Look Between The Boxes

Can you find yourself on your company’s org chart? Can you even find the org chart at the nonprofit you’ve worked at for years?

Most people don’t find them very useful because they don’t capture what really matters. The challenge for most organizations isn’t what’s happening inside the nicely organized little boxes, with those crisp, straight connective lines.

How well a sales or development office operates is obviously vital. Basic lines of reporting clearly need to be articulated. But for most organizations we’ve worked with, it’s what happens in the uncharted, in-between spaces that really tells the tale.

Power often stems as much from relationships and reputations as it does from positions on an org chart. Cross-functional teams, dotted-line reporting, and cross-training can be valuable.

We use org charts less to demarcate functions, reporting, or areas of responsibility and more to see what’s missing. Organizations recognize the importance of stakeholders, whether members of a community near a manufacturing facility, parents at a school, or a nonprofit working to level the playing field.

Yet responsibility for relationships with key stakeholders often bounces back and forth between marketing, government affairs, communications, or development.

Similarly, many foundations working to drive systems change lack expertise in defining critical elements of systems and how and why they function as they do. Various program officers or executives contribute bits and pieces of solid experience to the effort, but that’s not a systematic way to approach systems change.

Try this: Ask a few of the most experienced leaders in your organization, those who have been there for a very long time, to individually draw a basic org chart. Simultaneously, ask your most recent hire to do the same thing. If you then assess them, I’d wager you’ll learn a lot about the in-betweens—that white space that needs attention.

Would love to hear your results if you run the experiment!