part0011

I teach an MBA course about creating high-performing teams. One of the students’ course assignments is to ask 12 people who know them well to spend 20 minutes completing an online questionnaire about the student’s styles, strengths, and weaknesses. Usually, a few students tell me that they don’t know 12 people who can give them thoughtful feedback. I gently tell them that the fact that they can’t identify 12 people they can count on to spend 20 minutes to complete an online questionnaire on their behalves is perhaps the most useful takeaway they’ll get from the course. Heeding this cautionary advice, these students usually become more proactive in building relationships.

One of the most robust findings among researchers is that the ability to cultivate mutually supportive relationships is central to professional success and personal well-being.[ 1 ] No matter how conscientious and gritty you are, and no matter how deep your expertise, no one succeeds alone . The mutual good-will, trust, cooperation, and influence you develop through your relationships helps you get the resources you need to add value to your organizations, achieve your career goals, contribute to your communities, and take care of yourself and the people you love.

Researchers refer to the resources you get through your personal and professional relationships as social capital .[ 2 ] These resources include ideas, information, contacts, opportunities (such as job leads), mentoring, reputation, money, encouragement, and support. Without social capital, your ideas, projects, and goals can quickly get derailed.

Social capital can only exist within a relationship or network of relationships. It’s through your relationships that you obtain tacit knowledge that would otherwise be difficult to learn on your own—how to get along with a cranky boss or neighbor, what not to say during an important meeting, which courses to take, which clubs to join and conferences to attend, where to meet people who share your interests, where to find the best physician in town for your specific needs, and who you should talk to at your child’s school to find out about the challenges of the upcoming school year. In short, social capital refers to resources that add value and are embedded within relationships.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how social capital helps societies, organizations, and individuals achieve important goals. You’ll also learn four foundations essential to building your personal social capital: developing self-awareness, creating your brand, energizing others, and building your network of mutually supportive relationships. Throughout the chapter you’ll learn specific strategies for building mutually supportive relationships and creating social capital that benefits not only you, but also your family, organizations, and communities .

Researchers have found that strong social capital is essential for alleviating poverty, improving civil rights, fueling entrepreneurship, stimulating economic growth, creating safe communities, and enhancing the well-being of communities and families. The World Bank calls social capital the “glue that holds [societies] together” because it provides the solidarity, trust, and cooperation that encourages the exchange of critical information and resources, as well as the means for communicating common goals, gaining influence, and mobilizing action.[ 3 ]

Newly arrived immigrants with strong network ties have more access to opportunities such as jobs, living arrangements, and institutional support (such as through religious organizations). In a meta-analysis of the relationship between social capital and children’s well-being, researcher Kristin Ferguson found that children who grow up in families with members who have strong connections to each other, as well as to the people and institutions in their community, are more likely to stay in school and less likely to become depressed or get involved in delinquent activities.[ 4 ] She concluded that social capital is “second only to poverty” in predicting children’s well-being. Long before social media, grassroots movements for social change, such as the Underground Railroad, the women’s suffrage movement, and the civil rights movement, depended in large part on word-of-mouth communication through social networks to gather support for their respective causes. Today, with or without the use of social media, neighborhoods and societies depend on formal and informal networks to motivate changes such as increasing prosperity, ensuring the education of women, and eliminating human trafficking .

A competitive advantage is one that adds unique value that can’t be easily copied by others.[ 5 ] Organizations have long known about the competitive advantage of financial capital (money), structural capital (buildings and equipment), technological capital (information and communication technologies), and human capital (employees’ skills, education, and experience). More recently, many organizations have come to understand the competitive advantage of social capital—the benefits the organization gains by fostering mutually supportive relationships inside and outside the organization. These benefits include increased commitment to common organizational goals, fast exchange of reliable information and resources, and increased cooperation and coordination. Social capital has an important advantage over other forms of capital. Although organizations can copy each other’s financial, structural, technological, and human capital (by benchmarking best practices and hiring each other’s employees), they cannot copy an organization’s network of mutually supportive relationships that helps employees get things done better, faster, with less cost, and with more commitment.

Consider, for example, Google. The company has grown from a two person start-up in 1998 to over 53,000 employees in more than 40 countries. It is one of the world’s most valuable brands and often claims the #1 spot in Fortune Magazine’s rankings of the best places to work. It is a magnet for talent, with two million hopeful applicants every year. Google’s mission is twofold: “To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful,” and, unofficially, “Don't be evil.” The work at Google is challenging, and its perks are famous, including free gourmet quality meals, nap pods, onsite physicians and laundry, and subsidized haircuts and legal counsel. Interactive play among employees is encouraged with bowling alleys, billiard tables, and other games. Employees can bring pets to work. Employees receive 6% matching retirement contributions, and if an employee dies, the company gives his or her surviving spouse or domestic partner half the employee’s salary for ten years and gives his or her children $1,000 per month.

