Speed-to-market is critically important in this business. So, each product category team has been delegated the authority to determine whether to use in-house or third party laboratories to develop and test new products.

The design of the vertical organization is essentially the design of roles, power dynamics, decision rights, and management and reward systems to create the right mix of authority, accountability, and responsibility not just in individuals, but also in whole layers of leadership.

The terms authority, accountability, and responsibility are key words in the vertical organization, but they are often used interchangeably.

how to create a classification of leadership work, with each layer inclusive of the work below but not duplicating it.

“Assistant” and “senior” levels are added to promote people, pay them more, or give them supervisory experience. This is where outmoded human resource systems actually encourage hierarchy in the negative sense of the word.

Yet, those same direct reports often claim that they are disempowered. And, it is quite rational for them not to act. They do not see any reward or incentive to self-organize with peers to initiate the work required to solve systemic issues—and certainly not to try to do so alone. Further, those that see issues often don’t have the information or t

We often hear from senior leaders that they are exasperated by the passivity of their direct reports—not in the reports’ individual roles as managers of their respective teams, but as a collective group.

definition of hierarchy based on status. In fact, we will see that when we start to look at how work at the top of the organization is measured by how well it empowers the base of the organization, we can build the backbone of an organization that can be agile and adaptive as well as coordinated and connected.

Steve Drotter pointed out that in a well-designed hierarchy of leadership, each leader does not just do a bigger version of the work of the leader below. Rather, at each layer there should be a change in time horizon, time allocation, and complexity of problems to solve (Drotter, 2011).