Does your matrix structure need a “Matrix Guardian?” A “Matrix Guardian,” also known as a “Matrix Manager,” is an individual whose job it is to see to it that the matrix structure is functioning effectively and efficiently, and that the principles of matrix management are being applied correctly and fairly. The Matrix Guardian ensures that “good hygiene” is being practiced throughout the matrix structure.

Some of the key functions of the Matrix Guardian are to:

• Serve as a technical resource to staff, managers, and executives on matrix management practices and issues
• Conduct periodic inspections to ensure that key matrix success factors such as role clarity, process clarity, are in a state of continuous improvement
• Function as an ombudsman or arbiter in working through a variety of emerging issues such as chronic staff overwork/underwork or boundary disputes, for example
• Provide a long-range strategic perspective on the structure and assist in its evolution over time

Consider designating a Matrix Guardian under these circumstances:

• During matrix management’s early implementation or revitalization
• When there are challenges of intense internal politics or significant resource skirmishes
• When there are persistent concerns related to trust and fairness
• When you want to accelerate and fortify institutionalization of matrix management in a larger organization

How do you staff the Matrix Guardian position successfully? Ideally, the position should be staffed by someone who is thoroughly trained and experienced in matrix management and who is regarded as fair and approachable. The Matrix Guardian should be both mature and discreet—a person with whom people at all levels can converse candidly without fear of hearing their words echoing in the hallway or being communicated to “the boss” when confidential or low-profile problem-solving was the primary objective of the conversation.

One of my first matrix management consulting assignments was that of rehabilitating and re-strengthening a matrix manager in whom R&D personnel had lost trust. Up until the turning point when trust soured, the individual had been very effective in playing the role of Matrix Guardian. The rehabilitation project was a success. This assignment reinforced in my mind the valuable role that a Matrix Guardian can play—when the role is played effectively and when trust is building rather than eroding.

For help with your matrix, please email me at info@strategicfutures.com or call 703/836-8383.

Why are more organizations choosing matrix management? The answer that we are hearing most frequently relates to scalability. Often, the objective is to add new locations that are functioning as intact horizontal matrix teams. Sometimes the objective is to be able to scale up and add new projects.

These organizations want to be able to expand their operations without having to do a new restructuring every time that they increase the number of locations, number of projects, or other indices of growth. 

The good news about matrix management is that it allows such modifications without having to alter the structure or add considerable overhead as part of the expansion process. Most of the time, new locations or new programs can be added without any adjustments to the vertical organization.

As an organization moves to matrix management—prior to an expansion of locations, projects, or other dimensions—employees cannot reasonably be expected to understand immediately the need for the structural shift.  Until expansion has actually occurred, they may instead perceive the move to matrix management as an addition to overhead or superstructure. It is important to explain to employees the benefits sought from the move to matrix management and to offer this explanation plainly and repeatedly. Don’t assume that because you understand the reasoning for the structural change that anyone else will.

Also, don’t assume that explaining it once or twice will do the trick. It won’t.  Many employees will adopt the Missouri “Show Me” attitude and won’t understand the motives behind the move to matrix management until real expansion has actually been executed.  Thereafter, the reason for the change will have been clear to them all along! 

In summary, a key advantage of the matrix structure is that you are able to “snap on” a new horizontal team or any number of teams; up to a point; train up the team members; and then go “live” immediately. 

More and more, scalability is what our clients are seeking when turning to the matrix structure.  While there are other significant benefits of the matrix structure such as maximizing resource utilization, solving complex problems, achieving a flatter organization, and achieving cross-functional synergy, the advantage of scalability is driving many decisionmakers to opt for matrix management.

If you need consulting or training help with your transition to matrix management, please call me, 703/836-8383 or email me at info@strategicfutures.com.

