How to Revive a Tired Network

How important is having a good network to your ability to accomplish your goals? Even the most naive agrees that, like it or not, relationships hold the key to both their current capacity and future success.

What can a network do for you??

It can keep you informed. Teach you new things. Make you more innovative. Give you a sounding board to flesh out your ideas. Help you get things done when you are in a hurry and you need a favour.?The list goes on.

When it comes to stepping up to leadership, your network is a tool for identifying new strategic opportunities and attracting the best people to them.?

It’s the channel through which you sell your initiatives to the people you depend on for cooperation and support. It’s what you rely on to win over the sceptics. It protects you from being clueless about the political dynamics that so often kill good ideas.?

Your relationships are also the best way to change with your environment and industry, even if your formal role or assignment has not changed. Without a good network, you will also limit your own imagination about your own career prospects.?

Your network is also what puts you on the radar screen?of people who control your next job or assignment and who form their opinion of your potential partly on who knows you and what they say about you.

But just because you know that a network is important?to your success, it doesn’t mean you are devoting sufficient time and energy to making it useful and strong.

The good news is that you can change that. By managing the three key properties of networks that either propel you forward or hold you back—breadth, connectivity, and dynamism—you can develop a stronger network and use it as an essential leadership tool.?

This article will show you how to reinvent your network, by managing these three critical dimensions.

The BCDs (Breadth, Connectivity, and Dynamism) of Networking Advantage

Your network’s strategic advantage and, therefore, the extent to which it helps you step up to leadership, depends on three qualities:

• Breadth:?Strong relationships with a diverse range of contacts
• Connectivity:?The capacity to link or bridge across people and groups that wouldn’t otherwise connect
• Dynamism:?A dynamic set of extended ties that evolves as you evolve

How Diverse Is Your Network?

One of the first things that people notice when they audit their networks is that the network formed by the people they talk to about important work matters is much more internally focused than it should be.?

As these managers start to concern themselves with broad strategic issues and organizational change processes, lateral relationships with people outside their immediate area become even more critical to the managers’ ability to get things done. And in a connected world, building stronger external networks to tap into the best sources of insight into environmental trends is also part and parcel of the leadership role.

Data compiled from the network surveys shows that we are still not using networks to our best advantage. We build networks that are heavily skewed toward our own functional, business, or geographical group and fail to elicit or value the input and perspectives of peers from different functional or support groups. Moreover, we are still relying on networks that are mostly internal to our company, in a world where the rate of change outside is considerable.

You can also overdo diversity: the ranges also show that some of the executives have heavily external networks: up to 100 percent and 95 percent outside their specialties and units, respectively, and 88 percent outside their companies. That’s fine if an executive is looking to move elsewhere. But an exclusively outside network is not as useful if you are trying to bring an outside approach into your own company. You can’t bridge the outside to the inside if you haven’t established strong relationships on the inside.

Another common network blind spot consists of undervaluing the potential contributions of junior people. Managers striving to make their way up the leadership pipeline tend to manage up, forgetting that their connection to the layers below is often what makes them invaluable to seniors whose sponsorship they hope to attract.?

Given a choice between a network heavily skewed to the power players in your firm and a good mix of diverse contacts, which would you choose? Research shows that you are better off with the latter. This is because networks run on the principle of?reciprocity. The value of diverse relationships lies not only in what your contacts can do for you, but also on what you can do for them. Your senior leaders don’t need you to connect them with other seniors; they already know each other.?

Top management needs you to bring them the fresh ideas, insights, and best practices that you can only get elsewhere, outside, across, and below.?

Why We Need Fresh Blood

Stefan Wuchty, Benjamin Jones, and Brian Uzzi, a multidisciplinary team of researchers, decided to use big data to learn what distinguished ideas that had impact from those that didn’t. In a massive study of the twenty million academic articles,?they found that the difference lies in the kinds of networks that produce the ideas.

The study showed that the days of the solitary genius or lone inventor—think Newton or Einstein—are over. Creative and scientific work has migrated to teams and, more recently, to large, distributed teams like the hundreds of scientists that worked on the human genome project.

