building collaborative muscle

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CLI Quick Read

Building Collaborative Muscle in Your

Organization: Borrowing Best

Practices from Matrix Organizations


Building Collaborative Muscle in Your Organization:

Borrowing Best Practices from Matrix Organizations

SUSAN CAIN, Ed. D.

Do the people in your organization operate collaboratively across your company? Many

organizations have moved away from a top-down business model (within a department

only) toward a more “matrix” operating approach. Many combine both business

approaches successfully.

Matrix management is essentially a process for pooling people to operate more efficiently

across the functional areas of your organization. Skills and information flow horizontally

across to better manage large projects, develop products or deliver services. In a way, it

creates large multi-disciplinary teams capable of forming powerful interdependent

networks. Think “grid” instead of “vertical.”

Most employees in matrix companies report to the head of their department and across to

project managers or to a self-managed team. When you think about it, this necessitates

the need for a multiple command and control structure. A matrix organization

necessitates new infrastructures including behaviors, skills and cultural norms around

networking and sharing information.

The Business Case for Matrix Organizations

According to Paul Rogers and Jenny Davis-Peccoud of Bain

&Company (http://www.bain.com/Images/DECISIONS_INSIGHTS_12_Networked%20

organizations.pdf), matrix organizations are also known as the networked or

“boundaryless” company:

It’s a world of multiple bosses, endless solid-line and dotted-line. Decisions, after all,

determine performance. Better, faster decisions and better, faster execution naturally

produce better results than do poor, slow or badly executed decisions. This connection

between decisions and results is intuitive; it’s also supported by data that we gathered

from more than 760 companies around the world. Decision effectiveness and financial

results correlate at a 95 percent confidence level or higher for every country, industry

and company size we studied.1

Companies that rate best on decision effectiveness take two steps that other companies

often ignore. First, they identify and concentrate on their most important decisions. This

category includes not only the obvious candidates—big decisions involving a lot of

resources—but also the routine everyday decisions that deliver (or fail to deliver) a great

deal of value over time. Second, these companies work hard to optimize not just the

quality of their key decisions but also decision speed, execution and the degree of effort

involved. High performance organizations excel on all four dimensions.

http://www.bain.com/Images/DECISIONS_INSIGHTS_12_Networked%20organizations.pdf

http://www.bain.com/Images/DECISIONS_INSIGHTS_12_Networked%20organizations.pdf


CLI coaches many organizations moving toward increasing their matrix potential. Many

experience an increase in speed for delivering outputs enterprise-wide.

Borrowing Best Practices from Matrix Organizations

Many CLI clients have changed their fundamental approach from vertical management to

a matrix-based or modified-matrix approach. “Most corporate employees already need to

work across their organization to deliver their outcomes. This creates urgency to build

collaboration skills that can help individuals work up, down and across an organization’s

functional areas,” CLI’s Dr. Susan Cain noted.

How can organizations build collaboration skills quickly and embed them in their

culture? CLI has developed a training approach that helps employees transition faster.

“We know how adults learn best-with hands-on training; how they make decisions to

adopt new skills, and how to embed changes in the organization’s culture,” stated Dr.

Cain.

There are four essential best practices needed for improving the matrix potential of your

organization:

1. A clearly articulated business model explaining the value of matrix operations.

2. A clear map that allows people to understand the expectations, behaviors and action

steps they must take to operate in a matrix environment.

3. Informal opportunities for people to network.

4. Formal skill training to help people adapt and articulate the functional skills needed

in a matrix organization. These include adapting to change, asking and giving

information and support, and solving problems as a multi-functional team.

CLI recommends four steps to improving the collaborative potential of employees.

1. Take the pulse of your organization by launching The Denison Organizational

Culture Survey-an assessment that measures the perception of your organization’s

current capabilities. Analyzing the performance gaps in your organization increases the

urgency to change, and sets the needed direction for change to occur.

2. Collaborate with CLI to custom-design a training and development solution to

close performance gaps. Focus on the outcomes you need in the performance areas that

need it the most.

3. Accelerate results by mixing approaches-use informal and formal meetings and

gatherings to introduce the need for change, and formal training for skills and capabilities

needed to close them. Then mix skill training in the classroom and with informal


networking with hands-on activities in the outdoors-on CLI’s low ropes course or

portable team challenge activities.

4. Monitor change informally with open discussions or formally with evaluations or,

better yet, use The Denison Organizational Culture Monitor, to measure progress

toward performance goals.

We are The Corporate Learning Institute. CLI has been providing clients with custom-

designed services since 1986.

We work with organizations with the belief that personal, customized services build

confident and motivated individual contributors and teams are the backbone for any

organization.

For more information about our services, we invite visit our website, at

http://www.corplearning.com

Feel free to contact partner Susan Cain at (630)-347-6333

Feel free to contact partner Tim Buividas at (312)-615-2211

http://www.corplearning.com/