CHAPTER 8

STEP #5: IDENTIFY INFLUENCERS, ENERGIZERS, AND BLOCKERS

Organizational network analysis can provide an x-ray into the inner workings of an organization—a powerful means of making invisible patterns of information flow and collaboration in strategically important groups visible.

—ROB CROSS, PROFESSOR OF GLOBAL LEADERSHIP, BABSON COLLEGE

Practically every organization has a well-defined organization chart—a hierarchy the workforce recognizes as the formal chain of command. However, ask almost any employee a simple question: “Is that how work gets done?” and you’ll receive a resounding “of course not.” When workflow is truly studied, it typically reveals patterns of communication and influence that are very different from the formal hierarchical structures that the company has painstakingly created.

Here’s an easy way to think about it. Every organization has “go-to” people whom others in the workforce turn to for answers, comfort, opinions, and guidance. As you are reading this, someone’s face probably popped up in your head. Most executives would agree that those people are the lifeblood of the organization. Yet there’s a consistent problem in almost every company regarding these critical employees, these invaluable resources, these corporate rock stars.

Most executives don’t know who they are.

Don’t get me wrong. There are obvious rock stars in every company; they stand out because their influence is so strong and their value is so well-known. But many more are hidden and fly below the radar. They are often buried in the hierarchy, and just as often they are introverts who try hard to stay out of the limelight or are overlooked by most casual observers. But they are there every day, making the company hum and helping the organization thrive.

When renovating culture, it’s important to identify these influencers and make sure they are enlisted as proponents of the change because these hidden stars will likely have undue impact on a significant proportion of the workforce. They are the people who provide informal leadership, who span organizational boundaries, and who unleash the latent passion in the workforce.

In fact, it’s been estimated that more than 90 percent of change initiatives can be achieved in shorter timescales, and at lower cost, provided that the right influencers are identified and fully involved in all aspects of the change process.¹ Uncovering who those influencers are in the company is not particularly difficult, as long as the right methods are used.

The Power of Organizational Network Analysis

By conducting an organizational network analysis (ONA), those indispensable people are illuminated through a simple survey or through the analysis of interactions on internal communication platforms (like e-mail, Slack, Teams, etc.). The goal is to track and map the company’s flow of information, collaboration, and expertise sharing to see who is at the “center of the beehive,” and equally to understand who is on the outskirts. More importantly, it’s to understand who has influence to promote the culture renovation throughout the company.

The foremost expert today on ONA—most consider him the pioneer of this discipline—is Rob Cross, a professor of global leadership at Babson College. Spanning three decades, Cross’s work focuses on applying analysis of social networks to help solve business issues. He has authored three books, the most recent one titled Driving Results Through Social Networks. His work has been published in the Wall Street Journal, CIO, Inc., Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Business Week, Fortune, the Financial Times, Time magazine, and many other publications. Rob is also a good friend and a business partner.

“ONA can provide an x-ray into the inner workings of an organization—a powerful means of making invisible patterns of information flow and collaboration in strategically important groups visible,” said Cross. Over two decades of research, Cross and colleagues have found that 3 to 5 percent of people in a typical organization network account for 20 to 35 percent of the value-add collaborations. Typically, half or more are not predicted by leaders ahead of time. Even sophisticated talent management systems overlook most of these central players.

“To be clear, leaders get the top 3 or 4 right,” Cross noted. “But then they have surprises come in at 5, 8, 10–12, 17–20, etc. These invisible assets account for huge proportions of how work is getting done and how culture is reinforced or changed.”

ONA has traditionally been used to mitigate any issues that could arise with these central figures in the organization. For example, is that person a flight risk? It’s certainly possible that someone who is constantly besieged by coworkers may feel overloaded, underappreciated, and maybe underpaid. Often that individual’s departure creates internal havoc that was never contemplated.

On the other hand, it’s possible that person could be a bottleneck and might be doing work that others should be doing instead. The point is you don’t know unless you identify the collaboration points within the organization.

In all companies, strategic success depends on effective collaboration between employees. For example, if client-facing employees and those with roles that are internal and more operational aren’t communicating or collaborating frequently, the business suffers. Often entire departments, divisions, business units, and geographies don’t collaborate with each other, either on purpose or due to neglect. This is also very common after an acquisition; it can take years for companies joined through acquisition to truly collaborate with each other and to have everyone operating as one organization. This is precisely why many acquisitions fail—because no one thought to analyze whether collaboration was occurring or not.

