Heh... that's the problem with articles like this. They're not as big as a book. 😀

Someone smarter than me will probably figure out a better way but, yes, you can sort from left to right by level but not after you've built the nested sets. You have to do it before you build the nested sets and you can't use the EmployeeID for the sort path anymore. Instead, you have to sort by alphabetical position and assign new child/parent values to maintain each nodes position in the alphabetic hierarchy while still maintaining the parent/child hierarchy. That sounds real tough to do but it's actually not. You just need to assign a new sequential value to each employee in alphabetical order and then find the match of that new number as the new value for each manager. It does require a couple of extra steps (sorting is always expensive) but the code runs so fast, I don't see what an extra minute or two on a million rows would be much of an inconvenience. And, no... I wouldn't use a self joining CTE for this because that'll get calculated more than once. You need a table to store it in, anyway.

I'll post the code in a couple of minutes.