The org chart a new hire receives on day one is a map of formal authority. Within about two weeks, most newcomers notice the map has errors: a director whose approvals are ceremonial, a mid-level engineer whose objection can stall a launch, a chief of staff whose calendar is the real bottleneck. The company runs on a second chart that no one prints. Learning to read it is the most consequential skill of a first 90 days, and it is learnable.
The first thing to know is that the second chart exists everywhere, including, and maybe especially, in companies that claim to have no chart at all. Foss and Klein (2022), the field's most rigorous skeptics, document that many firms describing themselves as flat or bossless in practice retain real bosses and hierarchies, informal or renamed rather than eliminated. Their case study is Valve, the celebrated bossless game studio, where the flat structure produced what employees by 2013 called "The Wilderness," a state of creative inertia, and where shipping Half-Life: Alyx required management intervention despite the stated model. The lesson for a newcomer is not that flatness is fake, but that the absence of titles never means the absence of power. It means power is undocumented.
Two kinds of authority, one worth mapping first
A useful lens comes from the same authors' distinction between two types of managerial authority: Mark I, the power to hire, fire, and instruct; and Mark II, the power to lead, create structures, and build consensus. Formal charts record Mark I reasonably well. What they miss is Mark II, and Mark II is what moves daily work: who frames the problem before the meeting, whose draft becomes the plan, who people quietly check with before committing.
The mapping method is observational and takes no political skill, only attention. Watch three flows for a month. First, where decisions terminate: in any discussion, note the person after whose comment the topic stops being debated. Second, where exceptions go: rules describe the normal case, so whoever gets consulted when the case is abnormal holds interpretive power. Third, where drafts originate: the person who writes the first version of anything sets its boundaries. Three lists, one month, and the real chart is drawn.
Informal power is not the villain
A newcomer who discovers the shadow chart often reacts with cynicism: the flat talk was theater. That is usually too harsh. Much informal authority is earned deference to competence, the network routing around formality toward whoever is actually reliable, and that kind of hierarchy re-forms in any human group. The problem is not informal power but unaccountable informal power: influence that decides outcomes while formal accountability sits elsewhere. That is where newcomers get hurt, taking direction from someone who will not be answerable for the result.
The structural fix, where it exists, is making power legible and revocable. As Ricardo Semler has told it, at Semco everyone rated their boss anonymously twice a year, a low score twice running meant losing the role, himself included, and returning to technical work at the same salary was a legitimate exit. Whatever else that system did, it collapsed the two charts into one: authority that had to be re-earned on a schedule could not hide. Semler had begun the same way a newcomer does, arriving at 21 into his father's company, tearing up the org chart while veteran managers predicted destruction; the company grew tenfold. The chart, it turned out, had been describing far less than it claimed.
What to do with the map
Reading the real chart is not a license to bypass the formal one; a first-jobber who routes around their nominal manager burns trust they cannot spare. The map has quieter uses. It tells you whose feedback to seek before investing a week in a draft. It tells you which meeting is decorative and which one decides. It tells you whether the company's stated values are load-bearing: in a firm where the two charts roughly match, words like ownership and autonomy tend to mean something, and where the charts diverge wildly, the gap itself is the culture.
And it sets up the only career question that matters at 90 days: on which chart is your own name being written? Formal titles arrive slowly everywhere. But a spot on the real chart, being the person whose draft gets used, whose check-in is sought, is available to anyone who is reliable in public. The newcomers who advance fastest are rarely mapping power to flatter it. They are mapping it to see where reliability is currently missing, and standing there.
Sources
- Foss, N. & Klein, P. (2022). Who's the boss? The persistence of entrepreneurial hierarchy in flat organizations. Journal of Organization Design. Flat/bossless firms typically retain informal or renamed hierarchy; Valve's flat structure produced creative inertia ('The Wilderness') and required management intervention. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41469-022-00132-8
- strategy+business (2022). Can bossless management work? (on Foss & Klein, Why Managers Matter). Distinguishes Mark I authority (hire, fire, instruct) from Mark II (lead, structure, build consensus); concludes no structure is universally superior. https://www.strategy-business.com/article/Can-bossless-management-work
- Lee, M. Y. & Edmondson, A. C. (2017). Self-managing organizations. Research in Organizational Behavior. Even radically decentralized firms replace, rather than abolish, structure; hierarchy of reporting is the specific element removed. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059