Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [47]
5. Maintaining external contacts (e.g., “I ask others to give my regards to business acquaintances outside of our company.”)
6. Using external contacts (e.g., “I exchange professional tips and hints with acquaintances from other organizations.”)3
The networking behaviors they describe entail making some incremental effort to build, maintain, and use social ties with people. The people targeted are not necessarily in your sights if you are focused just on your immediate job and company.
NETWORKING JOBS
Many of the positions Roizen has held, including manager of software developer relations at Apple and venture capitalist, are, at their core, jobs that entail bringing together different parties who would otherwise not be in contact. Venture capital involves bridging the gap between people and institutions who have money to invest and entrepreneurs with business ideas who need capital. The role of the venture capitalist also entails helping start-ups find talent and occasionally business partners to assist in distribution or product development, and an extensive set of contacts is obviously helpful in these tasks. Roizen’s job at Apple linked the software development community to a computer company that relied on these developers to build products that improved the usefulness and therefore the marketability of its machines.
In general, jobs high in networking content require bridging separate organizations, brokering deals, and relationship building to influence decision making. When in 1966 Jack Valenti left his position as a White House aide to become head of the Motion Picture Association of America, he could provide political access to the movie studios that needed help staving off censorship and dealing with foreign governments on commercial issues, including the repatriation of funds. At the same time, he could provide an entrée to Hollywood and its enormous fundraising potential for the Democratic Party and Valenti’s patron, Lyndon Johnson. When Valenti finally stepped down, he was replaced by the former Kansas congressman and Clinton’s agriculture secretary Dan Glickman, another Democratic politician with strong Washington establishment connections.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America is closer to the Republican Party. PhRMA represents U.S. drug companies, which face numerous political problems ranging from staving off the importation of medicines from Canada to maintaining the right to continue direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs, Consequently, in 2005 it appointed as its head Billy Tauzin from Louisiana, who had served in the House of Representatives from 1980, including serving in the Republican leadership and as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has some responsibility for overseeing the drug industry. Tauzin had already been helpful to the drug industry as one of the leaders passing the expansion of Medicare to cover drug costs during the Bush administration.
Networking skills are not just important in the public sector or in brokering transactions across organizational boundaries. Inside companies, the job of project or product manager entails getting disparate groups to cooperate in making information technology projects work and in managing consumer products successfully. There are many leadership tasks where the essence of the work is bringing people and organizational units with different competencies and perspectives together to complete a task or consummate a transaction.
THE ABILITY TO NETWORK IS IMPORTANT IN MOST JOBS
Although your social network—sometimes referred to as social capital—is more or less important depending on the specifics of your job, the evidence shows that networking is important for people’s careers, period. Many studies show that networking is positively related to obtaining good performance evaluations, objective measures of career success such as salary and organizational level, and subjective attitudes assessing career satisfaction.4 There is a problem with many of these studies