#86: Weak Ties Social Capital, and How Career Communities Fuel Unlock Human Potential and Advancement
#86: Weak Ties Social Capital, and How Career Communities Fuel Unlock Human Potential and Advancement
In a technology-driven world, business is still human
Welcome To This Week’s Edition of Work In progress. If you’re new here, thanks for joining! Make sure to drop me a note and say hello!
Here is what we got this week:
Social Capital and Weak Ties
What We’re Watching
Career and Leadership Advice
✅Social Capital and Weak Ties✅
Today’s newsletter is all about human connection, and how people, and specifically, groups of people fuel growth and development at the organizational and individual level.
Social Capital
Social capital is about the value of social networks, bonding similar people and bridging between diverse people, with norms of reciprocity (Dekker and Uslaner 2001.)
Within a company, it is often the glue that can hold the organization together, strengthening trust, collaboration and a general positive working environment. Research has shown the benefits of social capital, such lower turnover, improved team and individual performance, increased knowledge transfer, greater innovation, and increased career mobility.
Source: McKinsey & Co
However, as a result of a global pandemic, new research from McKinsey shows a slowdown in interactions and how people build relationships in the workplace since the beginning of COVID-19. Here are some of the stats:
Less than half the respondents report making an effort to build their networks
only 24% of the nearly 5,500 respondents are focused on getting in touch with old contacts within their professional networks.
Only 28 % are focused on building new relationships, and 31 % say they are focused on strengthening existing relationships.
One other statistics according according to McKinsey’s research, social capital often varies by experience, with people in more senior roles self- reporting that during COVID-19, their access to social capital has grown much more than mid and front level workers. These are also some of the same conditions and reasons how networks and organizations oftentimes shut off access to the marginalized or underserved. If you are someone without access to social capital, it can be hard to advance. Furthermore, if you are both lower in the organization and part of an under-served population, that gap can intensify significantly.
Source: McKinsey & Company
This is also why as a manager, mentor, or senior leader, one of the best things you can do is to use your resources, privilege and networks to unlock opportunities for your employees and workers. To use the social capital you have, to fuel the opportunity and success for others. And that is where weak ties comes into play
Weak Ties
In the 1970s, Stanford Professor Mark Granovetter published a landmark paper called “The Strength of Weak Ties,” showcasing how casual acquaintances rather than close friends are more likely to aide us in a job search. The theory went that people who knew you may share a similar network, and may not have as much value as someone who only knew you casually, and might have opportunities that were outside of your core network.
For 50 years, this held up as common advice and knowledge in the job seeker market. However, If you talk to research folks, one of the main criticisms of Granovetter’s research was that A) it was done on a sample of 54 people B) it doesn’t account for today’s digital world. Despite this, the research and corresponding advice has held up significantly over the decades. LinkedIn gave Granovetter a lifeline this week when they published a new study “A causal ties of weak ties” that solidifies and aligns with Granovetter’s findings on weak ties.
Here is an excerpt from it their paper:
The authors analyzed data from multiple large-scale randomized experiments on LinkedIn’s People You May Know algorithm, which recommends new connections to LinkedIn members, to test the extent to which weak ties increased job mobility in the world’s largest professional social network. The experiments randomly varied the prevalence of weak ties in the networks of over 20 million people over a 5-year period, during which 2 billion new ties and 600,000 new jobs were created. The results provided experimental causal evidence supporting the strength of weak ties and suggested three revisions to the theory.
Among their key findings:
Weak ties are or can bring strong referrals - the stronger the newly added ties were, the less likely they were to lead to a job transmission
Moderate Weak Ties are best - If you share more than 10 mutual connections with someone, the usefulness to job hunting starts to diminish.
Industry matters - researchers found that weak ties are stronger in more digitally intense industries. Keeping up with your network, especially in industries that change fast is helpful to staying ahead.
The Third Place
Earlier this year, I wrote about two concepts that tie together weak ties and social capital. The first is the idea of the digital third place, a riff off of Ray Oldenberg’s original concept from the 1980s. These are the places online where we go to find community, build trust, and foster connections that fuel our professional, personal and career development.
Having a third place outside of your home and work used to be about separating work and life, but as many of us accept that we show up as humans that have multidimensional lives, a new form of third places has been popping up that bridge both the professional and the personal.
Career Communities
The second, is the idea of career communities. These communities, which sit at the intersection of learning and development, formal higher education, and career advancement are sources of trust, connection, and development for employees up and down the organizational chart. These are niche-based networks and organizations that present individuals with learning networks to ask questions, get guidance, meet other people and advance themselves, personally and professionally. They are an outside source of social capital, and certainly a place where you can foster more weak ties.
Recognizing the role that third places play in helping professionals move through their lives and careers, startups, professional and leadership development programs, online courses, trade associations and vendors are paying attention. Longstanding organizations, such as associations, learning platforms and programs, or traditional companies have invested significantly in their community efforts as a way to encourage more social capital, connection and learning. But the trend has become so pervasive that organizations, startups and companies are starting up in of themselves to solve this need.
