The Org Chart Is Lying to You
Pull up your company’s org chart. The boxes are clean. The lines of authority are clear. Reporting relationships are logical. It is a tidy document that describes, with apparent precision, how your company works.
Now think about how decisions actually get made in your organisation.
Who do people call when they need something done fast? Whose approval carries weight beyond their formal title? Who is the person that new hires figure out to stay close to within their first month, not because of their seniority but because of their access, their relationships, and their institutional knowledge? Whose departure, from a role you might have considered mid-level would actually create a crisis?
That person is probably not at the top of your org chart.
Every company has two structures: the official one that lives in the deck you sent investors, and the informal one that determines how work actually moves, how decisions actually land, and where the true capability and influence of the organisation actually reside. Most Nigerian founders and CTOs manage the first. The second is where the real leverage and the real risk lives.
Why the Formal Structure Misleads
Org charts are designed to communicate authority. They tell people who reports to whom, who is accountable for what, and how the company is theoretically structured. They are useful for this purpose. They are useless for understanding how work flows, where decisions are actually made, and whose departure would genuinely break something.
The formal structure says your Head of Engineering owns the technical roadmap. The informal structure reveals that three of your five senior engineers won’t act on architectural decisions until they have spoken to one specific colleague who has no direct authority but whose technical judgment the team trusts implicitly. The formal structure shows a Product Manager reporting to the VP of Product. The informal structure shows that PM communicating directly with the CEO, bypassing the VP entirely on anything time-sensitive.
These informal networks are not dysfunctions. In most cases, they are the actual nervous system of the organisation, the paths through which real information flows, real decisions are influenced, and real work gets done. The problem arises when leaders manage only the formal structure and remain blind to the informal one.
The Hiring Decision Made in the Wrong Structure
The most common consequence of this blindness shows up in hiring.
A role opens. A candidate is evaluated based on their qualifications, their experience, and their fit with the formal responsibilities of the position. They are placed into the org chart. And then something unexpected happens: they underperform not because they lack capability, but because they were placed into a formal structure without anyone mapping them to the informal one.
The new Senior Engineer sits outside the informal technical influence network. Nobody thinks to introduce them to the colleague whose opinion carries the weight. They make decisions that are formally correct but ignored because they lack the invisible credibility that comes from relationship and track record. They are technically competent and organisationally isolated.
This pattern repeats across functions. A new operations lead joins with genuine expertise but no understanding of the informal power dynamics between the operations team and the legacy vendor relationships that the previous lead managed through personal trust rather than formal contract. A new finance director with strong credentials walks into a team that has been making decisions in a specific way for three years and finds their formal authority strangely ineffective.
Research on organisational network analysis consistently shows that the most influential people in organisations are frequently not the most senior ones, and that ignoring informal network position when placing people is one of the most reliable predictors of integration failure.
The Risk Hidden in the Middle
There is a specific category of informal network node that Nigerian founders routinely underestimate: the mid-level operator who knows everything about how the company actually runs.
This person is not the CTO. They may not be a team lead. But they know why the legacy payment integration is fragile and what to do when it breaks at 2am. They know which clients require a specific kind of handling and why. They know where the bodies are buried in the codebase, what technical decisions were made under pressure and never properly documented, and which internal relationships require careful navigation. They are the person that new joiners quietly identify within their first 30 days as the person to actually talk to.
When this person leaves; for a salary increase, for a remote opportunity, for any of the reasons the best people in Nigerian tech leave, something breaks that cannot be easily repaired. The successor inherits the formal role. They do not inherit the informal network position, the institutional knowledge, or the credibility within the team that made the predecessor so operationally critical.
The org chart does not reveal this person because the org chart does not measure influence. It measures authority. These are different things, and conflating them is how companies discover their single points of failure only after those single points have already failed.
What Mapping the Real Structure Requires
Understanding your organisation’s informal structure is not a mysterious exercise. It requires asking questions that most leaders never think to ask.
Who does your team actually go to when they are stuck? Not who they are supposed to go to – who they actually contact? Whose opinion shifts the outcome of technical discussions? Who has relationships outside their formal remit that keep critical processes running? If this person left on Friday, what would break by Wednesday?
These questions surface the informal network. The answers to them should directly influence how you hire, how you onboard, how you structure knowledge transfer, and how you assess the risk of any given departure.
The organisations that manage this well treat informal influence mapping as a regular practice, not a crisis exercise triggered by a resignation, but an ongoing understanding of where the real capability and connectivity of the organisation resides. They onboard new hires with explicit introductions to the informal network, not just the formal reporting structure. They ensure that institutional knowledge has more than one custodian.
The Founder Who Manages the Wrong Map
The most expensive version of this problem is the founder who manages the org chart as if it were a complete description of reality.
They make staffing decisions based on formal role requirements without understanding how those roles are embedded in the informal network. They assess team performance based on formal reporting without understanding that the actual decision-making happens in conversations they are not part of. They manage escalations through formal channels while the real power dynamics play out elsewhere.
And when something breaks: a critical team member leaves, a function that appeared healthy suddenly underperforms, a new hire with strong credentials fails to gain traction, the founder looks for an explanation in the formal structure and cannot find one.
The explanation is almost always in the informal structure. The map they were managing was the wrong map.
The Bottom Line
The org chart is a useful fiction. It describes how your company is supposed to work. Understanding how it actually works: who holds real influence, where decisions actually land, what informal networks govern behaviour, is the work of leadership, not HR. And it is the work that makes the difference between placing people correctly and repeatedly wondering why good people are underperforming in roles they were apparently qualified for.
Placing talent correctly requires understanding the structure it will operate within, not just the job description. Revent Technologies works with clients to understand organisational dynamics before placements, reducing integration failure and improving time-to-contribution.
Start here → www.reventtechnologies.com/site/hire-a-developer
Research Sources
– Mindseton / Organisational Psychology Research — Informal network position predicts integration success
– Harvard Business Review — Analysis of formal vs. informal organisational structure and decision-making
– McKinsey & Company — How informal networks drive organisational performance