What do you actually know about the relationships in your organization?

Anyone interested in group dynamics has probably heard about the importance of relationships between people, and if you also want to be proactive, you’re trying to build a picture of what those relationships look like. To improve, you need to know where you are, right?

You have formal organizational charts, data from annual employee surveys and plenty of KPIs from different sources and pulse checks. Do you feel that gives you a picture of how the people in your organization are actually connected?

If the organizational chart is the map of the park showing the planned walkways, then the relationships are the paths people have worn into the ground. That’s where you see how people actually move.

You can ask ten people how they experience the group and get ten important data points. But you still don’t know who they trust, who they turn to, or which relationships barely exist at all.

The problem isn’t that this information is bad. Quite the opposite. The problem is that it mainly tells you things about individuals and the formal organization.

But relationships exist between people.

A relationship always has two ends. And the two people don’t even necessarily experience the relationship in the same way.

We’ve become very good at measuring the people in the organization. Much worse at measuring what exists between them.

So despite all the information you have access to, you may know surprisingly little about how the organization is actually connected.

Who trusts whom? Where are the relationships between teams? Where are the people who are more or less isolated? And where are the strong relationships that the rest of the organization depends on?

Hand on heart, how much do you actually know about the relationships in your organization?