What do the best matrix leaders do differently?

There is a version of matrix leadership that looks, from the outside, like ordinary leadership with extra meetings. The leader is diligent, professional, and committed. They attend every steering group, manage every stakeholder, and chase every slipping commitment. They work harder than almost anyone in the organisation. And they consistently achieve less than the situation warrants, because they are applying the tools of hierarchical leadership to an environment that does not run on hierarchical logic.

The best matrix leaders understand something different. They understand that the absence of formal authority is not a constraint to be worked around. It is the defining condition of the role, and it requires a fundamentally different approach to almost everything: how influence is built, how commitment is created, how accountability is structured, how conflict is addressed, and how a programme sustains itself when the leader eventually moves on.

This is the synthesis article for the matrix leadership series. It draws on all ten articles published to date and on the research that grounds them, to answer a question that runs underneath all of it: what, specifically, do the leaders who succeed in lateral roles do differently from the leaders who struggle?

The research finding that frames everything

The Centre for Creative Leadership has been studying cross-boundary leadership for over a decade. Their research involved more than 2,800 survey respondents and nearly 300 in-depth interviews with leaders across six world regions, alongside additional structured interviews with 128 senior executives. One finding from that research stands out more than any other. Of the senior executives interviewed, 86 percent said that collaborating effectively across boundaries was extremely important in their current role. Only seven percent said they were very effective at doing it. A 79 percent critical gap, the largest the researchers had ever recorded in their data at the Centre for Creative Leadership.

That gap is not primarily a skills problem. The leaders in that research were capable, senior people. It is a mental model problem. Most leaders who move into matrix roles bring with them a set of instincts developed in environments where formal authority was available, and those instincts consistently mislead them in environments where it is not.

Research specifically on leadership behaviour in matrix organisations, drawing on grounded theory interviews with programme managers and executives in a major aerospace business, identifies five constructs that distinguish effective from ineffective lateral leaders: the capacity to empower others rather than direct them, the quality of support given across boundaries, the rigour of decision-making in ambiguous authority environments, the flexibility to adapt rather than insist, and the communication discipline that creates clarity without relying on position. Each of these is, on closer examination, an expression of the same underlying shift: leading without authority requires a genuinely different relationship with power, with clarity, and with other people’s commitment than leading with it does.

The ten articles in this series have explored that shift across four capabilities and a set of practical challenges. The four capabilities are influence, networks, convening, and stewardship. The practical challenges cover decision-making, competing priorities, conflict, trust, and ambiguity. What follows draws them together around seven behaviours that, in the research and in practice, most reliably distinguish the matrix leaders who get traction from those who get exhausted.

The four capabilities as the foundation

Before the seven behaviours, the foundation. The series introduced a four-capability framework for lateral leadership in How do I lead when I’m not the boss?: influence, networks, convening, and stewardship. These are not a list of skills. They are the four domains in which a lateral leader has to build capability specifically because formal authority is absent.

Influence is what replaces direction: the ability to shape others’ thinking and action through credibility, relationship, and genuine alignment with their interests, rather than through instruction. Networks are what replace reporting lines: the deliberately built web of relationships across boundaries that creates the social infrastructure through which information, support, and cooperation flow. Convening is what replaces the management meeting: the capacity to bring people together in ways that generate genuine ownership and collective commitment rather than attendance and nominal agreement. Stewardship is what replaces positional accountability: the orientation towards the whole system that means a lateral leader holds themselves responsible for what the programme leaves behind, not just what it delivers.

Every one of the seven behaviours that follow is an expression of one or more of these four capabilities in practice. The capabilities are the foundation. The behaviours are what they look like when they are working.

Seven behaviours that distinguish the best matrix leaders

1. They make commitment the unit of currency, not agreement

Without formal authority, compliance is not available. A direct report can be instructed to deliver and, within limits, performance management will catch a failure to do so. A cross-boundary stakeholder can agree in the room and not deliver, and nothing forces the conflict into the open. The best lateral leaders understand this structural difference early, and it changes how they approach every interaction.

