Why the Most Connected Person in Your Organization Might Be Your Biggest Risk
Every time we run a network analysis and share the findings with a leadership team, the same thing happens. Before anyone asks a question, before anyone engages with what the data means, people start looking for their names.
When a senior leader finds theirs, surrounded by lines, at the center of a dense cluster, the biggest node on the map, the reaction is almost always the same. A kind of quiet satisfaction. Maybe a comment to the person next to them. They read it as importance. As being essential to how the organization operates.
They're not wrong that it means something. They're wrong about what.
After hundreds of these readouts, across industries and organization types, the conversation that follows tends to move through the same three questions: what does my score actually mean, what does a healthy network look like, and what am I supposed to do with this. The answers are less intuitive than most leaders expect.
How to read a network map: bubbles are people, lines are collaboration, size indicates connections, clusters indicate communication patterns.
"What Does My Score Mean?"
This is usually the first question we get, and it comes in different forms: "Do I have a good score?" "Does being the most connected mean I'm the most important?"
A network map of an organization shows you the informal structure: who goes to whom, for what, and how often. It's not the org chart. It's the map of how work actually moves.
When a leader shows up as the most central node, the person most sought out across the organization, the first question isn't "how important are they?" It's "why are 50 people routing through this one person, and what is that costing everyone involved?"
If a senior leader's role is to set direction, make high-stakes calls, and work at a strategic level, but the network data shows that half the organization treats them as the primary source of expertise, context, or approval, something structural is wrong. And when you press those leaders to reflect honestly on what that looks like in practice, the answers are consistent: long hours, decisions they shouldn't be making, strategies that keep getting pushed to the side because the operational load won't clear.
The biggest bubble on the map is not a trophy. It's a diagnostic signal.
The Reasons Vary. The Pattern Doesn't.
What we find when we investigate the "why" behind senior bottlenecks tends to fall into a few categories, and they look very different on the surface even though they produce the same network signature.
In banking and financial services, the pattern often comes from how client relationships are structured. Managing directors hold the context, the relationships, and the institutional knowledge needed to move things forward. No one else has the full picture, because the full picture was never designed to be shared. The bottleneck isn't a leadership failure. It's a feature of how the business was built, that eventually becomes a liability.
In other cases, the bottleneck is about trust, or the absence of it. We worked with a CPG organization where a senior leader had, over time, stopped believing that her team could make the right call without her. Every decision, no matter how operational, came up to her. It wasn't malicious. It was a pattern that had quietly taken hold over years, and neither she nor her team fully saw it until the network data made it visible.
In other organizations, the bottleneck is a legacy of performance problems. When an organization has been through a period of failure or crisis, it often responds by building in layers of control and approval. Over time, those controls outlast the crisis. What started as a protective mechanism becomes a culture of escalation. We've worked in organizations where frontline customer service employees were regularly escalating to CEO level, not because the CEO wanted that, but because the system had trained everyone that was how problems got solved.
And in some cases, the bottleneck is genuinely functional, at first. In a sales organization we worked with, one regional VP was dramatically outperforming her peers. When we mapped the network, the reason became clear: she was the primary relationship holder between her region and finance, managing frictions that other regions were losing to. She was effective precisely because she owned those connections. She was also burning out, and the organization had no way to see that her performance was being carried by relationships that existed only in one person.
The network makes all of these patterns visible before the performance data does.
"What Does Right Look Like?"
Every time we present a network map, someone asks this question. It's the right instinct, but the framing tends to lead people toward the wrong answer.
The mental model most people default to is that more connection is better. If everyone talked to everyone, the map would look like a circle: fully connected, no gaps. But if everyone connected to everyone, nothing would get done. An organization where every decision requires full cross-functional visibility isn't connected. It's paralyzed.
"Right" for an organization's informal network is not a fixed target. It's dynamic, and it has to align with what the organization is actually trying to do.
The clearest example of this we've encountered was in a large HR organization. The help desk was visually isolated from the HRBPs and talent acquisition teams. When we showed leadership the map, their first read was that this was expected: the help desk handled transactional volume, the HRBPs handled strategic partnership, and they operated in separate lanes by design.
But when we went deeper into the help desk data, a different picture emerged. The same issues were being escalated repeatedly, across different employees, different managers, different business units. The help desk was sitting on a pattern that the HRBPs were perfectly positioned to address systematically. But without a proactive relationship between those two groups, the pattern stayed invisible to the people with the authority and mandate to fix it. The organization was paying to answer the same question over and over, when the underlying problem was solvable.
The silo wasn't wrong because connection is always good. It was wrong because the strategic intent of the HR function required a feedback loop that the network structure was blocking.
"So What Do I Do With This?"
This is the third question we hear in almost every readout, and it's the one that matters most. Leaders can usually sit with a map that shows them a problem. What they don't always know is how to act on it.
The most common instinct is to reach for a structural fix: reorganize reporting lines, stand up a new cross-functional team, launch a change initiative. Those tools have their place. The problem is that most change management follows a logic of structure: define the new state, assign people to it, communicate the rationale, measure adoption. It works on paper. It underperforms in practice, consistently, because it assumes that the formal structure is what drives behavior.
What we've learned from doing this work across industries and organization types is that the informal network determines adoption speed far more than the formal plan does. The people who shape how everyone else interprets a change, who move belief at the peer level, who have the informal authority to make a new direction feel real or feel like another slide deck, are rarely the people on the stakeholder map. They're sitting two or three levels deeper in the network, and they're almost never in the room when the change strategy gets designed.
This isn't a small gap. It's the difference between a change initiative that gets announced and one that actually lands.
We used this approach with a global brokerage firm that was trying to build better cross-geographic connection and information sharing across its markets. Rather than designing a program and rolling it out, we used the network data to identify two groups: anchors, people with significant informal influence within their individual markets, and translators, the small number of people who were already connected across markets and moved information between them naturally.
We brought those people together, not to be informed about the program, but to co-develop it. They designed the agenda for what became a monthly market intelligence call. That co-design did two things. It built the cross-geographic ties the organization needed, because the process of building the program required collaboration across markets. And it created a call that was shaped by the people who would actually use it, which meant it addressed what those markets actually needed to share with each other, rather than what leadership assumed they needed.
The result wasn't just a better call. It was a stronger network, built through the work of building the tool, that then enabled the firm to better serve its expanding global customer base.
Why This Changes What a Diagnostic Is For
The reason we run network analyses isn't to produce an interesting map. It's to find the specific leverage points where deliberate action will have an outsized effect.
Centrality tells you where load is concentrated and where risk is accumulating. Network gaps tell you where strategic intent is being blocked by informal structure. And the informal influencers in the network tell you exactly who to work with, not just inform, when you need the organization to actually move.
Most organizational diagnostics tell you what's wrong. The network map tells you where to intervene and who to bring with you.
About the Author
Victor Bilgen is the Founder of BridgeLayer Analytics. He spent 13 years at the McChrystal Group running diagnostics and network analysis for Fortune 1000 executives, and built BridgeLayer because the gap between organizational insight and organizational action kept showing up in the same place: the work that comes before the recommendations. He is a contributing author to The Social Capital Imperative (Oxford University Press, 2025).
