Season 03 - Newsletter 05 --> Making an impact in the Maze: Finding the Gray Areas
Hi Friends -
This week, I wanted to continue on the series exploring how to continue and navigate a Matrixed organization. Once again we drew on the experience of a few who have successfully navigated very large organizations.
Q: As someone that worked in an organization where I was able to influence decisions, how do I influence decisions in the new team and the much bigger organization I just joined?
Another great question on how to navigate a Matrix organization. I’ve actually spoken to a few folks about this question which really boils down to how can we make an impact in these great big organizations.
We started answering this question in last edition from an enterprise or organization level. Let’s try and answer it from a project perspective.
Lets get to it.
Find the gray spaces (opportunities) - In big organizations, there often hide in plain sight interesting projects and initiative, who by their very nature can use some additional mental power. How do you find them? Often asking your manager. In an organization the status quo will occupy the urgent and important and these projects often occupy the important but not urgent or the not important and not urgent. And that’s okay because as the currency changes so will those labels. As a product managers asking your other discipline partners will also prove fruitful as their is almost always a deficit of product managers to go around.
Prep the runway - It’s important here to note the more wins you can get under your belt, the more trust and influence you will be able to build. Even with a tons of trust and influence, having a quick conversation with peers can can yield great results. It’s important here to look at everyone as players and potential allies. While some will naturally and quickly gravitate towards being an ally with very little effort for most of your peers, you will need to understand and communicate to them how you could help them do their job well. Some benefits could include being part of a big idea, saving the dimension they care money (ie the company, their division, their portfolio, their team), or just making them look good. Understanding their context, their success metrics is key and so is tying your recommendation to an outcome that will benefit them.
Acknowledge what has been done in the past - When you have figured out the players, allies, noise and blockers, their wants, it’s time to be deliberate about addressing their motivation and communicating / conversing early and often. On this last point, an area of opportunity I see, is someone that does 1 and 2 very well, but miss the mark when it comes to communicating. My recommendation here is to customize the value proposition in the communication to each audience down to the recipient. A good communication strategy can be summed up by the following sentence. While our previous effort paid dividends by addressing <a previous need> and achieving <insert outcome>, today we need to address <new need in order to achieve <insert new goal or outcome>. Once you have the sentence down (you may need to customized the previous need based on your audience), repeat repeat repeat, to each stakeholder. This not only insures the goal is clear of your effort, but that the previous work and efforts are acknowledge in a positive light.
I hope you find these recommendations useful and are able to apply them tomorrow within your organization and on your project. Great work can come from both complex big orgs as well as tiny one-person operations.
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