Ok – so your normal day at the office involves working on five separate projects, which are controlled by five different people, who have five different views on what is achievable by “EOP” Friday. This is either a chance to spend all day doing nothing whilst looking good…
“Sorry, your project is just not as business critical as the others I’m involved in at the moment; I’ll do my best to get it completed and I’ll try to review the documentation sometime on Saturday evening after my fathers funeral.”
…or a chance to improve your credentials by getting lots of sexy projects onto your CV – however you will be reviewing the documentation by yourself all weekend because the laws of business seem to dictate that all the deadlines you’re involved with have to be concurrent.
And whilst trying to satisfy these five demanding task masters your line manager is busy scheduling some time with you to discuss your performance and development plan – like they have the first idea about what you have been doing or how well you’ve been doing it!
It doesn’t have to be like this!
Business reality dictates that cross functional teams and projects are here to stay and that to be effective as an organization we need to engage in “matrix management”. Our problem is that we dream of working in a nirvana in which we have one manager who understands our strengths and weaknesses and assigns us to interesting projects which we love working on and which have reasonable clients and deadlines.
WAKE UP!!!! The real world is just not like this – we have many bosses and clients all of whom have expectations of us and place demands on our time. What we have to work out is how we structure our lives so that we can meet their expectations and deadlines without losing our sanity.
So, what is the secret? Is it matrix management?
Let’s be clear about one thing, matrix management is here – our choice is whether we do it well or badly. For matrix management to work the organization needs a clear sense of goals, objectives and accountabilities as well as being designed around processes rather than functions. This helps to defend the matrix against organizational politics – the death of many a great idea! It is not only entirely possible for a person to work productively on more than one project at a time, it is healthy. Variety within work is important not just to ensure that our interest is engaged but also for our self esteem – the chance of all our projects going “belly up” at the same time is slim!
It essence, matrix management gives the organization:
· People whose loyalty is to the whole, rather than individuals whose loyalty is to their silo;
· Clarity of resource planning;
· Clarity of project performance;
· A focus to each project;
· Elimination of duplication; and
· A flattened hierarchy
But, however well the organization is designed and however well we are managed we will still lose our sanity if we don’t work in a structured and planned way…