Working in the Matrix

One of the biggest visible impacts of the world's shifting center has been the transformation of organizational structures from centralized, hierarchical models to fluid, matrixed organisms. The transformation has been an evolutionary necessity for organizations trying to scale their operations across multiple geographies.

The matrix structure is a technique for managing an organization through a series of overlapping reporting relationships to create balance between the needs of various functions, geographies, business units, and product groups. Figure 4.1 depicts these common elements of many matrix organizations—some may have two or three and others all four. This structure is designed to facilitate rapid response to change in two or more environments, while flatter structure and multiple reporting lines permit a freer exchange of information. All these elements are critical to organizational agility within a fast-paced global economic reality.

Matrix organizational structures are commonly deemed the best antidote to unhealthy silos that isolate groups of employees from one another in separate units. Such silos are conducive to finger-pointing—engineering blames sales for not selling great products, but meanwhile sales blames engineering for not making what customers want—along with decreased accountability for collaborative efforts, and fragmented decision making. The intentional tension built into a matrix organization is designed to ensure that employees take into account a broader set of information and priorities beyond their own roles. Every matrix team has the ultimate goal of serving the best interests of the company as a whole.

leading a matrix team

A matrix structure's success, or lack thereof, is primarily a function of team health and team members' ability to navigate its complex reporting lines. Any matrix is really a collection of interconnected teams. Each team needs to operate at peak efficiency, and the collaboration between teams needs to be equally efficient in order for the organization to run well.

For team leaders in a matrix, what are the critical competencies that will ensure success? Previous team development efforts have focused on better intercultural facilitation, project management, and technology for virtual communication. However, our research shows that a leader's ability to correctly position the team in a matrix environment is a more critical factor for success.

Common Best Practices

There are many steps that Rick could take as the overall head of the team in this scenario to facilitate more productive interactions:

• Travel to India to meet the team members in person and learn more about them.
• Provide a big-picture introduction to the team's efforts.
• Set more tightly spaced milestones during the early project stages.
• Check in with Bhavesh and other team counterparts more frequently.
• Schedule one-on-one conversations with Bhavesh so that he can raise issues without losing face in front of his team members.
• Ask open-ended rather than yes/no questions. For example, “What do you think is a feasible time frame for completing this project?” “What other priorities do your team members have?”
• Use reflective listening, paraphrasing, and summarizing what others are saying to further draw out team members who show signs of uncertainty or hesitation.

All five of the cultural dimensions we introduced in Chapter 3 are relevant to this team as well. Figure 4.3 compares the profiles of individual team members along with the country averages for India and the United Kingdom. The contrasts between the team members, whose profiles correspond roughly to their country profiles—with some individual variation, as is normally the case—are easy to discern in the team members' interactions. Each team participant needs to “style-switch” in order to be more effective.

If Rick were to recognize the more interdependent and hierarchical nature of the Indian team members, their hesitation to take risks and to share problems directly, and how their comfort level is enhanced once they establish a personal relationship, he would probably alter his approach. For instance, when Bhavesh responds, “Yes, we will do our best,” in their initial team meeting, Rick would be less likely to take this response at face value. Instead, he'd recognize it as an expression of discomfort, and find ways to explore possible underlying issues. He would also be better able to recognize Azim's hesitation in responding to questions that he feels should be directed to his boss Bhavesh, and he might try a different approach that does not put Azim on the spot.

Indian team members such as Bhavesh or Azim could also contribute to more productive teamwork. To the extent that Bhavesh understands Rick's independent, egalitarian, risk-oriented, direct, and task-focused tendencies as culturally-based, he will find it easier to anticipate and respond to Rick's requests without being offended or appearing evasive. He, too, could take constructive steps such as suggesting that Rick come to India to meet the team, budget permitting, or that they schedule regular one-on-one calls that would allow him to speak more frankly. Likewise, he might be more direct in offering realistic deadlines for project completion and in describing problems with competing priorities. And when any of the Indian team members encounter unexpected obstacles and delays, they could reach out to Rick in order to keep him in the loop, even though they might normally avoid bringing nettlesome problems to a more senior foreign counterpart.

Global Team Performance: Beyond Facilitation

Yet even with all of the improvements that the team can make through culturally savvy facilitation on the part of the team leader and mutual style-switching, there is a deeper issue that could still derail the team completely. As we can detect in Bhavesh's unvoiced thoughts, he is not sure whether this project is a priority for Manish, his local manager. If he goes to Manish and is instructed to put other projects first, Rick is going to receive limited cooperation no matter how hard he tries or how many excellent facilitation techniques he uses.

