July 18 2007
The hidden workplace
There’s the organization chart - and then there’s the way things really work. Some smart companies are bringing power structures out of hiding, report Fortune’s Jennifer Reingold and Jia Lynn Yang.
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.
In a study released exclusively to Fortune, “The Informal Organization,” they argue that 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.”
…in companies where managers worked closely with informal employee networks, respondents were three times more likely to describe their job environment as positive.
Relative to the control group, employee satisfaction rose dramatically, as much as 71 percentage points. Customer satisfaction jumped too: Percentage increases ranged from 35% to 245%. “A formal organization is responsive to the exertion of power,” says Sabia, “but an informal organization is responsive to persuasion. It’s changed the way I think about management.”
Another key to striking the right balance is finding the right ambassadors to shuttle between the formal and the informal. Knowing who those people are is a challenge: (Rob) Cross’s data show that half the time, managers don’t know who the best networkers are. So while smoking may be bad for your health, hanging out with the smokers - or others like them - may actually help keep your company in the pink.
Great resources: Network Roundtable at UVA (Rob Cross), Org.net (Valdis Krebs). Informal Learning contains the results of interviews with both Rob and Valdis.
On Friday, I posted a picture of a silo labeled “Training” on Internet Time Blog.
A reader asked, “What is the significance of the picture in relation to training?”
I responded “The silo is a metaphor for a section of a company that is isolated from others. This is symptomatic of command-and-control hierarchies, where managers guard their fiefdoms. My suggestion with the picture is that training has entered its own silo. I advocate that trainers become performance consultants and business problem solvers, i.e., escape the silo. I woke up this morning with the image in my head.”
I am currently working with companies to boost performance through online collaboration and social software.
Collaboration is clearly a source of learning, but you can’t learn from it if you are not connected to your colleagues. Hence the need for Social Network Analysis. Who’s responsible for this? The Fortune article is a great example of learning that falls outside the traditional Training silo.
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Thought: Were a company on Facebook, it could generate an organizational network analysis automatically. (At least the data’s in there, not that I could program the network diagramming.) It would be fascinating to watch a network evolve over time.
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