emma's Blog: The power of social networks when you want to get something done!
February 29, 2008 at 23:28Give the President a day off, and invite your receptionist to the strategy session instead.
There’s a great article in Strategy + Business magazine this week.
Karen Stephenson, a New York–based developer of enterprise software for social network analysis, has written an inspiring piece about WHO you really need on your team, if you want to get stuff done.
I like the way she thinks. Stephenson says that, instead of recruiting the most senior members of the community when you want to address a complex problem (economic stagnation, for example, or failing schools), you should be engaging community heroes and people with large webs of personal relationships. Teams full of ‘power brokers’ more often than not get together, write a vision statement, and then the project fizzles. They aren’t the right people to really roll up their sleeves, build trust with all the stakeholders, and get the project done. Instead they delegate responsibilities to staff, difficult decisions get postponed and interest flags before anything gets done.
This is so true, isn’t it!! Well-intentioned big-shots get together to solve mammoth problems that are much more intimately understood by other people in the community. We see it on a community level, but in businesses too. Company presidents pull together their senior staff to address questions such as employee retention, when in fact there are dozens of other people in the company who have a more intimate knowledge of why people are quitting, or what might make them stay.
This reminds me of one of my long-standing pet peeves. I’ve always been irked by the fact that receptionists tend to be the lowest paid people in an office. It’s crazy! The receptionist is the first point of contact for potential clients. He or she is also, now that I’m thinking in Stephenson’s terms, one of the people in the office with the greatest web of personal relationships. The receptionist tends to know everyone, from the President to the intern, not to mention the couriers, spouses and clients who support the business. And a good receptionist gets things done.
Another lovely truism from Stephenson’s article is that “Trust and positional power are often inversely correlated: The higher someone’s position, the less likely it is that others trust that person.” Therefore, according to her article, “an ambitious local undertaking is practically guaranteed to fizzle if it relies on people whose chief qualification is a high place in the pecking order. Whenever change is on the agenda, the power of relationships trumps the power of position.”
This all makes me think of Malcolm Gladwell, of course, and his book The Tipping Point.
Gladwell’s book caused quite a stir with its spot-on insights into Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen, the three personality types that he says play a central role in social epidemics. Connectors know lots of people, something Gladwell tested by asking them to read a list of surnames and score points each time they knew someone with that last name.
The categories, for Stephenson, are hubs, gatekeepers, and pulsetakers. Hubs are the people who know the most people. Like Gladwell’s “Connectors,” they facilitate the expansion of the network or the dissemination of an idea. Gladwell and Stephenson would agree, I’m sure, that hubs and connectors are the most important people for any project, and are the key to success especially in community projects that rely on broad engagement across various groups.
This is all a good reminder for me as we start new client projects this Spring. We always get started by meeting with key staff and stakeholders at an organization, and we work hard to make sure we’re meeting, not just with the President, but with people working at all levels of the company. The best ideas almost always come from the editors, marketing people, tech guys and, yes, receptionists who are passionate about their company, but don’t always get invited to have their say.
Karen Stephenson will be leading a session on building effective teams at a Shambhala Institute workshop in Peterborough, Ontario in May.
