Should I break rank?
Is it cool if you chat up your boss’ boss’ boss? Likewise, should I grab coffee with the intern even though they’re two or three levels down the ladder? Let’s break it down by org size.
At a small org (say, less than 30 people), you talk to your boss and your boss’s boss, your report and your report’s report. That’s because there’s, like, 30 of you and you all know each other. It’s pretty cool: you can all stay in sync, and unless someone’s super insecure, it’s no big deal to ignore the “chain of command”, if there even is such a thing. Job titles are pretty fluid anyway. From the position of influencing such a culture, most of your thought should be on what happens as the org grows, since this arrangement is lovely but doesn’t scale.
Crossing hierarchical boundaries: socially acceptable and effectively built-in, and so politically acceptable and built-in, too.
