You need to be a self-starter to succeed here

I'm working in a heavily matrix managed organisation. Everyone is incredibly supportive and enthusiastic, but one thing I've noticed: You have to be a self-starter or you won't thrive here: people who are paralysed by the overwhelm and do nothing will inevitably fall out. Equally, people who ignore the insights and feedback around them will fall out too.

The worst thing is waiting for instructions

If you're going to get anything substantial done, taking initiative without explicit direction is key. There is plenty of enthusiastic and opinionated support, but it isn't directive. If you are used to being directed and expect it, you're going to struggle.

In a typical organisation, for a typical Individual Contributor, your line manager usually directs your work. Even if they're doing it passively, they are responsible for your day-to-day direction. In this org it is rare for your manager to be directing your tasks. Instead, a line manager is just one of many opinionated people, and possibly not even the most important person to listen to when it comes to what you work on.

If you're used to checking for permission to lead you're not going to get it—because you already have it, not just as a gift, but as an unspoken expectation.

What a hierarchical organisation has built-in is stronger alignment, a clearer signal (right or wrong) above the noise. Here you have peers and stakeholders across a wide range of disciplines, experience levels, job titles and expertise. Many of them are indirectly directing your work. You can (and probably have to) check with a dozen people and you'll come away with at least a dozen subtly different perspectives. With the complexity comes a lot of noise and lots of competing signals.

How do you know who to listen to, and when to have the confidence to lead, and act?

The second worst thing is not communicating

I have two suggestions: first, lean hard on the value of "Working In The Open". Make your thinking clear. Write down all the competing thoughts, add in what you don't know, what you think, and what your questions are. Then share that and invite feedback on your thinking. You'll get the extra insights that you may have missed^[1].

My second suggestion is: build and maintain your network. Networking is usually something people do outside of work, but it's extremely valuable here. You don't have a line manager maintaining a network on your behalf and filtering useful information to you. And it does need maintaining: the network you found during your onboarding won't last: teams and goals shift continually and people will come and go^[2].

The third worst thing is listening to everyone

A trap that many people fall into when they embrace this kind of organisation is over-indexing on consensus-seeking. Discussion and debate can easily become never-ending without boundaries. Some questions you have to work out answers to:

• Where's the sweet spot between too little and too much input?
• How will you know when you have enough information to make a decision?

There are no generic right answers^[3]. There are many tools and tactics to try, and I'm not going to suggest any. In a context like this, tools won't save you if you can't sense when to use them, or when they're not enough.

The real worst thing is not experimenting

With all of the organisational factors I've outlined—the frequent change, the enthusiastic support and opinions and the expectation to lead—this is an environment set up for experimentation, growth and feedback loops.

You don't get many environments like this, where there's space to explore, support to learn, and the expectation that you'll lead.

It can be overwhelming. But it's also rich with insight, energy, and the chance to grow in ways most roles don't offer.

Growth here doesn't come from certainty. It comes from curiosity, feedback, and the courage to act before everything is clear.