A first step for any leader or potential leader of a matrix team, including Rick, is to ask, “Is this team set up for success?” The checklist of questions in Sidebar 4.1 is a good place for the team leader to start before even agreeing to take on the job. For any significant team initiative, the answers to all of these questions should be positive in order for the team and its leader to have a strong chance of succeeding.

Each team needs effective executive sponsorship and organizational alignment in order to function at its best. In the absence of this kind of supportive context, the ties between team members, subgroups, and stakeholders are likely to be fragile and also to entail divergent objectives. The team leader will have to invest considerable time and effort identifying sources of misalignment or resistance, shepherding various stakeholders, and seeking buy-in without any direct authority. This is an uphill battle at best. An effective team sponsor can be instrumental in gaining stakeholder support across the matrix and orchestrating a collaborative rollout of the team's efforts.

Negative responses to the seven checklist questions may be a critical indication that more groundwork needs to be in place before the team's efforts are kicked off, or that the project itself should be reconsidered. Warning signs for prospective or current team leaders might include replies from team sponsors such as:

• “I haven't had time to speak to the other geographies yet, but it's a terrific idea for you to do that!”
• “I'm not sure what else your team members will have on their plates in addition to their work for you.”
• “At this point we can't change anybody's annual objectives except for yours, but you're very persuasive. I'm sure you can convince your team members of the urgency of this project!”
• “Just make it work somehow; this is an important initiative for us!”

Here is the kind of meeting that should have happened before Rick, Bhavesh, and the rest of the development team had their first team call.

The Data on Global Teams

In order to understand the factors underlying the scenarios above, it is helpful to take a closer look at the data available on global teams. Over the past decade, the authors have gathered survey results from 2,240 teams and a total of nearly 17,000 team members located around the world. This is one of the largest available sources of data anywhere regarding the performance challenges global teams encounter.¹ Figure 4.4 depicts the seven survey elements, while Sidebar 4.2 shows their ranking from highest to lowest scoring. Cultural diversity is at the center of the model, surrounded by more process-oriented stages of team development; the outer layer juxtaposes virtual and face-to-face forms of communication.

Contrary to what some professional facilitators or consultants might expect, global team participants see themselves as being relatively skilled at virtual communication methods and at communicating with remote team members. Items from these survey elements are generally rated at the top end of the scale. Team members give themselves high marks for effective virtual communication and for refraining from negative judgments based on overt differences in culture and language. The top-ranking survey items across this very large set of responses, with their corresponding elements, can be seen in Sidebar 4.3.

The most challenging global teamwork elements turn out to be team process and conflict resolution. Specific items that survey respondents gave the lowest ratings focus on systemic issues such as rewards, collaboration with other parts of the organization, and metrics. It also appears that team members can rely too easily on virtual communication and lack an effective balance of virtual and face-to-face contacts. Finally, they struggle to solve problems together when conflicts arise. Sidebar 4.4 shows the items consistently rated lowest by survey respondents.

Each of these global team weaknesses can be directly linked to characteristics of matrix organizations. As with Rick's project team depicted at the outset of this chapter, teams with matrix structures that harbor clashing priorities and reward systems are likely to have a hard time achieving their performance goals. All team members need to know where in the matrix their most critical stakeholders are located in order to receive the resources and cooperation they will need. Should they focus on the interests of particular functions, geographies, business units, or product groups? The metrics upon which team members are evaluated must be aligned, even though annual objectives are typically set within the context of different organizational silos. And although team members may be highly skilled at virtual communication, getting together in person—particularly at the outset of the team effort—can help build personal relationships, develop a shared understanding of diverse stakeholders, and create an aligned set of team processes. With so many diverse team interests and countervailing matrix pressures, it is essential for global teams to cultivate shared methods of problem solving that enable them to view issues collaboratively rather than antagonistically.

Many leaders of dispersed multicultural teams eventually express frustrations similar to those experienced by Vasilis. Figure 4.5 portrays the divergent matrix influences he described that can undermine trust and alignment among team members without careful handling.

Organizational Alignment and Team Foundations

Many team leaders have been thrust into their roles without the time or political latitude to work through checklist items such as executive sponsorship and organizational alignment. In addition to escalation strategies, which may or may not be feasible for leaders whose teams are already in motion, Figure 4.5 provides a simple analytical framework to begin to sort out possible reasons for conflicts between team members.

