Mapping an Organization for Fun and Profit

Gaining insights from a strategic sales skill.

One of the ways to find insights in your life and work is to steal ideas from unrelated disciplines and see if you can apply them.  In this article I’m going to take a strategy from strategic selling and see if there might not be an application in other parts of your world.

What are the attributes of a strategic selling environment?

In the Business to Business world (B2B) world many times the buying and selling processes are complex.  It’s not just you selling your product to a person.  It is your organization selling goods and services to another organization.  The larger the organization the more complex the interactions during the sales process.

Sometimes we are selling complex bundles of products and services worth millions of dollars.  We are selling these complex products to global organizations.  These organizations have thousands of people and billions of dollars in revenue.  They have global organizations with multiple competing business units.

All this makes interactions in the sales process complex or strategic.   Got it?

One of the first things that an account manager will do in these situations is to create a strategic account plan.  Central to the strategic account plan is an organizational chart.  One of the most powerful pieces of intelligence you can have when interacting with another organization is the organizational chart.

Yes, I’m talking about names in boxes with lines showing who reports to whom and what their titles are.  But, I’m also talking about what you can do with this information and how it guides your interactions within that organization.

Why do you care?  I propose that the mapping of the organization is a useful tool, not just in a sales engagement, but in any interaction with any organization.

For example, what we typically find when we guide an account manager through this process is that they are interacting with someone who has no power and we can quickly see who they should be interacting with.  This helps them in their approach.

Once you have the names, boxes and arrows of the org chart you can start asking great questions.  Where is the power in the organization?  This will be the person who has the ability to authorize a purchase or the power to hire, fire or promote.  Usually if you track the lines of power you will come to a single individual in an organization who has the power.

Then you can look for influencers.   Who are the people who don’t have power directly but influence the decision makers?  If you are selling or promoting a project into the organization you can map out who is your ally and who are your enemies?  Typically when we are assessing an account this way each person will get a + for ‘positive’ a – for ‘negative’ an o for ‘neutral or a ? for ‘we don’t know’.

For the + people you try to turn them into coaches who will actively support you and feed you critical information and help you navigate the account.  For the – you construct strategies to neutralizes them and box them in.  For the o you try to convert thm to +.

But by far the most useful information is the ?  This tells you what you don’t know.  These are your blind spots and you can create a plan to find out.

In this way the organizational mapping of an organization is an ongoing process of filling in unknown boxes and finding dark corners to shine your flashlight into.

You can see how this guides your approach to an organization.

I would contend that mapping the organization is applicable to any organization where you have things you want to accomplish.

I would suggest to you that within your own organization you can do the same exercise to define the opportunities and guide your personal career approach.  Look at where you are in the organization compared to where the power is.  See who the influencers are.  See where your blind spots are.  Test what you learn.

How could you use this information?   First, even if you choose not to act on any of the information it will remove blind spots.  I have seen many situations where a person is complaining about their direct supervisor when if they just took a minute to map the organization they’d realize that the supervisor has no power to change anything.  In reality they are wasting their energy working with a middle-person who has no authority.

I might advise that person to try to establish a communication channel to the person who actually has the power.  In the parlance you would ‘flank the gate keeper’ and there are ways to do this without getting in trouble IF you understands the dynamics of the org chart.

Or maybe you are trying to sell a project or implement change in your organization.  I would submit that you could map the organization and see who are your allies and who are your enemies in this endevour and build strategies to mitigate you risk and increase the odds of your success.

You might say, ‘this is office politics’, but information is neither good nor bad.  It is only negative if you choose to use it for some devious Machiavellian scheme.  You’re a good person, you wouldn’t do that.

I would submit that it is better to understand the dynamics of power in your organization, even if you don’t do anything with that information.  I think just by mapping the organization, any organization, you are going to have ‘aha!’ moments that will justify the effort.

Complex organizations are very nuanced.  Titles don’t always correspond to power.  Influencers can be anyone in the organization.  It’s a fun and interesting chess game if nothing else but I think it’s something you might want to try.  Do it with a colleague or peer you trust as an exercise and see what you can learn.

Mapping the organization is a strategic account management skill from the B2B world that you can (potentially) use to understand the organizational dynamics of any organization you are involved in.  In this way you can create a personal knowledge of how things get done in the organization.  You can reduce your risk and increase your odds of success by understanding your environment.

What are some other tools from differing disciplines that you can bring to bear in other parts of your life?