Written by Manfred Muell.
The Problem
Whether you’re a CEO, president, general manager or managing executive, your ability to consistently maintain a comprehensive view of the organization you’re leading is crucial.
It’s this bird’s-eye view that will enable you to effectively direct, guide and facilitate what’s needed to successfully strengthen and grow the business. When leaders find themselves overly engaged in a particular aspect of the business, they may lose sight of the bigger picture. Although there are times when focused attention may be necessary, a leader’s prolonged shortsightedness can weaken the momentum of a thriving organization, or worse, generate dysfunctional communications and operations.
Individual contributors, as well as managers, are required to focus on a particular project or department within an organization. It’s the leader of the organization who is responsible for setting expectations and standards for interdepartmental communications that will minimize noncooperation and maximize collaboration.
Healthy organizations have leaders who understand the connect-the-dots approach. Maintaining a full-page view allows a leader to promptly identify and understand the strong and weak links within an organization, and offer strategic direction. Your ability as a leader to dive in when you identify weak links, engage employees in recommending solutions, delegate effectively and promptly return to the helm and your bigger-picture view will allow you to continue to serve your employees and organization well.
In today’s work environment, like their employees, leaders find themselves stretched to the limit with multiple and immediate demands. Search the Internet for “behaviors leaders need to demonstrate” and the search generates more than 16 million links. In the midst of incredible pressures to perform, making it a priority to maintain overview will catapult your ability to lead effectively. (from Donna Rawaday)
The Approach (Matrix Structure)
The Scientrix™ matrix is an ideal approach to ensure overview and focus for leaders. Starting from a clear understanding of their ambition leaders can create a matrix structure that covers the landscape (big picture) and allows to prioritize and then deep-dive into the relevant focus areas. This can be done on corporate-, departmental- or team level.
The priority intersects in this Matrix can be granulated further to gain more insight resulting in a matrix architecture for a specific ambition.
Here are some exemplary use cases which provide the much needed overview and focus for leaders:
Revenue / Growth Matrix:
Functional Finance Matrix:
Customer Experience Matrix:
As can be seen granulating and visualizing ambitions in a matrix format is easy to understand, provides leaders with overview, helps to focus on the critical issues and reduces the fluff & noise in team conversations.
Once the landscape and the focus areas are clarified, leaders and their teams need to ideate and prioritize initiatives (projects), assign execution responsibilities and monitor progress and overall results. All this must be seamlessly linked as depicted below:
This will ensure that leaders have the bird’s-eye view on the relevant landscape and transparency on the execution progress towards their ambition.