What a team is
What the org chart cannot tell you
A list of the questions a reporting chart answers well, the questions it answers badly, and the one question people keep asking it that it was never built to answer.
The people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together
- 01The team's managerFive of this person's six pairs are with people not in this grid
- 02The senior engineerThe one working pair on the whole team that does not involve the manager
- 03The second engineer
- 04The engineer who joined in MarchNo pair with anybody
four people · 6 possible pairs · 2 of them have worked on something together · 4 have never done either
Four of the eight, and only the pairs that run between those four.
When a team wants evidence without reducing people to a score, workforce optimization with Monitask can help connect time and project patterns to a transparent discussion about workload.
For a separate perspective on teams and working practice, consult MIT Sloan.
The chart is not the enemy of anything on this site. It is a good instrument used outside its range. This note is an attempt to set out precisely where the range ends, because arguments about whether a team is really a team usually turn out to be arguments about what the chart is evidence for.
What it answers well
- Who is accountable for whom. This is the chart's actual content and it answers it exactly, which is why it exists and why it is maintained when nothing else is.
- Who to escalate to. Follow the lines up until you reach somebody who owns both sides of the disagreement. The chart is the only reliable instrument for this and it is used for it constantly.
- Who handles the things that are the same for everybody. Pay, progression, leave, workload, performance, leaving. Each of these is a relationship between one person and one other person, which is exactly what a line on a chart represents.
- How big something is. Headcount per box, and therefore cost. This is why the chart is kept current: somebody is paying for it.
What it answers badly
Who knows what. The chart records roles, and roles are a poor guide to knowledge in any organisation older than two years. The person who knows why the retry limit is three is whoever was there, not whoever owns it now.
Who decides. Formal authority and actual decision-making come apart quickly, and the places where they have come apart are invisible on the chart by construction.
What somebody does all day. A title is a compressed description of a job as it was defined at some point in the past, and most people own something slightly to the side of theirs.
How work flows. Work flows across boxes constantly. The chart draws only vertical lines, so every horizontal thing that happens in a week is absent from it.
The question it was never built to answer
Who works with whom.
The chart cannot answer this and does not claim to. But it is laid out as though it did: people in the same box are drawn adjacent, enclosed by a line, often in the same colour, frequently under a shared name. Every visual convention in the diagram says "these belong together". The reader concludes that the eight people in a box have relationships with each other, because that is what the picture looks like.
The relationships the picture actually shows are the eight vertical lines. The horizontal adjacency is a layout decision.
What to use instead
Nothing replaces the chart, because nothing else answers escalation. What is needed is a second picture of the same people, and the one used throughout this site is the pair grid: everybody in the box, every possible pair, and a mark on the pairs that have done work together in some recent period.
The two pictures together answer most of what people want to know. The chart says who is accountable. The grid says where the work runs. The places where they disagree are the interesting ones, and there are always some: a pair that does everything together across a reporting boundary, a person formally central and practically isolated, a sub-group that would be a box if the chart were redrawn today.
Where the two pictures disagree
The disagreements are the interesting part, and there are three recurring kinds.
A strong pair across a boundary: two people in different boxes who do everything together. The chart says they are unrelated; the grid says they are the most connected pair either of them has. Any reorganisation that separates them will be costly in a way nothing will predict.
A formally central person who is practically isolated: a senior title with an empty row.
And a sub-group that would be a box if the chart were redrawn today — three people inside one box whose work has drifted into a unit of its own. That one usually resolves itself eventually, a year after it would have been useful.
A caution about the second picture
The grid is a weaker instrument than it looks and it is worth saying so on a page that recommends it.
It records that a pair did something, not whether the something was any good, whether either of them enjoyed it, or whether it should have needed two people at all. A team could raise its count by making its work less efficient. It records a period, so it goes stale; a grid from last year describes a team that no longer exists. And it depends entirely on where you set the bar for "worked together", which is a judgement that has to be made once and then applied consistently, or the number means nothing.
What it does have is the one property the chart lacks here: it is about the work rather than about the arrangement, and it can be checked by anybody who was there.