Where a hierarchical leader might accept a nod in the room as evidence that something will happen, an effective lateral leader understands that the nod and the commitment are not the same thing. A commitment is specific: what will be done, by whom, by when, and what the person needs from others to make it possible. Anything less specific is an intention, and intentions have a short shelf life when they meet competing priorities.

The best lateral leaders build explicit working agreements into every significant relationship from the start: not just what will be delivered, but how disruption will be handled when priorities compete, who contacts whom when something changes, and what each person needs from the other for the relationship to function well. They contract for difficulty before it arrives rather than managing it after.

This behaviour is the practical expression of the convening and stewardship capabilities. It is explored most directly in How do I create accountability without authority? and How do I manage competing priorities in a matrix?

One reflection question: In your most important current cross-boundary relationships, are the commitments specific enough that both parties would describe them the same way a week later?

2. They invest in relationships before they have a need

The Centre for Creative Leadership’s research is specific about this: the capacity to build and sustain relationships across boundaries, before the need for cooperation arises, is one of the clearest behavioural differentiators between matrix leaders who get traction and those who do not. Leaders who try to build relationships at the point of need consistently get less cooperation than those who invested well before it.

This is partly about social capital: relationships built before a need arises carry a different quality of goodwill than relationships initiated at the point of request. But it is also about signal. A lateral leader who contacts a function primarily when they need something from it is signalling, accurately, what the relationship is for. A lateral leader who invests in understanding what a function is trying to accomplish and where its pressures lie, before bringing any request, is signalling something different: that the relationship is reciprocal, that they see themselves as a genuine ally rather than a periodic requestor.

Research on what makes cross-boundary trust durable is consistent on this point: the three components of trustworthiness, whether someone is perceived as able to deliver, as genuinely caring about the other person’s interests, and as consistent whether or not they are being observed, do not develop at the same pace. The middle component, genuine orientation towards the other person’s interests, is the hardest to establish at the point of need and the most straightforwardly built through sustained relational investment made before any need arises.

This behaviour is the practical expression of the networks and influence capabilities. It is explored most directly in How do I build a powerful internal network? and How do I build trust across organisational boundaries?

One reflection question: With your five most important cross-boundary relationships, when did you last invest in the relationship with no agenda of your own?

3. They create shared maps rather than managing competing private pictures

Without formal authority, a lateral leader cannot impose their interpretation of a situation on others. What they can do is create the conditions for a shared understanding to emerge. This is a more demanding task than it first appears, because in a matrix each function is operating from its own partial view of the same situation, and each partial view is accurate as far as it goes. The problem is not that any one function is wrong. It is that no single function can see the whole.

The best lateral leaders make the situation visible to everyone simultaneously rather than managing each stakeholder’s picture separately. When two functions are competing for the same resource, they bring both into the same room rather than negotiating bilaterally. When a decision has implications that only become visible when all the affected parties are together, they create the forum where those implications surface before the decision is made rather than after. When ambiguity is creating multiple incompatible private interpretations of the same uncertainty, they share their own working interpretation as an explicit provisional framework, invite critique, and treat the resulting conversation as the shared sensemaking the situation requires.

Research on boundary spanning leadership specifically identifies this as one of the most powerful and most underused practices available to leaders working across organisational boundaries: building shared understanding not by communicating a message downward or outward, but by creating the conditions for a map that everyone has had a genuine hand in building and correcting.

This behaviour is the practical expression of the convening and networks capabilities. It is explored most directly in How do I convene people who don’t report to me?, How do I manage competing priorities in a matrix?, and How do I lead through ambiguity and uncertainty in a matrix?

One reflection question: Where are you currently managing different stakeholders’ pictures of the same situation separately, when bringing them together would produce a shared understanding more quickly and more accurately?

4. They address the condition producing a problem, not just the current episode

When a cross-functional conflict surfaces, the instinctive response is to resolve it: facilitate the conversation, find the common ground, settle the immediate issue, and move on. When a commitment slips, the instinct is to address the individual. When a decision keeps being relitigated, the instinct is to rerun the decision process with more rigour.

