Why Being The Most Connected Is A Vanity Metric
Over the last
half century, a field of academic study called network science has turned
traditional relationship building on its head. Surprisingly, research shows
that being the most connected person is not an effective way to build your
network. The single best strategy is one that almost no one talks about.
My 6’5” dad was black and
grew up in one of the most dangerous cities in America. He sported a huge afro
into the early 90s when he died at the age of 33; one year older than I am now.
My mother, a white, Jewish
refugee from Poland, arrived in Brooklyn when she was 17 with no money and no
English. She essentially raised me as a single mother
Being The Most
Connected Is A Vanity Metric
One of the leading applied network scientists, Rob Cross, an associate professor at the University of
Virginia McIntire School of Commerce, offers a critical development in
understanding networks:
“Traditionally, self-help
books on networks focus on going out and building big mammoth rolodexes…What
we’ve found is that this isn’t what high-performers do. What seems to
distinguish the top 20% of performers across a wide-range of organizations is
not so much a big network. In fact, there is usually a negative statistically
significant likelihood of being a top performer and knowing a lot of people.”
(via Youtube)
If being the most connected
person isn’t the best strategy or even an effective strategy, what is?
Ron Burt is the Hobart W. Williams Professor
Professor of Sociology and Strategy at the University of Chicago Booth School
of Business. He is the leading academic researcher in the world studying the
ways that social networks create competitive advantage in careers,
organizations, and markets.
Burt’s research gives
insight into a strategy that has become one of the most reliable and replicated
findings in network science over the last 30 years.
However, before we
understand the strategy, we need to have a better understanding of network
science.
Principle #1:
Your Network is a Set of Clusters; Not One Big One
Old Paradigm
New Paradigm
A basic pattern
of network science is clustering. People tend to gravitate to clusters for a
lot of reasons whether it be working in the same company or industry, living in
a neighborhood, or going to the same school. These clusters get stronger as
people gain mutual friendships, establish norms, and build reputations.
This clustering tendency
has two consequences:
·
Information
Travels Quickly And Repeatedly Within A Group. Information travels
more quickly and you hear the same information repeatedly within any group. In
Burt’s words, “People tire of repeating arguments and stories explaining why
they believe and behave the way they do and develop shorthand symbols and even
dialects. Knowledge becomes unwritten but mutually understood.”
·
Information
Doesn’t Travel Between Groups. As a result of groups using shorthand, it is
hard for individuals from other groups to understand the full value and
relevance of what is being said. In other words, information becomes ‘sticky’
and does not easily move from one group to another if at all. Translation is required
for the ‘dialect’ of one group to be understood by another group.
One large example that we
can all relate to is the gap between those just entering the workforce and
those in their 50s and 60s. For many adults, the abbreviated words of
20-somethings are impossible to decipher. On the other hand, 20-somethings do
not fully appreciate the unwritten codes of how business is really done.
Principle #2:
Brokering Info Between Networks Is Game-Changing
Most people stay within the
same groups they start in because it is comfortable and validating. Most people
who were born as a Democrat, stay a Democrat. Most people born as Christian
stay Christian. Most people stay in the same industry they started in.
Within groups, we get
mastery. We build reputation. People like us. We become more efficient
coordinating with others. We form our identity within a group.
A key insight from network
science is the power of brokering, the act of moving information from one group
to another. Burt explains, “What a broker does is make a sticky information
market more fluid. Great ideas will never move if we wait for them to be spoken
in the same language.”
Network brokers (ie –
connectors) have three advantages:
·
Breadth. They pull their
information from diverse clusters.
·
Timing. While they may not be
the first to hear information, they are first to introduce information to
another cluster.
·
Translation. They develop skills
in translating one group’s knowledge into another’s insight.
Combined these three
advantages give an individual an overall vision advantage to see, create, and
take advantage of opportunities.
In a groundbreaking, widely
replicated study of 8 different populations, Burt showed that simply being in
an open network instead of a closed one is an extremely good predictor of
career success. In an open network, everyone doesn’t already know each other.
