REVISITING THE MATRIX—WHO’S GOT THE DING DONG!?

"No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the other.”

Luke 16:13

The above cited biblical verse, sort of, sums up the biggest issue facing the organizational management structural design known as Matrix management.  If you’ve worked in any modern day Fortune 500 company, you’ve no doubt been in the ‘Matrix’. In fact, most corporate organizations today are organized around some variation of the matrix structure. Basically, the ‘Matrix’ is organized around so-called support Functions in which employees with similar skills and/or professional training function like campus frats or sororities. Often, these employees pledge their loyalty first to their ‘functional boss’.  And, why shouldn’t they? Ultimately and contrary to what the policy says about shared evaluations, it is the ‘functional boss’ who will control their money, upward mobility and careers. Yet, once deployed, functional employees must quickly become adept at pleasing another boss; a line boss with a P & L—who, also, has some organizational ‘juice’ and power that must be reckoned with. Some well known examples of support functions are Finance, Engineering, R & D, Sales and HR.

 These Functional employees may be assigned to different business units and report directly into a ‘line or business boss’—as well as a ‘functional boss’ of equal status. I have been told that the Line boss tells you what to do and Functional boss tells you how to do it. While attempting to show who ‘owns’ whom, organizational charts  can be rendered undecipherable—with  a dizzying  array of solid and dotted lines competing for attention. Usually, however, the two ‘bosses’ work it out. They are, most likely, friendly—if not cordial; they are usually peers who respect each other; they will seek alignment and agreement before risking animosity and acrimony over disagreeing about a shared ‘direct report’. Geez, lest one forgets, they are members of the same ‘Leadership Lodge’. In essence, they’ve learned to share ‘the ding-dong of power’.

But, what about the Project Manager, who carries the portfolio of the Big Boss; who has to manage employees from multiple support functions; who has to meld a disparate group of functional experts into a cohesive project team; who has an unforgiving timeline and scarce resources –what about him or her? If the Bible warns about serving two masters, then, one would surmise that a third master is not really a master after all. So often, being a Project Manager in a matrix management organization is tantamount to “herding cats”. Not only must he/she manage a team with skill sets different from his/her; he/she must find a way to establish measures of effectiveness that are rigorous enough to ensure each member contributes their expertise to the best of their functional ability. He/she must know enough to evaluate their performance as well as enough not to be ‘snowed’ by functional jargon and terminology that doesn’t “move the peanut forward”.

And, as a former boss of mine often said, “I don’t need people who can describe the peanut or weigh the peanut—I just want the ones who know how to move the peanut forward.” In other words,  getting the job done is the main thing. Still, alas, the beleaguered project manager is left with the task of getting individuals from different parts—and, often, different time zones of the enterprise. Well, first,  to get off on the right foot, the project manager must “take the order” correctly. In essence, he/she must be absolutely clear on what outcomes the organization desires from the project being launched. Basically, he/she must find out ‘what good looks like” to the sponsoring ‘powers.’ Next, make sure the Function offers up individuals that are viewed as either high potential (the young upwardly mobile) or high professional (the institutional memory keepers). A mix of these two types of employees would be ideal. Their collective input and diversity of perspectives will guarantee that problems are viewed from a variety of different perspectives. It is only with these divergent views that we can expand the solution spaces.

Finally, the Project manager must encourage development of a set of decision rules to be used as the initiative goes forward. And, the most important decision rule is, “who has the performance evaluation “ding dong?” Put another way, who appraises the performance of the project team members? I would submit that it should be—no must be—the actual Project Manager. The Functional boss is too far away from the action and is often influenced by factors other than actual contribution to the Project.  More importantly, as Michael Leboeuf said, in his seminal book, Greatest Management Principle, GMP, “…people don’t do what you inspect or expect—they do what you reward.” Got it—they do what you reward! 


An equally important decision rule that must be hammered out has to do with the allocation and expenditure of resources. The Project Manager must be given both responsibility and authority. Authority boils down to who can spend what and when. 

These two decision rules will improve the probability of success for most projects. In essence, the Project Manager needs the two most important powers in the corporate universe--i.e., the "power to define ( what good looks like) and the power to punish (what is defined as not acceptable behavior).

Well, until next time, “that’s my point of view and I am sticking to it.”