we read about at Nut Island.
ReplyDeleteCourtney,
DeleteOur Northeast team actually does already have a shared document folder on a sharepoint website. Ideally, this would be a tool that could be used to form a shared identity, but the manager doesn't encourage the reps to use it. Instant messenger is a good idea, although as field sales representatives are running around from day to day they might not utilize the instant messenger as much as they would. I think the key to fostering this shared identity (in this case) would be the shaping of the team's culture by the manager (Hill, 1995). Some vice presidents within the company do a much better job at encouraging and enforcing collaboration between team members. This requires doing more than recommending collaboration; there must be systems in place that establish collaboration as a practice - such as the systems, like RIP calls, used in the Southeast.
Regarding the Nut Island Effect, you make a good point, the cohesiveness is not quite there. The situation doesn't fit the Nut Island Effect perfectly but the aspect that I was referring to was the significant investment made in the team without proper integration or support. There has been over a million dollars invested in our team but yet we don't have the support required to do the job effectively. Management is paying little attention to a major investment, much like the Nut Island situation (Levy, 2001).
Casey,
ReplyDeleteI know Courtney says that the lack of team prevents situations like Nut Island. However, with each person in charge of their own region, each person could possibly become their own Nut Island - doing what it takes to get by without real accountability for how that happens. I think your analysis is spot on - reporting to the regional VP would create more ownership for the region you work in and would help build a trust network with others in the region and increase collaboration.
Brenda
Interesting. Does "John" think this model is working, or does he know that none of the SPSers are happy with the situation? Seems like aligning with your region, but having the other SPSers available for some collaboration, questions, etc., might be a good structure.
ReplyDelete