Business Insight Zone

That’s the moral of the story in “How to Build Your Network,” a fascinating 2005 Harvard Business Review article by Brian Uzzi and Shannon Dunlap. (You have to pay for access to such things if you go to the HBR site, but you might just accidentally find a PDF of the article if you went to Prof. Uzzi’s site at the Kellogg School of Management. Ahem.)

The article covers more ground than I want to relate here, so much so that my hard copy of it is marked up pretty thoroughly in two colors of ink. It even includes interesting exercises that will help you evaluate the current strength of your own network. For now, I want to focus on two things.

Bridging gaps & brokering between clusters

First, good networks — and good networkers — bridge social or informational gaps. We touched on this principle several weeks ago in a post about Ronald Burt’s great article, “Structural Holes and Good Ideas,” but the simple version is that it’s common for people to cluster in certain ways, whether that means you know the people on your street better than the people on the next street over, or that the programmers tend to eat together at one table in the lunchroom while the marketers eat at another.

The individuals with the most useful networks are the ones who know people on both streets, or who can move easily between the programmers’ and marketers’ tables. And in business terms, “useful” can definitely mean “most lucrative.” As Uzzi and Dunlap explain, good networkers who do this type of bridging or brokering reap the benefits of networks’ “three unique advantages: private information, access to diverse skill sets, and power.” All of these can translate directly to better success in business.

Here’s a key passage from the article:

While expertise has become more specialized during the past 15 years, organizational, product, and marketing issues have become more interdisciplinary, which means that individual success is tied to the ability to transcend natural skill limitations through others. Highly diverse network ties, therefore, can help you develop more complete, creative, and unbiased views of issues. . . .

. . . Traditionally, executive power was embedded in a firm’s hierarchy. When corporate organizations became flatter . . . that power was repositioned in the network’s information brokers, who could adapt to changes in the organization, develop clients, and synthesize opposing points of view. These brokers weren’t necessarily at the top of the hierarchy or experts in their fields, but they linked specialists in the firm with trustworthy and informative ties.

Sharing activities

Second, to build ties like these, Uzzi and Dunlap recommend that you share activities with members of different clusters. If you’re not a coder, you may not be able to talk shop with the programmers — but you could go running with them after work. You might not work in the marketing department, but maybe you could share a Meals on Wheels delivery route with one of the marketing directors.

The point is that you can find something that you share with all sorts of different people, including those who work outside of your department, outside of your company, and outside of your industry.

The process isn’t a mechanistic one, and it shouldn’t be a mercenary one either. When you do it right, you really will come to share interests and activities — that is, to make friends — with people from diverse social or business backgrounds.

Which, in my experience, not only gives you more ideas and makes you a more valuable worker, but also lets you have more fun.

Time to bridge some networks!

~

Image by Oran Viriyincy, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Category: The working life