Managing a horizontal revolution

When a company moves from a traditionally vertical organization to a more horizontal, flattened entity, human resources has the job of refocusing the troops - now called teams or work groups. Getting people to define and value their skills and competencies, instead of their titles and paychecks, is critical to the change process. In her consulting work with organizations, Zandy Leibowitz of Conceptual Systems Inc. often uses a circular model that establishes a link between where the company is headed and what kinds of competencies people need to develop to be part of it. One company using Leibowitz's model to move from functional silos into more focused team-based business processes is Lever Brothers. At Integra Financial Corp., communication among team members as well as customers is a recurring issue. To overcome the communication gap, Mary York helped initiate various reengineering processes through the company. One of the processes designed to help people break down the functional silos and begin to operate in a team-based format was a discussion session York calls the Camp David process.