I have been handed a lot of org charts. As a marketing chief across nine companies, and now as the product manager of AssetEye by Dronetjek, I have collected them the way other people collect business cards.
Almost none of them described the company I actually worked in.
The chart is not dishonest. It is a map of reporting lines and salary bands, and for those two purposes it is accurate. The problem is that people treat it as a map of power. It is not. Reporting lines tell you who signs a performance review. They tell you almost nothing about who can stop a project, unblock a budget, or quietly kill an idea in a corridor.
Every organisation runs two structures at once. The drawn one, and the real one. If you plan a change against the drawn one, the real one will eat it.
How I learned this the expensive way
Early in my marketing career I ran a campaign that needed sign off from a marketing director. I got it. Fast, enthusiastic, in writing. On the chart, that was the whole approval path.
The campaign died anyway.
It died because a finance manager two boxes to the left had spent eleven years at that company, sat next to the founder at lunch every day, and thought the idea was reckless. He never blocked it. He never had to. He asked one sceptical question in a room I was not in, and the enthusiasm around me evaporated over a week. Nobody told me it was dead. It just stopped having meetings.
That man was on no path of mine. On the chart he was irrelevant to my work. In reality he was the single highest leverage person in the building for anything involving money, and everyone except me knew it.
The four questions that map the real structure
Since then I have started every new company, every new client, and every new team the same way. Not by reading the chart, but by asking four questions and listening to who comes up.
Who gets called when something breaks at night?
Not who is supposed to be called. Who actually is. That person holds operational trust, which is the most durable kind. They usually have far more informal authority than their title suggests, because everyone has personally watched them save something.
Whose approval do people seek even when they do not need it?
This is the clearest signal of real power that exists. When someone routinely walks a decision past a person who has no formal say, that person is a gate. Watch for it in the small stuff. People show you their real hierarchy in how they hedge.
Who can say no and make it stick without escalating?
Formal authority has to escalate. Real authority does not. If someone can end a discussion with a shrug and nobody appeals it, you have found a load bearing wall.
Who explains the company to new people?
Every org has one or two unofficial narrators. They tell newcomers what the company is really like, which rules matter, which are theatre. They are shaping culture more than any values document, and they are almost never senior.
Four questions. Ask them of five people and the real structure draws itself. It rarely looks like the chart. It is usually flatter in some places, far more centralised in others, and it always contains two or three people whose importance would surprise their own managers.
Why this is not cynicism
It would be easy to read this as office politics, something distasteful you tolerate. I think that is exactly backwards.
The informal structure is not a corruption of the formal one. It is the organisation compensating for the formal one being too slow, too coarse, or simply out of date. Companies change faster than their charts. The real structure is the company routing around its own diagram, and it usually routes toward competence.
The finance manager who killed my campaign was not playing games. He had eleven years of watching money get wasted and he had earned, informally, the right to be listened to. The organisation was smarter for listening to him than it would have been if it had strictly obeyed its own chart. My mistake was not that I failed to fight him. It was that I never knew he existed.
What I do differently now
Three things, in every team I run.
I map the real structure before I propose anything significant. Not to manipulate it, but because a proposal that has not been tested against the people who actually decide is not a proposal. It is a wish.
I bring the informal gates in early, on purpose. If someone has earned the right to be sceptical, they should hear the idea while it can still change, not after it is built. Almost every objection I have ever received early would have been a disaster if it had arrived late.
And I try to notice when the two structures have drifted too far apart. A small gap is healthy. A large gap is a symptom. When the chart and the reality have nothing to do with each other, it usually means the formal structure has stopped doing its job and people have quietly built a parallel company to get work done. That is not sustainable. Somebody eventually leaves and takes an entire undocumented function with them.
The uncomfortable part
If you are senior, there is a version of this that stings. You may be on the chart and not in the real structure. Title without traction. It happens constantly to people brought in from outside, and it is the reason so many senior hires fail in their first year despite doing nothing wrong.
The fix is not more authority. Authority you have to invoke is authority you do not have. The fix is the slow work that earns informal standing: being right in public, being useful when it is inconvenient, and being the person who gets called at night.
Draw your team's real chart this week. Not the one in the handbook. The one where the arrows point at the people who actually decide.
You will learn more in an afternoon than the handbook has told you all year.
I am Issam Fathi, a technology strategist and the product manager of AssetEye by Dronetjek, based in Tetouan, Morocco. I help companies build, adapt, and grow through technology.
Top comments (0)