A new leader I was coaching, let’s call him John, walked into his first strategy meeting and did everything right.
He had prepared a clear proposal, had the numbers, the timeline, and the risks on one page, and he presented it calmly. He answered the questions and nobody pushed back.
And then nothing happened for two weeks.
A version of his proposal, stripped of half its ambition, appeared in someone else’s slide deck. John’s name was not on it. His manager’s boss seemed mildly surprised that John had ever been connected to the idea.
John came to our session quietly angry. “I presented the whole thing and they all saw it. How did this happen?”
John had walked into the official meeting believing it was where the decision would be made. The decision had already been made, in three conversations nobody told him about.
The map is not the territory
In most Nordic companies, the org chart is a fiction, and a useful one. It tells you who reports to whom, who holds which title, which budget lives in which box. It is the map the HR system can draw.
But if you are trying to get a decision made, change direction, or move a stuck project forward, the org chart will mislead you. Because the real decisions do not travel along those lines. They travel along a second map, an invisible one, built out of trust and history and who had coffee with whom last Tuesday.
(If you have ever been surprised to find out a junior person in a different department quietly has more pull than your own director, you have already met the second map.)
In traditional hierarchies, the two maps overlap. Position means power, power means influence, and the official meeting is also the real meeting, more or less.
In Nordic matrix organizations, the two maps barely touch. Authority is distributed, and decisions are made through consensus, so influence flows sideways, through peer networks, through informal sponsors, through people who happen to be trusted by the ones signing the budget. None of this is on the org chart.
And if you are an international professional, you may not even know the second map exists. You were hired for the first map. You are being evaluated against the second.
The meeting before the meeting
Here is the rule I wish someone had told me earlier.
The meeting is where the decision is confirmed. By the time a proposal is on the agenda, three or four people have already decided whether they will back it, kill it, or remain politely neutral. They decided in the hallway, in a one-on-one, in the short call that happened the day before. Most of the work of leadership is the work of those small conversations.
In the meeting itself, nothing much happens that wasn’t already underway. Someone nods, someone says, “We could look into that,” and someone else suggests taking it offline. The decision lives or dies in the conversations you did not attend.
This is the single hardest thing for competent, technically strong people to accept. Because it looks, from the outside, like a game. Like politics. Like the decision should have been made on the merits, with everyone in the room, at the scheduled hour.
It was not, and it is never going to be.
(And calling it “politics” and refusing to participate is, in practice, deciding that other people should be making the decisions about your work. Which is a decision, just a passive one.)
What to do before the next meeting that matters
I learned this myself at Volvo, working on a cross-functional project with a Japanese supplier. My first instinct was always to prepare for the meeting, but my colleague Guillaume, who had worked with Japanese business culture for years, prepared the people who would be in the meeting, one at a time, over weeks. By the time we sat down in the room, the meeting was a formality. Everyone already knew what would be agreed, because everyone had already agreed in private.
What Guillaume was doing was leadership, the way it actually works in most Nordic workplaces.
You do not have to become that person. But you can borrow the instinct. Before the next meeting that actually matters to you, try this:
Identify the three people whose opinion will shape the outcome. The most influential, who are rarely the most senior. (Ask around and you will know within a day.)
Have a short, honest conversation with each one before the meeting. A genuine question, not a pitch. “We have this coming up next week. I want to make sure I understand where you are on it before we get in the room. What are you seeing that I might be missing?” (Most people, offered genuine curiosity instead of a sales job, will tell you exactly what they actually think.)
Adjust your proposal based on what you learn. Or, if the proposal still stands, walk into the meeting knowing which way the wind is already blowing.
Give credit in the room, publicly and by name, to the people who shaped it with you. This is how influence compounds. (Withhold credit once, and you will not be let into the second map again.)
None of this requires charm, or extraversion, or a particular kind of personality. It requires intentional, deliberate work for every meeting that matters. Most people do none of it. Which is why most people, like John, feel that they are doing the work and someone else is getting the outcomes.
The org chart is a fiction
The org chart is a map of who got which title.
The second map is a map of who gets listened to. And that map is built, slowly, out of how you show up in small rooms, one conversation at a time.
You get on the second map by being useful to people before you need them to be useful to you. By remembering what they care about. By giving them credit when you did not have to. By being the person who, in private, tells them the truth.
(And yes, this takes time, which is the point. The second map is slow, and the people who are on it tend to stay on it.)
I am writing a book about what it takes to lead from the middle of an organization, where authority is thin, and influence is the only real tool. And before the book comes out, I built a short self-assessment that helps you see which of the six structural gaps are costing you the most right now. Seven minutes. No pitch on the other side, just a map of where your gaps actually are.
You can take it here: florinlungu.com/assessment
(And if it is not for you, that is fine too.)
Florin
P.S. Next in the series: Your Team Heard You. They Just Didn’t Understand You. On the difference between communication that drives agreement and communication that drives action, and why many leaders are confusing the two.
