Matrix Management

Matrix Management has been evolving for at least fifty years in the industrialized world. It is a system for responding to the new opportunities presented by breakthroughs being made in all branches of technology. The exploding powers of computation and the expansion and acceleration of information sharing are driving these breakthroughs. Everywhere in the world, people and societies are confronted with a new age that is in fact faster, more complex, and full of new questions. The older forms of management, such as bureaucracy, are increasingly unnecessary and inadequate for determining how to invest the organization’s resources in order to make the new opportunities a reality.

Matrix Management is still not well understood or well practiced. Its implementation is, in fact, a major organizational intervention. Successful implementation requires understanding and leadership from the highest levels of organizational governance.

Matrix Management: What It Is and Why Organizations Use It

Four Management Concerns

There are four concerns that must be served simultaneously if an organization is to stay focused, fast, and flexible:

Technical skills are required by the organization. These skills reside in people who must be hired, retained, and continuously developed.
Products and services must be designed, produced, delivered, supported, and improved.
There are customers to be found, understood, served and maintained.
There are different geographical sites and cultures within which the organization must operate.

Matrix Management is the system by which all four concerns are served and kept in balance.

Group Decision-Making

Matrix management is a team-based response to management concerns. It is for managers — teams of managers — not individual contributors or individualistic managers. It is, in behavior, a system of management meetings.

Each of the four concerns needs its own set of management teams made up of people with the technical/functional expertise and formal authority to provide the resources it needs. All four sets of management teams are actually in competition with each other for the organization’s limited resources. None of the four concerns can be ignored for long before the whole organization finds itself in serious trouble. So there must be forums/meetings where the members of these four sets of teams come together for decision making. To keep the organization
fast and flexible, many of these decision making forums have to be located low in the structure, close to the actual performance of work.

Resource Allocation: the Focus of Critical Thinking and Problem Solving in Matrix Management

Matrix Management is essentially a system for making sure that the right people are meeting with each other, at the right time, to make decisions about how the organization should use its resources. Making these resource decisions is the kind of analysis and problem solving that has always been the primary function of management. Keeping managers focused on this function is more important and difficult--increasing complexity, opportunity, and information overload present enormous distraction.

Use of Conflict: the Essence of Matrix Management

The point of using Matrix Management is to sustain all four concerns and to constantly maintain a balance between them. This means sustaining the conflict. Matrix Management acknowledges this conflict and creates the forums in which it can be used for the organization’s benefit.

In Matrix Management conflict is used, but the conflict never gets finally resolved. A unique set of values/rules and practices are necessary to make sure that the conflict is engaged with the intent to achieve a win/win, temporary solution.

What it Takes to Succeed in Matrix Management: Five Key Management Practices

Teamwork: Organizational Structure as Bonded Management Teams

Each management team must have a leader/decider and a group of members who are committed to the team’s/leader’s set of output expectations and priorities. Holding the entire set of output expectations as the accountability of every team member is unique to this system of management.

Typically, members “bite off a piece” of the leader’s objectives and consider themselves only responsible (and reward-worthy) for achieving that piece. As a consequence, every team member competes with all the others at budget time to get as big a piece of the team’s resources as possible, and to protect their budgets from “raids” by anyone else—including the leader. The conflict is usually covert, but very real and very win/lose in its effects.

In Matrix Management, by contrast, the team leaders forbid these covert, competitive practices. Leaders encourage all members of the team to be responsible to each other for delivering all the team’s outputs in alignment with the team’s priorities.

When team members understand the requirement for serving the team’s output expectations and priorities, they start paying attention to each other’s output performance. They provide each other with information, advice, and actual resources of budget, people, supplies, equipment and space.

In Matrix Management, the team members operate from the assumption that when the team’s priorities require it, they will reallocate their resources within the team. This requires the managers to be adaptive so that the organization can adapt to the threats and opportunities unforeseen in planning.

The organizational structure in Matrix Management is actually a pyramid of management teams. The leader of each team links his/her team to one or more management teams above it by attending as a member of those higher level teams. Each member of a middle-management team, links that team downward to one or more teams below. The “linking roles” become the channels through which resource needs are escalated upward when necessary, and through which all management decisions are passed down for implementation.

This chart shows a very simple illustration of this kind of management structure.

Because every member of a management team is committed to the whole set of team output expectations, within each team the members are also horizontally linked. They “own” each other’s output expectations and resources. In every meeting, they decide how to balance those expectations and resources.

The better each management team gets at managing its cross-functional relationships the sooner they begin making the larger organization around them more sensitive and skilled at cross-functional cooperation.