Our survey results strongly suggest that global team leaders also need to pay special attention to creating a sound “container” that they can use to align team members' efforts. A shared vision and business objectives—standard business guru prescriptions for teams getting started—are particularly difficult to establish and maintain if collaboration among team members is undermined by crosscurrents between different reward systems, stakeholder demands, metrics, and so on. Ingrained habits, whether they are process driven or formed based on organizational or national cultures, tend to be most tenacious and reflexive when conflicts occur. The more complex and matrixed the team structure, the more probable it is that such issues will surface. Although the need to balance competing interests is deliberately built into matrix organizational designs—the intentional tension referred to previously—most team leaders are thrust into their roles with minimal preparation (they literally “didn't get the memo” with the rationale for a matrix team) and must learn to navigate the matrix on their own.

One further set of data from the global team survey, the items rated by respondents as having the highest importance, offers insight for matrix team leaders about where else to focus in the early stages of team development besides on the Global Team Leader Checklist shared earlier. High-priority items identified in the survey results underline the value of paying special attention to the building blocks of team development, as four out of five items come from the Team Foundations element of the survey (see Sidebar 4.5). In other words, matrix teams are likely to face strains and struggles that homogeneous groups can master more readily, and they require foundations built on bedrock rather than on sand.

Wise team leaders will begin with extra attention to these items, and will go back to basics when conflicts emerge to reinforce a shared platform for all team activities. These priority items may include resource or systemic elements that are partly out of the team's control, but there are steps that team leaders can take with respect to each of them. (See Appendix A for a set of recommendations for what team leaders can do to address each item.)

Ironically, looking beyond the immediate task of facilitating interactions between team members makes for more effective facilitation in the long run. Knowledge of the wider matrix environment in which the team functions—and especially how this influences individual team members—will enable leaders to understand their team's dynamics more deeply, to address underlying structural issues where feasible, and to focus team-building efforts where they can have the greatest impact.

Enabling New Matrix Leaders

Looking toward the future, it is important for global companies to position leaders from all backgrounds for success. This is true both for developing team leaders like Bhavesh or people such as Huang Shiguang, the Chinese expatriate in Germany portrayed in Chapters 1 and 2.

The matrix structure itself is particularly challenging for leaders from more hierarchical and relationship-based leadership cultures such as India and China for two reasons. First, the model creates ambiguity around who is in charge, and the “leader” or decision-maker can change on a project-to-project basis. Multiple reporting lines also create competing priorities and confusion around whom one should ultimately seek to please. One Chinese leader describes his perplexed response to a matrix organization:

In China, there is always a head and this person is always the one with the authority. Everyone recognizes whose position is highest. But in Western countries, the authority or the head isn't always the person with the highest position. Many times someone is given the title of being the facilitator or coordinator and they have the authority in this certain situation. Authority often shifts in a matrix environment.

In addition, the matrix structure often strips leaders of their local relationship networks and asks them to do the same level of work leveraging a group of foreign strangers whom they may have never met face to face. One Indian leader compared this experience to having his limbs cut off. In response to these factors, many leaders prioritize their local business context, in which they often thrive, and withdraw from the global, matrix dynamics of the organization.

A global manufacturing company recently reorganized, deepening its matrix structure, taking decision-making power away from country directors and putting it with global functional councils. The leadership skills needed to operate within these councils are vastly different. As one leader put it:

Before, country-level leaders needed to be experts and made decisions with relative independence. They are now just one voice seeking to influence a joint global team decision. They have to understand the global business context and advocate decisions that are best for the entire global organization, not just their local context.

Matrix leaders are expected to articulate their points of view in the context of the holistic global business. This requires a cross-functional and cross-regional breadth of knowledge and experience, which is rare in certain locations. As a result, some leaders are perceived to favor the business needs of their region or country. This, in turn, damages their credibility at the global decision-making levels and leads to accusations of “lack of global or strategic mindset” or “lack of global business acumen.” The vice-president of a global organization noted that an overly local focus damages a leader's ability to influence:

An influential leader is open-minded about whose idea may be the best idea, regardless of where it comes from. Influence is not just about pushing one's own idea onto others—because your idea may or may not be the best idea. Share the ideas, listen to others' ideas, then try to sell your idea if you have the best one. A good leader is one who is able to get the best ideas on the table.

What makes leadership in a global matrix particularly difficult for client-facing employees in fast-growth markets is the need for a high degree of competence in the local market coupled with global business skills and acumen. Local business acumen is nonnego-tiable in these fiercely competitive environments. At the same time, leaders must be able to run regional operations or global business units as well as align with and drive global strategy in an integrated matrix environment. But the transition from the local-only leadership role into regional or global matrix roles is a big leap, and the skills needed to be successful in each role are often at odds with one another. Sometimes the very competencies making leaders indispensable in their home markets are also inhibiting their growth inthe global matrix.