The company designs relationship-building into everyday work because it knows that relationships drive innovation, employee satisfaction, retention, and organizational growth. No detail is too small in Google’s People Analytics Department’s obsessively data-driven efforts to “build the happiest, most productive workplace in the world.”[ 6 ] The department figured out that, to encourage informal interactions among employees, the optimal amount of time that people should wait in line for meals is about 3–4 minutes. Google installed long tables in its cafeterias so that employees are more likely to sit near people they don’t know. The long tables are placed close together so that employees are likely to bump into a chair behind them, encouraging brief interactions. Google employees (“Googlers”) call it the “Google bump.”

Discussing the design of Google’s New York offices, Craig Nevill-Manning, Google’s engineering director in Manhattan, explains, “Google’s success depends on innovation and collaboration. Everything we did [when building our Manhattan office] was geared toward making it easy to talk.”[ 7 ] Ben Waber, author of the book People Analytics , agrees. He says:

The data are clear that the biggest driver of performance in complex industries like software is serendipitous interaction. For this to happen, you also need to shape a community. That means if you’re stressed, there’s someone to help, to take up the slack. If you’re surrounded by friends, you’re happier, you’re more loyal, you’re more productive.[ 8 ]

One Googler explained, “We are surrounded by smart, driven people who provide the best environment for learning I've ever experienced. I don't mean through tech talks and formal training programs, I mean through working with awesome colleagues.”[ 9 ] Even ex-Googlers (former Google employees) stay in touch with each other through the alumni network called Xooglers (pronounced zoo-gler). Says one Xoogler, “Xoogler groups are some of the largest support portals in the world. If you're a Xoogler, you'll know someone in any country you visit.”[ 10 ]

Regardless of whether you work in the private, public, or nonprofit sector; regardless of your position; and regardless of the focus of your particular job, the quality of your relationships will significantly determine your ability to achieve your professional and personal goals. Research shows that people who develop a strong network of mutually supportive relationships are more likely to:

In one meta-analysis that included 148 studies and followed 308,849 people for an average of 7.5 years in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Australia, researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstat and her colleagues concluded that individuals with adequate social relationships have a 50% greater likelihood of survival compared to those with poor or insufficient social relationships. The magnitude of this effect is comparable with quitting smoking, and it exceeds many well-known risk factors for mortality (e.g., obesity, physical inactivity).[ 11 ]

Despite these remarkable advantages of social capital, many people underestimate the value of relationships. By doing so, they miss opportunities to enhance the quality and speed of their work, the growth of their careers, and the well-being of the people they care about because they believe the following widespread myths about the role of relationships.

What you know (your knowledge, skills, expertise) and your dependability (your willingness to help and come through for others) are as important as who you know because people want to work with others who they trust to add value. People are unlikely to put their reputations on the line to recommend someone for an opportunity if they don’t think that person will live up to his or her endorsement.

Some people believe there is something insincere about connecting with others for instrumental reasons (e.g., to ask for help on a task or to get introduced to a contact who can provide information about a potential job). Yet relationships built on authenticity, respect, goodwill, and reciprocity also become the most effective instrumental relationships. If your job is to add value to your organization, then it is your responsibility to reach out to others in the organization to let them know what you’re good at, where you need help, and how you can help others so that they can place you where you can add the most value and make your best contributions.

Although it seems intuitively likely that extroverts would have bigger networks than introverts, research is quite mixed on this. The general consensus is that if there is any relationship between extroversion and network size, the significance of that relationship is small.[ 12 ] Researchers Hans-Georg Wolff and Sowon Kim explain that, “Building contacts might satisfy the need for social attention of extraverted individuals (Ashton et al., 2002), but they may not necessarily focus on the more instrumental aspects of maintaining and using contacts . . . .”[ 13 ] The researchers speculate that extroverts may engage more in “incidental networking” that doesn’t take much effort for them and gains social attention, but they may also “put less emphasis on the strategic choice of interaction partners.” In short, although extraverts may be more social, they may not be more strategic or more skillful than introverts in developing effective networks.

I hope by now I’ve made a convincing case that if you want to achieve your personal and professional goals, building mutually supportive relationships is a need-to-have, not just a nice-to-have. If you are responsible for adding value at work, building relationships is integral to your job because doing so helps you and others get better results in less time while using fewer resources.

In the following sections you will learn four foundations for building social capital that I mentioned earlier in this chapter. As you read through the rest of this chapter, consider how effectively you’re currently developing your social capital, what steps you can take to enhance it, and the benefits you, your teams, your organizations, your communities, and your family may gain by doing so.