The goal is not just more collaboration. Rather, it is to align the pattern of collaboration—the lifeline of how the organization is getting work done—with strategic objectives. In some instances, this might mean reducing excessive collaboration. And in others, it could mean connecting silos in the company. To accomplish this, an ONA will reveal:

  Where an organization is most siloed

  Which units are collaborating well and which ones never communicate with each other

  Where the company can optimally invest to immediately impact performance through enhanced collaboration

ONA is often used to identify three types of important network roles:

  Connectors. The go-to resource for many, connectors support many coworkers in a variety of ways. They often create alignment within a team or department through informal leadership and often are consumed by helping colleagues at any time.

  Boundary spanners. With ties and relationships that bridge typical organizational boundaries, such as departments, functions, locations, and so on, boundary spanners have a good understanding of the views and concerns of various groups. They often have knowledge of what will work in different parts of the organization and are seen as credible by others.

  Energizers. By creating enthusiasm and energy around them, energizers instill a sense of possibility in those they interact with. They fuel engagement in conversation and inspire innovation and creativity, as well as unleashing passion deep in the workplace.

These groups are important to uncover in the context of culture renovation. Over half (57 percent) of organizations that successfully renovated their culture conducted an ONA to identify the most influential employees, listen to their perspective, and enlist them as “culture ambassadors” to champion culture change initiatives.

The Role of Culture Ambassador

The concept of culture ambassador is somewhat new, but it is a pivotal role in making change happen.

“I’m a believer now in the concept of culture ambassadors, but I certainly wasn’t when we first set out to change our culture,” Tim Richmond confessed to me one morning. Tim is chief human resource officer of AbbVie, a Chicago-based biopharmaceutical company that employs 30,000 people in 75 countries. AbbVie was spun out of Abbott Labs in 2013 and is a public company trading on the NYSE. At its inception, AbbVie had a very rare opportunity: act as a large start-up company and create a culture from scratch.

The CEO asked Richmond to oversee this effort.

“We often talk about the value of top-down leadership and messaging when embarking on a culture renovation, but there’s a lot of influence from the bottom up that I probably underappreciated,” Richmond said. “As we were establishing our culture, I had some people in the company approach me to say we should create these culture ambassadors around the world. Every country should have at least one, every site, every laboratory, and even every work group.

“I remember asking, do we really need to have this right now? But I’ve learned over time that you listen to good people who have good ideas and ask, well, what would that mean? How would it work? It turns out it was a huge catalyst for change. Because you think you have great ideas from headquarters . . . and sometimes we do . . . but if you are in another country it often doesn’t apply. In my career I’ve been on an international assignment, and you get something from headquarters, and you think, I have no idea what this is. We have no idea how to use it. But the concept of a local ambassador is someone who works at the local level to take the broad enterprise ideas and create from it whatever is important to them.”

As a spin-off company, AbbVie had a blank canvas on which to paint new cultural norms.

“We had the opportunity to chart our own course when we became a stand-alone company at the beginning of 2013,” said Richmond. “It was up to us to establish our independence and build our future, and it was essential that we succeed—for our employees, our shareholders, and, most importantly, our patients.”

Richmond continued: “Creating our culture was so essential to our business success that it was established as one of our top four business priorities. We knew that a positive culture—one with highly engaged employees—impacts business performance for the better and would enable us to deliver on our business objectives. We took advantage of the unique opportunity to intentionally design, and systematically work to bring about, a culture that would enable us to achieve industry-leading performance.”

From day one, AbbVie culture has been instilled in the day-to-day working lives of all employees. Like F5, AbbVie emphasizes the importance of behaviors, believing that how employees work with each other to achieve results matters just as much as achieving the company’s goals. In the spirit of renovation, AbbVie established a culture that balanced “the best of the old with an eye to new philosophies,” according to Richmond. This included aligning new business strategies and culture drivers that would feel uniquely AbbVie.

A core part of this process, according Richmond, was when AbbVie gathered top leaders in the organization to prioritize focus areas and to obtain early buy-in and commitment. Armed with research and insights, the company zeroed in on (1) raising awareness about the culture it intended to build and (2) equipping employees with the skills needed to behave in ways that would be fully consistent with that culture. Overall, the purposeful establishment of culture has been a huge success at AbbVie. The company successfully executed on its strategy, and the shareholder return has been significant since the company debuted on the NYSE on January 2, 2013, outperforming most indexes and competitors.

