The hidden power of social networks (book by Cross & Parker)

The Hidden Power of Social Networks

Rob Cross & Andrew Parker

Hidden Power of Social Networks

 The central premise of this book is that the real work of organizations is done via the social networks within the organizations. The tools developed to analyze physical network analysis reveal that social networks have features also found in physical networks. There are people with many connections who fill a central role and people who are essentially isolated. There are others who create bridges or bottlenecks between groups. One important feature of these social networks is that they may not be visible to casual observation, and consequently leaders may be unable to see when decisions disrupt networks or prevent them from forming.

 

An organization often has multiple networks present simultaneously with different kinds of interactions present in different networks. For example, there may be one network that transmits awareness of technical capability (many examples in the book seem to be from organizations dedicated to technical work). Another network in the same organization may be used to solve problems, and another to communicate gossip. People are not part of a network; they are part of different networks that serve different purposes.

 One common reason to investigate social networks is collaboration failures. Groups, dependent on collaboration, find that they are inefficient and seek to understand why. In an investigation of one consulting firm, partners were found to collaborate with their peers well, but with other ranks less well. The least collaboration was among the junior consultants. A deeper analysis of information flows showed that information flowed from lower to higher ranks, but not the reverse. This revealed that partners were actually bottlenecks in communication, as they were often the recipients of requests but not always responsive. Work stopped while awaiting responses. Connectivity was weakened by the practice of assigning newly hired personnel to remote sites to begin work, so that they did not have time to get connected with each other or other organizational levels. The firm changed their on-boarding process to get new hires better connected and to create on-going opportunities to build and maintain connections.

 Networks contain four kinds of roles: central connectors, boundary spanners, information brokers and peripheral people. Central connectors facilitate connections or act as bottlenecks. The facilitation seems straightforward, but the bottlenecks are often overlooked. When people in the network recognize the value of these connectors, they send more requests than the connectors can handle. Curing this requires deliberate efforts to create additional connections between people within the organization. This must be combined with increased expectations of responsiveness to requests across the organization. Some bottlenecks are the result of information hoarding, but these can be overcome the same way. Boundary spanners link different departments, business units or functions and are relatively rare. This is because few people are really accepted well enough on both sides of a real boundary to create useful networks. Companies usually benefit when they identify and support their boundary spanners. Information brokers are the people who connect central connectors. The key to this role is that it links “local” sub-networks together. Finally, there are a number of people who are peripheral in a network. Some of these people are peripheral because they are new. They can be better integrated by being assigned to project teams, participation in various face-to-face activities and mentoring activities. There are also people on the periphery who are most effective because they are peripheral. Technical experts are a good example of people who are and should remain peripheral. For these individuals, the time spent maintaining a network might be better spent maintaining their expertise. A small network is shown below with each of these types illustrated. Blue disks are central connectors, the purple triangle is an information broker, the red square is a boundary spanner, and the orange diamond is a peripheral individual.

 

 

 

Many organizations suffer from low connectivity in the lower levels and this is difficult to remedy. For one thing, there are many people to connect. For another, they may be divided by their specialties and assignments. This failure is important because the specific expertise to solve problems is generally located in these levels. Lack of connection leads people to refer more problems to higher levels where delays may arise. A functional lower level network allows people with problems to find experts with solutions.

 Many organizations try to build expert networks to eliminate this problem, but they rarely work. One reason is that people prefer to connect with people they already know. Expert networks are often build alongside knowledge management systems in hopes that people will get information or connections on a self-service basis. Network analysis shows that when people are faced with a new problem, they ask their existing network of connections for help in finding the information from people – not the system. This may reflect the difficulty of coding certain problems, but also reflects the role of trust in seeking help. The problem with this is that people tend to build networks of people like themselves. Scientists network with scientists and accountants with accountants. Building more diverse networks requires active measures to connect people and build working relationships. 

 It is useful to think of networks as latent entities. For a person, their network represents a potential. Among the things that networks potentially can deliver are information, access to help, decision making, problem solving skills, and awareness (of capabilities, information sources). Studies of some networks have shown that awareness can be quite good, but access poor. In other words, I might be aware of who can help me but I can’t get them to help me. Access may be limited by hierarchy (people need permission to respond to requests), priorities (people may be accountable for their own work before others’) or overloading (too many obligations for the time available). Performance management systems can increase or decrease the ability of people to respond by whether they emphasize individual or collaborative performance. It is common for awareness networks to be rich (many connections) but access networks to be sparse (fewer connections, more bottlenecks). Effective collaboration requires access to be similar to awareness. Access to colleagues’ knowledge and capabilities may require reform of performance expectations, project planning systems, “courtesy” expectations (expectation of returned calls/email), and time allocation (insuring time is available for spontaneous response to requests).

