Collaborating and working in teams is de-facto for all successful corporate efforts. Most teams in organisations are globally spread out and dispersed. The pandemic accelerated this with an increase in remote working teams.
Often, organisational structures are setup to drive central consistency and efficiency while maintaining local relevance for organisations in regional markets. Consistency drives specialisation in a sub-function, that can then be optimised at scale across a country/region/globally. As an example, think of company & product messaging, which can be created once and used everywhere in a consistent manner to the brand. And the team creating the messaging are specialised in it, with the adequate research etc., to back the strategy, approach, and choices in the messaging. Furthermore, while looking beyond a single function, there is a need for cross-functional collaboration to drive business success; typically, across product – marketing – sales – finance – post sales support – customer service etc.
Teams along with dotted lines connecting team members in an org chart constitute a matrix team. These dotted line constructs may appear for example, as specialised teams or cross-functional teams collaborate with other local/regional teams. A core facet of working with matrix teams is the ability as a leader to move away from command/control. In the past, I have written about how we now need to rely on influence rather than authority in teams today, especially those faced with constant change.
Successful matrix-ed teams are grounded on a few basics, including (a) A unifying vision in the strategy that is usually cascaded top-down (b) Consistent vocabulary that’s spoken across the teams – including strategy elements, priorities, data sets etc. (c) Consistent goals/targets and KPIs that are defined and measured the same across the company (d) A decision matrix that puts some structure around the roles and how choices are made.
With the above as background, lets now look at how a leader can drive strong influence in matrix-ed teams while leading the business forward.
Leaders will inevitably in their career run into managing matrix-ed and geographically disparate teams. Learning to manage via influence rather than authority, via the five ingredients above, is a key skill that one must master to successfully lead matrix-ed teams through change and to growth.
Srihari Palangala , Senior Director & Head of Marketing, International Medium Business, Dell Technologies
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