The Division Model part III - Ability

In creating a team, you want to create a certain amount of diversity. With the divisions, most of the diversity will be in the form of the member’s personalities. There will be a little difference in people’s ability to do tasks but mainly you want them all to have the same skills. In this, you want each member to have to tools to do any job the division is assigned to.

The first step in this is to train the members fully in their jobs. Often, when training isn’t mandatory to do a certain job, it will only be given based on the necessities of the moment. Once everyone is on equal footing on paper, you want to make sure that, at least within one division, everyone performs equally. The design of your divisions plays a big role in this. A bit like the lines in hockey, you might want to put your strongest assets together. This will mean that if you have three divisions doing the same job, one will be better at it than the two others. It might seem weird but you assign the workload based on the weakest team. This will give you the flexibility necessary to react to unforeseen event.

Of course, if there is a huge discrepancy in skill between the divisions, there will be a problem as the higher groups will have too much idle time. This is something that should be evaluated based on cost and, of course, politics (managers don’t like seeing idle employees).

On another note, there are the five Rs used to enhance workers abilities..

• Resupply: Most people think that everyone doing the same job should use the same tools. The fact is that people are not the same, something that also holds true for divisions. You must find out if this particular group has the tools that they can use for their job, to make them perform as well as possible. This goes for software, hardware, support, etc.
• Retrain: Usually, this will be very similar to the resupply point except that it focuses on the members’ knowledge
• Refitting: This is much harder for divisions as they are made based on the work descriptions. Normally, refitting will need to be done in rare conditions. In this case, if it has to happen, the point would be to look at the team members themselves and not just only the division.
• Reassign and release: These two would again be based on the individual since, because of the nature of the divisions, where they are tied to the job description, they cannot possibly be reassigned or released.