I was coaching a Programme Director leading a major operational transformation across their whole business. She was experienced, credible, and well-organised. The steering group met monthly. Attendance was strong. The agenda was always covered. And yet, three months in, almost nothing was moving. When we explored what was happening, the pattern became clear. People were coming to the meetings. They were agreeing with what was discussed. They were leaving and returning entirely to their own priorities. She had attendance. She did not have commitment. And until that conversation, she had assumed they were the same thing.

She is not unusual. In matrix organisations, the gap between attendance and commitment is one of the most common and least examined leadership problems. It is common because it is invisible: a room full of nodding people looks like alignment. It is unexamined because most leaders attribute the problem to the wrong cause. They conclude that the stakeholders are not sufficiently engaged, that the governance model needs strengthening, or that they need more senior sponsorship. These things may all be true. But the deeper issue is usually earlier and simpler: the way people were brought into the work in the first place.

Convening is the practice of bringing people together in a way that creates genuine commitment rather than polite compliance. It is one of the most important and least developed capabilities in matrix leadership. It is not logistics. It is not chairing a meeting or facilitating a workshop, though both of those things matter. It is the work that determines whether the people in the room have chosen to be there, understand why their contribution matters, feel any ownership of the outcome, and leave prepared to act rather than simply to report back.

This article is a deep dive on convening, the third of the four capabilities explored in How do successful leaders create commitment in matrix organisations? That article introduced the full framework: influence, networks, convening, and stewardship. This article takes convening apart. It explores six elements that separate convening that generates commitment from gathering that generates attendance: invitation, possibility, ownership, commitment, participation, and the creation of collective action. The other deep dives in this series cover what a matrix organisation is and why companies adopt one, how to build influence without authority, and how to build a powerful internal network.

What convening actually is in a matrix organisation

Most leadership gatherings in matrix organisations are not convened. They are scheduled.

There is a difference. Scheduling brings people into proximity. Convening creates the conditions under which people can do meaningful work together. Convening is not the same as chairing a meeting. A chair manages process: the agenda, the time, the sequence of speakers. It is not the same as facilitation, though skilled conveners often facilitate. A facilitator guides dialogue once people are in the room. The convener’s work happens before, during, and after, and the before is where most of the real work takes place.

This distinction matters in a matrix organisation for a specific reason. In a hierarchy, you can summon people. Presence is not optional and engagement, while it cannot be mandated, can at least be pressured. In a matrix, the most important people in the room, the colleagues from other functions whose genuine commitment you actually need, have a real choice about how much of themselves they bring. They will be present. They may be engaged. Whether they commit is an entirely different question.

Consider two versions of the same initiative. A supply chain transformation programme needs the active cooperation of finance, commercial, logistics, and technology. In the first version, the programme director calls a steering group meeting, sends an agenda two days in advance, and runs through the slides. People agree the programme is important. Actions are logged. Six weeks later, three of the four functions have quietly reprioritised. In the second version, the programme director begins differently. Three weeks before any formal gathering, she has individual conversations with each function’s representative: not to present the programme but to understand what each person’s current pressures are, what they already see as the problem, and what they would need to feel that their involvement was genuinely worthwhile. The first formal meeting is designed around those conversations. The difference in energy, ownership, and follow-through is not subtle.

The second programme director was convening. The first was scheduling.

Peter Block, whose work on community and belonging provides some of the most useful frameworks for convening practice, argues that the convener’s job is not to solve problems for people but to create the conditions under which people can solve problems together. The convener holds the context: the clarity of purpose, the quality of invitation, the space for genuine dialogue, and the architecture that turns conversation into commitment.

Why convening fails in matrix organisations

Before exploring what effective convening looks like, it is worth naming why it so often goes wrong. The failure modes are recognisable across every kind of matrix organisation.

Convening too late: The leader calls people together after the shape of the solution has already been determined. Consultation becomes performance. People sense this and contribute accordingly. The regional director who presents a fully formed operating model to the country leads and asks for input is not convening. She is informing.

Treating attendance as engagement: A global product steering group with fifteen members and a sixty percent attendance rate may look like active governance. If the people who attend are largely there to report upwards rather than to contribute to collective thinking, the meeting is decorative. Attendance is not a proxy for engagement, and engagement is not a proxy for commitment.