Output and Priority Statements (OPs): the Ability to Define Your Role for Others in Two Minutes

Every manager in Matrix Management quickly states the outputs he/she is expecting from the individual contributors who work with his/her part of the organization. Years of observation and research have found that this statement will have the following characteristics:

It is not about what the manager does; it is about the outputs that individual contributors deliver in their part of the organization.
It is a brief statement—no more than seven outputs.
It is comprehensive—the outputs represents all the resources the manager controls and influences.
It identifies the manager’s sense of the relative priority of these outputs; i.e., the outputs are weighted with points that add up to 100.
It can be, and frequently is, said from memory; it is easy to remember after it has been heard a few times.

In the rapid paced, conflicted environment of Matrix Management, these output and priority statements are an essential act of communication and vital to creating the bonds of mutual understanding and trust.

Work Preview Meetings—the Group Processes for Looking Ahead Instead of Backward

In Matrix Management, managers spend unavoidable (and necessary) time in meetings. It is extremely important that the meetings be well run, using procedures that keep the meeting focused on the management function: allocating the organization’s resources to make sure its outputs and priorities are achieved.

Members learn to define management issues as those related to allocation of resources. Resolving technical problems are the key tasks of Individual Contributors, not managers. (Sometimes, managers also play this Individual Contributor role.) But in their management role, their contribution is to make sure the right technical experts are focused on these technical problems and are able to solve them.

In Matrix Management, it is crucial that every manager use a dashboard of charts and graphs that are constantly updated to show whether expected team outputs in his/her part of the team’s work are being accomplished. When there is a gap between the expected and actual outputs, and the manager’s current allocation of resources is not adequate for closing the gap, the gap becomes an issue for escalation to the management team above. The manager needs to be able to communicate the scope, cause, and potential consequences of these issues clearly and quickly.

The heart of every management meeting is resolution of resource issues. Every management meeting should decisively answer the questions about how the team can better use its resources in the immediate future. It should be future focused—a Work Preview rather than a work review meeting.

Consultative Group Decision-Making and the Requirement to Disagree and Commit

Management meetings cannot waste precious time merely sharing information. Passive listening is a waste of the power and authority sitting in management meetings. The outcome of management meetings must be decisions—the near-term resolution of the resource issues and the conflicting demands being placed upon the team’s resources.

It is crucial for managers to learn the skills of Group Decision-Making so that the conflict becomes overt and is managed reasonably rather than covertly through political power play and manipulation.

The most efficient (and effective) decision-making process is Consultative Group Decision-Making. Members offer their consultation to one person, usually the leader, who decides for the team. Thorough discussion of the issues presented by the members assures understanding of the problem and the recommended solution. Alternatives are explored. Finally, the decider states the decision (which all should understand as the team’s decision) and tests for the members understanding and commitment.

Consultative Decision-Making cannot work unless members understand the principle of disagree and commit. “Commitment” is not agreement or emotional enthusiasm. Commitment is two behaviors. Members:

Understand and can explain the decision;
Bring the resources under their control and influence into immediate compliance.

As a member of the management team, members are committed ahead of time to implement team decisions. They commit whether or not they agree to the decision; i.e., they disagree and commit.

Self-Management Systems for Individual Contributors as They Perform Their Key Tasks; i.e., Clear Output Expectations, Self-monitored Feedback, and Access to Necessary Resources

The ultimate measure of management effectiveness is whether Individual Contributors are empowered to accomplish the organization’s output expectations. All of the management processes ultimately come down to this:

Did we make the output expectations for our people clear?
Can they monitor their own performance to determine whether they are on track to meet expectations?
Did we put the resources at their disposal necessary for them to meet those expectations? If not, are they empowered to initiate corrective action.

Assuring that these conditions exist for Individual Contributors is especially the concern of first-line managers. They are the link between management and organizational performance. They need to be skilled at empowering Individual Contributors to manage their key tasks effectively and efficiently. They also need to be reliable as the early-warning system concerning resources issues.

Summary: The Five Key Management Practices Are a System of Behavior

All five of these practices must be done by every manager. They are a minimal set of practices. Each practice dependents upon the other four to have a positive effect on organizational performance. If any one of them is omitted, the system breaks down. As each manager improves the weakest of the five practices, all four of the others are also improved—the system multiplies the results of the improvement effort.

When implementing Matrix Management, it is important to pay attention to all five practices at once. To do this, you need to take on whole departments of managers—structure of management teams--at once. You are implementing a system of management behavior and an entire way of doing business, not just a few new skills. It is an organizational intervention, not a series of classroom or e-learning events. Action learning (on-the-job learning) will be required. Those who are going to manage this way together have to learn it and commit to it, together.

The Aspects of Emotional Self-Management Required for Matrix Management

Getting Beyond the Emotional Stages of Dependence and Independence to Full Interdependence

Matrix Management requires a significant amount of emotional maturity, including initiative and assertiveness. Effective Matrix Managers embrace interdependency. In simple terms, they have gotten over themselves.

