Two Maps of the Same Company: Why the Org Chart Doesn’t Show Who Really Decides

TL;DR: Every company runs on two maps. The org chart shows authority: who can decide, approve and spend. The informal network shows influence: who people listen to, who they check with, and who actually gets things moving. Engineers tend to trust the first map and ignore the second, and then wonder why decisions seem to come out of nowhere. You need both, and drawing the second one takes about ten minutes.

The person who isn’t on the chart

Your manager reports to the VP. That’s on the org chart. But everyone in the office knows that Sarah, the VP’s executive assistant, decides which meetings reach the VP’s calendar. Who gets thirty minutes. Who gets a two-line reply. Sarah isn’t a manager. She isn’t on any chart. And she might be the most important person you haven’t spoken to yet.

Every team has a version of Sarah. The senior engineer everyone messages before they decide anything. The veteran who has been there fifteen years and knows why things are the way they are. The security or compliance lead who can quietly stop almost anything. None of them need a big title, and all of them shape what happens to your work.

Same people, two very different pictures: the formal map shows authority, the informal map shows influence.

Authority and influence are different things

Two words do most of the work here. Authority is the right to decide. It comes from your title. Influence is the ability to move a decision. It comes from trust, expertise and access. The VP has plenty of authority. Sarah has almost none. But ask who moves things through the VP’s office, and you’ll hear her name first.

Social psychologists John French and Bertram Raven described this decades ago in their bases of social power. Three are formal: legitimate power (your title), reward power (raises and praise) and coercive power (the ability to punish). Three are informal: expert power (knowing what others don’t), referent power (being respected and liked) and informational power (knowing what’s going on before everyone else does; Raven added it a few years after the original five). Formal power is visible on the chart. Informal power is visible in the room.

Why the second map matters more than it looks

Formal power is fragile. When the company reorganizes, a title can disappear overnight, and the power goes with it. Informal power travels. Expertise, trust and relationships don’t show up on a chart, so a chart change can’t remove them. People who built only formal power are left with nothing after a reorg. People who built both keep working, whatever the new chart says.

What it looks like in IT

Say you need access to a server. The formal route: raise a ticket, wait for triage, wait for approval, wait for the security review, then provisioning. About three weeks. The informal route: you know James in DevOps. He knows exactly what the approver needs to see, and he pushes your request through the same process in two hours.

Illustrative numbers, real pattern: the informal route doesn’t skip the process, it moves through it.

Neither route is wrong. Notice that James didn’t bypass anything. The ticket, the approval and the review all still happened. But if you only know the first route, you’ll wait three weeks for everything, and you’ll conclude the organization is slow when it’s really just opaque to you.

The trap has two sides

If you only use the formal map, your requests stall and decisions seem to come out of nowhere. You learn about the architecture choice after it was made, in a meeting you weren’t invited to.

If you only use the informal map, you skip the process, and the people who own it feel bypassed. “Nobody told me,” they say. And they remember. Going around the change board once because a friend could push it through is how you turn a neutral gatekeeper into a permanent blocker.

The useful version sits in the middle: use the informal map to move through the formal one, not around it.

Draw your own map on Monday

This takes about ten minutes and a sheet of paper:

• Draw your team the formal way. Who reports to whom. Solid lines.
• Draw it again on the same names. Who do people actually go to? Who do they ask before deciding? Who do they message first? Dotted lines.
• Look where the two drawings differ. That’s your real map, and usually the first place to spend a coffee.
• Keep it private. It’s a working note for understanding, not for gossip or leverage. A good test: would you be comfortable if the people on it read what you wrote?

The formal map tells you who decides. The informal map tells you how it gets decided. Carry both.

Want to go further?

This post is adapted from one lesson of my new course, Office Politics for Tech Professionals: nearly four hours of short, visual lessons for developers, architects, analysts and consultants on how power, visibility and decisions really work in tech companies, told honestly and without manipulation tricks. It covers stakeholder maps, influencers and gatekeepers, political capital, the credit and blame games, architecture boards and RFCs, and a 30-day plan to turn it into habits.

👉 See what’s inside the course