Self-awareness matters for many reasons. Knowing our values helps us make some of the most important decisions we face in life: who to love, where to live, where to work, and how to spend the limited number of days we have on earth. Knowing our strengths and weaknesses helps us make the most of our talents and work on our limitations. Knowing how we’re perceived by others helps us understand the consequences our behaviors have for others at work and at home. Knowing our hot buttons and how we act under pressure helps us manage ourselves more effectively in stressful situations.

Researchers at the global consulting and executive search firm Korn Ferry have found that “leaders who are self-aware are more likely to be high-performing, to meet their business goals, and save on turnover costs.” They are also more likely to be able to “honestly size up the organization’s capability and capacity [and] make sound decisions about investment of resources.”[ 14 ] The costs of lacking self-awareness can be high. In one study in an executive program in a Fortune 10 company, researchers Erich Dierdorff and Robert Rubin collected data on the performance of 300 leaders who were participating as part of 58 teams in a business simulation. The researchers also compared the leaders’ self-assessments of their behavioral contributions with other team members’ perceptions of them. When there was a large gap between the leaders’ self-assessments and others’ assessments of them, researchers found that the teams “made worse decisions [and] engaged in less coordination.” The most damaging situation occurred when teams included “significant over-raters” because they “cut the chances of team success in half.”[ 15 ]

Unfortunately, self-awareness seems to be in short supply in organizations. In a study of 6,977 professionals in 486 publicly traded companies, Korn Ferry researchers Dana Zes and Dana Landis found that nearly 80% of the professionals had at least one blind spot (a skill area the leader perceives as a strength but others see as a weakness), and 40% had at least one hidden strength (a skill area that a person perceives as a weakness but others see as a strength).[ 16 ] Some of the biggest blind spots were in areas related to building and using social capital, including “demonstrating personal flexibility,” “getting work done through others,” “doesn’t inspire or build talent,” and “doesn’t relate well to others.” These findings have been confirmed by many others. In a meta-analysis of 22 studies, researchers Ethan Zell and Zlatan Kirzan found that there was on average only a .29 correlation between study participants’ self assessments and more objective assessments of their skills (a correlation of 1.0 would mean that their self assessments accurately matched the objective measures).[ 17 ]

When employees lack self-awareness, it hurts the bottom line. When Zes and Landis tracked the stock performance of the 486 Fortune 500 companies over 30 months, they found, “Poorly performing companies’ employees had 20 percent more blind spots than those working at financially strong companies. Poor-performing companies’ employees were 79 percent more likely to have low overall self-awareness than those at firms with robust ROR [return on revenue],” and “companies with the highest percentage of self-aware employees consistently outperformed those with a lower percentage.”[ 18 ]

So the bad news is that researchers have found that many people are not very high on self-awareness. The worse news is that the less competent people are, the more likely they are to overestimate their abilities. In one study, researchers Justin Kruger and David Dunning gave participants assessments of the participants’ own sense of humor, grammar, and logic. They then asked participants how well they felt they did on the assessments. Those who scored in the bottom 12th percentile of performance estimated themselves to be in the 62nd percentile.[ 19 ] Fortunately, there’s good news as well. Once people who are low in a skill area learn that skill, research shows that they also become better able to assess their competency in that area because they have learned more about what it takes to be competent. As Albert Einstein wisely remarked, “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.”

You can develop your self-awareness in many ways, including taking self-assessments like the Myers-Briggs or Social Styles assessments* to help you understand how you see the world, make decisions, and interact with others. Each of these assessments assumes (1) we all have predictable and taken-for-granted ways of seeing and behaving in the world; (2) each of us tends to have a bias toward using certain styles in our everyday behavior and decision-making; and (3) if we can understand our preferred styles and appreciate the preferred styles of others, we can see situations from a broader perspective, make better decisions, and gain support from more people than would otherwise be possible. These assessments become even more useful if you ask others to assess you using these tools as well. You can complete the assessment in Figure 5.1, at the end of this section, to get an overall sense of your style preferences. [*Note: You can find free assessments online, including variations of the Social Styles assessment and a free Keirsey Bates Temperament Sorter assessment (which is similar to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, http://www.keirsey.com ).]

Many organizations offer the opportunity to receive 360-degree feedback in which your boss(es), colleagues, and direct reports all complete an assessment of your work-related behaviors (for example, the effectiveness of your communication and decision-making styles). You can then compare how you’re perceived from different vantage points and identify ways in which these groups see you similarly and differently. Researchers have found that 360-degree feedback is particularly valuable when combined with one-on-one coaching, especially if you then create an action plan for change based on what you learned.[ 20 ] If your organization doesn’t offer you 360-degree feedback, you can take it upon yourself to ask others to give you feedback. You can have others complete the assessment in Figure 5.1 or ask them to name your three greatest strengths and three greatest weaknesses and compare their answers with your own perceptions of yourself. You can consider situations in which your strengths serve you well so that you can place yourself where you can make the greatest contributions. You can also consider situations in which your weaknesses can hinder you and others from achieving important goals so that you can work on minimizing or eliminating these weaknesses.

