Page 15 - 1.2

JIMINY SELF-HELP HANDBOOK 15

Organizational Awareness means having the ability to read a group's emotional currents and power
relationships, and identify influencers, networks, and dynamics within the organization.

Leaders who can recognize networking opportunities and read key power relationships are better
equipped to handle the demands of leadership. Such leaders not only understand the forces at work
in an organization, but also the guiding values and unspoken rules that operate among people. People
skilled at the organizational awareness competency can sense the personal networks that make the
organization run and know how to find the right person to make key decisions and how to form a
coalition to get something done.

One of the examples of lacking organizational awareness is when a company’s purpose of business
(the mission statement) is not related to the way people operate day-today within the organization.
The leaders and the external consultants who prepared that statement are obviously failing in their
responsibility to make sure the company’s operations are in line with its mission.
Researchers at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management found that, the position of
a potential changemaker in the hierarchy of a company, matters less than his ability to read and
mobilize the informal networks needed to make change occur.

The Radar Effect
Kate Leto (an organizational design consultant) gives a nice example of a low-ranked person who
embodies Organizational Awareness. It is the fictional character from TV show M*A*S*H: Walter
“Radar” O’Reilly (the elder in JIMINY’s focus group may relate better to that). For those not familiar
with the show, Radar was a young corporal and clerk for the M*A*S*H hospital. Typically, someone in
that role would be the low person on the totem pole, simply doing what they were told.

Radar was different. He had an amazing ability to get
things done; to maneuver the human networks of the
military to get supplies, Jeeps, passes, medicines – you
name it. He knew how to work the unwritten, unmapped
human system to get the unit whatever it needed. He
sensed a problem and had a solution before anyone else
in the camp even had a clue it existed (thus the name
“Radar”). He was a perfect example of how Goleman
describes Organizational Awareness: “The ability to read
the currents of organizational life, build decision networks and navigating politics.”. Even though the
character was fictional, those who have worked in larger organizations can remember such a colleague,
“low-ranked” many times, with extreme abilities of delivering difficult tasks against the internal
bureaucracy being positive, pleasant and without breaking the rules as well.

So organizational awareness helps guide strategy to accomplish goals in any organization or network,
no matter the setting.
Going back to role of leaders in organizations we should also consider the term ‘attentional bandwidth’
which roughly means ‘who should pay attention to what and for what reason’. It is obvious that the
attentional bandwidth of a group of people can be greater than that of any one person alone. The
leader with high organizational awareness can see to the efficient distribution of that bandwidth so