“This high-performing culture enables us to deliver on our business objectives,” said Richmond. “To sustain our business performance in the long term, a strong culture with engaged employees is critical. Engaged employees perform better and lead to greater business results; they are intricately linked.”

Passive ONA Versus Active

To understand who is best suited to be a culture ambassador, or a member of a culture cabinet, companies can conduct an ONA in stealth mode by analyzing communication patterns of popular technology platforms like e-mail, calendar data, Teams, Slack, or other tools. Often referred to as “passive” ONA, this technique has a couple of issues. One is that it can easily pick up false signals since it tends to focus on the volume of communication or interaction between parties versus the quality or context. For instance, it’s hard to ascertain the strategic importance based on e-mail volume when there is a flurry of messages about this weekend’s social plans or when the latest funny meme goes viral internally or an inbox gets buried in bureaucratic travel expense approvals.

The bigger issue is that passive analysis won’t illuminate the key ingredient of influence. To understand that better, most organizations turn to “active” ONA that is done through surveys. In those surveys, typical questions are:

  Please identify colleagues in your group who are important to your ability to achieve your work goals.

  Please indicate whether greater access to (i.e., more time and attention from) each person below would help you be more effective at work.

  Please place a check next to the names of people below whom you consider to be important sources of open, energizing interactions for you at work.

This, according to Cross, is how you uncover the real influencers and energizers that will initiate change and make it last. It also allows you to identify a mechanism to make desired communication flow more efficiently throughout the company.

“A traditional approach to cultural change that cascades messaging from the top down often misses the hidden cultural influencers that really matter, the ones that are deeper down in the organization,” said Cross. “In one study we conducted which utilized ONA to map this, we found that the top 50 leaders could directly influence 31 percent of the population just by looking at their network connections. But by shifting our focus to the people who were truly connected internally, the top 50 influencers could reach almost twice as many people. The disproportionate impact of these top influencers might easily have been lost without conducting an ONA.”

In any culture change initiative, uncovering the true influencers and energizers could be the difference between success and failure.

“Leaders have always known that they should involve others in cultural change, but without an analytic view it becomes difficult to see whose opinion yields the greatest insight and results,” Cross adds. “This is one reason why the large-scale participatory processes that were popular in the nineties died off, due to the work and time involved to get consensus.”

As important as influencers and energizers are to culture renovation, it’s equally important to understand where blockers exist. Cross has often used ONA to help organizations illuminate those likely to derail the effort.

“Everyone has been a part of change efforts that falter because of resistance,” Cross noted. “Often the resistance stems from a small set of opinion leaders with strongly held positions on either side of a practice, norm, or belief. People might mumble that this department or team is holding us up. But the reality is often driven by a small set of key influencers in networks.

“Why would any leader let these disagreements passively slow or derail change efforts or bring them into full group forums where emotions and positions solidify? We would never handle conflict on our teams this way—but our lack of granularity in understanding cultural rifts and the best and most efficient way to heal them leads us to actions that exacerbate the problem.”

Sometimes it takes extraordinary events, a crisis even, to unveil the influencers, energizers, and blockers in the organization. How individuals respond to unexpected change is often not known until everyone is in the heat of the moment. Few companies I know of experienced this quite as suddenly or jarringly as Sony Pictures.

Country Versus Company

Monday morning, November 24, 2014, should have been like any other day at Sony Pictures in Culver City, just a few miles west of downtown Los Angeles. But instead it was historic—and horrific.

As employees logged on to their computers, they were immediately assaulted by gunfire—luckily just the recorded sound of it, not the real thing—and the image of an ominous red skeleton on the screen with “Hacked By #GOP” written across its forehead. Underneath the skeleton was a very poorly written message:

Underneath were website addresses outside of the company that contained many internal sensitive documents, with messages threatening to release them if Sony Pictures did not comply with the group’s demands. Computer after computer was systematically infected throughout Sony’s headquarters, all carrying the same message. The IT department at Sony moved quickly and made the drastic decision to shut down the entire network, including overseas. Before it did, the malware wiped out 3,262 of Sony’s 6,797 personal computers and 837 of its 1,555 servers.²

“Our head of IT was a smart, sharp, and strong people-oriented leader, but he also had the technical skills to really know what to do in this kind of situation,” George Rose, the head of HR at the time, told me years later. “As soon as he heard about the breach, the first thing he did was—thankfully—shut everything down. It would have been far more damaging had he not done that.”

