Off Course-On Target: The Hidden Workforce

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I am overdue for several notes about "org charts" so will try to catch up with this post and the next. I'm also behind in my reading (is there any such thing as being caught up?) but wanted to bring your attention to a recent article in Fortune magazine on "The Hidden Workforce".

"Hidden" in this case refers to the more informal organization and the way things really work. Most who have worked in any kind of large organization know that to successfully work within an organization, you need to figure out who the "go to" people are for given issues, topics, and expertise as well as who to avoid. The opening of the article sums it up very well:

"Anyone who has ever worked knows that the org chart, no matter how meticulously rendered, doesn't come close to describing the facts of office life. All those lines and boxes don't tell you, for example, that smokers tend to have the best information, since they bond with people from every level and department when they head outside for a puff. The org chart doesn't tell you that people go to Janice, a long-time middle manager, rather than their bosses to get projects through. It doesn't tell you that the Canadian and Japanese sales forces don't interact because the two points of contact can't stand each other."

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In every company there is a parallel power structure that can be just as important as the one everyone spends stressful days trying to master.......successful managers must understand this "constellation of collaborations, relationships, and networks," particularly in times of stress and transition. "We're not saying you can formalize the informal," says Katzenbach. "We're saying you can influence it more than you do."

Ahead of me as usual, a long time colleague Jay Cross also noticed this Fortune article in his "Kindred Spirits" posting last week. I suspect that Jay was interested in this article because of the study called "The Informal Organization" which spurred the Fortune article and because Jay has been bringing some much needed attention to the issue of "informal learning" on his blog and book by the same name. Both of them are worth your time.

Jay and the Fortune article provide some additional links that are worth looking at such as the New Roundtable site by Rob Cross who recently published the book "The Hidden Power of Social Networks" and Orgnet.com which are both focused on the details of social networks and how to bring these otherwise invisible patterns into focus.

This type of work is the crux of the Fortune article, and it outlines the work being done with Social Network Analysis (SNA). The article has some very illustrative examples of how some diverse organizations have tackled problems such as energizing a sluggish culture, grooming leadership, keeping the talent happy, and improving collaboration. This has been an area of study for many years and I've always been fascinated with how social networks and technical networks are so amazingly similar. For example, in both cases the analysis of network "traffic" is able to clearly show the "hubs and spokes" of a network—be it a data network or a human network. In one of the cases outlined in the "Hidden Workplace" article, 300 peak performing executives and senior managers from Lehman Brothers, a large investment bank, worked with Rob Cross and Network Roundtable and:

"..... generated a graphic for everyone, a web of nodes and networks that allowed each executive to see who is connected to whom. The analysis assessed the strength of each person's network relative to others in Cross's database. It also mapped information flows. Several types emerged, including "connectors," who had the most extensive direct ties, and "brokers," who had the most diverse networks and who were key to getting things done. Then there were the 'bottlenecks,' who— either because they were overworked or because they hoarded information—kept things from happening. All the employees were able to see if they were on the periphery of networks or in the middle of them."

It's definitely worth your time to read this article and related links. Next post I'll talk about the trend toward obviating the org chart. Stay tuned!

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