The best lateral leaders notice that the same problems keep surfacing in different forms, and they ask a different question: what structural condition is producing this? In a matrix, the most damaging conflicts are generated not by difficult individuals but by unclear boundaries between functions, by incentive systems that put two legitimate sets of objectives in direct competition, or by resource scarcity that makes genuine cooperation structurally costly. No amount of relational skill addresses a structural fault. The leader who keeps mediating the same conflict is working at the wrong level.

Research on leadership behaviour in matrix organisations identifies this as one of the five critical differentiators: the decision-making and flexibility to operate at the level of the system rather than the episode. The leaders who succeed are those who surface the structural condition to whoever has the authority to address it, with enough specificity and evidence to make the case, rather than absorbing its symptoms indefinitely. This is a specific form of stewardship: holding yourself accountable not just for what the programme delivers but for what the system becomes.

This behaviour is the practical expression of the stewardship capability. It is explored most directly in How do I resolve conflict between departments?, How do decisions get made in a matrix organisation?, and How do I create accountability without authority?

One reflection question: Is there a problem you have resolved more than twice in different forms? What structural condition is producing it, and have you named that to someone who could actually change it?

5. They reduce their self-orientation visibly and consistently

Of all the elements that determine whether a lateral leader builds durable influence across boundaries, among the most powerful and most underestimated is how self-oriented they appear to the people they need to influence. Research on what makes trust durable in professional relationships identifies a specific denominator effect: perceived self-orientation does not simply reduce the trust that competence and reliability are building, it actively cancels it. Even moderate levels of perceived self-orientation can erase large amounts of trust built through consistent delivery.

For a lateral leader, this is particularly consequential. A hierarchical leader can sustain influence through positional authority even where they are perceived as primarily self-interested. A lateral leader cannot. Every relationship they hold depends entirely on the other person’s willingness to cooperate, and that willingness is shaped heavily by whether they believe the leader is genuinely trying to help them or primarily trying to extract what the programme needs.

The practical discipline is not about becoming selfless. It is about a specific set of observable behaviours: going into stakeholder meetings with a genuine question about what the other person needs before raising what you need; following up on the things that matter to them with the same urgency as the things that matter to your programme; and being seen, at least occasionally, to advocate for a cross-boundary stakeholder’s position in a forum where doing so costs you something. These are the signals that accumulate through the informal network into a reputation for genuine service rather than sophisticated extraction.

This behaviour is the practical expression of all four capabilities, but it most directly enables influence and stewardship. It is explored most directly in How do I build influence across functions and departments?, How do I create accountability without authority?, and How do I build trust across organisational boundaries?

One reflection question: If the five people you most depend on in your matrix were asked what you are primarily trying to accomplish, would their answers reflect your programme’s needs or theirs?

6. They probe rather than plan when the situation is genuinely complex

Research on adaptive leadership is direct about this: the most common cause of leadership failure is treating adaptive challenges as though they were technical problems. A technical problem has a correct answer that can in principle be found with enough expertise and analysis. An adaptive challenge requires new learning, new behaviour, and adjustment from multiple parts of the organisation, and the answer is not available until people have begun to act and have observed what happens.

This matters particularly for lateral leaders. A hierarchical leader who feels uncertain can often escalate to someone with more clarity. A lateral leader usually cannot, because the ambiguity in a matrix is frequently structural: the organisation does not have the answer either, and waiting for clarity before moving is a reliable way to run out of time without having moved.

The best lateral leaders distinguish between situations that are complicated, where the right answer is in principle findable with expertise and analysis, and situations that are genuinely complex, where the right answer only becomes visible after the organisation acts and observes what happens. In complicated situations, more analysis is the appropriate response. In complex ones, it consistently falls short. What works instead is probing: small, reversible actions designed to generate information, followed by careful observation, followed by adjustment and further action. This is a qualitatively different relationship with uncertainty from either waiting for clarity or projecting false confidence, and it is one of the clearest behavioural markers of a lateral leader who is genuinely comfortable with the nature of the role.

