Okay, as part of our discussion on team structure, remember we're gonna
talk about both formal team structures and informal team structures.
With respect to formal team structures, we're gonna talk about four dimensions.
The first one is what we call departmentation.
The concept is actually pretty simple.
It's how we group jobs and activities within the team.
So as the leader of your team,
you often have a choice about how you're going to group different rolls,
different formal jobs, different activities within the team.
So for example, will team members be organized by function, geography, product,
customer segment.
Really if you want to think about it.
What is the organizational chart of your team?
So the really important discussion that you have to make, for a number of years I
worked in consulting and the image that you see here was one of the most common
structures that we used in consulting teams and
some of the teams will be bigger than this, but you can get the basic idea.
We have a team leader.
We have lots of team members, but then we would group different parts of the work.
Such that, that there's a modular leader who's
leading a specific module of the broader consulting project.
There's another module leader who's handling another component
of the overall consulting project.
And each one of those module leaders might have a few team members
who are working with them in these sub groups.
But ultimately, when you start to make decisions about those module leaders and
in particular what are the modules,
you have to make some really important decisions.
Are you going to have those people be generalists or
are you going to have those groups of work be, for example, specialists?
So a generalist might be the person is going to focus on a particular region for
a company, but it's going to cut across functions or cut across lines of business.
Or you might focus on a specialist approach which is, this module leader,
or that module of work is really gonna be focused on a particular function,
marketing for example.
Or a particular product and really be a specialist in that.
These grouping decisions, of how you're gonna group different aspects of the work
are called departmentation.
And that is a formal structure that you decide, you put in place for
your team around how you're gonna group the different activities, the different
jobs in the team, which will ultimately mean what roles people have in a team.
And you need to think carefully about these decisions.
I like to think in particular about the specialist versus generalist decision.
And the reason is because, a lot of our research on team structure has
lead to insights about just how important organizing or
structuring our team by specialist functions versus generalist
work domains is important for team performance and success.
And what we're learning in you can see this here in this graph.