Collaboration In A Matrix Environment

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Most organizations today have some kind of matrix structure in place, rather than the traditional hard silos of the past. The challenge in a matrix environment is getting people to be accountable and work effectively outside of their function or division.

The problem fundamentally is one of ownership. Not knowing who owns what, whom one really reports to and what authority one really has often becomes an excuse for not taking responsibility for producing results.

People avoid accountability for the end goal of improving bottom-line profits by claiming conflicting priorities or lack of cooperation as the cause. “They” (meaning the other departments) “won’t come to our meetings to help us,” is the chronic complaint often accompanying a throwing up of collective hands.

But one myth that must be unwound in the matrix environment is that you can only affect things over which you have authority.

We hear this all the time from managers who tell us they can’t generate true alignment, effective communication and a strong sense of team with stakeholders who don’t report to them or in a group over which they have no authority.

But to be successful in a matrix environment, managers first have to abandon that paradigm and engage in a more empowering perspective — that everything is a function of influence, partnership and alignment of shared goals.

In reality, people have the capacity and the desire to be focused on, loyal to and aligned with visions, commitments and objectives they believe in, having nothing to do with structure. In the end, staff loyalty and passion can be driven by their relationship to a goal.

What are you doing to create teamwork in your matrix environment? I would love to hear your comments.

Why Agenda Driven Meetings Don’t Work

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A key principle of generating total alignment and engagement is ensuring that you are always working backward from a deliberate, desired future — rather than merely extrapolating or perpetrating business as usual. When it comes to meetings — which consume enormous amounts of most managers’ time — this principle can make the difference between meetings that make a big impact, and those that waste valuable time.

To begin with, most meetings are designed backwards. The agenda planning starts with the questions:
How much time do we have? and What do people think we should talk about?

The reason we say these meetings are designed backwards is because the time allocated for the meeting should be determined instead by answers to the more useful questions:

  • What do we want to accomplish?
  • What do we want people to leave the meeting with?
  • What could we do during the meeting to achieve the desired objectives?

The answers to these questions will determine whether the meeting is worth having, who should attend, what should be covered and how much time it should take.

Once the purpose and agenda are agreed upon, and the meeting commences, the agenda should also be managed to produce the agreed outcomes, rather than having success determined by whether the planned schedule was adhered to. We have repeatedly seen meaningful, productive conversations interrupted by a timekeeper who thought his or her job was to play the role of the agenda police.

This orientation around time rather than outcomes means discussions that may have served their purpose might be extended unnecessarily, while other conversations that are yielding unexpected fruits might be shut down once the time allocated to them has been exceeded.