The Ties of Informal Leadership

Informal leadership is most effective when conducted with a small number of closed ties (involving three people) and a mix of friendship- and task-orientated activities. When the ties are open (involving only two people) or become too numerous, informal leadership begins to break down and can hinder or even endanger an organisation's operational efficiency.

In last week's column, I began a two part introduction to informal leadership by looking at The Boundaries of Informal Leadership. The premise was that over the last forty years, we have seen tremendous growth in the requirement that employees engage in collaborative activities. The upshot is that it is essentially impossible for managers to be in all the collaboration activities with which their team engage. Activities in which decisions are inevitably taken; decisions that change the course of a team's, department's, or organisation's strategic direction.

When employees think 'they've got this' — but in fact are merely feeling the need to do something and this is something therefore they should do this — costs to the bottom line, an erosion of operational capacity, and decline in organisation value are often the result.

The fix is not, as so many poor managers seem to think, for the formal leader to be in ever more meetings, taking ever more decisions, at an ever more detailed level. Rather, the fix comes in the form of empowering people without positional authority to take on informal leadership. When done well, this is particularly effective in boundary spanning work — activities across teams without a shared manager.

With 'done well' being the key phrase here, it begs the question, "When is informal leadership done well?". While this is a question too complex for a short read, it is a question to which key structural and qualitative criteria can be applied to begin to answer a much simpler question: Are employees in my team effective informal leaders or merely highly social people building their brand?

Measuring the Strength of Ties

For leadership to be valuable, be it formal or informal leadership, what is termed the boundary spanning effort needs to deliver results. For example, in consistently and accurately transferring information or managing inter-personal or inter-team relationships.

In formal leadership roles this is a challenging task, particularly when a manager must lead across teams. For informal leadership the process is even harder, not least because of ever increasing role specialisation. For organisations who are taking the wise path of dealing with management challenges by embracing hierarchy, growing departmentalisation can add another hurdle for informal leaders to surmount.

A major driver of inter-team hurdles are the procedures, policies, and even language used in different areas of an organisation. Something that requires not only the boundary spanner — the leader who is bridging the gap between teams — to invest considerable time, but also for other employees involved to engage in information sharing to help the informal leader understand the issues in play.

This latter challenge can be a major source of friction between teams. I have worked on many projects in which I have had to address the complaint from managers that their team does not have the time needed to engage in information sharing. A challenge that usually results in heightened interpersonal strain and negative views of employee capabilities. Further eroding the process and necessitating even more formal leadership time be invested in what should have been a procedural requirements gathering engagement.

When a mandate from a manager for cross-functional teams to work together is lacking, the process of informal leadership can often break down completely as employees already under stress to deliver, or irritated by the requests, take the adversarial route, and refuse to cooperate, work to rule, or simply ignore or avoid requests and questions.

Yet lack of engagement can be overcome, and a useful indicator of whether an informal leader is surmounting obstacles and working effectively can be found in the strength of their ties to employees with whom, or even over whom, they are trying to exert informal leadership. A theory which can be used to assess the strength of these ties is Simmelian Tie Theory (STT).

Named after the German sociologist Georg Simmel, and coined by David Krackhardt in his 1999 paper The ties that torture: Simmelian tie analysis in organizations, a Simmelian tie can most simply be described as a clique between a pair of individuals. While these cliques or ties can greatly strengthen the relationship between individuals, enabling people to exert informal leadership where in a non-clique setting such leadership would be impossible, they also restrict individuals due to the emphasis on group norms. This is because as the number of ties or cliques grows, so does the number of restrictions placed on that individual.

Norms or mores are an essential glue in the functioning of groups, but they can also exert the negative connotations of glue — restricting or even preventing movement. As our work world becomes increasingly networked, it is easy to delude ourselves that people with many contacts or ties provide a higher level of value due to their connectedness or that they have a greater capacity for choice and action. But, if an individual's commitment of the tie is weak it may be of little or no value. If the ties are strong, they may curtail available actions — meaning a person with fewer or weaker ties would be in a better decision making position.

With an ability to overcome the challenges inherent in ties being an essential part of exercising informal leadership, STT can help in assessing the strength of a tie and by extension the likelihood that people will respond to a request. It also, returning to the metaphor of glue, elucidates the conditions in which a tie may be effectual in making an ask but limits our options. STT posits that ties have both qualitative and structural dimensions.

Qualitative: the quality of a tie relates to if it is friendship- or task-orientated.
Structural: the structure relates to whether the tie is open (dyadic, consisting of two people) or closed (triadic, consisting of a dyad plus a third person).

The Structure of a Tie

Open ties are considered relatively weak because there is no common or enforcing third party. Open ties also tend to be highly individualistic, but often involve increased levels of bargaining power. As a result, the weakness of an open tie can manifest in heightened self-interest, the manipulation of information, and a failure to reciprocate. The result is a degradation of trust and eventually a breakdown in the tie. This is why open ties tend to problematic in organisations because they can easily mutate from highly effective (i.e., when there is strong trust) to toxic (i.e., when real or imagined slights create distrust between the individuals).

For these reasons, open ties are often insufficient as a basis for informal leadership in boundary spanning activities because information and expertise sharing are less about improved outcomes for the organisation and more about personality contests — do I like the person making the request.

