Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [53]
Consider the case of Kenji, working in a large Japanese electric utility. Kenji, with an undergraduate degree in nuclear engineering and an MBA, speaks both English and Japanese. When he returned to his company following his postgraduate education, he went into international business development, where he worked building and acquiring power plants all over the world. Even though Kenji had a low job title and little seniority in a culture where seniority was valued, he was in a great position to broker relations between important departments—engineering and business development. He was the only MBA with a degree in nuclear engineering and the only nuclear engineer with a business degree. He told me, “Right now I am in a unique position, where critical information related to business development in the global nuclear power sector flows through me since I am the only one who is well connected to both the international division and the nuclear division.” Because Kenji’s English skills were better than many of his colleagues’, he was invited to participate in telephone calls with some of the most senior people on international development projects to help with the translation. Because of his access to information from brokering relations between engineering and the international business development people and the insights he acquired from his participation in many calls about projects, senior managers began consulting Kenji on a number of important topics.
Although it is too soon to tell how things will work out for Kenji on his path to power, the research strongly suggests that occupying brokerage positions—filling structural holes—is advantageous for one’s career. Social capital, measured by how many structural holes an individual bridges, positively affects promotions, salary, and organizational level attained. Other research discovered that social capital also increases an individual’s returns to personal attributes such as education and experience—education and years of work have a greater effect on the salaries of individuals who are rich in social capital.
One other research finding is important for the building of social networks. People sometimes believe that if they are connected to someone else who occupies a good brokerage position, they can achieve almost as much benefit. However, Ron Burt found that this intuition was not accurate. People even one step removed from the person doing the brokerage enjoyed virtually no benefit.14 To return to the Japanese electric utility example, while Kenji enjoys many benefits from his network position, someone who is connected to Kenji profits very little. You have to do the network “work” yourself if you want to accrue the benefits.
RECOGNIZE THE TRADE-OFFS
You can overdo any strategy, including networking. Bridging structural holes and being in the center of many social ties requires time. You should decide how much time to spend and your specific networking strategy based on the extent to which your job requires building social relationships for you to be successful—a topic already considered in this chapter—and the type of knowledge most useful in your job.
The research literature typically divides knowledge into two types: explicit, codified knowledge such as that represented in diagrams, formulas, or “recipes” for task performance; and implicit, tacit knowledge such as that possessed by good clinicians who understand not only the scientific basis of job