The problem with Matrix Organizations – from Office Space

This sums up how frustrated employees feel in a matrixed environment:

Peter Gibbons: I have eight different bosses right now.

Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?

Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses.

Bob Slydell: Eight?

Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That’s my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.

AgileDC 2013

Discussion of The Benefits of Dedicated Teams at the AgileDc 2013 Conference.

AgileDC 2013 – The Benefits of Dedicated Teams

AgileDC 2013 – The Benefits of Dedicated Teams

Yesterday I spoke at the 2013 AgileDC conference at Gallaudet University.  It was a great experience!  The AgileDC folks did a great job organizing the conference.  My presentation was titled “The Benefits of Dedicated Teams:  How Agile is Changing the Structure of Service Organizations”.  This was my first time presenting my research study to the public outside of my dissertation defense.  The presentation and topic were well received.  I had quite a few people follow up with me and want to discuss my experiences and study results in more detail, so there was some genuine interest in my area of research.

Here is a link to my presentation.  If you attended, please let me know what you think!  Is employee job satisfaction and communication just as important as productivity?

Are you really “Busy”?

I recently read an article where the topic really hit a nerve.  The article, The Worst Word in Business: “Busy”, discusses people’s obsession with appearing “busy” at work and the perception that in order to be effective one must always be “busy”.  Throughout my career I have always place more value on working smarter, not harder.  I place a higher value on customer service and in my opinion, the way to provide my clients with a high level of service is to be flexible and respond to the client proactively rather than reactively.  In order to be proactive, one must have control of their time, schedule, and to a certain extent, their tasks at work. 

I have managed teams ranging in size from 2 to 45+ individuals, so I can say that I have pretty much seen/heard it all when it comes to the way team members interact with each other and perform their jobs.  Each team member joins a team with different expectations.  The most effective team members are proactive and seek to understand where they are needed and what tasks they can take that provide the most benefit.  These team members seek to control their schedules.  Other team members are reactive and wait for the boss to assign them tasks.  Once assigned, the team members do their jobs, seek to fill their schedules, and come back looking for additional work when complete.  The effective team members seek to create or expand upon their tasks to add benefit to their clients. 

When I approach effective team members with new work, I have never once received a response that they are too busy to take on additional tasks.  Effective team members seek to discuss and strategize how to fit the work into their schedules and what can be moved around or prioritized to ensure that the important work gets done first.  They realize that not everything is a priority and can distinguish between what needs to be done now versus what can wait.  This is a talent that I wish everyone I work with would have, but sadly, a lot of people still cling to the idea that in order to be effective at work, one must be “busy” and make sure everyone knows that they are “busy”.

Organizational Change

A large portion of my research has been focused on what happens to a company and its employees when the leadership all of a sudden decides to implement a reorg and change the fundamental structure of the organization.  Why does leadership choose to implement a matrix structure?  How do they go about preparing for such a massive shift in dynamics?  Well, I have found that normally, these types of changes at companies usually get short changed by the leadership.  Surprisingly, these changes are often based on a leader’s past experience.  If a CEO has had a good experience at company X with a matrixed structure, then they will bring that experience with them to company Y and start lobbying for the same organizational structure to be implemented at company Y, even though company Y may be half the size of company X and it doesn’t make any sense to invest in the change a this particular time.

 Ron Ashkenas recently blogged about the challenges of organizational change.  He mentioned that leaders first inclination when sales drop or performance is not what it should be is to implement a reorg and shift people around.  Ron advocates looking at the existing organization and working within the current structure.   I’ve been at a few companies where the leadership gets spooked and they do not even conduct cursory analysis to see if the managers were setting realistic goals for their departments or teams.

This leads to making sure that your organizational structure is aligned with the company’s strategy.  In this day and age, corporate strategies are changing rapidly.  It is management and leaderships responsibility to keep the organization moving forward and anticipate those changes.  It is even more important for leadership to conduct a thorough analysis before investing resources in a poorly thought out change plan.

Leaders can end up wasting more money executing a poorly thought out organizational change than they would have saved just by thinking about the organization’s goals and objectives and aligning their underlying strategies with the goals and objectives.  Changing the company’s organizational structure is not a panacea for all that ails and leaders need to start realizing that planning and analysis is key to establishing the ground work for a successful change.