Organizational Reconnaissance

Never Walk Into an Organization Blind

One of the most important things the military taught me was this:

Never enter unfamiliar territory without conducting reconnaissance.

You don’t just walk into an environment and hope you figure things out once you get there.

You study the terrain.

You identify the key players.

You determine where decisions are made.

You look for threats.

You look for opportunities.

You figure out how things actually work.

Then you move.

Why should your professional career be any different?

Navigating organizational culture is one of the most underappreciated elements of career advancement. For Black professionals in particular, understanding how an organization really operates can mean the difference between simply having a job there and learning how to thrive there.

Every organization has an official structure.

Then it has the real structure.

Those two are not always the same.

There is an organizational chart telling you who technically has authority.

Then there are the people everyone actually listens to.

There are written policies.

Then there are unwritten rules.

There are stated corporate values.

Then there are the behaviors the organization actually rewards.

Your job is to figure out the difference.

That’s organizational reconnaissance.

Culture Is How Things Get Done

When I talk about assessing office culture, I’m not talking about whether everybody wears jeans on Friday or what kind of snacks they keep in the break room.

I’m talking about understanding how things get done.

Who influences decisions?

How are disagreements handled?

Does the organization reward risk-taking or punish mistakes?

Who gets promoted?

Who gets high-visibility assignments?

What characteristics do successful leaders appear to have in common?

Who can walk into the boss’s office without an appointment?

Whose email gets answered immediately?

Whose opinion can change the direction of a meeting?

Those things tell you considerably more about an organization than its mission statement.

Formal job titles do not always correspond to actual organizational power. If you pay close attention, you’ll begin to identify the informal hierarchy.

And once you understand the informal hierarchy, the battlefield looks completely different.

I Treated a Job Interview Like an Intelligence Operation

A while back, shortly after completing graduate school, I applied for a position with Booz Allen Hamilton.

I wasn’t too far removed from the military at the time, so I approached the interview exactly the way an intelligence officer might approach a new operational problem.

I made reconnaissance.

Remember BAMCIS?

Begin planning. Arrange for reconnaissance. Make reconnaissance.

I wasn’t going into that interview cold.

I wanted an advantage.

So before I ever sat down in front of the interview panel, I started collecting information.

First, I researched the company itself.

Where was headquarters?

Who were the senior officers?

Who was the chairman?

Who was the CEO?

How had the company evolved from its founding to its current position?

What services did it provide?

Who were its major competitors?

Where did the company make money?

What did its compensation structure look like?

What kind of organization was I actually trying to join?

Most applicants prepare to answer interview questions.

I wanted to understand the battlefield on which those questions would be asked.

Then I started looking at the people.

One of the senior leaders at the time was a 24-year Naval Intelligence Officer.

Now my ears perked up.

I started researching his professional background and noticed that we had some common duty stations and experiences.

That mattered.

Why?

Because now I understood part of the professional language through which he viewed the world.

We had common reference points.

Common organizations.

Common experiences.

That gave me an opportunity to establish rapport that another applicant might never recognize existed.

That’s reconnaissance.

I wasn’t changing who I was to impress anybody.

I was identifying authentic points of connection that were already there.

Then I Turned the Lens Around

Good intelligence analysis never examines something from only one perspective.

So I didn’t limit myself to what Booz Allen said about Booz Allen.

I looked at the workforce.

How large was it?

What did leadership look like?

What were the demographics?

What benefits did employees receive?

What kind of policies did the organization maintain?

What did outsiders say about working there?

Then I looked at the company from the perspective of its critics and competitors.

Where had it faced controversy?

What criticism had appeared publicly?

What potential weaknesses would someone on the outside identify?

Why do this before a job interview?

Because I wasn’t merely trying to convince Booz Allen to hire me.

I was assessing Booz Allen too.

That’s another mistake professionals make.

They enter interviews believing they’re the only people being evaluated.

No.

You should be evaluating them just as aggressively.

Is this a place where you can succeed?

Does its culture align with how you operate?

Do people like you advance there?

What does the organization actually reward?

Remember: getting hired into the wrong organizational culture isn’t necessarily a victory.

Know How the Other Side Is Going to Fight

During my reconnaissance, I also learned that the company used behavioral interviewing.

So what did I do?

I studied behavioral interviewing.

If I knew the interviewers were going to use a particular method, why would I wait until the interview to encounter it for the first time?

That’s like knowing the other team runs a particular offense and refusing to watch game film.

I learned the STAR framework:

Situation. Task. Action. Result.

Now I knew the structure through which I needed to organize my experiences.

I wasn’t going to walk into the room and try to remember a good story after somebody asked the question.

I wanted relevant examples already loaded.

Professional accomplishments.

Leadership challenges.

Problems I’d solved.

Situations that started badly but ended successfully.

Examples showing measurable impact.

The first time I heard the question wasn’t going to be the first time I thought about the answer.

That’s preparation.

That’s reconnaissance.

And there’s a larger lesson here that goes far beyond interviewing.

Whether you’re joining a new company, moving into a new department, taking over a team, or trying to advance within an organization you’ve worked in for years, you should constantly be collecting information.

Observe.

Listen.

Study.

Learn who has influence.

Learn what gets rewarded.

Learn what gets punished.

Learn which skills are becoming important.

Learn where the organization is going before everybody else figures out that it has moved.

Because your career does not exist on an empty playing field.

It exists inside an organizational environment with terrain, personalities, alliances, incentives, history, and culture.

And if you don’t understand that terrain, someone else probably does.

Never enter the battlespace blind.

The question is not simply whether you can do the job.

The question is whether you understand the environment well enough to position yourself to succeed once you’re there.