They:

Accept both their strengths and limits.
Acknowledge that they cannot actually control everything that affects their lives and work.
Sincerely listen to and learn from others.
Are genuinely thankful for the strengths that come through human cooperation.
Offer themselves reliably into relationships of interdependence.

Being Emotionally Resilient (adaptable and capable of learning and change)

Matrix Management requires both persistence and flexibility. Each manager:

Cares about getting the organization’s resources properly invested every day.
Persists in asserting the importance of his/her organizational function.
Accepts and moves toward conflict rather than away from it.
Acknowledges and accepts their own fears and frustrations so that they are ready to listen and defuse the emotional intensity that overcomes other peoples’ rational abilities to engage in problem solving.
Knows when and how to alter his/her own behavior to fit the needs of the situation and the organization’s requirements.

Dealing with the Stress of Matrix Management

Matrix Management is a set of practices that intends to shelter its managers from the stress makers at work.

By staying focused on outputs, performance feedback, and resource issues, managers protect themselves and others from role-ambiguity and role-overload. By encouraging diversity and disagreement and using the practices to utilize rather than avoid or ignore conflict, managers protect themselves and others from the dangers of covert role conflict.

Matrix Management ushers people toward mature, interdependent cooperation and a moderate level of stress at work.

Expressing Negative Emotions (e.g., fear, frustration, anger) Through Problem Solving

An especially important concept and skill for Matrix Management is learning to control the expression of one’s negative emotions. Fear, frustration, and anger, for instance, are normal, everyday experiences for people entrusted with managing. These emotions are the dark side of caring about the organization’s success. Only those who care really feel disappointment and frustration. But for people of authority to express these emotions explicitly and intensely is almost always self-defeating for the performance of their management role. It tends to make the leader’s negative emotions the focus of attention instead of the problem that needs to be solved.

Managers are greatly assisted in their performance by learning to acknowledge and accept these negative emotions before acting on them. When the emotions about the problem have been set aside through private acknowledgement and acceptance, it becomes possible to act reasonably and constructively on the actual problems.

Matrix Management Empowers A Manager to Become a Leader

Leadership is the Ability to Cause Voluntary Organizational Change

Constructive leadership is defined as the ability to cause voluntary change within the organization. This ability is almost entirely related to a manager’s reputation for integrity and competence. In most organizations, developing this empowering reputation is haphazard. If it happens at all, it usually takes many years within the same organization. The teamwork required in Matrix Management accelerates the growth of this reputation.

Matrix Management Strengthens and Displays Integrity

Matrix Management encourages the clear definition of formal, managerial authority and creates an environment in which it is possible to exercise authority reasonably, decisively, and effectively. Commitments are carefully made and honored. Outputs and results begin to accumulate to the credit of his/her team and to all its members, including its leader. Around these kinds of successes, individuals are encouraged to make positive assessments of each other’s reliability—to create the bonds that form an organization’s infrastructure of trust and confidence.

Matrix Management Accelerates the Growth and Reputation for Competence

Because Matrix Management exposes and empowers every manager to exercise at least some extent of cross-functional responsibility and influence, every management meeting is a classroom that accelerates the members’ learning about the business. Consultative Group Decision-Making requires every member to become a consultant to the team leader, and this encourages everyone to learn all of the team’s business. The meetings in Matrix Management are the real engines for developing a practical understanding of how the organization does its business with its specific customers in its specific regions of the world. As an individual climbs the ladder of management teams, his/her understanding of the business and how to manage it becomes broader and broader. Both the competence and its display within the organization accelerate the manager’s ability to exercise leadership.

About William R. Daniels

Since 1973, William R. Daniels has assisted executives and managers throughout the world to achieve breakthroughs in their managerial performance and organizational productivity. A specialist in the sociology and psychology of rapid organizational change, he has identified and successfully implemented management practices that make an organization fast, focused, flexible and profitable. Top managers from all organizational levels have praised his contribution to their organizations’ successes.

In addition to executive coaching and large group presentations, Bill is an accomplished author and designer of some of the best management training programs and simulations in the industry, including The Dress Rehearsal and Chain Gang. He takes complex ideas and “translates” them into a series of key concepts and experiences that keep participants engaged – challenging them to teach each other. Thousands of managers and professionals have experienced Bill’s popular workshops and simulations.

Bill has served as keynote speaker at numerous management conferences and events, including supervisory, middle and senior management seminars for several Fortune 100 companies. He also has participated as faculty of university programs, including UC Davis’ Executive Program and Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management. He has an MBA in Finance.

Recognition of Bill’s work:

2005 Recipient of the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) Thomas F. Gilbert Professional Achievement Award
Past Member of the Board of Directors for the International Board of Standards for Training, Performance and Instruction (IBSTPI)
Frequent presenter to audiences at ISPI, ASTD and the Organizational Development Network’s (ODN) National and Best in the West (BAODN) conferences

For additional information, please see:

Matrix Management by William R. Daniels