Designing for information transfer: A common pattern in matrix organisations is the update meeting: each function reports its status, the programme director synthesises, and the group disperses. Information has moved. Nothing else has. The most important conversations, about competing priorities, about where the initiative is genuinely at risk, about what each person is actually willing to do, never happen.

Generating agreement rather than ownership: A head of transformation convenes a cross-functional workshop. The group agrees on three strategic priorities. Everybody leaves feeling aligned. Eight weeks later, it becomes clear that each function has interpreted those priorities through the lens of their own objectives. The alignment was real but shallow. Agreement was reached around words. Ownership of what those words meant in practice was never established.

Neglecting what happens between gatherings: In a matrix, the work does not stop between meetings. Competing demands reassert themselves. Priorities shift. Commitments that felt firm in the room become negotiable when a line manager applies pressure. The convener who treats each gathering as a self-contained event will find that the commitment generated in one meeting has quietly eroded by the next.

The six practices of effective convening

Practice 1: Invitation

Consider two versions of the same message.

The first is a calendar invite: “Cross-functional steering group. Digital transformation. Quarterly update. 90 minutes. See attached agenda.” The second is a message sent individually to each person: “I am bringing together the people whose perspective will most shape whether we get this right. I want to start not with the programme update but with what you are seeing from where you sit, and what would need to be true for your function to be genuinely engaged, not just informed. Your view on that question is something I cannot get from anyone else in the room.”

Both invite people to the same meeting. Only one is an invitation.

The distinction matters because in a matrix organisation, the quality of the invitation signals what kind of engagement is being asked for. An invitation that treats attendance as assumed creates a particular expectation: this is something I am obliged to attend. An invitation that names the purpose, the possibility, and the specific value of the person’s contribution creates a different expectation: this is something I might genuinely want to be part of.

Block argues that a powerful invitation creates choice rather than obligation, names a challenge worth addressing, and makes clear why participation matters. This is particularly relevant in matrix organisations where leaders depend on cooperation from people who have no formal obligation to prioritise their initiative above competing demands.

Before any convening conversation, effective matrix leaders ask four questions. What challenge are we trying to address? What possibility are we trying to create? Why does this matter now? And why does this particular person’s involvement matter? When people can answer those questions clearly before they walk into the room, the conversation starts from a fundamentally different place.

When the Programme Director began sending individual messages before her steering group meetings rather than a single calendar invite, she noticed something immediate: people started arriving having already thought about the question she had posed. The meeting did not need to warm up. It began in the right place.

Questions you can use with your own stakeholders before you convene:

  • “What would need to be true about this conversation for you to feel it was genuinely worth your time?”
  • “What would make this a gathering you chose to be part of, rather than one you felt obliged to attend?”
  • “What is the commitment you would be willing to make to this work, if the conditions were right?”
  • “What do you need from me, before we bring the group together, that would make your participation feel meaningful rather than dutiful?”
  • “What would it mean for your function if this programme achieves what it is trying to achieve?”

Practical actions:

  • Write the invitation before you write the agenda. If you cannot articulate why each person’s specific perspective is needed, reconsider who you are inviting.
  • Send individual messages rather than a single group calendar invite for high-stakes gatherings. The extra effort signals that participation is not generic.
  • Frame requests around purpose and possibility rather than tasks alone. The difference between “we need your input” and “your experience of this from the customer side is something we cannot replicate from the centre” is the difference between obligation and invitation.

Practice 2: Possibility

Most organisational meetings are organised around problems. This is not unreasonable: problems are what prompt people to gather. But a conversation dominated exclusively by problems creates a particular kind of energy: analytical, cautious, risk-aware, and often defensive. People become focused on what cannot be done, what has been tried before, and what stands in the way.

Effective convening creates space for a different conversation alongside the problem analysis: the conversation about possibility. What could be different? What would success actually look like? What becomes possible for customers, for the organisation, for the people in this room, if we get this right?

