The Org Chart Is a Lie
The person who quietly asks to talk may be showing you how the company actually works
This post is part of my Medium blog.
Someone comes to you and says, "Can we talk about something?"
Usually, they are not coming through their own management chain.
Most of the time, the thing they want to talk about sounds small. A problem with a handoff. A decision that does not make sense. A person who keeps missing something important — because they do not understand the work, because nobody is managing them closely enough to notice, or because everyone around them has decided it is easier to work around the problem than deal with it. A concern about a project that is officially “fine,” which is often how projects in trouble are described right up until somebody has to explain what happened.
Sometimes the person comes to you because the normal route has not given anyone a useful picture of what is happening. A vice president may need to understand that a project is tenuous rather than, as every status report insists, perfectly on track. And if you are the manager being brought into that conversation, you may be taking a real risk: the existing manager may see your involvement as a threat, even when you are only trying to find out whether the project is actually going to work.
That is how small problems gather momentum.
Corporate structures are usually drawn as trees. The CEO at the top. Executives below. Directors. Managers. Teams. Lines running downward until they terminate at an individual contributor who is supposed to know exactly where they belong.
The tree is useful. It tells you who is accountable for what and where decisions are supposed to go. It also gives management consultants something to redraw after leading your teams through trust-building exercises that were really gathering data for the reorganization proposal.
The important thing to understand about these trees is that they capture official reporting relationships. They do not capture the relationships that actually drive decision-making. The tree is a claim about the organization. It is not the organization.
The real company is a network of trust, expertise, dependency, fear, reputation, and access. The engineer who knows how production actually works may have more influence over a director than the director’s manager does. The analyst who understands the financial consequences may stop a project without owning it. The person everyone calls when something breaks may not appear anywhere near the decision-making center on the org chart.
They are still in the center of the organization.
The most important decisions are often made through those unofficial relationships. When a decision needs to be made, skip-level meetings and out-of-band management emails activate the people in the organization who can actually pull the levers of action. The formal route may still record the decision afterward, but it is often not where the decision was made.
A company can publish a process that says concerns should move from employee to manager to director to vice president. In practice, the concern may travel from an engineer to a staff engineer, from a staff engineer to FinOps, from FinOps to legal, and from legal to an executive who was never named in the original process. That executive may make the decision after hearing from three people who do not report to them and one person who technically does.
If you pay attention to the org chart, you will often end up making the wrong decisions. It is not an accurate picture of the company so much as the version of the company it wants everyone to believe.
Someone says, “Can we talk?” They are usually testing whether that unofficial network still works.
Ask why. Ask what they tried first. Ask who else knows. Ask what they are worried will happen if the concern becomes official. You do not have to promise to fix everything. You do have to notice that the conversation happened.
The org chart can tell you who someone reports to.
It cannot tell you who they trust with the truth.
HQ 7 — Guided. Written from dictated notes and revised with AI assistance; the structure, argument, and final editorial decisions are mine.
In Redundant, the first book in The Condition Set trilogy, Rob Coleman runs the FinOps review that names the waste nobody wants to hear about. The numbers do not change. The question is who they get used against.