Leadership and management
Why matrix organisations have to be high-performing ones
“There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” Morpheus – The Matrix – 1999
When working with organisations to achieve high performance, my colleagues and I at edoMidas encounter two variations on the situation outlined in the quotation above. Some of our clients need knowledge of “the path” – the concept that your organisation should play to your people’s strengths. Then we can show them how to “walk the path.” Other clients know the path and we help them to walk it.
A good example of the latter is Matrix organisations. The potential benefits of this path are generally well known:
- Companies make best use of their time by increased utilisation of person-hours that reduces downtime and non-productive effort and saves labour costs.
- The sharing of best practice, knowledge & skills makes for higher quality products and services and projects are more profitable as the cost of re-work falls.
By removing the inflexibility of traditional departmental “silos” and replacing them with cross-functional teams, a matrix organisation can help you to become more agile, creative and closer to your customers.
Sounds great doesn’t it? Who wouldn’t want to walk this path? Well, there are a few bumps along this road that you may need to step over and around when:
- Your staff experience conflicting priorities from the multiple projects they work on
- Difficulties in scheduling work results in cost over-runs
- Specialists may disagree about which is the most important aspect of any project (theirs!)
- Disappointment and cynicism could result as your great new way of working proves a lot worse than the old one.
So to fulfil their promise, Matrix organisations need to make the following things happen:
- Leaders take responsibility and give clear direction from the top that this is “the way things are done around here” (and why)
- Project managers and team leaders ensure early engagement with stakeholders to agree priorities and enable successful collaboration
- Everyone understands the shared purpose of the matrix and promotes the shared values of teamwork, cooperation, transparency and respect
- Managers and leaders know how to handle conflict and deal with it constructively at the right time
- Nothing is set in stone – anyone and everyone should look for ways of doing things better.
All of this takes strong leadership communication and highly capable management practise. At edoMidas, we work with two frameworks to achieve this, one for leaders (Dynamic Leadership) and another for people managers (5 A’s of High Performance). Both are based on extensive research into the highest performing leaders and managers in organisations, drawing out the key factors that set them apart from the average.
If this is the path you’d like to take, we’ll show you how to walk it.