A leadership team in a global professional services firm spent the first six months of a cross-regional integration initiative in meetings dominated by risk registers, dependency maps, and escalation logs. Progress was slow and the energy in the room was consistently flat. A new programme lead joined and changed one thing: she began each gathering with thirty minutes on a single question. If this integration works well, what will our clients be able to do that they cannot do today? The shift in energy was immediate. The risk conversations did not disappear. But they were now in service of something the group could see and wanted, rather than simply problems to be managed.

This is not naive optimism. It is a deliberate act of leadership. Research on motivation and organisational change consistently suggests that people commit more fully when they are moving towards something they want to help create rather than simply away from something they want to avoid. The convener’s role is not to provide the vision. It is to create the space in which the group can articulate one together.

The Programme Director used a version of this when her steering group had become mired in dependency conflicts between functions. Rather than trying to resolve the conflicts directly, she opened one meeting with a single question: “If this transformation delivers what it should, what will be different for the people running operations in two years’ time?” The conversation that followed was the most energised the group had in months. It did not solve the dependency conflicts. But it reminded people why solving them mattered.

Questions you can use to open up possibility in cross-functional gatherings:

  • “What is the future you would be genuinely proud to have helped create through this work?”
  • “What would make this worth the difficulty it is going to take?”
  • “If this succeeds, what changes for the people you are responsible for?”
  • “What possibility does this open up that you have not yet said out loud in a meeting?”
  • “What would need to be true about what we create together for you to look back and feel it was worth your full commitment?”

Practical actions:

  • Design time explicitly for possibility conversations, not as a warm-up or an icebreaker but as substantive work.
  • Ask what success looks like for all of us, not just for this initiative or this function.
  • Spend as much time discussing desired outcomes as current problems. If your agenda does not reflect that balance, your meeting will not either.

Practice 3: Ownership

The most common failure in organisational gatherings is that people leave having agreed with the leader rather than having taken responsibility themselves.

This is the ownership trap. Leaders who call people together, present the challenge, explain the solution, and ask for support are engaged in a transaction, not a convening. They may get what they asked for. But they rarely get what they actually need, which is people who feel genuinely responsible for what happens next.

A product director leading a customer experience overhaul spent the first two quarters presenting his team’s analysis to a cross-functional group and asking for sign-off. He got it, every time. He also got minimal follow-through, because the other functions felt no ownership of a plan they had reviewed rather than shaped. In the third quarter, he changed his approach. He brought the problem, not the solution. He asked each function to identify the part of the customer journey they had the most insight into and the most leverage over. The plan that emerged was messier and took longer to develop. It also had six functions who felt it was theirs.

Ownership is created when people have genuine input into the diagnosis of the problem, the shape of the response, and the definition of their own contribution. Block describes this as the difference between accountability, which can be assigned, and ownership, which cannot. You cannot give people ownership. You can only create the conditions under which they take it.

The Programme Director noticed this pattern in her own steering group. She had been arriving at each meeting with a progress report and a list of decisions required. People engaged with the decisions but left the meeting having made choices about her programme rather than decisions about theirs. When she began arriving with questions instead of answers, and asking each function to diagnose the part of the problem they were best placed to understand, the quality of the conversation shifted. So did the quality of what people did between meetings.

Questions you can use to build ownership rather than generate agreement:

  • “What part of this challenge do you feel a genuine sense of responsibility for, regardless of whether it sits in your formal remit?”
  • “What would you be willing to do differently in how your function shows up to this work?”
  • “What are you prepared to be held accountable for by this group, that goes beyond what your job description requires?”
  • “Where have you been waiting for someone else to act, when you could act yourself?”
  • “What would it mean for you personally to be someone who helped make this work?”

Practical actions:

  • Resist the temptation to arrive with the answer. Bring the question instead and be genuinely open to where the group takes it.
  • Ask individuals what contribution they are willing to make rather than what they agree to support. The language matters: willing to make is active and personal; agree to support is passive and vicarious.
  • Involve stakeholders before major decisions are finalised, not to consult them on a decision already made, but to genuinely shape it with them.

Practice 4: Commitment

There is a distinction that every experienced matrix leader eventually learns. Agreement is not commitment. A meeting can end in universal agreement and produce nothing.