As it turns out, this was not a one-day event. The GOP, which stands for Guardians of Peace, had been accessing Sony’s network for several weeks and had already stolen most of Sony’s data and deleted the original copies from Sony computers.

Sony’s network was down for days as IT tried to repair the damage. The company had no voice mail, no e-mail, no Internet access, and no production systems. Employees were relying on fax machines and whiteboards to do their jobs. Someone found a few old BlackBerrys in a storage room and gave them to executives so they could at least exchange text messages. They even resurrected some old machines to cut physical payroll checks in lieu of electronic direct deposit.

Initially, Sony didn’t understand the extent of the breach. In fact, the company’s first statement on November 24 could have gone unnoticed by many: “We are investigating an I.T. matter.”³ A more accurate statement would have been: We’ve just suffered one of the worst cyberattacks in history, and it was executed by a hostile foreign government with the primary purpose of destroying our company.

Within a week, the extent of the breach became clear, and more than a dozen FBI investigators were on the scene. The hackers had taken everything. Contracts with actors. Film budgets. Sales reports. Salary data. Retirement and termination plans. Medical records. Social Security numbers. Passport data. Personal e-mails. Passwords. Home addresses. Five entire movies, four of which had yet to be released. Over 170,000 messages between top executives including then CEO Michael Lynton and Motion Picture Group chairman Amy Pascal.

Many of the e-mails were downright embarrassing and were quickly reported by the press. One was from producer Scott Rudin to Pascal about Angelina Jolie regarding the actress’s desire to direct. “Kill me please. Immediately,” he said when he learned she was studying films of potential directors for a “Cleopatra” film in development. “I’m not destroying my career over a minimally talented spoiled brat,” he said in another e-mail. Another revealed that Mark Cuban was not happy with the $30,000 he was getting per episode for Shark Tank, a show distributed by Sony Pictures Television. Another revealed Pascal spent $66,350 on a two-day trip for car services, air travel, and a suite at the St. Regis hotel to attend the premiere of Fury, starring Brad Pitt and Shia LaBeouf, in Washington, DC.⁴

It wasn’t long before the primary suspect in the hack was uncovered: North Korea. The reason? A movie Sony was set to release on Christmas that year—a dark comedy called The Interview.

The movie starred Seth Rogen (who also coproduced it) and James Franco as a pair of bumbling journalists. The duo scores the interview of a lifetime when they are invited to North Korea to meet with Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. After arriving, they are soon contacted by the CIA and tasked with assassinating him instead. Like many of Rogen’s movies, it’s frat boy humor, but it had a twist rarely seen in cinema: the very visible death of a living political leader.

The depiction of Jong-un’s death was hotly debated internally. Studio executives pressured Rogen to tone it down, which he did. A little. The movie ultimately ends with a graphic, slow-motion sequence where Kim is killed when his helicopter explodes, engulfing his body in a fireball. An earlier cut of the scene had shown his head exploding.

North Korea had complained about the film for months, with the threats getting more dire each time. In June, the North Korean government called the film an “act of war” and had promised a “merciless” retaliation against the United States if the film was released. Rogen didn’t take the threats very seriously at first, tweeting, “People don’t usually wanna kill me for one of my movies until after they’ve paid 12 bucks for it.”

Rogen’s tone changed markedly as time went on. After the hack on headquarters, there were additional terrorist threats as the movie’s Christmas premiere loomed closer. They warned Sony it should not show the movie in theaters, or there would be consequences. Spooked by this, most major theater chains canceled the movie, but a few independent theaters around the country showed it anyway. The movie ended up being released early to digital soon after. Sony made only $12.3 million worldwide in box office ticket sales, but it made another $40 million in digital rentals (Sony’s most successful digital release) for a modest profit on the movie’s $44 million budget.

