Unaware of this method.
Future-proofing the organization the ‘helix’ way
The German auto supplier ZF Friedrichshafen is reinventing a key division. Its head of transformation explains how separating the company’s people leadership from its product lines improves both.
By Kirsten Weerda, McKinsey
The German auto supplier ZF Friedrichshafen is reinventing a key division. Its head of transformation explains how separating the company’s people leadership from its product lines improves both.
Balancing flexibility and stability is the goal of any organizational structure. In fast-changing industries, flexibility supports the mastery of technological shifts while stability provides the much-needed efficiency to scale them up. Yet, too much flexibility breeds inefficiency or even disorder. And too much stability invites inertia and bureaucracy. Locating the sweet spot is elusive. Julian Fieres and his team are trying to find it—and bring the organization along with them.
Fieres, the head of transformation, strategy, and sustainability at ZF Friedrichshafen AG (ZF), Electrified Powertrain Technology division, is in the thick of a transformation involving two newly merged business units that together account for 30,000 employees and $10 billion in annual sales. Rather than combine the divisions in the usual way, however, ZF shook up the management hierarchy by separating people-leadership responsibilities from the task of running the product lines that form the traditional heart of the division. The result is a “helix” model featuring two parallel lines of accountability—a “dynamic axis” for the product lines themselves and a “stable axis” for the people, capabilities, and functional domains that support them. As with other agile organization models, the helix allows people and other resources to be shifted much more flexibly across product lines, helping ZF to compete in the fast-evolving landscape of e-mobility. ... "
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