What once was an External Opportunity may no longer be so because of reduced consumer spending patterns or otherwise reduced demand. Businesses that do well in poor economic situations correctly identify opportunities. These opportunities may be more counter-intuitive than in rosier times. For example, take a look at the perceived needs of different market segments. These “needs” might be great chocolate, cosmetics, even some health care products. In tough times, needs often translate into products and services that make consumers feel better. You need to examine opportunities with precision. On one hand, an opportunity may be “basic”. On the other hand, it may seem extravagant. To many women, chocolate is a basic. To many men, it is an extravagance.

One or more of your competitors may now be an External Threat because they have adopted a price leadership strategy whereby they are undercutting your prices in the marketplace. The correct response in your new strategic plan may not be to match their low prices. Instead, you might want to emphasize the value of your products and services (market differentiation) or choose a niche strategy such as a hyper-focus on products or services for a particular market segment. As an example, a cosmetics product that has been targeted to a larger audience may be re-focused to a niche such as women over 50 who are active and have a strong focus on health. The product differentiation in this case could be redefined to zero in on the anti-aging benefits AND the product’s wearability and longevity during exercise.

Having established these strategies based on External Opportunities and Threats, you then need to assess your Internal Strengths and Internal Weaknesses so that you are able to respond to the new horizon of Opportunities and Threats that are presented by the current economic environment. Continuing with the cosmetics example: Does your marketing, advertising and product branding/packaging need to be re-tooled to emphasize the new focus on the active, health-conscious woman over 50?

The key to effective strategic planning in any economic environment is to regularly review your plan to make certain that it continues to work for your organization.

If you need help with your Strategic Plan, please contact us at info@strategicfutures.com. We have been around long enough (almost two decades) to have successfully facilitated strategic plans when the economic outlook was not so rosy. We have a successful track record working with businesses, nonprofit, association and public sector clients.

In recent months, we have had multiple opportunities to assist clients with the design of key jobs in their matrix organizations. These clients have included an energy engineering consulting enterprise, a medical device R&D operation, as well as a confidential client. These assignments have allowed us to work collegially with clients in spelling out a number of roles, their responsibilities and key relationships.

As I have written in articles, blogs, and the book, the interface player in the matrix is a make-or-break player. All too often, this mid-level position is given short shrift and that is surely an avoidable mistake.  Your matrix organization will not work if the unique mix of vertical and horizontal responsibilities is not competently and confidently exercised by these key individuals located at the interfaces of the matrix structure. Making plain what they are to do, how they are to do it, and with whom they need to consult is central to success. Patterns and limits of decision-making are also critical to this examination. We have been working with our clients to ensure that there is adequate specificity for these and other roles. C-level executives participate in these sessions and have told us that they are convinced that the investment of time in achieving this clarity is well worth the time and effort.

As a small business, we are able to move in an agile way to ensure that these key roles and relationships are defined in hours and days rather than weeks and months. We believe that the longer things get dragged out and immersed in unusable and unhelpful levels of detail, the murkier things can become. At the risk of sounding polemical, matrix organization job design should not involve a lot of lengthy, go-nowhere “consulting foreplay.” We believe that the better way is to draw together client principals for purposes of designing the job, keyboarding the elements of the role directly during a work session, with the results projected on screen at the front of the room. In this way, participants in the process have an opportunity to seek clarification, express objections, or otherwise jump into the discussion to ensure that competence and confidence are not just enabled, but ensured. That’s what we have been doing as of late.  Clients are gratified by the results and, from a consulting viewpoint, it puts us in a stronger position to ensure that subsequent training and coaching efforts will be sure-footed.

These efforts also help spell out the types and uses of both formal and informal, persuasive authority in the organization in a way that helps build a smooth, confident operation on a day-to-day practical level, rather than a too-cute-by-half theoretical level.  There’s a balance here to ensure that there is sufficient clarity to hit the road running but enough degrees of freedom to allow the job incumbent to grow the role organically over time. 