 It is logical to think that central connectors or boundary spanners are highly extroverted people for whom this activity comes naturally. Study of a number of networks shows that personality is a factor in network richness, but it is not as big a factor as how people see their work and role. Introverts and extroverts are found in all roles, so changing the way people interact may require changing how they think about their work. If people think they are primarily responsible for getting their own work done, they will develop sparse networks with an emphasis on just-in-time development. If they see their work as collaborative, they will proactively build richer networks. Some people actually have excessively large networks that take excess time to maintain and are redundant. Pruning the excess connection improves their effectiveness.

 As the authors studied more organizations, they realized that it is not just information that flows in these networks but “energy”. Some people in central roles added or subtracted energy from those around them.  This energy influences productivity in many ways. One of the most important effects was on learning. It is worth remembering that people seeking information are engaged in a learning activity. They are less likely to seek help from a de-energizing person than an energizer. Sometimes these energizers are “invisible” to the usual performance management measures and systems. Upon deeper examination, one of the attributes of the higher performing people was their ability to energize others. In other words, energizing people often provided leadership though their role may or may not have been designed for that purpose.

 The study of energizers showed that 5 behaviors increased energy: (1) focus on a compelling goal, (2) creating the possibility of contribution, (3) developing a good feeling of engagement, (4) making progress perceptible, and (5) making success seem possible. Energizers help people to feel that they are making useful contributions to the solution of real and solvable problems.  In contrast, de-energizers focus on the defects in an idea or proposal. Energizers in central or connecting roles improve the performance of those around them, while de-energizers decrease performance.

 The answers to the following 8 questions help define whether a person adds energy or not.

• Do you make an effort to weave relationship development into work and day-to-day interactions? Even when you feel swamped, do you make time to engage with others as people, and not just a means to an end?
• Do you do what you say you are going to do?
• Do address tough issues with integrity and sincerity? Do you allow political behavior to creep into decisions or interactions with others?
• Do you look for possibilities or identify only constraints? Do you critique ideas without venturing alternative or revealing your own thinking?
• When you disagree with someone, do you focus attention on the issue and not on the value of that person’s contribution?
• Are you mentally and physically engaged in meetings and conversations?
• Are you flexible, or do you force others to come to your way of thinking?
• Do you use your own expertise appropriately?*

 The first item, relationship building, turns out to be very important in networks. Flow of information through a network is linked to the quality of relationships between people and the best connectors develop good relationships with people. This is more than a professional relationship; it often has numerous personal elements. Meetings start with discussions of personal items and move onto the official agenda. Well connected people may create events for their networks to attend in order to build and maintain these relationships. When networks fail to be productive, it is often discovered that people know each other, but don’t know each other well. It seems that they know a few things about their connections, but not enough to be well connected. The phrase “I didn’t know that you could do that” is exemplary of this sort of shallow connection. Good connectors learn and remember a lot about their connections so that they are good guessers about their connections’ capabilities.

 Combining the subjects of energy and personal connection suggests that trust may have a role in functional networks, and close study seems to confirm this. Trust can be based on competence (you know what you are doing) or benevolence (you will act with my interests in mind). Some behaviors that improve trust include:

• Acting with discretion
  • Confidences are kept confidential and information is not used to embarrass people.
• Matching action to speech
  • Setting expectations and clarifying meaning help people prevent misunderstandings
• Communicating frequently with richness
  • Face-to-face communicates much more than a memo can. Ideally, the interaction is personal. A speech to 500 people is not really face-to-face.
• Using shared language to create shared vision
  • Words matter and it is often worth the time to define the meanings of words. Assuming that everybody understands the same meanings for words is a mistake.
• Making boundaries of competence clear
  • Nobody is expert in everything. People who clarify what they don’t know increase the credibility for what they do know.
• Knowing when to break role
  • Sometimes it is better to be the person than the role (boss, project manager, etc.). People may talk about things with a person that they won’t with a boss. People want to know people, not positions.
• Giving valuable things (information, help, leads, insight, etc.) to connections
  • This is a demonstration of trust because nothing is asked in return.
• Helping people gain clarity
  • When the situation is ambiguous, helping them clarify the situation (goal, problem, requirement, limitation, etc.) for themselves demonstrates a focus on them.
• Making fair and transparent decisions
  • Decisions made with consistency and clarity demonstrates a degree of reliability. This often is a complement to “matching action to speech”.
• Expecting and reinforcing accountability for trustworthy behavior
  • Perhaps what is really meant is that trustworthy behavior is something that people are trained in, receive feedback on, and know the importance of. People who behavior poorly are told so and removed from positions of importance if they don’t learn better.

