The illusion of agreement in matrix organisations

In this month’s edition

• Perspective: The illusion of agreement in matrix organisations
• Practice: Recognising complexity in your work
• Good reads: Leader as Healer by Nicholas Janni

Perspective: The illusion of agreement in matrix organisations

This month, I’ve been thinking a lot about the distinction between agreement and alignment. 

I’m currently working with a regional leadership team in a highly matrixed organisation. On paper, everything looks clear: five priorities for the year ahead, all agreed and approved. But as we prepare for their offsite, it’s obvious that the agreement is only at the surface level. When it comes to role clarity and commitment, the team is far from aligned.

The Managing Director is ultimately responsible for the top and bottom line in the region, and the sales leader’s mission is very closely aligned with the MD’s mission. The HR, Finance and Marketing leaders, however, report into their own functional heads and have responsibilities above and beyond the regional remit. 

Everyone is trying to do the right thing - but it is hard to know whose definition of “right” applies. Each leader is accountable for outcomes that lie outside their span of control.

This raises the question of how can I be accountable for things I do not control? People tend to respond in one of three ways:

1. Avoid accountability – I can’t be responsible for what I don’t control.
2. Push for control – I will try to control resources anyway.
3. Manage the imbalance – I will find ways to collaborate.

That third response, managing the imbalance, is where alignment begins.

If we are going to manage the imbalance, we have to drop the first and second postures. We have to shift from washing our hands of accountability entirely, and we have to stop trying to control everything. 

If we stop walking away, we signal trust.

If we stop trying to push people to work on our agenda, we signal trust.

And trust paves the way for alignment and the creation of a "we" - a shared sense of purpose and shared ownership of goals, even if have limited control over the resources we need to get there. We feel a genuine stake in the success of the team. 

Agreement often gives the illusion of clarity and commitment. But IMHO, alignment is really where it’s at. 

Every month I share a practice to help you lead more coherently through change. This time, it’s about recognising complexity and knowing how to adapt your leadership style depending on the level of complexity you’re tackling.

This is incredibly useful because we often work on the assumption of more simplicity than we have in reality. This can lead to over-planning, frustration and disappointment when plans fail.  

The Stacey Matrix (below) is one of my favourite tools for diagnosing what kind of work you’re dealing with. It uses two variables - certainty and agreement - to explore the extent to which your work is simple, complicated, complex, or chaotic.

High Agreement + High Certainty = Simple

When all your stakeholders are in agreement, and you are certain about where you’re going and how you’re going to get there, your work falls into the Simple category. There’s a clear link between cause and effect … follow the recipe and you’ll get the result. This is when we can optimize for efficiency and best practices. 

Partial Agreement + Partial Certainty = Complicated
When there’s partial agreement about what needs to happen, and partial certainty about how best to do it, your work sits in the Complicated category. The path is knowable, but you may need to bring in some experts and get your stakeholders together to move closer to alignment. 

Low Agreement + Low Certainty = Complex
When there’s both uncertainty and disagreement, you’re in the Complex zone. The landscape keeps shifting, there’s no single right answer, and perspectives are fragmented. You can’t predict your way forward so you have to learn your way forward. The leadership style that serves best is agile and facilitative: creating conditions for experimentation, iteration, and collective sense-making.

No Agreement + No Certainty = Chaos
When there’s virtually no agreement or certainty, the system is in Chaos. This is crisis territory, and typically decisions must be made quickly to restore some level of stability, and ideally then bring people back toward complexity. 

Putting it Into Practice

To start recognising complexity in your own work, use the Stacey Matrix to map your work according to the degree of certainty and agreement that exists. 

• Some work might fall into simple e.g. procurement or reporting.
• Some work might be complicated e.g. rolling out a new system.
• Some might be complex e.g. transforming a culture.

Now consider how you might adapt your approach to decision making and execution for each category.

Good Reads: Leader as Healer

I started working with emotional fluency during my Integral Facilitator training, but experienced a profoundly deeper understanding of working with emotion in the last 12 months during my Transformational Coaching training with Nicholas Janni and, this month, I’ve chosen to spotlight his book Leader as Healer, which won Business Book of the Year in 2023. 

One of the things I really appreciate about Nicholas’s writing is how rational and accessible he makes quite radical ideas. 

The central thesis is this. 

• We can’t think our way through complexity.
• The leadership our world needs now is not just strategic, but more whole.
• And wholeness comes from feeling our emotions and reconnecting with the parts of ourselves that we’ve learned to leave out: the body, emotion, intuition, etc.

Nicholas told me they tried to categorise the book into the Wellness category, an idea he wholeheartedly rejected. The hard work of integrating our emotional and rational selves certainly helps at a personal wellness level, but much more than that, it equips is to lead in these extraordinarily complex times.