But being part of a team wasn’t enough for high impact. The really great ideas were much more likely to come from cross-institutional collaborations rather than from teams from the same university, lab, or research centre. Not only that, but the most successful teams mixed things up. They avoided the trap of always working with the same people, and successful groups brought to the team both newcomers and people who had never collaborated before.

On making a list of their relationships, even highly experienced leaders find that they’ve failed to network with people who are different from them or to build bridges across and outside their organization’s lines.?

How Connective Is Your Network?

The connectivity of your network is the basis for the famous?six degrees of separation?principle—the idea that we are rarely ever more than six links removed from anyone else in world through the friends of our friends—discovered by Harvard psychologist Stanley Milgram?in the 1960s. As any LinkedIn user knows, the fewer degrees of separation between any two people in a network, the easier it is to access the resources you need.

In the original study, Milgram gave a bunch of people in Nebraska a letter destined for a stockbroker in Massachusetts—a man they didn’t know. Their job was to get the letter to him by sending it to someone they did know, who might then send it to someone else, ultimately reaching the stockbroker.?

Milgram found that it never took more than six links (thus the six-degrees concept) to reach the stockbroker, for those letters that actually arrived. But many of the letters never got there, because the first degree—the people his participants knew directly and contacted first—didn’t have networks that reached outside their local environment. So, many of the letters never got out of Nebraska. They only circulated inside the same circle of people who all knew each other.

Something similar happens when you fall prey to the biggest trap in networking: everyone you know knows the same people you do, and the flow of information gets stuck in the same office, in the same industry, in the same neighbourhood.?

Sociologists use the term?density?to describe this property of networks: it quantifies the percentage of people who know each other in a network. Density is an imperfect measure, but it is a quick way to check how much six-degree potential you have in your network.?

How Dynamic Is Your Network?

One of the biggest drawbacks of a poorly managed network is that it quickly becomes a historical artifact, the residue of manager’s past rather than a tool to move into the future. We change jobs, firms, and even countries, but our networks lag behind our new responsibilities and aspirations and therefore pigeonhole us just when we need a fresh perspective or seek to move into something different.?

We’re exceptionally slow to build relationships that allow us to perform in a new position or prepare us for future roles.

Making Your Network Future Facing

To make your networks future facing,?you’ll need to build and value your weak ties—that is, the people and groups that are currently on the periphery of your network, those you don’t see very often or don’t know so well.

What’s important about these contacts is not the quality of your relationship with them (just yet), but the fact that they come from outside your current world. These contacts tend to be several levels removed from you or circulate in different circles.

That makes reaching out harder. Getting to know your weak ties or getting to know them better usually requires an explicit plan and strategy—these relationships will never evolve naturally, because you have no common context in which to develop them. Nevertheless, these are the ties from which you stand to gain the greatest outsight.

Another problem with relying exclusively on your strong-tie network is that it limits your capacity to?rethink yourself. The people close to you may mean well, but they are often not helpful when you are trying to stretch yourself. Despite their good intentions, they hold restrictive views of who you are and what you can do. So, they are the people most likely to reinforce—or even desperately try to preserve—the old identity you are trying to shed.

Practical Steps to Expand Your Network

• Attend a conference you have never before attended. Meet at least three new people. Follow up with them afterward.
• Start a LinkedIn or Facebook group. Be the connector for this group of people.
• Spend a day with a millennial in your company. Learn more about how he/she uses social media.
• Get in touch with a venture capitalist. Find out how he thinks about leadership and innovation.
• Be a guest speaker at a local or national event. Use it to build or strengthen your brand around a particular area of expertise.
• Go to lunch with a peer from a competing company. Learn more about your market value.
• Start a blog. Find out who reads it.
• Take advantage of your next business trip to connect with someone you’ve lost track of. Have this person help you connect with someone new.

This article?is adapted from the Harvard Business Review Press book?Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader?at https://hbr.org/2015/02/how-to-revive-a-tired-network