Please explain how LevelsToTop field gets updated in Delve?

[tieje]

We're create a webpart that brings in profiles from Delve, but we would like to sort by organizational hierarchy, specifically by the LevelsToTop field. All employees have a LevelsToTop value of 30 right now when different organizations have values around 1 to 100 so we know it is possible? How is the LevelsToTop field updated?

[#2]

Our company discovered that there was a circular reference at the top where two higher-ups who were leaders of the organization were a manager of each other. This led to a loop that stopped at the max value of LevelsToTop, which is apparently 30, for everyone under them. This was confirmed by looking at people not within the org structure whose LevelsToTop was zero (top level) because they had no manager. Fixing the circular reference fixed the LevelsToTop fields.