THE IMPORTANCE OF PRIORITISING YOUR VERTICAL VS YOUR HORIZONTAL TEAM
I’m constantly training and coaching emerging team leaders who don’t understand that they are part of two teams rather than one. More often than not they fail to prioritise the team that they should, which is their horizontal team rather than their vertical team.
The vertical team is the team that you are responsible for and as such they are ‘below’ you on an organisational chart. To use a sporting analogy, you are the player/coach, and your team members are the players. The other team that you are part of that you may not think of as a team is your horizontal team- these are the team leaders or supervisors that are on the same level of authority as you are (see image below).
You all report to the same manager and as such he or she is the head coach, and all his or her direct reports (yourself and your fellow supervisors or team leaders) are part of this team described as the ‘horizontal team’ because you all sit on the same horizontal level on your organisational chart.
So, whether you realise it or not, in stepping up to this leadership role (and alongside other team leaders), you have now become part of another team which your manager and the wider business require you to see as a higher priority than the vertical team which has always been your focus as a team member. This means that your priorities will need to be altered, which may require you to make decisions in the interests of the other vertical teams (lead by your fellow team leaders) over your own team. These may not be popular decisions with your vertical team, but as the Priority Hierarchy model illustrates, the needs of the business are a higher priority above the needs of your immediate vertical team.
You may be fortunate enough to have a manager that has already articulated this concept of the horizontal team to you, even if he or she hasn’t used that actual phrase. If it hasn’t been communicated to you, especially the need for you to prioritise your horizontal over your vertical team, then you are about to embark on a journey which will require your mindset to shift, possibly significantly.
As an example of horizontal versus vertical teams, I was working with a manufacturing business that produced a plywood-type product that went through numerous process elements from lathing logs to create veneer, drying the veneer, gluing the veneer, pressing multiple glued sheets, and finally sawing the finished product.
Each process was led by a team leader with a specific vertical team. If the logs were of poor quality to begin with, the lathe team would still push all their product through to the kilns to be dried so as to maximise their ‘metres output’. Even though the drying team were receiving low quality veneer, they still dried the entire amount to maximise their ‘metres output’. The same thinking occurred at each stage with each vertical team focusing on their productivity outputs, until quality control eventually discarded the fully manufactured products that were sub-standard.
You can imagine how distressed the manager of the team leaders was that not only was the product being discarded, but so much time and effort had gone in at each stage despite each team leader knowing the outcome would be a waste. In this case, the team leaders were only focussed on their vertical team outputs and failed to see that they were part of a horizontal team (all of the process team leaders) headed up by the process manager. In this case they failed to think in terms of the bigger picture of their horizontal team, at significant cost to the business.
