I’ve been meeting with a newly minted executive coach (congrats Freddie Helrich!), and after a recent meeting, he assigned me a project to “map out” my internal organization. We had been discussing one of my strategic objectives, better communicating ideas internally to various constituencies. I made the comment that one of the things I think my team and I can do better is communicate our processes, engagements, ongoing projects, day-to-day activities, etc. Up and down the organization, as well as laterally.
Keeping key parties abreast of our strategic plans and how we are executing on those plans is a challenge, and I don’t think we’ve always done a great job at it (frankly, we’d rather focus on doing good work for clients vs. managing an internal bureaucracy). But, it’s a very important part of high functioning teams: timely, clear, effective communication… a goal and a challenge.
Freddie asked me to “map it out” and that struck me as a potentially high value activity. It struck a chord, I think in part because while previously working on my goals, challenges, and attempting to find the root causes of my challenges (a la Ray Dalio Principles), I wrote down the following:
“Weakness – It’s challenging for me to understand complex interpersonal networks, like the politics of a large office or organization”
It never occurred to me previously that I needed a better tool in order to “see” the interpersonal network, and that I could develop such a tool myself. So I set about to do just that. To start, I wrote down all of the members of the organization, one person per post-it note, everyone that we interact with, influence, or who influences our ability to execute on our objectives internally. I used some internal org charts and email distribution lists to capture all the names.
Next, I laid out plenty of space on my dining room table and attempted to “map out” the over 100 names. In my mapping, proximity would represent ease of flow of information and ideas, so there would be various “centers of gravity” within the org chart. Notes adjacent to eachother have influence and communicate ideas between eachother easily. Overlapping post-its would represent individuals within a specific geographic area or product segment, groups on individuals that are closely linked and where ideas would be shared very easily. The various colors represent capital markets vs. investment banking orientations.
This differs from a traditional org chart because in a standard hierarchy a liner, logical relationship exists between parties. Information flows up and down the org trees, and each branch of the tree appears to have equal weight and influence. But, in reality, that is not how information flows. In reality, there tends to be many more interconnected lines of communication, often based on proximity and informal relationships. Those were the relationships that I was most interested in better understanding and mapping.
First attempt (names blurred for privacy):
Second iteration:
It was really very challenging to try to figure out how all the pieces fit together. Individual relationships are usually easy, but the interconnected nature of the organization is the challenge. I went through a few iterations. Often, when I’d move one “sleeve” I’d realize that there wasn’t a perfect fit for a replacement, or moving one individual would push another individual or sleeve further away from a connection that I wanted to keep very close. So there we many iterations, like a jigsaw puzzle.
Stepping back, the initial take-away is a story of complexity. Just the sheer number of post-its is obvious. The number of possible connections and iterations is staggering. My wife asked me “You deal with all these people???” And the answer is yes, in some form I, or my team, touch all of these individuals, and nearly all of them cover multiple clients (that’s the next layer!). Each card represents a complex human, with their own motivations, strengths, weaknesses, communication styles, etc. I think being able to manage information flow in a large complex organization like this may come naturally to some people… they have a natural, intuitive way of keeping the interrelated personalities in some order in their mind. It’s like the person that can calculate equations quickly in their head.
People with that skillset are adept navigators of large organizations. They see the big interconnected network easily and they know intuitively what strings to pull and from whom and how to communicate effectively across teams, groups, geographies, etc.
I am not one of those people. But exercises like this create useful schematics for helping me think about the organization from that higher level. I can now layer a logic on top of this visual representation and develop a plan to better communicate. When I see this, I makes me realize that each of the sleeves require their own communication channel from our team, which should be monitored, tracked, and gauged for effectiveness. That channel will differ based on the nature of each sleeve… the communication method could be as different as formal scheduled meetings, with printed materials (spreadsheets and powerpoint presentation or memos), to informal meetings, like grabbing a coffee or drinks, to build report and trust. Phone calls, in-person visits, attending client meetings together, dinners, training tutorials, email outreach, etc. In each case, and for each sleeve, a plan needs to be developed, executed, and tracked.
The schematic also helps me to quickly see where I might get the most “bang for my buck” in terms of the largest / deepest pockets of individuals and influence. Where should we spend our limited resources of time and energy to make the biggest impact? Who do we ultimately want to influence? Are we happy with our current center of gravity? Would we want to shift that in some way, drawing certain groups closer to ourselves, or moving our center of gravity closer to the decision making pockets inside the division. With these ideas and questions in mind, we can start flushing out a plan. Very helpful exercise!!!
How do you think about your organization? Your place within it? How does communication and influence happen inside your organization? How are decisions made? Does your org chart make sense? Does it accurately reflect the organization of leadership, ideas, influence, drivers of activity? How would you remap it? I think that depends on the final objective. In my case, I’m concerned with communicating ideas and disseminating information, so an information flowchart was appropriate, but there are certainly many forms that this could take.
Also, my chart maps how I see the world. A colleague’s chart could be dramatically different. We see the world uniquely. We all do. Mapping a vision of the world that you operate within can say a lot about how you see yourself and others. I’d recommend it.
Thanks for spending some time engaging with this idea. I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback!!
Sincerely
-DD