Level Based: companies + organizations like Round, Chief, Athena Alliance and OnDeck For Executives, which serve specific audiences, generally have an application to be admitted, and create space for people who need to connect with peers in a private setting.
Persona Based: companies like Medley which serve professionals of underrepresented backgrounds personally, and professionally, as well Gen Z VC, a community of Gen Zer’s interested in Venture Capital.
Role or Function Based:The Product Marketing Alliance, Culture Amp’s People Geeks Community, or Lattice’s Resources For Humans (People Ops) These are great communities especially for careers or professions where it can be hard to identify professionals who share your role. For example, Chief of Staff is a common role, but not necessarily it’s own function like finance or marketing, so finding other people at your company to connect and build relationships with can sometimes be a challenge. On Deck’s Chief of Staff Program provides a space, community and learning programs to help both current and aspiring Chief’s of Staff to connect personally and professionally.
Career Based - Job and career seekers & switcher communities where people can find jobs and internships in places like Nova, or Product Buds
Learning Based - Reforge’s learning & development program, where a yearly membership includes both learning experiences and access to a community for professionals in product management, engineering, marketing, etc.
But these communities are not just for corporate workers. Take organizations like Braintrust and PassionFruit, which are networks/platforms for freelancers and solo business owners, that also act as “third places. Communities are critical for freelancers as they do not have the same infrastructure, social capital and weak ties that someone working at Google or Proctor and Gamble has.
In a world of increasing reliance on technology, social capital, weak ties, third places and career communities tell us what many of us already know - business is incredibly human, and requires relationships to advance and thrive. This is true, whether you’re trying to solve a problem in your job and need a creative idea, or you want to find opportunities to advance yourself. Furthermore, so much of career advancement comes from people making decisions who are in rooms that you are not in - when others who know you can advocate on your behalf, it unlocks your surface area for opportunities to come your way.
At the end of the day, most opportunities don’t just come out of thin air, but rather, when people who know you can associate you or something about you with an idea or thing that comes to mind. Having the right mix of social capital, a good network of both strong and weak ties, and career community or third place can help with that.
👀 What We’re Watching 👀
Article: The New Learning Economy (A16z) - Anne Lee Skates, a Partner at A16z, published her thesis on the Learning Economy and why she and a16z are excited about investing in this space. Core to their thesis is the belief that learning is so much more than tooling and infrastructure for core education, but all knowledge gaining and learning that humans do throughout their lives, personally and professionally.
Article: Hone raises $30M to grow it’s corporate training platform (TechCrunch)
Tom Griffiths and Savina Perez Co-Founded Hone as a way to democratize executive-quality training across the organization, and picked up another $30M to make that dream a reality. I covered Hone in my professional development trends report earlier this year, and was intrigued by their model of training, relevant courses, and from instructors that I’ve spoken with, much more attractive compensation for instructors.
Nextford is an U.S. Online University that providers online accredited education to emerging markets. Learners get a fully online U.S.-accredited higher education and lets them study at their own pace, and cost around $3,000-$4,000 per degree. They are expanding their degree offering into other fields, and
Article: CHROs to HR Tech Vendors: The Year of Grace is Over (HR Executive)
It appears that everyone in my network was in Las Vegas this week for HR Tech’s Conference, but one of my takeaways from following along from home was that while HR Tech is still an important priority for companies, vendors need to start focusing on making sure that customers get value from their investments. This is a tale as old as time in the software/vendor space, but to me, shows the maturity and growth of the market.
📙 Career and Leadership Advice 📙
Article: The Cure For Burnout is Not Self Care (The Atlantic) - This article contains an interview with Amelia Nagoski, one of the Co-Authors of Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. Amelia shares her thoughts on how quiet quitting intersects with burnout, namely, being the thing you do when you can longer (or will no longer) want to deal with the stressor (toxic workplace, bad boss, etc.)
Article: Quiet Quitting is a Fake Trend (The Atlantic) - In my humble opinion, Derek Thompson is one of the more insightful and thoughtful journalists who cover the work beat. He’s yet to take the bait on Quiet Quitting until now, and outlines why this isn’t a trend and even takes a few respectful shots at some of his journalist colleagues for falling for corporate propaganda.
Podcast: The Case Against Loving Your Job (Ezra Klein’s Podcast) - A good listen for anyone trying to evaluate their relationship with their job and work. This podcast came out well before quiet quitting was a thing, but Sarah Jaffe’s book Work Won’t Love You Back is an interesting read and her conversation with Ezra was really thoughtful
Article: Managers Can’t Do it All (HBR) - Following up on issue 85’s piece on Managers, this is a good case study from the former CHRO of IBM on how she and her team at IBM evolved the role of the manager and supported managers through the transformation.
Have a great week!
Al