One of the easiest mistakes to make when joining an organisation is to believe the first convincing explanation you hear about how the place works. Someone tells you who is difficult, who can be relied upon, which team is struggling, why a particular process exists. The account may be offered generously and in good faith. It may even contain a great deal of truth. But it is still one view, from one position, shaped by one person’s experience. I learned that lesson badly. Early in one role, I heard a strong view about someone and allowed it to influence how I approached them. I challenged them before I had taken enough time to understand them for myself. Four years later, when we knew each other far better, they told me how that first encounter had made them feel. We are friendly now and have remained in touch long after I left the organisation. That almost makes the memory more uncomfortable. I had behaved in a way I would now tell another leader to avoid.
If I could have that first conversation again, I would not begin with what I had heard. I would begin much as I have learned to begin with people since: What are your strengths? Where do you think you need to develop? What can I do to help? The difference sounds small, but it changes the relationship. One approach arrives with a judgement already forming. The other arrives with curiosity. It does not mean ignoring what other people tell you. Leaders would be foolish to discard information simply because it is second hand. It means refusing to let the first opinion become the lens through which everything else is interpreted. The first opinion is not always the most correct opinion. Sometimes it is not even close.
That matters because every organisation has at least two versions of itself. There is the formal organisation: structures, reporting lines, responsibilities, procedures, job descriptions and strategic plans. Then there is the organisation people actually experience: who they ask when they are stuck, whose judgement they trust, who can persuade a room, who quietly resolves problems, which processes work only because somebody compensates for them, and where knowledge really lives. The two versions overlap, of course, but they are rarely identical. A title gives someone authority. It does not necessarily give them influence. A process tells you how work is supposed to happen. It does not necessarily tell you how the work gets done.
I remember joining an organisation and noticing someone with no formal leadership position whose influence extended far beyond her role. People trusted her. She understood a great deal about how the place operated, and her view carried weight. Earlier in my leadership career, I suspect part of my instinct would have been to get someone like that on side. If she understood me, perhaps she would speak positively about me; if she spoke positively about me, perhaps other people would understand me too. I would still make the effort to build that relationship now, but for a different reason. Someone with that degree of informal influence can show you a part of the organisation that the organisational chart cannot.
That does not mean the influential person is automatically right. I have encountered people with an extraordinary gift for persuasion whose influence was not particularly healthy. Charisma, confidence and a ready audience can make poor judgement travel remarkably well. There is a danger in discovering the informal hierarchy and then treating it as somehow more authentic than the formal one. It is not. An influential colleague may understand relationships, history and day to day experience exceptionally well while knowing little about confidential issues, financial constraints, competing priorities or strategic decisions. Formal authority can provide a wider view of the organisation. Informal proximity can provide a sharper view of one part of it. One can be wide but blurry; the other narrow but focused.
The task is not to decide which view is the truth and discard the other. It is to understand what each can see. If an influential person is strongly critical of a decision, I may eventually conclude that their criticism is wrong. But their influence is still information. If many people trust their interpretation more readily than they trust the formal leadership’s, that tells me something about the organisation even if I disagree with the argument itself. Perhaps they have accumulated credibility over many years. Perhaps formal communication is weak. Perhaps people do not feel heard elsewhere. Perhaps the person is simply unusually persuasive. “Help me understand” is therefore not surrender. It is a way of finding out what is visible from where somebody else is standing.
People can hide organisational reality in another way too: by being extremely good at their jobs. I have worked with someone who, in many respects, held a team together. They were capable, committed and wanted things done to a very high standard. They also found delegation difficult. We talked repeatedly about the need to distribute responsibility. They wanted to delegate, but they also wanted perfection, and those two desires did not always sit comfortably together. The more they personally ensured that things were done well, the more the team depended on them to ensure that things were done well. Their strength was real. So was the vulnerability developing around it.
This is one of the stranger organisational problems because a single point of failure often does not look like failure at all. It can look like excellence. I have seen the same risk in a one person HR function. The work was being done, so on the surface the arrangement could appear efficient. My concern was what would happen if that person became unavailable through illness, an extended absence or simply leaving. There was not enough of a safety net. Nobody is irreplaceable, but that does not mean everything a person carries can be replaced quickly. You can appoint another employee. You cannot instantly recreate ten, twenty or forty years of organisational memory, relationships, judgement and accumulated context.
Documents matter here. Good procedures, handovers and records are essential reference points. They give the next person somewhere to begin and somewhere to look backwards. But there are limits to what can be captured on a page. You can read every book available about football and still not know how to play football. Some knowledge exists in the doing. Judgement develops through making decisions, seeing consequences, noticing patterns and working alongside people who know more than you do. An organisation therefore does not become resilient simply by documenting what an experienced person knows. It becomes more resilient when knowledge and capability are sufficiently shared that other people have actually had the chance to use them.
