How do support functions rank in comparision to "business"?

Submitted by Jochen Sulhanen
in
General Questions and Comments

Hi,

in one of the later casts, (Boss meeting prep - no surprises) M&M mentioned that rank plays a big role, even in matrix organizations. So if you a senior manager and act as project manager, a VP in your project still outranks you and you have to be careful.

I wonder how support functions are classified in this ranking system. I am a lawyer and often business needs my input.. I guess the same would apply for IT or HR.

Best regards,

Jochen

Submitted by Mark Horstman on Wednesday February 2nd, 2011 10:47 pm

A VP in a support function can often be seen to have less influence (though more pure role power) than a senior manager in a line function.
Legal is sometimes a special case, because liability is a special kind of risk that your function mitigates.  And by special, I mean "expensive."
The solution to ALL of this is robust relationships.  The best lawyers always have great internal networks.
It is similar.  IT always wants to fight for equality, when in fact demoting itself to a service role gets it more of what it wants.
Mark

Submitted by Jochen Sulhanen on Friday February 11th, 2011 5:14 am

Thank you Mark for a quick answer!
I think this is sound advice. My experience has been that there exist in our business two schools of thought: Some see legal as a necessary evil; some consider it so powerful that they expect us to run their projects.
In any case, I will work on this one: "The best lawyers always have great internal networks."
Jochen