Bottom line? Don’t go “live” with your matrix organization unless you have committed to clarifying roles and relationships in adequate detail.

Matrix management-related developments are monitored closely here at Strategic Futures. One good source of information is Google Alerts, a resource one can access and subscribe to on www.google.com. Google Alert–Matrix Management is increasingly displaying job vacancies where the applicant is expected to have experience managing or working in a matrix environment.

Indeed, we can’t help but observe that more and more companies are moving to matrix management. There are significant employment and promotional opportunities available to those who can represent fairly that they are ready, willing, and able to work in a matrix structure.

A jobseeker or someone looking for career advancement may have the requisite technical skills for a job vacancy but may lament that s/he doesn’t possess extensive matrix management experience–or perhaps none at all. What to do?

First, let’s consider that you may well have relevant experience and not know that you do. Have you worked on a cross-functional team where you were collaborating with people drawn from disciplines other than your own? This may have been in pursuit of a specific goal, performance of a specific project, or the satisfaction of a particular customer’s requirements. If so, you are part of the way there.  Have you worked successfully on multiple projects at once?  If so, this is something to emphasize!

Cross-functional collaboration is at the heart of any well-designed and managed matrix organization. Seeking out the productivity- and profit-building synergies that are expected from such collaboration is the strategic companion to the matrix structure. If you are able to talk about your contributions to results achieved from such cross-functional effort, you already have your foot in the door.

On the other hand and as you might expect, there’s more to it than that. When multiple cross-functional teams pursue shared objectives using shared resources, things get a bit more complicated and your ability to work through and with these complications is what the employer is seeking. There are specific roles that are played by participants in the matrix structure. There are also rules and tools that you need to know.

One way to get over this employment screening hurdle is to indicate that you have worked on cross-functional teams (if you have) and/or on multiple projects at once, and also to indicate that you have familiarized yourself with the structure and dynamics of a matrix organization by reading pertinent literature. You might want to order one or two of our booklets, namely Life in the Matrix and also Matrix Stations. Better yet, you may want to order my book, Matrix Management Success: Method Not Magic. Chances are if you read the booklets and/or the book as well as reviewing the articles in our Library such as Matrix Management: Method, Not Magic and our matrix management blogs, you’ll know as much as the person who is reviewing your resume and interviewing you. Indeed, if you read the book, odds are you’ll be more knowledgeable about matrix management than the person who is scrutinizing your application for employment.

Good luck in your quest!

Designing a matrix management structure is not a “one size fits all” proposition.  The key issues that emerge when moving to a matrix structure surround a thirst for clarity at every level of the organization. Employees want to know: “What am I supposed to do differently?”; “How does an arrangement where I report to more than one boss actually work?” Leadership wants to know what it can do to usher the new structure into place – with minimal resistance and maximum speed and success. There are roles, rules and tools that make a matrix structure work successfully. These need to be designed systematically and with all due diligence if matrix management success is to be achieved.

Strategic Futures helps clients in the formative stages of matrix management by framing the 18 key decisions that need to be made, emphatically steering the client away from known perils – towards successful, proven practices.

Here’s the thing: These 18 formative decisions are largely invisible to organizations setting out on the matrix management journey. The good news is that key decisions are known to Strategic Futures because of our work with dozens and dozens of clients in a full spectrum of industries over many years. Explicit and conscious decision-making concerning these key issues saves our clients time, money, and frustration in very significant ways. No amount of recasting matrix management as “the new matrix” or “the blended matrix” or other such new-and-improved spins will exempt you from making these critical decisions. 

There’s more good news: Decision outputs can then be imported into future briefings and training for staff that builds employee understanding and confidence in accomplishing great things using an agile matrix structure that makes the highest-and-best use of all available talent.  You don’t want to be in a position of telling management and staff that “we’ll get back to you on that,” or “we hadn’t thought about that, we’ll have to think about this.”

No one has all the answers all of the time, but a failure to think ahead should be an episodic event, rather than a chronic condition.