Commitment has a different quality. It is specific, personal, and voluntary. It is not “we agreed that action X is important.” It is “I will do Y by Z.” The difference is not semantic. It reflects whether people have internalised the work as theirs or experienced it as someone else’s initiative that they have endorsed.

The difference shows up most clearly in what happens when competing demands arrive, as they always do in a matrix organisation. A person who agreed to support an initiative will deprioritise it when their line manager asks for something else. A person who made a specific, personal, public commitment is considerably more likely to find a way to honour it, or at the very least to be explicit about why they cannot.

Generating genuine commitment in a convening context requires three things. First, people need to feel they had real choice about whether to be involved. Second, they need to have had genuine input into the definition of the work. Third, they need to make their commitment specific and public, in the presence of others.

The Programme Director began ending her steering group meetings differently. Rather than summarising the actions agreed as a group, she asked each person individually to state what they were committing to before they left the room. The first time she did this, two people could not answer the question. That was useful information. It told her where the ownership had not yet formed. It also told the group something about itself.

Questions you can use to move from agreement to commitment in cross-functional settings:

  • “What are you willing to do, that you have not yet said you will do, that would make a real difference to this work?”
  • “What is the contribution only you can make here, and are you willing to make it?”
  • “What would it take for you to make a commitment to this group that you feel in your bones rather than one you feel you ought to make?”
  • “Is there something you have been holding back from committing to? What is stopping you?”
  • “What would it mean to this group if you brought your full effort to this, rather than what your schedule currently allows?”

Practical actions:

  • End gatherings with individual commitments, not group summaries. Ask each person to state specifically what they will do, by when, and what they need from others to make it possible.
  • Make commitments visible after the meeting. A brief written record of who committed to what, shared with the group, changes the social dynamic around follow-through.
  • At the start of the next gathering, return to those commitments before moving to new business. This signals that what people say in the room has weight beyond the room.

Practice 5: Participation

Participation is often assumed. If people are in the room, they are participating. But participation exists on a spectrum.

At one end is presence: physical or virtual attendance. At the other end is genuine contribution: bringing real thinking, honest questions, and real willingness to be changed by the conversation. Most organisational gatherings hover somewhere in the lower half of that spectrum, and most leaders do not know it because the signals of non-participation, polite agreement, vague contributions, and silence in the moments that matter, are easy to misread as engagement.

The quality of participation is shaped by everything that precedes it: the quality of the invitation, the clarity of the purpose, the degree to which people feel ownership of the question, and the degree to which the convener creates a space where honest thinking is welcome rather than managed. A senior leader who dominates the first twenty minutes of a cross-functional discussion will not see genuine participation from the rest of the room. A convener who treats every contribution as something to be synthesised into her existing view will stop receiving contributions that challenge it.

It is also shaped by who is in the room. Effective conveners think carefully not just about who needs to be informed but about whose perspective is genuinely needed in order to produce a better outcome. These are often different lists. The person who needs to be informed may be two levels more senior than the person whose operational knowledge would most change the quality of the conversation.

The Programme Director realised that one of her steering group members, a senior commercial lead, had been attending every meeting but contributing almost nothing. When she spoke to him beforehand and asked directly what he would need to feel the meeting was a genuine use of his time, he told her that the conversations never touched the thing he actually cared about, which was what the transformation would mean for major customer relationships. She restructured one agenda item around that question. He was the most engaged person in the room that day, and his contribution changed the direction of a key workstream.

Questions you can use to deepen the quality of participation in cross-functional gatherings:

  • “What have you been thinking in this conversation that you have not yet said?”
  • “What would you need to feel safe enough to say the thing you most want to say in this room?”
  • “What does this group need to hear from you that only you can offer?”
  • “Where have you been holding back your real view, and what would it take to share it?”
  • “What do you owe this group that you have not yet given?”

Practical actions:

  • Before convening, ask who is missing whose perspective would change this conversation. Then consider whether the right person for the work is the most senior available representative or the person with the most relevant experience.
  • During the gathering, create conditions where contribution is valued over consensus. This includes making space for dissent, uncertainty, and challenge rather than steering towards premature agreement.
  • Notice the pattern of who speaks and who does not. In cross-functional gatherings, silence from a particular function is rarely indifference. It is usually a signal worth exploring.

