The People Who Make Organizations Go—or Stop

The People Who Make Organizations Go—or Stop

In this Harvard Business Review article, Rob Cross and Larry Prusak note:

‘We’re all familiar with the truism “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Managers invariably use their personal contacts when they need to, say, meet an impossible deadline, get advice on a strategic decision, or learn the truth about a new boss. Increasingly, it’s through these informal networks—not just through traditional organizational hierarchies—that information is found and work gets done. Social networks can be powerful political tools as well; few managers can resist the temptation to use their connections to discredit business initiatives they dislike or to support proposals they favor.’

The power of Social Network Analysis (SNA) is its capacity to help you map and interpret such social networks within the workplace. As a relational framework, SNA enables you to see an aerial view of the social networks between people in your organisation, and understand opportunities and vulnerabilities in ways that non-network approaches cannot.

Figure 1: Example Identifiable Issues from an SNA Perspective

For example, Figure 1 shows that there are some ‘winners’ and some ‘losers’ in terms of their position within a network. The ‘broker’ (or critical connector) controls the flow of information between three different sub-groups and so is exceptionally well placed in terms of controlling communication. Of course, such brokers can also serve as bottlenecks and suffer from burnout because of a high reliance on them from others.

SNA can show us where formals leaders are in a network. Are they distributed around the network, or disconnected from everyone? Then there are informal leaders who may go unseen but are the ‘go-to’ person for many other employees and provide a critical role in terms of, for example, knowledge sharing or problem-solving. There are also employees in the organisation who may be totally isolated from others and alone, perpherally connected so be the ‘last to know’ about issues within the organisation, or connected up to others but in a ‘social ghetto’ on their own.

Of course, this approach requires the identification of individuals in your organisation. However, you can collate information at the Department level of an organisation, to give you insights such as seen in Figure 2 below, where individual identities can remain anonymous.

Figure 2: Hi-quality and low-quality information receival between departments

What is evident from Figure 2 is that many departments indicate that they receive low-quality information from the Project Management Department (indicated by the red arrow pointing towards the Project Management Department). This suggests that for such a central and important department in the organisation (note its central position in the network in connecting up departments from one side of the organisation to the other) that some action needs to be taken (e.g., improved communication processes, more staff) to rectify this issue.

Have a look at our interactive Organisation Demo Report to see in more practical terms how SNA can be of use in better understanding the People Dynamics of your organisation.