Steve Safier’s and Josh Bellis’ Integrated Talent Management class hosted guest speaker, Norm Celotto. Norm is a seasoned, expert consultant who works with organizational leaders to better articulate their vision, translate the vision into a working business-model, and best structure their teams, roles, processes and systems to align with the vision. Among many other Human Capital Management areas, Norm has researched and consulted on the topic of Matrix Management, which our class has been studying.
Norm began his lecture by quoting from Jay Galbraith, one of the foremost experts in organization design, who taught that the core problem that structure solves for is information overload, and that there are only two options for dealing with this:
• Reduce the amount of information being processed, or
• Increase the capacity for processing information.
Some other key points from Norm’s lecture included the characteristics of the most successful matrix enterprise leaders, namely:
1.) Having an “enterprise perspective”
2.) Self-Management
3.) Listening with Respect
4.) Displaying a cross-functional perspective
5.) Exerting Matrix influence, and
6.) Enabling collaborative solutions
Again, highly relevant to our class, Norm emphasized the requirement to balance structural and personal expectations to successfully implement a matrix model. Toward this end we discussed:
1.) Building organizational systems that will support the matrix model (management processes, HR systems and policies)
2.) Determining how people will collaborate (Shared accountabilities, independent relationships, processes and norms), and
3.) Defining expectations (roles, skills and behaviors).
Thank you, Norm, for a relevant and thoughtful discussion of topics that are class is learning and that organizations are dealing with around the world!
