Getting matrix organisations right

I love matrix organisations. I love seeing them done well and I take secret pleasure at seeing a group of intelligent people in an organisation occasionally tie themselves in knots with them.

The secrets to getting them right are pretty basic.

Firstly don’t use a matrix structure unless you need to. A more traditional command and control hierarchy will quite happily run many operations in a business. The level of fluidity in the day to day work of team members is the main differentiator between hierarchical and matrix. You can build the pyramids with command and control (I have 7.5 million tonnes of evidence if you care to go to Cairo with me) but you can’t juggle myriads of projects effectively in the same way.

Okay choose well – that was a pretty easy point to mention right?

The rest of the key points are about role clarity. It’s where you get a mixture of roles that conflict will tend to occur. This is maybe best explained with an example.

Resource managers are meant to ‘keep a roof over the heads’ of the staff they look after – keep them fed, happy, paid and maybe even developed if we’re feeling ambitious.

Project managers are put in place to direct a unique process that will only be carried out once. They draw on resources from different resource groups to carry out tasks to get the project done.

Easy isn’t it? Well actually a common mistake organisations make is in trying to ask people to be other resource and project managers. With the best will in the world it is a very tricky compromise. As a resource manager, the role is to help project managers put together their teams and achieve their objectives. As a project manager, the objectives of the resource manager’s own project may conflict completely with other projects. A key resource may be needed to prevent a crisis in another project but not freed up because the combined project/resource manager is watching their own back. This ‘selfish’ behaviour is why you need to avoid resource managers being project managers if you can possibly avoid it.

Now I’m a big boy and know you can’t always do this. My world is about getting results in tricky situations – not living with the ideal. So when you are forced to deal with individuals fulfilling the combined project and resource management roles, you may need to oversee the resource decision making in the affected group – possibly appointing someone else to do the resource allocation for the duration of the role conflict.

© Copyright 2005 Richard A D Jones

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Consistency in leadership – say how you intend to work and stick to it

People are cynical animals. More so perhaps in Europe than in the United States. When someone starts in a new role, they will not just take what they are told about fresh starts, new ways or working or anything at face value. They probably don’t believe it’s going to happen and wait to pounce on the first outward sign that the person involved is not actually doing as they said they will do.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to say what you will do and stick to it. Pretty soon people will understand that maybe this time it is different and join you. However, this slow victory can be shattered in an instant with a bad judgement and behaviour in the ‘I told you so’ category.

Say what you’re going to do and stick to it!

If ever you really have to change then tell your teams what you are doing, why you have to break the ‘promises’ you made and how you will revert to the correct way of working immediately the situation is over. You might get away with most of your credibility intact – but I can’t promise.

© Copyright 2005 Richard A D Jones

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An evening with Jack Welch (and 1000 others)

I was priveleged (along an intimate group of 1000 others) to hear Jack Welch talk about his career at GE. Despite criticisms of his job cutting programmes, he is someone I admire immensely for his intellect, focus on developing people and ability to cut through crap and business jargon to get to the heart of issues fast.

Some of his simple principles from the night are:

Reward the best 20%, get the next 70% to aspire to be the best and let the bottom 10% know that is where they are. His view is the bottom 10% drift off to do other things - where perhaps they will be more successful. This fits in with his view that you should be open and candid with people.

Fight bureaucracy. Keep reducing the number of layers. Jack said it was a big problem when he started in GE and it was still a problem when he left.

Sales people. Their job is to make their customers more productive. If they can do that it will develop stickiness.

If you have an important initiative, put your best person on it. If you choose some person close to retirement who has been floating around the company then your people are not going to believe you are serious about what you are doing.

People are your most important asset. He asked how many HR people have an equal seat at the board table as the Finance Director. Few hands went up. Then he asked if you went to a football team - who would you rather talk to - the finance person or the person picking the team. It's pretty eye opening when you think of it like that isn't it!

PS You can get his new book Winning at Amazon.co.uk. His autobiographical book Jack is probably the best business book about a person I have read. (Not affiliate links)

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