Many prospects and even my clients approach me wondering if their experience managing matrixed technical teams and completing projects and deliverables for years on end can translate into their being considered for functional management roles with teams of people directly reporting to them as their boss. In this new role they would have hire-and-fire authority, responsibility to grow and mentor their teams, develop and provide an environment for their team’s success, and have responsibility to keep their organization productive. Some of these clients are highly accomplished experts in their field of work and who have managed matrixed teams of 100 or more spread across geographies, running projects that span one year or more. Yet, they often fail to qualify for management jobs that require direct reports, functional responsibility, and management authority, because of lack of what I’d like to call as executive experience.
Why is that?
For one, managing a matrixed team to organize a task or a project and driving its mission to completion is very different from having functional responsibility for a team of the same size—or even smaller for that matter—that requires reporting oversight. On a project with a matrixed team the manager’s focus is mostly on the mission to complete the project within the available resources and to meet project objectives—more like a lead commando on a mission with their team. Here, the focus is almost entirely on the project rhythm and on providing the required leadership that may or may not entail having in-depth technical expertise to complete the project. Sometimes, this technical expertise can come from the matrixed team members themselves, with the project leader providing the driving force for the project to stay on track by managing its everyday flow and by anticipating showstoppers.
Even though the project leader may also provide the required technical expertise to propel the project to completion, in addition to managing the provided resources, the role only provides partial—yet useful—executive experience. The missing pieces are managing hiring, development, conducting performance reviews, promotion, firing, keeping the functional organization aligned with the overall business mission, and developing a long-term organizational capability.
In addition, when someone is driving a project to completion their focus is often on the end goal, much like a lead commando, as described before. So, if they have to adopt some short-cuts or exceptions to achieve an objective, they feel comfortable obviating certain norms and processes and getting what they need to complete a task. They may even contrive some way to overcome an obstacle, which may not be in the best interest of the overall organization. A manager with functional responsibility, on the other hand, must find ways to deal with the exception as a trigger to normalize that as a process for future needs, which requires a different leadership focus. This is just one example of the difference between the two perspectives. So, as these two different responsibilities shape the individual their ability to see the other side of the leadership responsibility become increasingly more remote.
Here, the functional (Vs. project) role evolves into a much bigger undertaking that typically involves—first and foremost—having the in-depth technical expertise to lead the departmental team, dealing with people matters, HR issues, succession planning, departmental bureaucracy, and dealing with issues such as budgets, planning for the future (Vs. project planning in the matrixed role), and having to deal with departmental politics (an element largely absent in a mission-driven project leadership role, where you can bulldoze through any obstacles that impede your project as outlined in the preceding paragraph). Working in such a functional role is tantamount to having the executive experience critical for success of both the selected person and their team/department. In such a role the executive is said to have line responsibility (as against matrix responsibility in a typical project setting).
As a long-term career path, a functional management role often offers greater possibilities for growth than does a project or program management role because there can be many such project management roles in an organization with a flat hierarchy. Many program managers roll-up into a PMO organization led by a director or a vice president. Whereas, a functional head has more possibilities to move up into executive roles or even in parallel functional organizations as an avenue for one’s career-growth. In such contexts a functional role is designed to show a manager’s potential to grow a functional area into a center of excellence (CoE), whereas program manager does not often have such an avenue open with as many opportunities. In keeping with the previous lead commando metaphor for a project manager, a functional manager is more akin to an infantry officer, who has much broader responsibilities for his troops’ long-term capability and success.
The perceived irony and slight here, from the perspective of those who manage successful projects in a matrixed setting, are that they often fail to fully appreciate what it takes to master these “HR” and executive issues in their departmental role, since, to them, they appear as trivial or even commonsense. What they fail to understand and appreciate, however, is how difficult it is for a leader to establish a culture of trust, camaraderie, and the X-factor which ultimately determines the success of their department. Also, as an expert in their field of specialization how they deploy that skill is also different, as they run their functional department as compared to how they ran projects. In a project-management role, the leader does this more transactionally—what I’d like to call drive-by problem-solving—to protect their mission and does not spend time to make this a part of their ongoing culture, primarily because that is not how their success is measured. Functional managers are now measured on their functional excellence more than they are on their ability to finesse a project.
Mastering this line role is not a trivial matter because it requires long-term view of how to build a functional capability for excellence, which is quite different from running a matrixed team in a transactional engagement to deliver on the project, even when you are engaged in both project management and overseeing a technical development. It is not fair to say that this is a lesser role; it is, however, fair to say that it is a different role that reveals a different capability for its success. It is difficult for the management to accept the two experiences as fungible, and that is today’s reality in how such decisions are made in candidate selection for a functional role.
So, what is the best way for someone who has run successful projects to claim a line role, even in the same area of their technical expertise? Here is my guidance:
- Do not assume that because you have delivered successful projects running matrixed teams—even while providing hands-on technical expertise—that you are automatically entitled to a line role of comparable responsibility.
- If your career goal is to migrate
to a line-management role in a particular functional area you must make your
objective clear to your manager during your Annual Performance Review (APR) and
set a realistic timetable to achieve that goal with an express support from
your boss. Ask them what specific skills upgrade you need and what experience
you must demonstrate to claim a line role starting at the lowest level of
functional responsibility.
If you are unable to secure this transition into a functional management role within your company in a reasonable timeframe, then you must exit to secure something worthwhile outside your company, than merely waiting for empty promises just to keep you juiced up. - Even of you have run projects with large matrixed teams and long durations do not expect to have your first line role to have a team of that size from the get-go. You may start as a section manager and go up from there, earning your stripes in this new area of responsibility.
- As a functional manager your role will be quite different from that of a project manager, so learn how to become effective in this functional role by incorporating all the other responsibilities described above to round out your development. You’ll no longer be measured by how you deliver projects on time and on target. Find out what those new measures of success are and what you need to do to achieve those KPIs.
- With more and more organizations adopting Agile, Scrum, and SAFe approaches to product development a functional manager’s role has morphed into providing mentoring to their teams, in addition to creating CoEs in their own areas of expertise.
- In a line-management role your ability to build excellent teams, camaraderie, and functional superiority outweigh all other priorities. So, learn how to focus on these priorities and become a functional rock star in your area of expertise.
Meanwhile, as those running matrixed projects get approached for roles that require line-management experience, it is best to showcase what your responsibilities are, acknowledging that you appreciate what it takes to be a line manager from HR and functional perspectives. Then say, leading a matrixed team without line authority takes leadership skills that require high influencing and political skills for the projects to succeed and I plan to bring that success to the new role in which I’ll be directly managing my team. Do not be disappointed if this argument does not win.
Moving from project roles to line-management roles is not always an easy transition. Understanding the import of the message from this blog will make you appreciate why this transition is not always easy to make; you must earn it.
Good luck!