Temporary workarounds can create exactly the same illusion. Sometimes an organisation genuinely cannot solve a problem properly yet. There may not be enough money, time or people, so someone steps in and keeps things moving. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The trouble often arrives later. The following year someone remembers that this person handled it brilliantly last time, so they are asked to do it again. Then again. What began as a practical response to a temporary problem slowly becomes the normal allocation of responsibility. Nobody consciously decided to design the organisation that way. It simply happened because the workaround worked.
This is where highly capable people can accidentally make weak systems look strong. They absorb extra work, remember what everybody else has forgotten, resolve disputes, translate decisions, compensate for poor processes and step into gaps before those gaps become visible. Leaders see completed work and stable performance and conclude that the system is functioning. Sometimes it is. Sometimes what they are actually seeing is a weak system being protected from its own consequences by strong people. The distinction matters because the organisation may discover the truth only when one of those people stops compensating.
The person carrying the organisation is not always an innocent victim of the arrangement either. Perfectionism, reluctance to delegate, status, habit or a genuine enjoyment of being needed can all reinforce dependency. Leaders can create the problem by repeatedly returning to the same reliable people, while capable individuals can create it by finding it difficult to let other people take responsibility. Often both forces operate at once. That is why simply telling someone to delegate rarely solves much. If they believe the standard will fall, or if the organisation continues rewarding them for personally rescuing everything, the instruction conflicts with the environment around them.
A useful question, then, is whether capability is genuinely distributed. In a sizeable organisation, I become wary when an extraordinary amount of knowledge, influence or problem solving seems to lead back to a very small number of names. That does not make those people a problem. Quite the opposite: they may be among the organisation’s greatest assets. But an asset can also reveal a dependency. Who gets called when something goes wrong? Who knows why a process exists? What stops when somebody is away? Where do decisions bottleneck? Who can explain the work in depth, and who gives only shallow answers despite formally being responsible for it? Watching how a team actually operates can tell you more than the boxes on its structure chart.
None of this can be discovered from a desk in a few days. Time matters. You have to get out, listen, observe, ask similar questions in different places and notice what keeps recurring. Even then, I am cautious about calling any one account the truth. Different people can experience the same organisation very differently without any of them necessarily lying or misunderstanding it. What becomes useful are the patterns that survive multiple perspectives. If the same concern, dependency or informal route keeps appearing independently, it deserves attention. Evidence accumulates.
This is one reason I believe in going slow to go fast. A new leader can reorganise quickly. They can redraw reporting lines, formalise responsibilities, remove a workaround or decide that an influential person has too much power. Some of those decisions may eventually be right. But speed can destroy something before you understand what it was doing. The awkward workaround may be compensating for a problem nobody has yet solved. The unofficial influencer may be carrying trust that the formal organisation has failed to build. The indispensable employee may be holding knowledge that has never been transferred. Understanding these realities does not mean preserving them forever. It means knowing what you are changing before you change it.
There is a similar danger in believing that seniority gives clarity. Authority usually broadens the view. Leaders may see budgets, strategy, confidential information and competing organisational needs that most colleagues cannot see. But breadth creates distance as well as perspective. The more of the organisation you are expected to see, the harder it becomes to see every part of it sharply. Someone much closer to the work may have a narrow view, but within that narrow field they may notice things that are invisible from above. Good judgement comes from resisting the temptation to confuse the widest view with the clearest one.
Perhaps that is what the organisation beneath the organisation really is. It is not a secret network waiting to be uncovered, and it is not evidence that formal structures are meaningless. It is simply the accumulation of human realities that no chart can fully represent: trust, memory, influence, habit, workarounds, expertise, relationships and the countless small acts through which people keep a place functioning. Leaders need formal structures because organisations cannot run entirely on relationships and improvisation. But leaders who see only the formal organisation will always be working with an incomplete map.
My early mistake with that colleague still bothers me precisely because I know better now. I allowed somebody else’s map to become mine before I had walked enough of the territory myself. Four years later I discovered that a conversation I may once have regarded as a small leadership interaction had remained with another person for years. I cannot change that beginning. I can allow it to change how I begin now.
So when you enter an unfamiliar organisation, listen to what people tell you. Listen particularly carefully to the people others trust. Read the procedures. Study the structure. Ask who owns what. But do not stop there. Notice who people actually turn to. Notice who quietly keeps things moving. Notice which systems survive only because somebody repeatedly rescues them. And above all, resist the comfort of the first convincing explanation. The organisation you have been told about may exist. Give yourself enough time to discover the one that exists underneath it.
If you enjoyed this article, you can continue exploring these ideas through the growing collection of short leadership videos published across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Wherever you choose to follow, I hope the reflections encourage you to think a little differently about the quieter moments that shape leadership every day.