Building Collaborative Muscle

Building Collaborative Muscle in Your
Organization: Borrowing Best
Practices from Matrix Organizations

CLI Quick Read

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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.


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 customdesigned 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


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