For each pair of phrases in Figure 5.1, please circle the one you feel better describes you. Of course, our styles are more on a continuum than they are discrete; but making yourself select one of the phrases in each pair helps you identify broader patterns in the way that you think and behave even though you don’t think or act the same way in all situations. You can select an overall context for the assessment (for example, at home or at work) if that makes it easier for you to choose between the phrases.

One useful way to use this assessment is to assess yourself and have someone else you interact with regularly complete it for themselves as well. Then you can discuss how your similarities and differences influence your relationship. Or, another useful way to use this assessment is to complete the assessment yourself and have someone else complete the assessment for you as well. Then you can compare your self-perception with the other person’s perception of you.

In 1997, management guru and former McKinsey consultant Tom Peters propelled the language of personal branding into the mainstream business press when he published the article “The Brand Called You” in Fast Company Magazine . Long before social media made it possible to craft an online presence through blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, Peters reminded people that we each have a brand based on other people’s perceptions of us, whether we like it or not. Today, over 300 books about personal branding are listed on Amazon.com, all designed to help you shape such perceptions by creating and promoting your personal brand.

In his article, Peters boldly stated, “To be in business today, your most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called you. … You’re every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop.” His article, although controversial at the time because of his blunt claims, was meant to be a wake-up call for people who believed their work would speak for itself. Keeping your nose to the grindstone and hoping people will notice your good work may have worked when most people stayed in jobs for enough years for others to get to know them well. But this was becoming an increasingly risky strategy as layoffs became more common, pensions disappeared, and lifetime employment was becoming a thing of the past.

Jobs were becoming more complex and specialized as the predictability of manufacturing industries was being replaced by a fast-changing knowledge, technology, and service-based economy. Organizations were increasingly using contractors to provide services that used to be performed by full-time employees. The dot-com era was ushering in a new wave of entrepreneurs. Employees increasingly wanted to craft their own jobs and work hours so that they could enjoy both their work and their home lives. Peters figured that this was the perfect time to rethink how we present ourselves at work in order to benefit from the opportunities and protect ourselves from the risks of the new economic realities. And so the era of “the brand called you” was born.

If crafting your brand doesn’t appeal to you, keep in mind that you already have a brand, whether you’re aware of it or not. If you’re on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, or other social media sites, you are already creating your brand by choosing what to make public and what to keep private as you present yourself as you’d like to be seen. Even without using social media, the people with whom you interact are making assumptions—true or not—about your interests, goals, knowledge, skill level, integrity, and readiness to handle a challenging career opportunity. Researcher Susan Fiske and her colleagues found that people are likely to make assumptions about your warmth and competence within the first few minutes—even seconds—of meeting you.[ 21 ]

With people making assumptions about you so quickly, it’s worth considering whether you want to leave people’s impressions of you completely to chance or whether you instead want to take some control over how you’re seen. Managing perceptions becomes even more important as organizations become more diverse and people increasingly encounter others who may be tempted to draw inaccurate conclusions about them (e.g., I don’t know if “people like you” are honest, smart, hard workers, effective leaders, etc.; Do “people like you” get along with “people like me?”; “Can you be committed to your job if you’re a parent?”).

Creating your personal brand is a way of clarifying your values, aspirations, character, expertise, and how you add value. Your brand can be an anchor in a sea of change and opportunity. It helps you understand which jobs fit you best and which jobs are best filled by someone else, or what kind of projects bring out the best in you and which leave you feeling just meh. It also helps you differentiate yourself from the crowd. Consider the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who graduate with the same type of degree every year (e.g., business, education, engineering, law, psychology, sociology, health sciences). It’s difficult to stand out if you expect your degree alone to distinguish you from the rest. You don’t want to be the best kept secret in your organization or field, nor do you want to make people guess what your interests and strengths are, because it’s your responsibility to let people know where and how you can make your best contributions.

Whether you want to consider yourself a brand is, of course, your own decision. But one thing is certain: How you present yourself to others matters because people’s perceptions of you will determine whether you have an opportunity to make your best contributions, add value to your organizations, and reap the rewards of your efforts.

Peters also recommends that you consider whether you are viewed as a dependable team member who is interested in the success of others, whether your contributions are difficult to copy, whether your work is clearly aligned with the organization’s priorities, whether you are aware of the challenges and opportunities the organization faces, and whether your brand is at risk of becoming out of date.

