Leadership Networks

Commonwealth Software (a pseudonym) is an example of an organizational leadership network. It is a young company with 50 employees that is planning for rapid growth. In order to grow effectively, the CEO of Commonwealth started an "Emerging Leaders" program. About a year later, Commonwealth used social network analysis to evaluate all its leadership development efforts, including the Emerging Leaders program.

The figures below display some of the basic data that informed the evaluation: the weekly advice network of Commonwealth Software. Node shapes correspond to formal departments: circles are members of administration, sales, and marketing departments; triangles are members of the software engineering department; and squares are members of the product development department. Two distinct teams within the product development department are indicated as two different shades of squares. Node sizes indicate betweenness centrality (i.e., bridging).

The first goal of the Commonwealth Software evaluation — and the goal most directly related to its Emerging Leaders program — was to check the CEO's assumptions about who were the emerging leaders. The overall view confirmed the emerging leadership perceived by the CEO, especially the leadership of one new employee, node 36 in the map.

Further analysis of the advice network and related data revealed an overtaxed senior leader in the organization (node 24 in the overall view, above). Members of this leader's own department reported that he was frequently busy and inaccessible. Members of other departments reported relatively little interaction with him. These data highlighted a specific area for improvement in the existing leadership network and underscored the need for the Emerging Leaders program.

Another goal of the social network analysis was evaluating the collaboration between the two product development teams of Commonwealth, one of which occupied a different office than the rest of the company. The departmental view below shows the advice network of Commonwealth, with specific focus on formal organizational boundaries. The network map is drawn so that employees in the same department are close to each other; thick links show intra-departmental advice and thin links show inter-departmental advice.

The network map of the departmental view revealed a surprising gap in the company's existing leadership development efforts. Because Product Development Team A worked in the same office as the rest of the company, and Product Development Team B worked in an office many miles away, the CEO was concerned that Team B might be isolated. In fact, the network evaluation revealed that Team B was not isolated from the rest of the company; instead, members of Team B were relatively isolated from each other.

The CEO used the results of the network evaluation to reorganize the formal leadership structure of Commonwealth Software. The overtaxed senior leader was repositioned and additional leadership resources were added in order to help wean employees from their dependence on him. Realigning Team B — a team with strong historical ties to this same senior leader — was an integral part of this effort.

When interviewed after the evaluation and restructuring, the CEO of Commonwealth reported that, even though the evaluation proceeded as he had hoped, its most important benefits to him were entirely unanticipated. Maps such as those above gave him a new perspective on how the pieces of Commonwealth fit together. He reoriented his leadership development focus from individuals to the collective leadership system. We will speak more about the CEO's appreciation of the collective leadership system in our next installment of this case study, when we see how SNA revealed to the CEO that a key leader of his company was someone outside the formal organization altogether.

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