Henry Ward's Shadow Org Chart: What You Find When You Actually Map It
In 2017, Henry Ward — CEO of Carta — published a short piece on Medium that quietly became one of the most-cited posts in talent management circles.
He'd run an organizational network analysis on his 250-person company. He mapped who employees actually turned to for advice, who they called when decisions needed to be made, who energized them at work. The result was a network graph that looked nothing like his org chart.
"Both fascinating and humbling," Ward wrote, "I am the CEO and didn't make the top 10."
He called it the shadow org chart.
Ward promised a follow-up. A few years later, Carta published the full results: the geographic clusters, the siloed business units, the unexpected influencers who'd been at the company for less than six months.
But the question most leaders come away with isn't what Ward found. It's: what do you do with it?
What the Shadow Org Chart Actually Reveals
When you map an org's real influence network — not the reporting lines, but the actual human connections — you consistently find the same four surprises.
1. Your top-rated performers and your most-influential employees are almost never the same people
Ward found it at Carta. Almost every organization that runs ONA finds it too.
The employee at the top of the performance ranking and the employee who influences 70% of the company are, more often than not, different people.
Why? Because performance reviews measure output along defined dimensions. They capture what someone was supposed to do. They don't capture who six colleagues called before submitting their Q3 plan. They don't capture who showed three new hires the actual way things work around here.
Research across companies consistently shows that 20-30% of the most valuable contributors in any organization rate in the middle of performance distributions. Not low performers — hidden ones. They're invisible to the formal system because their contributions don't fit the measurement categories.
Ward's scatter plot showed tenure correlating with influence, but only loosely. Long-tenured employees who never reached influence potential sat alongside brand-new hires who'd rocketed into high-influence positions inside six months.
That's not an anomaly. It's a signal: influence is earned differently than performance ratings.
2. Geography shapes your shadow org chart more than you think
Ward's analysis showed that the shadow org chart "crosses business units and functions but is tightest through geography. Tribes form most consistently through physical proximity."
This was 2017. Most companies hadn't seriously grappled with distributed work yet.
Post-2020, this dynamic has become more complicated — and more consequential. When Carta mapped their shadow org chart, the Rio engineering cluster was completely detached from the rest of the company, connected only through a single node. One person's departure could isolate an entire group.
In remote or hybrid organizations, these detachments are harder to see and more likely to fester. The new hire who joined during a hiring surge and never got into a real collaboration pattern. The team that moved to async and quietly drifted from the broader network. The high performer who's technically effective but organizationally isolated — burning without knowing it.
You can't fix what you can't see.
3. The most critical nodes are also the most fragile
Ward identified what ONA researchers call "brokers" — people who connect otherwise separate clusters. In his network, there were individuals who were the only connection between major parts of the company.
These people don't necessarily have impressive titles. They often don't top performance rankings. But if they leave, a connection breaks. Information that used to flow stops flowing. Decisions that used to get made start getting stuck.
This is a retention and succession problem that most HR systems are structurally blind to. Your HRIS doesn't know who the brokers are. Your succession planning spreadsheet doesn't flag the team that's one departure from being functionally siloed.
4. Influence moves faster than you expect in new hires
One of Ward's most counterintuitive findings: new employees — hired within the last six months — were already among the company's top influencers. Not because they'd been around long enough to prove themselves. Because of something specific they did to earn trust quickly.
Ward's comment: "These new employees did something to rocket into high influence positions. The first half of this exercise is to identify our most influential employees. The second half is to understand how they did it so we can manufacture more of these high influencers."
This is a question most onboarding programs never ask. We optimize the 30-60-90 day plan around functional productivity. We rarely think about network integration — how intentionally we're connecting new hires to the actual influence map, not just the org chart.
What You Actually Do With This
The point of mapping the shadow org chart isn't the map. It's the decisions the map enables.
Calibration. When you surface ONA data alongside traditional performance scores, you can correct for systematic rating bias. The employee who's been underrated because their impact is diffuse and hard to attribute — the ONA shows you who they're actually helping. That's calibration data that should affect comp, promotion, and retention decisions.
Attrition risk. If your top network broker scores a 3 on "meets expectations" and hasn't gotten a raise in two years, you have a flight risk that your standard HR metrics aren't catching. ONA lets you flag organizational vulnerabilities before they become costly.
Succession planning. Traditional succession planning asks: who is ready to move into this role? ONA asks: who is already doing the most critical work that role requires? Those are different questions, and the second one is usually more accurate.
Onboarding design. If you know how your fastest-integrating new hires built network centrality, you can design intentionally for it. Who should every new hire meet in their first two weeks? Which meetings are the ones where the real decisions happen? The shadow org chart tells you.
Manager development. Ward noted that managers and executives influenced the network, but not by as much as expected. The informal influence network rivaled the institutional management hierarchy in weight. That's worth factoring into how you evaluate manager effectiveness — measuring influence built across the organization, not just within direct reports.
Why This Still Matters in 2026
Ward wrote his original post when Carta had 250 employees. The insights were sharp enough to earn a Carta follow-up and get shared in HR circles for years.
But here's what's changed: the tools to do this well have gotten dramatically better, and the problems the shadow org chart helps solve have gotten harder.
Remote and hybrid work broke the proximity signals that used to make influence networks somewhat visible to managers. You could walk the floor, see who was talking to whom, notice who the new hire was spending lunch with. Now that ambient data is gone. The shadow org chart is harder to see — and more important to see — than it was in 2017.
The organizations that are doing this well aren't just mapping the network. They're incorporating network data into performance decisions. They're using the same survey touchpoints that employees expect from reviews to surface ONA insights — who helped you accomplish your goals, who you turn to for advice, who influences decisions on your team.
The result isn't a static network diagram. It's a live signal: who's gaining influence, who's losing it, who's becoming isolated, who's doing more than their job description captures.
That's the shadow org chart Ward was pointing toward. Not the map, but the ongoing visibility into how your organization actually works — and a performance system that treats that visibility as data, not decoration.
How Confirm Surfaces Your Shadow Org Chart
Confirm builds performance management software grounded in ONA research. Our performance reviews include the network questions — who helped you most this review period, who you rely on for expertise, who elevates everyone around them — and surface that data alongside traditional performance ratings.
The result: you see the hidden high performers, the network brokers, the new hires who are integrating fast and the ones who are quietly isolated. You get the calibration data to make better decisions and the retention signals to act before it's too late.
Related reading: How to Find Your Hidden High Performers: The ONA Playbook · What Is Organizational Network Analysis?