That’s where we come in.

Recently, I was asked to review the strategic plan of a professional association. The plan had evolved over many years: With each iteration, goals and objectives were added such that the plan had become a detailed encyclopedia of all of the activities that were supposed to be performed by the organization’s staff.

There were two major problems with the plan: First, some of the activities included in the plan were not being performed; in other words, these activities were not being taken seriously, thereby detracting from the plan’s credibility.  In a nutshell, staff were accountable for the pursuit of some objectives contained in the plan, but not all.  But which ones? The plan had lost its value as a navigational tool – as a device for tracking progress and correcting the organization’s course. 

The second problem with the plan was that the organization was insufficiently staffed to implement it, and not by a little, but by a lot! This resulted in cynicism concerning the plan as well as no small amount of staff fatigue.

Strategic planning is a process of making decisions about priorities and then setting forth serious operational plans which permit the attainment of major goals. Strategic plans should be aggressive. They should provide “stretch.” However, “stretch” should not take things to the breaking point, because, to be brief, things can and will break if stretched too far.

In making decisions about priorities, it is inevitable that a quality strategic plan will entail making decisions about what not to do, whether this means deferring a priority until a later time, or just swallowing hard and discarding one initiative in favor of another which promises greater pay-off or “goodness of fit” with where the organization wants to go.

To quote Nancy Reagan, sometimes it’s “Just Say No.” Good strategic planning helps an organization make these choices with all due diligence.

If you need help, contact us about our Strategic Futures Strategic Planning Facilitation services.

Mentoring programs are morale-builders. They replenish energy among those who are expected to be more productive tomorrow than they were yesterday. Mentoring’s considerable contributions to morale and energy are an investment in tomorrow and an investment in today.

As an example, a forward-looking city government in Southern California, with which we have had the privilege of working as mentoring training consultants, has leveraged its mentoring program to build a strong esprit de corps throughout its workforce. The commitment of staff to bettering themselves spills over into the important work that they do everyday.

A recent study published by the Harvard Business Review (January-February 2010 issue, "What Really Motivates Workers" by Teresa M. Amabile) reports that an important ingredient, perhaps the most important ingredient in employee satisfaction is having a sense of making progress in the work that the employee is doing.  At Strategic Futures, we believe that this principle applies not only to the work that the employee does for the organization, but also the work that the employee does on and for himself or herself.

Mentoring is as important, perhaps more important, in economically difficult times as it is during times of prosperity. It’s neither a secret nor inappropriate that employees who leverage your organization’s mentoring program and seek out mentors are committed to cultivating their careers. Naturally, it’s important for mentors to make plain that extraordinary efforts to develop oneself are not a guarantee that promotion will follow. Expectations must be set judiciously. The bottom line is that employees who make an investment of time and effort in bettering themselves and their skills are likely to increase the probability of promotion or other rewards, but there is no guarantee.

That said, career mobility in today’s flattened organizations is not what it once was. Promotions and rewards in budget-constricted organizations can be few and far between. Indeed, sustaining one’s gainful employment at a status quo level is a challenge in many places.

However, these difficult times can be viewed by employees as an opportunity to “pre-position” themselves for future career gains. Once the protégé or mentee, has grasped today’s economic realities, s/he can gain motivation from the fact that they are gearing themselves up for opportunities that will eventually emerge. A large cadre of mentees who share this optimistic view and who continue to improve themselves affords vital positive energy to the enterprises that are strapped by current economic challenges.

When you are considering the possibilities for high-return HR investments, give mentoring programs a close look.

When it comes to designing and implementing a fully successful matrix organization, the old adage of “in for a dime, in for a dollar” comes to mind. Changes in organizational structure are not to be taken lightly.  Structural changes have enormous consequences for organizations and the people who labor in them. Everyone has the same question, “what am I supposed to do differently?” Answering this question in a definitive way that mines the considerable benefits of matrix management – and builds both competence and confidence –  takes time and deliberate effort. 

