You know that person. There’s always at least one in a company that is the life of the party, el centro de atracción; le metteur d’ambiance; l'anima della festa—well if there isn’t one, then you should really question your culture. They may or may not be a top executive, but they are a leader among the people.
What happens when that life of the party walks out the door? The room darkens just a little bit; a subtle wind shifts; a small silence may permeate; people start to break up into smaller silos of conversation; that binding element in the social fabric is gone and the threads spread apart.
This is an issue that most HR departments may not think about, but really should consider, in efforts to make or keep the organization more human. This is not a question of the rationale of why they had to leave, but a look at the effects on the organization in the process.
With a pure social network analysis (SNA) view, the immediate result is that you lose a core node in the network in the organizational social graph. The effect is a disconnection of other parts of the organization; perhaps, it may even leave some groups totally unconnected to others. They tend to be the person who connects across silos, and when that link disappears for whatever reason, you may get back those silos that leaders are always clamoring to eliminate.
They are the go-to-person for many. If you’ve ever felt that loss of a great go-to-person for one key area for yourself, multiply that feeling across many others. That loss is one to grieve, and you may sense that among the remaining employees. It is demoralizing, and leads others to question the culture and reasons why they left, whatever that may be.
I should stress first: look beyond the hierarchical leaders. They can be core nodes from a management point of view but those are trivial to detect. The bigger challenge is in detecting those informal leaders somewhere in the organization. They stand in such a position from a practical, or cultural point of view.
Can only one person really do that? Perhaps, perhaps not—it varies with organizations and the centrality of the person. But the effect is still felt immediately and it takes time to rebuild or strengthen other links, for the network to heal itself. Like physics, social networks abhor a vacuum.
The sound you may not notice, however, is that of productivity being sucked out of the system. It is inaudible—invisible in action—because you may not notice the many little tasks that now take longer in the micro scale: “Where can I find that? Oh _____ will know.” “Does anyone know a contact over in the ______?” “Where did I hear that from? I need to track it down.” “Who should I bring to this meeting/event/conference call that will inspire others to act?” Individually, it is discrete, but in aggregate there is impact.
Another thought is that some folks may feel they are such a core node, and may claim to be so. How do you verify that? There are two indicators. One is obvious from a sociological view: develop and map your social graph. The second is to listen for the outcry—although perhaps, that would be too late.
There are plenty of tools that create that mapping, but what you really need is data showing the relationships and interaction. Decades before social networking software, most of this was done by hand, by interviewing people and developing personal or role interaction patterns as written notes.
Social software makes it actually practical to do so. What you will need is the capability to examine interaction pairs over time, and an automatic tracking and mapping tool. You don’t need the content of the interaction for that matter, just that it occurred and between whom. Then you need the software that will graph it all together. In some commercial software like IBM Connections in particular, their Atlas tool, that mapping tool already exists. Otherwise you can use independent SNA tools like NodeXL that will take the data from a spreadsheet, and generate the maps for you (see Figure 1).
While we would all love to hold on to such stars in our organizations, there is likely going to be some time when this occurs, regardless of success or failure. We need to prepare for that. This issue is a more subtle aspect of running an organization that used to be much more difficult to detect, and so management and HR teams could only scramble when it was in effect. While it would still be very challenging to predict when it might occur, you can still detect where (the person) that impact may be.
As mentioned before, look beyond the hierarchy, and into the actual patterns of flow in the organization. That is boots-on-the-ground knowledge, to borrow the military term; the reality of what exists in the organization over the perceived operation.
Many organizations spend the effort to plan when a hierarchical leader or an executive leaves. CEO succession for one is a hot topic, and of broad interest, certainly. However, even if it is only felt within the organizational culture, this issue is still a real problem. I have yet to hear of an action plan when an informal leader leaves. It becomes a case-by-case basis but more than that may become a firedrill. Worst of all is when the organization doesn’t even realize it, yet the aftershock is much more damaging. The reality is the business management has matured to this point where this is an addressable, if not preventable, issue. We have the technology to assist us. It reflects on your organization’s readiness if you can execute on it. The people will still mourn the loss of the life of the party in their own ways.
Do you have a plan for action when informal leaders leave? I would love to hear about it. Feel free to contact me on Facebook.com/rawnshah or @rawn. Or better yet, come discuss this in the Work Hackers community on Google+