A thoughtfully-crafted brand is not the same as style over substance. If a gap exists between the brand you present and who you are, you have two problems. First, sooner or later, people will recognize inconsistencies between what you promise and what you deliver, so your brand will lose its power. Second, over time this gap between who you say you are and who you will likely be takes a toll on you because of the emotional energy it takes to maintain a façade .

Some people are able to bring out the best in others, whereas other people have a knack for sucking the life out of every interaction. Researchers Rob Cross, Wayne Baker, and Andrew Parker studied the impact of energizers and de-energizers in different organizations to identify the energizers, what they do differently than others, and their impact on performance.[ 23 ] The researchers mapped out the social networks in each of these organizations to identify who was connected to whom, then interviewed people within those networks. They asked study participants the following question regarding each person in their networks: “When you interact with this person, how does it typically affect your energy level?” The study participants responded on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being very de-energizing and 5 being very energizing. The researchers found that the people who were identified as energizers had higher performance ratings, got promoted more quickly, and inspired more learning and innovation in the organization.

In another study, researcher Bradley Owens and his colleagues studied networks in a wide variety of industries (including health care, hospitality, education, finance, retail, and food) to identify the impact energizing bosses had on the feelings, thoughts and behaviors of their direct reports.[ 24 ] Employees who worked with energizing bosses tended to be more productive, engaged, committed, helpful to their colleagues, and willing to do work outside their official job descriptions in order to meet organizational goals. They also had less absenteeism and were less likely to quit. One employee in the study described his boss this way:

His energy made me feel . . . that my feedback was very factual and useful. This person motivated me to work harder, and I also paid more attention to detail. … On days after having meetings with him I got twice as much wo rk done, because of the motivational energy that he brought to the room.[ 25 ]

Says Kim Cameron, one of the researchers, “Managers spend so much time managing information and influence . . . but relational energy trumps both of those by a factor of four as an outcome determiner.”[ 26 ]

What specifically do energizers do? They are realistic optimists who draw people in and inspire them through demonstrated commitment to the team’s vision. They show interest in, and respect for, others and demonstrate faith in other people’s abilities to achieve their goals. By communicating a compelling vision, they infuse meaning into employees’ everyday work—even the inevitable mundane aspects that exist in just about every job. They focus on opportunities rather than obstacles and encourage participation and contributions from employees. They fully engage in their interactions, making others feel heard, appreciated, and respected, and they exude integrity by matching their behaviors to their words.

Not only are energizers higher performers, but the people who work with them are as well, because energizers release what researchers call “psychological resourcefulness” in others—the commitment, motivation, stamina and intellectual stimulation that enhance people’s wiliness and ability to put in extra effort and perform to the best of their abilities.[ 27 ] Energizing relationships increase our desire to cooperate and coordinate with others. People are also more likely to listen to energizers and support their ideas. As the reputation of energizers spreads, the most talented people want to be on the energizers’ projects, and other energizers are drawn to working with them.

Energizing relationships are a precious resource to organizations because they typically don’t cost anything, are hard to copy, and are renewable (meaning they regenerate themselves and spread, rather than becoming depleted with use). The value of energizing relationships increases over time due to what is called “emotional contagion.” Emotions, whether positive or negative, are “catching” because people act as role models for appropriate ways of feeling, thinking, and behaving. Researcher Sigal Barsade explains that “people are walking mood inductors” who pass their moods onto others.[ 28 ] An abundance of energizing relationships creates a virtuous cycle in which positive emotions cascade throughout the organization, and the associated benefits spread and increase steadily over time. In contrast, de-energizers can create a vicious cycle in which people think more about protecting themselves than about contributing to a greater good. Simply stated, organizations with an abundance of energy have a hard-to-copy competitive advantage.[ 29 ]

Energizers are not necessarily extroverted or particularly charismatic, nor do they always focus on the positive. They don’t avoid giving bad news, making tough decisions, or having difficult conversations. When they do address problems, however, they focus on resolving the issues rather than making recriminations. They show compassion to others.

One of the most important jobs of an energizer is to buffer people from de-energizers who are exhausting to others. De-energizers suck the life out of a room as soon as they walk in, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief when the de-energizer walks out. There are different kinds of de-energizers. Some don’t listen to others; others treat people as though they’re invisible; and some resort to belittling others and their ideas. Some de-energizers focus primarily on the negative, or they may show enthusiasm only for their personal ideas and shut down others’ ideas. Some are pleasant interpersonally, yet can’t be trusted to keep their commitments. Not surprisingly, de-energizers tend to be lower performers and bring others’ performance down as well.

