Social Capital

The Official Currency of Narrative Worth

Four years ago, when Rob McLoughlin and I originally created The Narrative Playbook, we set out to create an assessment to help establish someone’s prevailing narrative. ? The assessment wasn’t meant to be a personality test like Myers & Briggs or DISC or Strengthsfinder. It was designed to understand your various capitals and sphere of influence.?

We looked into your Social, Emotional, Intellectual, Temporal, and Algorithmic Capitals.? We got your inside-out perspective and then collected an outside-in perspective from a peer group of your inner and outer core network.? A circle of truth, of sorts.?

We called our assessment Narrative Quotient (NQ) and it gave us clues into why you believed what you believed to be true.? These insights show up in the workshop and progress through the Narrative Framework portion of our Executive Sprint.? Ultimately, landing in a comprehensive playbook for you to strategically execute against going forward.?

Our approach was qualitative in nature, with a quantitative scoring approach that allowed us to achieve a comparative result and a benchmark of sorts.??

SCIENTIST VIEWS?

My corporate work has led me to meet a host of people who specialize in social capital and its impact on networks.? Michael Arena is one of those people.? He has a PhD in Organizational Dynamics and is currently the Chief Science Officer of Syndezo and Co-founder of Connected Commons.? Michael specializes in social capital and networks across organizations.? His newsletter Social Capital Compendium has become a staple for me.

Last week we had a chance to catch up on a project we were engaged in and that led to a discussion about the significance of social capital.? The concept of social capital starts with you.? You have gained or earned a sense of social capital through your accomplishments and reputation as well as your ability to build networks.

We talked about people with weak ties and strong ties and how that impacts doing a job as well as getting a job.? His work has led to the study of knowledge workers and how they are connected.? We talked about Fast Movers, Fast Scalers, and Fast Risers and how these personas impact leadership and team dynamics, based on their ability to influence others.? Which comes back to knowing your narrative.

These distinctions play out in the ability to be a key influencer in your network, how you build energy across your strong and weak ties, and how this interaction builds network buzz using and spreading your social capital across the organization.??

GOSSIP and REPUTATION

One of the things I work on with executives and ultimately Business Unit leaders is the importance of Reputation and how someone speaks about you when you are not in the room.? I come at this from a narrative perspective, where Michael and his peers come at this via a more scientific approach.??

A case where “narrative and numbers” plays out again.? Not as a financial valuation, but as a way to better understand human connection and alignment across an organization. This has become a more acute scenario as hybrid work and distributed offices have won the day as a way of working.?

Michael led me to Ron Burt, a PhD at the University of Chicago and his work on Gossip and Reputation.? I was fascinated by Ron’s views of reputation from a Human Capital and a Social Capital context.? His human capital story cites “trust” as a key currency.?

“Where trust is the willingness of a person to commit to a relationship with being certain of how the person will behave, reputation is the extent to which a person or group or organization is known to be trustworthy”.

Whereas his social capital story comes together around the impacts of reputation and gossip.

“Colleagues are not reacting to an employee’s competence so much as they are reacting to stories they have heard about the employee.”

TEMPORAL VALUE

The Gossip and Reputation research goes on to say that if human capital is responsible for the stability and if social capital explains why reputations persist from one year to the next, then stability should increase with the connections between colleagues.

I see this play out in both my corporate work and executive work.? Threading needles between an executive who runs a business unit, yet is part of the parent company requires a keen understanding of social capital and the deployment of it both internally and externally.??

Designing and building a Northstar for a CEO is in the majority of cases the Northstar for the company as well.? Understanding the temporal, emotional, and social capital associated with owning and leading that narrative is critical to know and incorporate into your practices.

My recent panel discussions at Transform Plus on the concept of “Mateship” with my newly discovered mates, taught me a lot about the idea of mates looking out for one another in times of need and acceleration.? It ties back nicely to the idea that a reputation precedes you and it may not always be accurate.?

Nevertheless, it leaves a lasting imprint.? An imprint that either builds or destroys your social capital and with it your Narrative Worth.??

NOW (How you are realizing this today)

1. Are you aware of your social capital?
2. Do you know your sphere of influence?????
3. How do you know??????

NEW (How you will realize this tomorrow)

1. I will take a Narrative Assessment to understand my prevailing narrative by Oct 31.
2. I will assess and refine my personal network by the end of 2024.
3. I will read a few articles from Michael Arena and think about where I have social capital and can make a bigger impact in Q4 and 2025.?

NEXT (I see a world in which)?

I see a world in which building social capital is the currency for generating Narrative Worth? - the third pillar to Self and Net worth.?

THE PAYOFF

"Your network is your net worth."? Porter Gale, marketing expert and author

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If you are seeking to build your social capital in your company, book a free consultation with me, and let's consider the possibilities. ?My work has raised a collective $1B+ for the companies I have worked with over the last 10 years.?