We rely on organization charts because they portray the formal structure of power and division of labor in organizations. After a merger or acquisition, an internal reengineering, or simply personnel changes at the top levels of an organization, everyone wants to see the new org chart so they can place themselves in the new environment. We want to know who’s responsible for what and who reports to whom.

At the same time, we also know that org charts don’t give us the full picture. We know organizations work through lines of collaboration that are at least as much horizontal as vertical, but we have almost no idea what those lines look like. That’s what organizational network analysis can show us. By asking employees who talks to whom about what to get their work done, organizational network analysts can map those lines of collaboration, giving us diagrams that are the informal counterparts to org charts.

Rob Cross, an expert in organizational network analysis, has been conducting these assessments for Fortune 500 companies for years. An assistant professor of management at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce, Cross is also director of the university’s Network Roundtable, a consortium of corporations and government agencies.

Professor Cross is co-author, with Andrew Parker, of The Hidden Power of Social Networks: How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations (Harvard Business School Press, 2004). We talked with Cross recently, and we asked him about the emphasis in that subtitle.

CSC World: Are people surprised to find that work gets done through informal networks?

Cross: No, but they are surprised by who is and isn’t influential in the network. Almost everybody knows that a network is an asset, that better-connected people do better. But when we do network diagrams for an organization and show them to the executives, they usually see only about a third of what they thought was happening. There are always substantial surprises, about people who are far more influential than they realized and people who are much more peripheral than expected.

CSC World: Is there any pattern to who is more and less influential than executives expect?

Cross: It’s common to find that people who one way or another get an executive’s ear — and there are great stories about how people do that — are not influential in the larger group. They’re more political, and executives expect them to be close to the center of a network. A lot of times, they show up on the edge.

Sometimes they’re not political. For instance, experienced hires at the executive level aren’t that successful in most organizations. These people are hired because they have depth, expertise, and a lot of contacts. But they have to prove themselves at the new organization before they’re listened to. That takes one to two years. Many aren’t willing to invest that much time, or simply quit when they can’t crack the network. A lot of these people joke that by the time they become influential, they’ve forgotten what they knew. They may joke, but it’s a very expensive error that can be avoided with a network perspective.

CSC World: How do you uncover these informal networks?

Cross: The two most prevalent ways are surveys and tracking e-mail. The networking software that tracks e-mail can help you see broad networks for an entire organization. But they don’t capture face-to-face interactions. And executives tell me e-mail isn’t how the bulk of their work gets done.

I prefer surveys. We’ve developed a Web-based survey tool here at UVA, which takes only 15 minutes to complete. The network diagram lets us see who people interact with to get their work done.

CSC World: What do you look for in those diagrams?

Cross: The first thing I look for is people who are overly connected. Whether because of job design or because they’re very good, they’ve gotten overloaded and are holding up people on the edge of the network — often without knowing it because they themselves are so busy. They become bottlenecks.

That’s a common leadership trap. Leaders see things happening around them all the time, but they lose sight of what’s happening, or not happening, out on the edge of the network.

Another problem is that people who are too central to a network can dramatically disrupt organizations when they retire, get promoted to a different area, or are hired away.

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