Implementation of structural change cannot nor need not take forever.  Indeed, the more systematic your approach to making these changes, the better off you will be. Progress can be and should be rapid. As our articles, Matrix Management: Method, Not Magic and Five Not-So-Easy Pieces of Matrix Management explain in more detail, effective matrix management requires planning, clarification of roles, and supportive training for standing up the matrix organization and occasionally refreshing employees at all levels as to roles, rules, tools, and the winning behaviors required for success.

A “launch-and-abandon” approach to designing, implementing or even refining your matrix organization is a formula for disappointment. Planning, persistence and follow-through are essential. By launch and abandon, we mean any major initiative announced by senior management and then left to its own devices with little or no additional investment or reinforcement.

These are hyper times. These are difficult times. Everywhere I look, I see employees striving harder than ever before to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Employees are energized, gravitating rapidly in synch with the direction that the organization seems to be moving – with the speed akin to moths moving towards a new light source.

Given the environment in which we find ourselves, it becomes all the more critical that our decisions and actions – particularly those related to structure – be sure-footed and first-time-final.  While some might argue that flavors of the month were affordable during those Halcyon days of greater resource abundance, there can be little doubt that such dalliances are no longer affordable today.

If you are in pursuit of the considerable benefits that matrix management can provide, e.g., better goal focus, customer focus, improved capacity utilization, synergy, organizational creativity and the like, then you are definitely “in for a dime, in for a dollar.”

If you are in the mood for a flavor of the month, matrix management is not the right flavor for you.

The Washington Post reported on February 13, 2010, that the “Toyota Way” was derailed in part because the company had thinned its ranks of expert mentors. The article quoted Susan Helper, a professor of economics at Case Western University in Cleveland, as follows: “So much of what made the company work well was that each manager was personally trained by a mentor who himself had long experience with the company.  When the fast expansion came, Toyota was very short of senior managers who were ready to become mentors.”

Whether you are dealing with explosive growth, constricted staffing, or simply the changing of the guard as a new generation replenishes the ranks, the Toyota story is instructive: Mentoring is not an HR frill to be dismissed lightly. Indeed, as the Toyota example demonstrates, sufficient high-quality mentoring is the make-or-break difference in ensuring continuity of quality and productivity as well as pivotal values and norms. Those who have brought success to an enterprise can and should pass the torch to those who will bring future success after the mentors have moved on. Effective mentoring is the passing of this torch of success–a torch that is not passed by accident or raw luck.

It takes several years to ramp up a quality mentoring program with an adequate stable of capable mentors. This cannot be done overnight. No mentoring “miracle-grow” exists. Fancy electronics won’t get it done either.

Mentoring is a long-term investment intended to yield long-term benefits and as such, it conflicts with day-to-day operating imperatives. Long-range initiatives are trumped regularly by the emergencies of the day. Those of us in the training business often hear “there is no good time for training.” This logic suggests that there is no good time for mentoring either. That said, ask Toyota if there is a good time for failing.

Once your mentoring program has developed momentum, it is essential that it be maintained adequately. This means ensuring that new mentors are cultivated and that legacy mentors are refreshed periodically. In addition, once target mentor-mentee ratios have been established for the workforce, an enterprise must ensure that these ratios are maintained properly.

We don’t know if quantitative and qualitative indicators of mentoring were Balanced Scorecard dashboard items at Toyota, but we surmise that Toyota now wishes that it had paid more attention to the maintenance of a mentoring program that was once the envy of its industry. “Short-Term Bottom-Line Fast Buck Freddy” companies don’t and won’t make the long-term investment that quality mentoring requires, but “Built to Last” companies will.

To ignore mentoring is to ignore the long-term interests of your stakeholders. Today’s choices surrounding mentoring are your strategic future. The strategic future is now.