Yet, make the tie closed by adding a common third party — technically called triadic — and we see a radical shift in the strength and stability of the tie's structure. This is because the tie is less individualistic due to the modulating effects of broader group or organisational norms which provide clear expectations as to conduct and the expectation of conformity to legitimate requests. When the third party takes the form of a manager there is the added dynamic of official sanctions — which can seldom be invoked in open ties between colleagues where sanctions may seem petty or personal.

Closed structures also tend to improve conflict resolution because employees are usually keen to avoid the escalation of issues or the invocation of sanctions which have the additional impact of eroding personal brand in the wider organisation. As Simmel observed:

there is no triad in which a dissent between any two elements does not occur from time to time — a dissent of a more harmless or more pointed, more momentary, or more lasting, more theoretical or more practical nature — and in which the third member does not play a mediation role.

(Simmel 1950, 149)

The Quality of a Tie

Turning to the qualitative aspects of ties, these can loosely be divided between task- and friendship-orientated. Task-orientated ties focus on the job in hand and are effective in disseminating information and achieving objectives. Friendship-orientated ties are driven by interpersonal relationships.

Friendship-orientated ties have the powerful dynamic of emotion, which can be an effective motivator in getting colleagues to go above-and-beyond their baseline professional obligations. This may be as simple as a willingness to spend more time information sharing or as complex as providing emotional support in the face of adversity.

There is also an increased propensity among employees with friendship-orientated ties to worry less about being taken advantage of, thereby sharing more with colleagues. A process that not only benefits the individuals who form the tie but also their manager, in the case of a closed (triadic) system. Friendship ties across teams are also more likely to enhance inter-team coordination as employees are less likely to see other teams as competitors for organisational resources.

Task-orientated ties are predominantly transactional in nature and usually driven by an individual's role. An example of this is if I query HR regarding an employees contract, I don't need a tie of friendship for them to share relevant information and provide any necessary insights regarding employment policies.

While at face value task-orientated ties are weaker than friendship-orientated ties, in terms of the likelihood of the individual going above and beyond, they are nonetheless of considerable benefit. This is because task ties leverage existing organisational roles and, being largely devoid of emotion, are less likely to result in employees deploying additional resources to deliver on an ask — taking them away from other more pressing duties. They also have the benefit when, in the best interests of the organisation rather than the individual, an ask necessitates a 'no' response of relieving the informal leader of the emotional labour in being bombarded with 'but I thought we were friends'.

Whether the ties are task- or friendship-orientated, there is a point of diminishing returns. This is particularly the case in friendship ties where the relationship can become problematic as people overcommit their available resources to the detriment of professional obligations. In other words, it is productive for the team and healthy for the individual to have friends at work, but too many friends can begin to have the opposite effect as managers come to see well intentioned efforts at informal leadership as being nothing more than a social clique and as distracting from essential duties. A process that will erode an employee's brand and potentially harm their prospects for advancement.

Putting Theory Into Practise

As with all theoretical work, this begs the inevitable 'so what?' The short answer is that without informal leadership organisational value is lost as managers, irrespective of their capabilities, cap out their capacity to make decisions and move the organisation forward.

The longer answer is while organisations have org charts, which can quickly tell you the span of control of an individual manager, informal ties go largely unmeasured. While it is not true that you cannot manage what you cannot measure, it is certainly hard to manage what you cannot see. This makes capturing ties an often unexplored, and by extension an unexploited, opportunity for organisations.

One approach is to leverage the tools and frameworks for stakeholder mapping that should already take place in project management — creating an overview of the ties and discretionary boundary spanning that goes on between individuals. While this would be a Sisyphean task at an organisational level, it is a practical and valuable activity at the team level where it can be undertaken by the line manager who should only have a handful of direct reports, and who in turn will have a limited number of ties.

It is important to not simply map who is talking to whom, but whether the tie quality is friendship- or task-orientated, and whether the structure is closed or open. Of particular interest will be the open ties due to the absence of a third party, and thus likely absence of any oversight.

As with all organisational documents the process is as, if not more, important than the output. Mapping can begin via daily discussions and observations of employee interactions, but because individuals will have the keenest insights into the dyadic ties they have with people in the organisation, it is important not to be too covert in the observation process. The challenge and value a manager can provide to the organisation, and the individual employees engaging in the ties, is that individuals may be unaware of the relational patterns which have emerged, or perhaps how to interpret them.

For managers: the mapping process can help to unlock the power of discretionary boundary spanning and facilitate improved informal leadership. A process that magnifies their capacity for management as they have better oversight, and by extension control, of the proliferation of collaboration, automation, and offshoring which either unlocks or limits the outcomes of their strategic decisions.

For employees: understanding the ties and discretionary boundary spanning at play can help them to better understand the invisible blockers to task accomplishment and reduce the friction in their day. This is accomplished when their manager helps them to comprehend that they may be making a lot of friends, but this is increasing the drain on their limited resources. Instead, they would be better served, and in a better position to help their colleagues, by keeping their friendship ties 'as is' while increasing their closed task-orientated ties (e.g., by using a closed tie in which their manager has a mandate to achieve a goal which requires cross team collaboration, rather than trying to get colleagues to help them as a favour).

When done effectively, use of informal leadership has the power to amplify the brand of employees and managers — providing genuine value to the organisation.

Good night, and good luck.

Photo by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash.