The work behind the work
An organizational chart can tell us who reports to whom. It cannot tell us who keeps the work moving when priorities collide, information is incomplete, or decisions cross departmental boundaries. That work often happens before a problem reaches a meeting agenda: a leader connects two teams, a colleague translates information into a decision, or a manager spots a failure before it reaches the customer.
I would not call this work a flaw. It is often evidence of strong leadership and the relationships that make complex organizations effective. Research by Brennecke and colleagues (2025) shows how formal structures and informal knowledge networks work together to coordinate complex work. The relationships matter, even when they are difficult to see on paper.
What matters is whether leaders can distinguish this valuable contribution from the work their organizations have quietly come to depend on because something else is missing.
An organizational chart is not an operating picture
Knowing who has authority is not the same as knowing how decisions get made. A recent review identified more than 100 types of organizational structures spanning areas such as communication, coordination, leadership, and authority (Watson et al., 2025). The point for executives is practical: the reporting hierarchy is only one view of how an organization works.
Imagine a major initiative involving operations, finance, technology, and human resources. Every function completes its assigned portion, but the initiative still stalls. Why? No one has reconciled the competing priorities, resolved the dependencies, or clarified who gets to decide when the functions disagree. Someone eventually steps in to connect the dots. The work moves forward. But was that intervention part of the operating design—or did someone rescue it?
The difference between collaboration and compensation
Organizations need people who cross boundaries and share expertise. Informal collaboration helps them respond to changing conditions. Research by Parker, Lomi, and Zappa (2024) examined advice relationships across units within a Formula One team, showing why the conditions surrounding informal coordination deserve attention. More collaboration, on its own, is not necessarily the measure of a stronger organization.
At BAG, I find it useful to separate collaboration from compensation. Collaboration brings the right expertise together to accomplish work that genuinely requires joint effort. Compensation occurs when capable people repeatedly fill gaps in responsibility, process, or decision authority so the work can continue. This is BAG’s executive interpretation of the research—not a category tested in the cited studies.
The pattern tells the story. Bringing several leaders together to solve a new problem is collaboration. Bringing the same leaders together every week to resolve the same handoff raises a different question. If the intervention keeps succeeding but the problem keeps returning, what exactly has improved?
When capable leaders make fragile systems look strong
The strongest leaders often make difficult work look routine. They anticipate failures, negotiate competing demands, and quietly repair broken handoffs. Their competence deserves recognition. Yet it can also make the operating model appear more reliable than it is.
This is not limited to executive leadership. Justesen and Plesner (2024) describe the connecting, compensating, and cleaning work required to sustain apparently seamless digital systems. Their research concerns digital work, not a direct test of executive leadership. Still, it offers a useful lesson: smooth outcomes do not tell us how much unseen effort was required to produce them.
I would ask executives to consider a simple possibility: the organization may be performing because the system works—or because particular people keep making it work. Those are not the same condition. We should not need someone to leave before we discover the difference.
Look beneath the performance dashboard
A dashboard tells us whether targets are being met. It does not always reveal the extra coordination, repeated workarounds, or concentrated expertise behind the result. Two departments may achieve the same outcome while carrying very different levels of operational risk. One can repeat its performance through shared capability. The other may depend on a few people who know how to navigate everything the process does not address.
That makes four questions worth asking: Where does progress stop until a particular person intervenes? Which decisions are renegotiated again and again? What essential knowledge is still held by individuals rather than shared across the organization? What changes when those individuals are unavailable?
These are questions for executive inquiry, not a validated assessment instrument. They can reveal where closer observation of workflows, decision rights, and dependencies is warranted.
Recognize the work. Reduce the dependency.
The answer is not to write a policy for every conversation or remove the judgment that makes experienced leaders effective. Organizations need discretion, trust, and relationships. They also need to learn from the work people are doing to keep operations moving. Where a relationship creates value, recognize it. Where knowledge is concentrated, build ways to share it. Where decisions repeatedly stall, clarify authority. Where workarounds have become routine, examine the design.
This is not about making exceptional leaders less important. It is about ensuring their contribution builds organizational capability rather than creating a permanent dependence on their intervention.
Leadership will always include work that cannot be fully captured in a job description or measured on a dashboard. That should not prevent executives from understanding it. We have a responsibility to distinguish the judgment that strengthens an organization from the recurring compensation that holds its weaknesses in place.
The question is not merely whether the organization performs. It is what, and whom, that performance depends on.
Batiste Advisory Group™ | See Clearly. Align Intentionally. Execute Sustainably.
References
- Brennecke, J., Coutinho, J. A., Gilding, M., Lusher, D., & Schaffer, G. (2025). Invisible iterations: How formal and informal organization shape knowledge networks for coordination. Journal of Management Studies, 62(2), 706–747. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13076
- Justesen, L., & Plesner, U. (2024). Invisible digi-work: Compensating, connecting, and cleaning in digitalized organizations. Organization Theory, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/26317877241235938
- Parker, A., Lomi, A., & Zappa, P. (2024). Effect of time pressure on informal advice relations across organizational units: Evidence from a study of collaboration within a Formula One racing team. Organization Studies, 45(10), 1441–1465. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406241261448
- Watson, M. K., Winchester, C. C., Luciano, M. M., & Humphrey, S. E. (2025). Categorizing the complexity: A scoping review of structures within organizations. Journal of Management, 51(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/01492063241271252