Practice 6: Collective action

The test of any convening is not what happens in the room. It is what happens afterwards.

Collective action, the kind that matrix organisations genuinely need, is not coordinated individual activity. It is something qualitatively different: people who feel shared ownership of a challenge, who understand what others are doing, who hold each other accountable, and who adjust their individual contributions in response to what they see happening around them. That quality of collective action does not emerge automatically from a well-run meeting, however well designed.

A cross-functional team working on a new product launch held an excellent kick-off session. Roles were clear, commitments were made, energy was high. Eight weeks later the programme manager discovered that two workstreams had made conflicting decisions about a key customer touchpoint, because neither team had thought to check what the other was doing between meetings. The gathering had created individual commitment. It had not created collective responsibility.

Sustaining collective action requires the convener to maintain the conditions that made the gathering productive: keeping people connected between formal meetings, continuing to hold the possibility in view, supporting commitments as they are tested by competing organisational demands, and convening again when the work requires it. Effective matrix leaders understand that convening is not a single event. It is an ongoing practice.

The Programme Director introduced a simple rhythm between her monthly steering group meetings: a brief fortnightly check-in, fifteen minutes, not to report progress but to surface anything that was threatening a commitment before it became a problem. Attendance was optional but almost always complete, because people understood that it was the mechanism by which the group stayed honest with itself between formal meetings. Within two months, the dynamic in the steering group had shifted noticeably. People were arriving already aware of what others were working on and where the pressure points were.

Questions you can use to sustain collective action between and beyond formal gatherings:

  • “What does this group need to be, not just do, for the work between meetings to stay alive?”
  • “What are you each willing to hold each other accountable for, in a way that feels like care rather than control?”
  • “What would it mean for this to be a group of people who feel responsible for each other’s success, not just their own workstream?”
  • “Where are we depending on the formal process to do something that only the relationships between us can actually do?”
  • “What would you be willing to risk, in service of the collective work, that you would not risk for your own function alone?”

Practical actions:

  • Create lightweight mechanisms for the group to stay connected between formal gatherings: a shared record of commitments, a brief check-in rhythm, or a simple way for people to flag when their commitment is at risk.
  • Make the collective progress visible. When people can see what others are doing, they are more likely to align their own efforts with the wider work rather than optimising locally.
  • Reconvene when the work encounters reality, not just when the calendar dictates it. A brief, focused gathering at a moment of genuine uncertainty or decision is more valuable than a scheduled update at which nothing has changed.

Wrapping up

Convening is one of the most important and least examined leadership capabilities in matrix organisations. It is not what happens in the room. It is everything that determines whether what happens in the room becomes something real.

The Programme Director I described at the start of this article did not need a better agenda. She did not need stronger governance or more senior sponsorship, though both of those things eventually came. What she needed was a different understanding of what it meant to bring people together. Once she began treating convening as leadership rather than logistics, the quality of engagement in her steering group changed within two meetings. Not because the stakeholders had changed, but because what she was asking of them had.

The leaders who convene well understand that the work begins with the invitation. They create conditions for possibility as well as problem-solving. They build ownership rather than generating agreement. They design for commitment rather than compliance. They think carefully about who participates and how. And they understand that collective action requires ongoing attention, not a single well-facilitated meeting.

Convening without formal authority is not a constraint. It is a different kind of leadership. One that, practised well, produces something more durable than compliance: people who have chosen, freely and specifically, to contribute their expertise and energy to something they helped create.

Three questions for reflection

  1. Think of a recent gathering you convened. At what point did you begin the convening work: at the point of sending the invitation, or earlier? What would have been different if you had started sooner?
  2. How much of the time in your typical cross-functional meetings is spent on problem analysis versus the conversation about possibility? What would shift if you changed that balance?
  3. After your last major gathering, how many people left with a specific, personally owned commitment rather than a shared agreement about what the group would do?

Inspiration

Block, P. (2008) Community: The structure of belonging. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Block, P. (1993) Stewardship: Choosing service over self-interest. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Schein, E.H. (2013) Humble inquiry: The gentle art of asking instead of telling. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.