Even people who are fully capable of doing good work may have trouble mustering the energy to do so when they have to deal with de-energizers. Instead, they think, “not now, not in this activity, or not with these people.”[ 30 ] Researchers Tiziana Casciaro and Miguel Sousa Lobo found that even if a de-energizer has the information that a person needs, people would rather get second-rate information from someone who makes them feel good than suffer through an interaction with someone who is difficult to work with.[ 31 ] People’s instincts to avoid de-energizers make sense because the cost of dealing with a de-energizer can be greater than the cost of missing out on first-rate information.

Research shows that de-energizers on a team (including non-contributors, downers, and bullies) can reduce the team’s performance by 30–40%.[ 32 ] Researchers have found that the cost of de-energizers is so great because “bad is stronger than good,” meaning that people remember negative interactions more intensely, in more detail, and for longer periods of time than they remember positive interactions. It takes at least two positive interactions to counter the effects of one negative interaction.[ 33 ] A few bad apples really can spoil the whole barrel.

Energizers don’t let de-energizers take down a team. Researchers Peter Frost and Sandra Robinson found that people who they call “toxic handlers” are useful for dealing with de-energizers in organizations.[ 34 ] Frost and Robinson call toxic handlers the “unsung heroes” of organizations because they voluntarily neutralize the negative effects toxic people have on others—frustration, sadness, and bitterness. Although some de-energizers may be merely disheartening to others rather than toxic, their behavior may still have a similar toxic effect over time.

Toxic handlers do several things to eliminate or minimize the negative impact toxic people have on others. They notice when a toxic person is present, and they protect and rescue those affected. They listen and show genuine concern, help affected people figure out strategies for dealing with the toxic person, and help them move forward. They take action to neutralize the toxic behavior by coaching people who cause problems, moving toxic people into roles where they can’t do any damage (or out of the organization altogether), withholding promotions and other organizational rewards until the toxic person meets expected standards for behavior, and structuring meetings in ways that ensure that everyone lives up to acceptable standards for interacting with others. As one leader put it, “I try to be the umbrella that stops the rain from falling on my team.”[ 35 ]

These 12 questions will help you assess whether you are likely to energize or de-energize others. This assessment will be most useful if you answer the questions yourself, ask others to rate you, and then assess whether your perceptions match others’ perceptions of you .

The questions in Figure 5.2 were adapted from: Cross, Rob, Wayne Baker, & Andrew Parker. (2003). What creates energy in organizations. MIT Sloan Management Review , 44(4), 51–56; Cross, Rob, & Parker, Andrew. (2004). Charged up: Creating energy in organizations. Journal of Organizational Excellence , 23(4), 3–14.

Think about the times that you benefited from someone giving you information, advice, support, or an introduction to someone else. Did you hear about a job, a promotion, or other work opportunity? Did you learn about a good restaurant, shop, day care, school, dentist, physician, or class to take or avoid? Did someone teach you how to do a task or your new job better? Did someone give you advice on how to negotiate a job offer, a sale, or work with a difficult person? Did someone introduce you to someone else who would become an important part of your life (a neighbor, colleague, or someone to love)? Did someone give you emotional support in a time of need? Throughout our lives, our relationships play a central role in helping us make and implement the decisions—big and small—through which we build our lives.

How is your network working for you? One way to find out is to create what researchers call a sociogram. Write your name in the middle of a piece of paper or put your name on a post-it note and put it on a wall. Now think about the people with whom you’ve connected in the past six months (e.g., to discuss important issues, give advice, socialize, get your work done, help someone else get work done, or get or give emotional support or support for a project). Write the names of each of these people around your name, putting clusters of people who are in similar groups together. For example, you may have a family cluster, work cluster, neighborhood cluster, school cluster, religious institution cluster, club or hobby cluster (e.g., golf club, book club), or children’s school or activity cluster (e.g., sports team, theater group). Next, draw a dotted line between people who know each other, both within and across clusters, as well a solid line between every one you know and yourself. Put a star next to people you know very well. It will look something like the diagram in Figure 5.3 .

Your sociogram is a visual depiction of your network of social connections, consisting of interconnected individuals and clusters of people. It’s your connections to these people and the links between them that predict the type and amount of social capital you have, as well as the speed with which you can access these resources. Your network is probably too complicated to be adequately represented by a drawing; eventually you’d run out of space or the lines connecting people would become so dense that your diagram would become illegible. However, performing this exercise will help you learn about some of the key characteristics of networks and how your network can help you or hinder you from achieving your goals. Note that although I’ve framed this section about networks mostly around what you can get from your network, you should keep in mind that successful networks are built on the fundamental value of reciprocity: giving as well as taking. We’ll come back to this point later in this chapter.

The most successful people do not leave their networks to chance but instead systematically build, maintain, and use their networks to create mutually supportive personal and professional relationships. You can assess the structure of your network by focusing on the four characteristics described below: size, structure, diversity, and strength.[ 36 ] Consider what each characteristic tells you about your current network, as well as what steps you can take to enhance your network’s effectiveness.

