09/10/2022
THE SHEER POWER OF THE SOCIOGRAM IN COMPLEX BUSINESSES
Last night I went to a piano recital by a Cambridge PhD and expert in microwave technology, who is also a concert pianist with 800,000 social media Followers. Like so many amazing people he was incredibly modest and likeable.
That led me to think about some amazing business leaders I have worked with who seemed extremely likeable, but later found that their peers secretly hated them. This is not surprising, as to get a top job it almost invariably means being appointed instead of someone else who wanted it. And whilst both remain in the organisation that animosity normally persists, often to be forgotten years later. So there is something about power in an organisation - and especially what people regard as illegitimate power, that breads animosity.
In Anglo-American business culture the influence of the Human Relations school of OB is so great that we all have to pretend to like each other - like actors do - but normally without the air kisses. But not so the French. I went to Business School in France and French business academics openly discuss these issues, and they have refined the idea of sociograms to analyse power relationships within complex matrixed organisations.
The top left chart is based on interviews with staff, and used to generate the Power chart, top right. So you can see that Department 1 likes Department 2, but Department 2 dislikes department 1 in return. This means that Department 1 has some significant power over Department 2 that Department 2 staff resent. If we can identify these relationships, we can often eliminate the cause, and hence the dysfunctional behaviour that normally results from it.
Now with personal rivalries you can sometimes ‘knock heads together’ and the threat of disciplinary action occasionally leads people to act less dysfunctionally. Otherwise, normally someone has to leave. But with whole departments you can’t do this.
To give a real world example: digging down into a difficult inter-departmental relationship you might find that the root cause is that the Accounts department always provide their monthly figures late, which doesn’t give the Sales department enough time to process them properly before they have to produce their own monthly report. Sales resent this and take it as disrespect, and therefore are unhelpful to Accounts in return. But if the Accounts department could find a way to run those figures just one day earlier, it might well remove that tension completely.
So by using sociograms in complex organisations, often you can identify unaddressed process or related issues, and hence improve internal cooperation and overall organisational effectiveness.
Perhaps we could also try applying these techniques to our national relationship with the French?