This behaviour is the practical expression of the influence and stewardship capabilities deployed under uncertainty. It is explored most directly in How do I lead through ambiguity and uncertainty in a matrix? and How do decisions get made in a matrix organisation?

One reflection question: Think of the challenge in your current role that is generating the most analytical effort without producing workable clarity. Is it complicated or complex, and if it is complex, what would the smallest useful probe look like?

7. They build capability in the system, not just deliver through their programme

The most significant thing that distinguishes an effective lateral leader from a merely diligent one is what they leave behind. Without formal authority, a lateral leader cannot build anything that depends on their continued presence, because when they move on, the programme’s sustainability will be determined by what the group can do without them. The leaders who build something durable are those who invest consistently in the group’s capability rather than carrying the capability themselves.

This is not a point about delegation in the conventional sense. It is a specific, lateral-leadership observation: the accountability habits, the shared language, the working agreements, the trust structures, and the sensemaking practices that the best lateral leaders build into the groups they work with are the only legacy that survives their departure. A programme that depended entirely on one person’s relational skill to hold it together is a programme that will quietly dissolve once that person moves on.

Research on boundary spanning leadership describes a specific practice that captures this precisely: weaving, which is the act of extracting differences between functions and incorporating them into a larger whole that belongs to all of them rather than to the leader who facilitated it. When the group owns the practice, the accountability structure, the shared map, the leader has successfully transferred what was once a personal capability into a systemic one. That transfer is the measure of stewardship: not whether the programme succeeded while you were responsible for it, but whether the system you led is more capable because you passed through it.

This behaviour is the clearest expression of the stewardship capability and the natural culmination of convening and trust. It is explored most directly in How do I create accountability without authority?, How do I convene people who don’t report to me?, and How do I build trust across organisational boundaries?

One reflection question: If you were unexpectedly unavailable for the next three months, what in your current programme would continue to function, and what would quietly stop?

The underlying pattern

These seven behaviours are distinct from each other, and each maps to specific capabilities and specific articles. But they share a single underlying logic: in every case, the effective lateral leader is operating at the level of the whole system rather than at the level of their own programme.

They make commitment rather than agreement the unit of currency because they know that the programme depends on what people genuinely choose to do, not what they nominally agreed to. They invest relationally before they have a need because they know the network is the infrastructure, and infrastructures need building before they are needed. They create shared maps rather than managing competing pictures because they know that the situation will remain invisible and unresolvable as long as each function is navigating its own private version of it. They address structural conditions rather than individual episodes because they know that the conditions will keep generating new episodes until someone changes them. They reduce their self-orientation because they know that durable influence, without authority, depends entirely on being seen to serve rather than to extract. They probe rather than plan in complex situations because they know that action generates information that analysis cannot. And they build capability in the system rather than carrying it themselves because they know that the only leadership that outlasts a lateral leader’s tenure is the leadership they have given away.

The four capabilities of matrix leadership, influence, networks, convening, and stewardship, are the domains in which these behaviours live. Influence is how you build the credibility and reciprocity that makes people willing to follow without being told. Networks are the social infrastructure through which cooperation flows. Convening is how you generate genuine collective ownership rather than nominal attendance. Stewardship is the orientation that ensures you are serving the whole rather than your slice of it.

Together, the four capabilities and the seven behaviours describe a form of leadership that is not a reduced version of hierarchical leadership with the authority taken out. It is a different kind of leadership entirely, with its own logic, its own disciplines, and its own particular demands. The leaders who succeed in matrix environments are those who make that shift completely, not those who make it partially while waiting for the authority that the matrix was never going to provide.

Three questions for reflection

1. Which of the seven behaviours is most consistently present in how you currently lead, and which is most consistently absent? What does the gap tell you about where your development as a lateral leader most needs to go?
2. Of the four capabilities, which one, if significantly stronger, would have the most immediate impact on your current programme? What is one specific action you could take in the next two weeks to develop it?
3. If you were to ask the people you most depend on in your matrix to describe what you are trying to accomplish, how confident are you that their answers would reflect the whole system rather than your own programme’s needs?

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