Size refers to the number of people you have in your professional and personal networks, including people both inside and outside your organization as well as people in your neighborhood, various community organizations, and other places where you interact with others. Researchers have found that people with larger networks within their organization tend to gain more knowledge about the organization and its strategy, especially if they know people in many different parts of the organization.[ 37 ] Conversely, people who are socially isolated, as well as lonely, are at higher risk for a variety of health risks and mortality “on par with smoking, obesity, elevated blood pressure, and high cholesterol.”[ 38 ]

Structure refers to the degree to which the people in your network are connected to each other. When you look at your network, are most people connected to each other or are there instead gaps between people and groups? Researchers have found that the structure of your network is more important than its size due to what researchers call redundancy . Regardless of how many people you have in your network, if most or all of them know each other, they are likely to share a lot of the same resources—information, expertise, contacts, and opportunities. Consequently, you are likely to get a lot of redundant information from your network, giving you a narrower range of resources.

A network in which most people know each other is considered to be relatively closed or dense . If you spend most of your work day interacting only with people on your team or in your department, and those same people live in the same neighborhood and attend the same religious services and social clubs, you likely have a fairly closed network. Closed networks have the advantages of having more trust, loyalty, predictability, cooperation, and cohesiveness, through which it’s easier to build a shared identity and common goals. On the other hand, limitations of closed networks, in addition to providing fewer and less diverse resources, include making members less likely to have influence outside your group, more likely to develop an us-versus-them perspective, and more likely to engage in groupthink. A closed network provides limited social capital, because your “network reach” is smaller.[ 39 ]

An open network is one that has many people and clusters of people who aren’t connected to each other. If you have a lot of people in your network who don’t know each other, then your network is considered relatively “open.” In an open network, you are likely to enjoy the benefits of greater social capital because non-redundant contacts provide access to non-overlapping information, contacts, support, and opportunities. Researchers call the gaps between people and groups who don’t know each other structural holes . They’ve found that people who have more structural holes in their networks tend to be higher performers, get promoted more often, get paid more, have more influence, and demonstrate greater creativity.[ 40 ] An open network provides greater visibility among people in many different places. People in different social and professional circles give you access to diverse information, skills, opportunities, and contacts from their networks, and you can access these more quickly. You are likely to have more influence because you can act as a bridge that brings people and groups who don’t know each other together and, by doing so, you provide others with valuable contacts and resources that they wouldn’t have if you weren’t in their network.

Researchers have found that people who are connected to multiple groups (e.g., family, neighborhood, work, religious institutions) tend to be healthier, live longer, and have less cognitive decline. In one particularly interesting study, researcher Shelden Cohen and his colleagues recruited 276 healthy people to have nasal drops with two rhinoviruses (common cold germs) put into their noses to find out who would catch a cold and who wouldn’t. They found that the people who were connected to diverse social groups were less likely to catch a cold.[ 41 ] Open networks also have some limitations. People in your network are less likely to share common goals and are more likely to experience conflict. You also can get overloaded with information and resources to the point where they bring diminishing returns, and at some point the costs of keeping up with your network may become higher than the benefits.[ 42 ]

You can have a lot of people in your network and know people in many different places, but your network can still lack an important kind of diversity if the people in your network share the same identity groups. When you look at your network, how diverse are the people in it? In answering this question, you should consider identity groups such as gender, race, nationality, religion, education, age, income, sexual identity, social class, and other groups that are relevant in your culture. Also consider whether you have access to people at different levels and functions in your organization.

Diversity among the people in your network provides some of the same advantages as open networks: access to more and diverse resources. For example, someone who is older can often offer younger employees more experience and knowledge, as well as a rich pool of contacts, whereas someone who is younger can offer older employees fluency with the newest technologies, as well as fresh perspectives that are not entrenched in long-held ways of thinking. You are more likely to get career sponsorship if you know people who work in higher organizational levels, especially if you’ve earned their respect and they’ve heard good things about you within the organization. Researchers Robin Ely and David Thomas found that teams benefit from diversity when they encourage team members to proactively communicate and use these diverse perspectives to achieve their teams’ goals, but the benefit of diverse teams is lost if diverse ideas aren’t integrated into the teams’ decision making processes.[ 43 ]

Strong and weak ties refer to the strength of the connections you have with the people in your network, specifically how much contact, degree of intimacy, and emotional investment you have in each other.[ 44 ] You have strong ties to people you know very well and with whom you are mutually invested in each others’ success and well-being (e.g., family, close friends, and colleagues with whom you interact regularly). A strong tie is a confidant—someone you feel comfortable telling things that you may not share with more casual ties. A weak tie is someone with whom you interact infrequently and in whom you have little emotional investment (e.g., casual acquaintances, neighbors you wave to in the morning on the way to work but don’t know very well, students you take classes with, colleagues you see at meetings but don’t work with closely, someone you’ve shared a meal with at a conference but haven’t interacted with since then).