As a result, you are in between many different clusters. In a closed network,
everyone already knows each other.
As you can see in the chart
below, the further to the right you go toward a closed network, the more you’ll
repeatedly hear the same ideas, which reaffirm what you already believe. The
further left you go toward an open network, the more you’ll be exposed to new
ideas. People to the left are significantly more successful than those to the
right.
The study shows that half
of the predicted differences in career success within a line of work (i.e., —
promotion, compensation, industry recognition) can be explained by the extent
to which a person is a network broker (i.e. connecting different clusters). No
other factor was more important in predicting career success!
Application:
Brokerage helps
give context to why introductions and convening are so powerful. It also shines a light
on an often underappreciated part of introductions – translation. While it may
be obvious to the broker how two people in different clusters should connect,
it may not be obvious to the two people. Therefore, it is worth devoting extra
attention to helping helping others see the same opportunity you see.
Principle #3:
Brokerage Is More Than A Tactic. It Is A Way Of Life
Brokerage is more than just
a tactic to be deployed. It requires a completely different way of seeing and
being in the world that is often uncomfortable.
Being deeply connected and
respected while having a high status in a single network feels good.
On the other hand, being a
broker means pulling from diverse perspectives that may seem conflicting. This
requires intellectual flexibility. It means often being an outsider. It means
less stability.
Ideas that are obviously
beneficial to you because of your unique place in your network might seem
trivial and risky to someone deeply inside a network.
By becoming a person who
can become comfortable in this environment, you become someone who can more
easily leverage brokering.
Application:
In order to be
an effective broker, you must continually fight against the comfort and
validation that comes from staying in one group.
Kathy Calvin, President and CEO of the United Nations Foundation,
has built her career on being what she calls a ‘tri-sector athlete’. Pulling
from her diverse experience in the government, for-profit, and nonprofit
sectors, she has brokered global partnerships to help solve some of the world’s
largest challenges.
Kathy has developed a
15-minute meeting policy where she takes meetings with people she wouldn’t
normally connect with. This exposes her to new networks while still maintaining
her fast-paced schedule.
This policy has
been extremely beneficial. One example is a 2005 meeting with Elizabeth Gore who was in her late twenties and
had just returned from spending two years in a remote village in Bolivia with
the Peace Corps. The meeting was in November. By March of the next year,
Elizabeth joined the UN Foundation in a newly co-created position. Elizabeth
went on to create the Foundation’s largest campaigns, Nothing But Nets,
Shot@Life, and Girl Up. Today, Elizabeth is the first-ever Resident
Entrepreneur leading their work on innovation and entrepreneurship.
How To
Participate In The Network Science Renaissance
We are in a
renaissance period for network science. It is only in the past few years that
billions of people have connected to each other via global networks (ie –
Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, & Google) and started to publicly share in
trillions of ways.
It is the field of network
science that is perhaps best poised to understand this massive data. On the
other hand, it is us as entrepreneurs who may be best poised to understand how
the discoveries of network science apply to our day-to-day lives.
What we now
know is that the simple act of constantly putting yourself in an open network,
a network where people aren’t connected to each other, will give you a huge
advantage in your career. It will give you a vision advantage that allows you creatively capitalize on new amazing
opportunities. More importantly, it will expose you to the conditions you need
in order to build the skill-set and mindset of a network broker.
Growing up ‘uncomfortable’
gave me the freedom to create an identity that wasn’t based completely on
belonging to one group. This made it easier for me to go against the grain and
make two of the most important decisions in my career; starting a business at
16 when no one else I knew was an entrepreneur and taking a semester off from
college to write a book against the strong pushback from people closest to me.
Each of these decisions
required tremendous leaps of faith that my unique upbringing ultimately made it
easier to make.
Throughout my career, I’ve
continued to surround myself in new groups.
Today, Empact,
the organization I co-founded, helps connect the country’s top young entrepreneurs
to new groups they normally wouldn’t connect with including the US Chamber of
Commerce, United Nations Foundation, and the White House. We translate the
objectives of each group in order to create platforms that help entrepreneurs
give back.
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