Aaron De Smet, Sarah Kleinman, Kirsten Weerda [Archive.org URL]

The secret of the helix lies in disaggregating the traditional management hierarchy into two separate, parallel lines of accountability—roughly equal in power and authority, but fundamentally different.

One of the two lines helps develop people and capabilities, sets standards for how work is done, and drives functional excellence; the other focuses those people and capabilities on the priorities for the business (including overseeing their day-to-day work), creates value, and helps deliver a full and satisfying customer experience.

By disaggregating the hierarchy and ensuring that for any given set of leadership responsibilities only one person is accountable, we can stop forcing employees to answer to multiple “bosses” who think it is within their purview to perform the same set of leadership functions such as hiring and firing, job assignments, promotions, evaluations, and incentives. All this helps to preserve unity of command, reduce tension, increase speed and flexibility, and more effectively confront the challenges the matrix was meant to address in the first place.

In our experience, there are two principal benefits of adopting a helix design (besides greater clarity and simplicity for the employee, which unlocks their productivity and performance). First, it helps those companies that have already achieved agility at the team level make agility a reality across the whole enterprise, by making resource allocation more dynamic. Second, it alleviates tensions between centralized functions and decentralized business units, allowing entrepreneurship and flexible reactions in different business units without losing the positive scale effects of a global function.

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