The organizational technique of “matrix management” will almost certainly factor into any career spent in either private companies or national laboratories. From the scientist’s perspective, matrix management can seem like an arbitrary convention or a strange formalism imposed from the top down as part of “how we do things here.” The technique actually has a long history and sound logic. Understanding both will help you navigate your matrix-based organization and be more effective in achieving your goals.
Matrix management is a response to the rapidly changing, highly complex technological industries and projects that developed in the mid-twentieth century. Andy Grove, the former chairman and CEO of Intel and author of the classic High Output Management, credits the formalization of matrix management to NASA. The core idea is that a project manager can wield as much influence as the line manager. Let’s define those terms:
Line Manager: This is your “home” group supervisor who is responsible for managing your overall work and performance reviews. Depending on the specifics of your organization, they might also handle your formal vacation requests, purchase approvals, and other administrative issues and conduct recurring one-on-one meetings with you. You should have only one clearly defined line manager at any given time.
Project Manager: This individual is responsible for managing any significant work you are doing outside your home group. It is possible to have multiple simultaneous project managers who change relatively frequently as the organization’s needs shift. If your company does formal goal setting, also called management by object, then your line manager will run the process; however, any project manager who guides a substantial fraction of your work will participate.
One of the prime benefits of matrix management is the flexibility it provides. It enables things like diverting resources from a strong organization to one that is falling behind by “matrixing” people from the former to the latter on a temporary basis. At the individual employee level, that flexibility is felt in the form of frequent change, which is balanced by the presence of a consistent line manager.
Modern organizational structure goes hand in hand with matrix management. Nearly all technologically focused companies and laboratories operate as hybrids of the two primary approaches to organizing work: functional organization and mission organization. In a functional organization, people are placed into homogeneous groups by their discipline, e.g., all the electrical engineers in one group, all the mechanical technicians in another, etc. This tends to be an efficient way to organize things and it gives individuals clear career paths in their specialties. However, functional organization can lead to the formation of factions within the company, a loss of focus on the overall goal, and a lot of “not our fault” finger-pointing. By contrast, mission organizations construct heterogeneous groups containing all the different specialties needed to achieve a particular goal and focus exclusively on it. For example, you might have electrical engineers, quantum physicists, computer programmers, and laboratory technicians lumped together in a mission organization working on a quantum computer. Early startup companies are classic mission organizations, as are, to some degree, university research groups. The downside of a mission organization is that it tends to be inefficient beyond a very small scale because, in a large organization composed of mission elements, you are replicating all the different disciplines in each group rather than sharing resources. Also, in mission organizations, individuals tend to feel a bit lost in the long term, as career trajectories become somewhat muddled and unclear. For example, what does promotion look like for the sole mechanical engineer in that mission-organized quantum computer group? She might not care for a few years, but eventually, she will. For all these reasons, most organizations inevitably become hybrids of the two styles, using functional organization in some areas and mission organization in others as needs and circumstances warrant. Universities are a classic example of hybrid organization with mission-based single-subject departments embedded in a functional administration structure.
As Grove points out, the inevitability of hybrid organization does not mean it is perfect, just that it is the best way people have found to organize large-scale efforts after many decades of trying. Matrix management was, in many ways, developed to match the needs and strengths of individual contributors to the requirements of dynamic hybrid organizations.
Your personal view of matrix management will depend on the organizational culture in which you work. As mentioned, if you work on a small mission-organized team like a startup, none of this matrix management theory pertains to you. On the other extreme, when I worked at a national laboratory, I had a line manager whom I saw a couple of times a year at performance review time, while my day-to-day work was directed by a single project manager. A friend of mine recently related that she had a similar extreme matrix management experience with detached line managers at a large non-profit organization. In my current company, I have employees operating in the more common middle ground of matrix management. They have a line manager with whom they spend perhaps 60% of their working time, and a project manager in another division who directs the other 40% of their work. We find, as many companies do, that operating in this middle ground is the optimum way to use the concept of matrix management.
Executing matrix management effectively is still not easy even when operating in optimum mode. Peter Drucker, a famous management theorist, referred to the matrixing method that NASA created as the Systems Structure and noted that, to be highly effective:
“It needs clear goals, high self-discipline throughout the structure, and a top management that takes personal responsibility for relationships and communications.”
Clearly, that is a tall order for any organization. It is a good idea to ask prospective employers whether they use matrix management and, if so, how it works in their organization. Their answers will give you a glimpse of what your future workplace will be like.