Networks beyond the ‘like’ on LinkedIn

By Georgina Fekete

You’re reading this on the world’s largest professional network, with more than 950 million members. LinkedIn’s mission is to “connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful”. As a network, it strikes me that it’s primarily used to share information and knowledge on interesting leadership and organisation-related subjects, connect with people you’ve met or link up through others, and an avenue for job searching.

At the Forward Institute, we’re supporting a network of 600+ leaders from the public, private and social sectors, all working to change and build a more responsible future.?How can we think about our networks and the role they play in our leadership in a more deliberate way?

‘Personal Boardroom’

At a recent Forward Institute residential in Sandhurst Military Academy, UK, our Fellows explored what it means to think deliberately about one’s network – not in the traditional sense of networking, but the company we keep. We used the Personal Boardroom, a tool developed by Zella King and Amanda Scott to analyse your own network by reflecting on who we surround ourselves with, and where and how we seek information, advice, encouragement and influence.

We challenged ourselves to think about how many of those who support us in these roles are different to ourselves, either by gender, ethnicity, age, sector, employment status or life experience. Are we in an echo chamber? How can we purposefully fill a functional gap and ensure we have diversity of perspectives to help us make decisions that aren’t at risk of falling back to the status quo? And what role do we play for others?

Tight/loose networks and ‘nodes’ of informal power

A leader’s plate is often overflowing with things to do, so we don’t always have the time we need to cultivate the range of relationships we’d like. Margaret Heffernan helpfully shared that we should think about two types of networks: tight networks and loose networks.

Tight networks are useful for execution as you have a close relationship with others, underpinned by trust built up over time. Loose networks, on the other hand, are fundamental for innovation. These are characterised by a broad diversity of people with whom we may not have deep relationships, but they bring in more perspectives and challenge. This expands a piece of work by Professor Mark Ganovetter back in 1973 that encouraged leaders to find their ‘weakest ties’ – those least like themselves – to enable them to get out of their echo chamber, a symptom that’s common the more senior we get as leaders.

When we think about networks, we could default to our organisation chart and the inevitable hierarchy that exists. But what if we thought differently and examined the ‘nodes’ or informal power in our organisation? This is where the informal power sits, the people everyone trusts and goes to for information. Margaret encourages us to understand who the nodes in our network are: “they may not know everything but they know everyone who knows everything”.?

Working generously

So far, I’ve only talked about what we can get from networks. But what about what we give? Working generously is one of the Forward Institute’s core practices. We believe that leaders who work generously give time, ideas and themselves. They ask for help and involvement from others, and they collaborate.

So how can leaders create a culture of working generously? One of the ways we can employ it is in how we think about relationships and networks: what, and to whom, do we ‘give’ and what do we ‘take’?

Organisational psychologist Adam Grant argues in his book Give and Take that ‘givers’ tend to be more successful than ‘takers’ because they build larger, more supportive networks. They inspire their colleagues to be creative and tend to be successful in negotiations. Taking the point about networks further, he contends that if you give without expecting anything in return, when you do need to reconnect, the other party is more likely to cooperate. But those who use networks tactically, for their own ends, will soon be identified as ‘takers’ – and dropped.

Your reflections

Next time you connect with someone on LinkedIn or ‘like’ or repost something, reflect on:

• Who are your go-to people?
• Are you a ‘giver’ or a ‘taker’?
• Who are those in your longer list of connections you rarely interact with?
• Who’s not there at all?
• What would be unleashed if you built a more generous and interesting community around you?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Please email them to: [email protected]