Challenge

A multinational medical device company originally came to Finerty Consulting seeking a keynote session for their annual senior leadership meeting consisting of the division’s 130 function heads, vice presidents and senior directors. Recent employee surveys revealed significant frustrations about the lack of collaboration across the organization. The organization’s complexity and lack of collaboration was causing costly product and shipping delays, quality issues and considerable employee and leadership frustration.

The leaders wanted the annual meeting to not only get at the collaboration issues, but be an example of how they needed to work together. It became evident very quickly that a simple keynote address would not be enough.

Approach

As the Finerty Consulting team worked with the client team to define what success would look like for this meeting, the goals became clear:

• Understand realities of work in the matrix; identify specific realities of the client organization’s matrix
• Identify, assess and action plan for building, rebuilding and maintaining key matrix partnerships
• Assess individual influence across the organization
• Examine decision-making traps and remedies
• Identify five key leadership behaviors to enact and reinforce

With this clarity, the client agreed that an expanded workshop was needed and gave the Finerty Consulting team an additional 8 hours of the meeting agenda.

In less than a month, the Finerty Consulting team worked to develop, align, and deliver on a customized approach for the 1-day interactive workshop for 130 senior leaders. The customized Master the Matrix session included:

• Brief keynote sessions with Susan Finerty, Author of Mastering the Matrix
• Interactive table group discussions
• Customized case study that incorporated specific organization scenarios
• Finerty expert facilitation of breakout room working sessions where functional groups were able to drill into their specific matrix challenges
• Interactive use of audience polling technology to engage learners throughout the session

Outcomes

Based on the group discussions and debriefs, the executive leadership team committed to taking significant actions to supporting this group by:

• Lay out a plan for horizontal and vertical goal alignment across the division so that the teams would no longer be working at cross purposes to each other
• In an effort to improve the building of partnerships globally, this leadership team would further support the implementation of global cultural differences training for Germany and France
• Defined set of common leader behaviors to adopt to drive collaboration at their level and throughout the organization
• Pulse survey to check integration of the behaviors

With a process for better calibrating goals, a focus on partnerships and a common set of behavioral expectations - this leadership team was able to shift behaviors and see collaboration rise to the top of employee survey as a strength versus a frustration.