Both strong and weak ties contribute to your success. The advantage of strong ties is that you can count on them to give you emotional support, provide career sponsorship, and come through for you with the resources you need if they have the ability to do so. They also may be more willing to take the risk of passing on sensitive information or take the time to discuss more complex issues.[ 45 ] But weak ties, on the other hand, can be more helpful for finding jobs, due to sheer numbers. Given that fewer strong ties can be maintained, your greater number of weak ties can give you access to more diverse opportunities.[ 46 ] A word of advice: Researchers have found that people with multiple mentors benefit more than people who focus on having a strong tie to one mentor, because each mentor can provide different benefits. One mentor may introduce you to people and opportunities, another may help you learn specific skills, another may give you political advice, and another may provide emotional support as you navigate through the challenges in your organization and career.[ 47 ]

Take a look at your network. Are you satisfied with the size and structure of your network given your goals? Is it more closed or open? More homogenous or diverse? Do you have both strong and weak ties? What steps can you take to strengthen your network? No one type of network suits everyone’s needs because people have different goals that change throughout the course of their lives. The best network for you is one that you have crafted to help you meet your life goals and that helps others achieve their goals. I’ve provided below some general recommendations for developing your social capital through your network. Remember that small steps can result in big rewards.

You may know a lot of people, but your network isn’t going to add much value if you don’t have a reputation for being competent, reliable, and trustworthy. The most important things you can do to build your network is to build a reputation based on authentic expertise, conscientiousness, integrity, and goodwill, and become known as someone who creates bridges rather than barriers across people and groups. It’s not just who you know that determines the strength of your network, but also what they know and tell others about you.

In the past week, how much did you help others compared to how much you asked for help? Network researchers consider reciprocity to be at the heart of successful networks. At a deep level, human beings recognize that we depend on mutual give and take for our very survival, not only as individuals, but as a species. Sociologist Howard Becker once said that reciprocity is so central to our survival as a species that we should be called “Homo reciprocus” (man who reciprocates) rather than “Homo sapiens” (man the wise).[ 48 ] Wayne Baker explains that:

Each contribution you make is an addition to an endless chain of events; visualize it as a drop of rain rippling the water’s surface, sending out wider and wider rings of influence. By practicing generalized reciprocity—contributing to others without worrying about who will help you or how you will be helped—you invest in a vast network of reciprocity that will be there when you need it.[ 49 ]

There are many things you can do to build your network. Get to meetings early and spend time talking informally to people rather than checking your phone. Walk to someone’s office to talk about an issue rather than send an email. Introduce yourself to people in the elevator and ask who they are. Help out someone who needs help. Take job rotation assignments and international assignments that expose you to different kinds of people (e.g., diversity of demographics, organizational function, and hierarchical level). If you can’t or don’t wish to travel or change jobs every few years, then get on committees that expose you to different people and perspectives. Go to conferences and join networking groups in your field. Take opportunities to connect at work (e.g., casual conversations before or after meetings, at lunch) or join professional or social groups based on common interests outside of work.

Pick up or drop off your children at day care so you can get to know the teachers, staff, other parents, and your children’s friends. Maintain your contacts by staying in touch by sending cards, helpful emails, and articles that are of interest to them; and introduce your contacts to each other if they can be helpful to each other. Ask for help when you need it as well. If you repeatedly give, but don’t ask for help when you need it, you can drain your own and your team’s resources, which doesn’t do anybody any good. Reciprocity, by definition, needs to act in both directions.

If you want to proactively increase the demographic diversity of people in your network, you’ll need to rise above the human biases to interact more with people who are located physically near you (e.g., in the same office or neighborhood) and people you perceive to be similar to you. To override this bias, put yourself in situations that will expose you to more diversity. When our children were little, their dad and I put them in a day care that offered a sliding scale fee in order to increase the chance that the children they met, and the parents we met, would be a more diverse group. Reach out to people from diverse backgrounds at work to go to lunch with, include people from different backgrounds on your projects, and avoid making assumptions about competence, conscientiousness, or trustworthiness based on people’s identity groups.

Many of the things you can do to increase the size, structure, diversity, and strength of your network don’t require much time or money. To learn more, read some of the many books about relationship building, search the Internet for information, take courses (including free online courses at Coursera and edX) and workshops in relationship-building skills, and observe people who excel at building relationships and ask them for advice. Most importantly, remember that getting ahead requires getting along, and no one succeeds alone.