Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [50]
Because networking does entail some effort, you ought to be strategic about your networking activities. Make a list of people you want or need to meet and organizations where some personal connection might be helpful. Work your way down that list, figuring out ways to build social relationships with a wider and more diverse set of individuals. A person I know wanted to build a career in biotech even though he did not have a scientific background or any experience in the industry. He targeted people to meet, asking others to introduce him when possible, followed up after meetings with thank-yous, and provided information and contacts to the people he had met so they would receive value from interacting with him. In a short time, proceeding from a position of little formal power, he developed a large and influential network of contacts in the industry that helped him launch his career in biotechnology.
Another barrier that seems to stand in the way of networking is that people naturally fall into habits, and one habit is interacting with the same set of people all the time. You get comfortable with them, you come to trust them, and it is easier and more pleasant to interact with people you already know than to build relationships with strangers. So go out of your way to meet new people. Katie works at an executive recruiting company. Executive recruiting assignments come, in part, from the human resources department. To build a network of HR managers and to meet more people to help her in her job, Katie organized short seminars in which participants would read and listen to and then discuss ideas from thought leaders in managing people. Her very first meeting was a big success, with lots of participants, a lively discussion, and the creation of an ongoing forum that will be very useful for Katie in her current job and in building relationships useful to her future career. Once again, not that much work. All that was required was some initiative and being willing to reach out to strangers—to get out of one’s comfort zone.
NETWORK WITH THE RIGHT PEOPLE
Not everyone is going to be equally useful to you and you should account for that fact in how you spend your networking time. In the early 1970s, sociologist Mark Granovetter conducted a classic study in Boston about how people find jobs.7 Two of his findings are scarcely surprising. Granovetter found that social ties were important in the job-finding process and the more one used social ties, as contrasted with less personal mechanisms such as formal applications, the better the job the individual found. He also found that the process used to fill jobs differed by job type: managerial jobs were more likely to be found through personal contacts rather than through more formal means such as responding to newspaper advertisements or making a formal application, whereas lower-level or even well-paid but technical jobs tended to rely on more formal means of hiring. What was surprising was the type of social ties that mattered in the job-finding process: weak ties.8 Strong ties are typically with family, friends, and close associates at work and involve frequent interaction. Weak ties are with casual acquaintances, people you hardly know and with whom you have fairly infrequent interactions.
The intuition behind the idea that weak ties are frequently more useful than stronger ones is that the people you are closest to, your close friends and family, are more likely to travel in the same circles, be close to each other also, and therefore provide redundant information. Weak ties, by contrast, are more likely to link you to new people, organizations, and information, providing new information and contacts. For weak ties to be useful, however, two things must be true: casual acquaintances must be able to link you into diverse networks and they must be willing to do so. Frank Flynn’s research on asking,