But the damage had been done. Actors were upset, and lawsuits were filed. Pascal was out just a few weeks after the attack. Rogen called the entire episode “a horrible experience.”⁵ Sony’s employees undoubtedly would agree.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the ordeal was seen as a wake-up call to boardrooms and corner offices around the country and “did more to raise national security cyber-awareness than any other single event,” said John Carlin, assistant attorney general at the Justice Department for national security.⁶ “It was a real game-changer,” said cybersecurity expert Peter Toren, who used to work in the Justice Department’s computer crime and intellectual property section. “It wasn’t the typical cybercrime by thieves in search of credit card information to sell—it was an enemy nation causing as much damage, chaos and humiliation as possible.”

Culture at Sony Pictures certainly was significantly altered as a result. Employees were disturbed about the amount of personal information that was stolen. Most had to go through the tedious process of changing account numbers, passwords, and even passports. Many lived in fear for several months, wondering when the next hack would take place. Ultimately a class-action lawsuit was filed, and Sony agreed to pay up to $8 million to employees who claimed their personal data was stolen.⁷

Rebuilding Culture

As head of HR, George Rose was in the middle during the entire time. Now retired, he and I reminisced about what it was like to rebuild the culture in the aftermath.

“Initially, everyone was afraid. Literally. They were walking around uncertain about what was going to happen to them,” remembers Rose. “And I think the universal feeling was the common bond. Everyone faced similar sets of challenges. For management, since we couldn’t control the press and we couldn’t control what was being disseminated about us, written about us, thought about us, was to overcommunicate. And we told employees, this is what we need to do to get back. This is what we need to do to get it right. This is what you should focus on and pay attention to.”

Rose points to some key leadership actions that started the company on a path to recovery.

“There are a couple of things that happened that really helped,” he said. “First, Michael Lynton went on CNN to do an interview, which I thanked him for doing afterward, and told him it was very courageous. On CNN, he expressed—in a very explicit way—that the criticisms we were receiving were unfair. He did this in the midst of everybody, including the president, saying that we had done bad things (by canceling the movie release) and that we weren’t upholding the First Amendment, among other things. People internally were so down after the news conference with Obama saying that we had made a mistake that having Michael so strongly refute this on CNN was motivating to them. It was really helpful and constructive.

“The second thing was David Boies wrote a letter to the media (cautioning them against using information that hackers have leaked). He basically said you’ve played perfectly into the hands of the attackers. You’ve really created a circumstance where you’ve made it much more difficult than it otherwise might be by not respecting these things as being private property, but seeing them as public domain that could be shared, should be shared everywhere.

“That was motivating for our people. And as a senior team, we reminded people of that . . . that this was an effort to destroy the company and that you should, as best you can, ignore what’s being written. Focus on the tasks at hand and have everyone across the organization similarly directed. I think it gathered people in a way that we otherwise hadn’t experienced before. Sony culturally was not necessarily a highly integrated company. We really pushed the highly personal communication effort that needed to take place to sustain the effort of keeping people’s focus and discipline toward the task of getting back together and into improving the cultural environment.”

Rose said the crisis brought out the best in some people.

“We had to stand up and tell people I know this is difficult, but let’s find a way together to see if we can solve for this. I think the majority of people elevated. And it was really encouraging and positive to see so many people contribute ideas, have the energy and the stamina and the will to overcome the personal challenges that they faced. The culture change that took place after that was the result of their efforts.”

“I think the culture that we created from this is much stronger,” observed Rose. “Better teamwork, communication across the organization, sharing of people and skills and capabilities, knowledge and insight . . . the culture was certainly better and stronger in the aftermath than it was previously. It was there, but it was kind of a skill that hadn’t been exercised. And once we started practicing it, the more we continued to hone that, the better it got. It changed the culture. It really helped us become a more integrated organization than we had been previously. Overall, I think it was better because we had all gone through something that no one could fully appreciate, but that really gave us a chance to improve organizationally.”

A crisis illuminates leadership, and Sony certainly experienced that.

“Amy Pascal, kiddingly but seriously, said at a holiday party afterward as she was thanking everyone, ‘Who would have ever thought that our IT function and our HR function were the two organizations that would have led us through this challenging period?’ I really appreciated her saying that,” reflected Rose.

“There were some people that really elevated and delivered extremely well . . . and others that did not. Like the COVID-19 crisis, you see the quality of leadership when you’re in the midst of it. Our attitude was we were either going to figure out a way to get through this or who knows what was going to happen to the company.

“When you’re faced with that, you really see what people are made of. The character of people stands out.”