Much of the preceding discussion dealt more with individual aspects of network formation. Organizations have a significant effect on the networks their employees create.  One organization had two regions that were performing quite differently after a merger. Investigation of their networks and management choices showed that the better performing region made a number of different choices. For example, except for the partners, who had periodic meetings, the group in the more fragmented region had no forum for coming together, meeting each other, and learning about colleagues’ skills and expertise. But what the fragmented region deemed as an unnecessary expense, the better-connected region considered critical. In the cohesive network, employees indicated that other people in the region became viable sources of information only after they had met face-to-face and had an opportunity to understand one another’s strengths. Even though they used a state-of-the-art skill-profiling system, it was the personal, face-to-face contact that dictated whether and how people trusted others enough to reach out to them for information.

  Conventional management practices related to formal structure, work management practices, culture, human resource practices and strategic perspective influence employee’s attitude towards the type and extent of networks they form. The book repeatedly mentions that organizations that place a high premium on individual (or business unit) results often inadvertently suppress cross-boundary collaboration and the networks that support collaboration. Both the initial interviewing process and subsequent performance appraisals can enhance or suppress network building. Assignments to teams are used in many organizations to build networks; team assignments are especially valuable to integrating new employees.

 While face-to-face interactions are important, not all such interactions are equally useful. The forums that work best for network building are not the standard operational status or quarterly review, where people listen to presentations and then mingle at a cocktail hour within those they already know. At the most successful forums…people read material beforehand and used their precious time together for collaborative problem solving….employees form teams from various functions or physical locations, and these groups not only solve problems but also help to form relationships across boundaries. These relationships often last beyond that meeting, thereby creating a more robust network.

 The importance of the personal component in these relationships becomes clearer when people are asked what they seek in their networks, and what is most valuable. Interviews suggest the following benefits are obtained: task-related information, learning and career development help, career (political) support, making sense of events, personal (emotional) support in recovering from setbacks, and maintaining a sense of purpose.  And although the relationship functions become increasingly abstract as we move down the list, the deeper functions are often considered the most important.

 The book certainly promotes the virtues of building strong networks to improve organizational performance. But it also warns against thinking network analysis will solve everything. An analysis is only as good as the information available. People’s recollections can be off in many ways. The diagrams produced can be complex and difficult to understand – leading to inappropriate simplification. Managers presented with network diagrams can experience defensive reactions. Finally, people can misuse network analysis to cause harm. The authors suggest that network analysis can help diagnose what is going well or poorly in an organization, but it takes ordinary good management to reinforce or improve connection and collaboration. Some businesses will be very dependent on networks, while in others the influence will be slight.  Managers have recognized for decades the importance of connections. “It is not what you know, it is who you know.” What has changed in recent years is the ability to uncover, analyze and visualize these networks in ways that allow deliberate decisions to be made to manage the networks.

 Comments and interpretations

• The problem in building networks among people low in the hierarchy probably also suffers from a bias among managers. In essence, managers attend many meetings that have the effect of building networks. They make two mistakes at this point. They think that since they are connected, their organizations are equally connected. They may confuse the problems they have in their roles with the problems their staff have; they aren’t connected to the people who can solve operational problems – only managerial problems. These manager networks are a by-product of other activities (strategy determination, talent management, etc.). People lower in the organization do not have equivalent joint activities, so networking becomes the chief reason for bringing them together. This is expensive and the direct benefit may not be obvious. Some organizations hold quality or innovation days to create ad hoc networks. Others create whole business functional meetings where people attend to share best practices, accomplishments and obtain training. These are not manager meetings but multi-level meetings that often involve “forced” mixing activities.
• An alternative cultural vehicle for increasing access involves “favors”. When people help others, they build up “credit” that is repaid by a return favor. It may be that the essential currency in an access network is help and that this is one reason that access networks fail across hierarchy. If senior people believe that they do not need to return favors to lower ranking people, vertical networks may become weaker. If people do not feel the need to do favors for people in other functions or units, organizational collaboration may be weaker. People new to the organization have little credit together with few connections, so are less able to take advantage of existing capabilities. Obviously, the use of favors as currency implies a fair bit of trust and/or the ability to punish people who do not repay their debts.
• I have been in a number of customer interactions where we asked for “something for nothing”. Nobody was happy at the end. They felt put upon, and we did not get much useful information. I have also been in a number of interactions where we gave them information about subjects of interest to them. When we asked if this made sense to them, they often told us in great detail what they thought was important and valid. In some cases, I think they thought they were just correcting us, but they were really teaching us something new. Since we taught them too, we had a fair exchange and everybody left happier. Over multiple interactions, groups became comfortable talking about real issues and solving problems together. My interpretation of this experience is that, when entering a potentially beneficial connection, I may want to know what valuable item I can offer to the other party – and offer it preemptively. If I do not get a reciprocal response in a reasonable time, I can terminate the connection.

 *text in italics is directly quoted from the book