Social Capital in The New World of Work
The Leader's Role in Making Connections that count
In my post on trends I am watching for 2025, one trend I wrote about was the importance of social capital and why leaders should focus on helping build the social capital of their employees.
Here is what I wrote:
The degree to which leaders can help their people develop their networks and help expand those of their employees will put them in a position to be successful in their work and broaden their exposure and opportunities for future development and growth. In the workplace, many new ideas for problems or solutions for products and services come when people share ideas, information, talents, and skills. Helping your employees develop their social capital helps them get more exposure to share their talents and skills. Still, it also helps them build new relationships and expand their surface area for opportunities.
Part of this stems from my own observations in the work I do each day with managers and leaders, part comes from my own lived experience, and part is born out of some research I did last fall on this topic. (As a subscriber, you can see a free preview here)
I wanted to share some more thoughts on this topic as it’s often one that comes up in many of my leadership programs.
What is Social Capital and Why Does it Matter at Work?
The textbook definition of social capital refers to the resources and advantages an individual can access through their network of social relationships.
It is the collective value of all social networks and the benefits that arise from these networks.
When an individual has social capital, she can call on her peers to advance an initiative, get support for a project, or gain exposure to people she needs to meet in order to achieve a goal. The sheer fact of engaging with someone else in also helps promote connection and trust, something that’s critical for most employees and organization.
Working inside of an organization is rarely done in a silo. Most knowledge worker employees operate in a system that is much bigger than themselves and their work.
In order for that employee to be successful, they need to have the trust, goodwill and relationships needed to get support for their work, advance their cause or initiative, or find the opportunity to contribute.
Without it, it’s hard to be effective in your job, and personally, it makes it difficult to advance toward your own career goals.
Social capital fuels how work gets done in organizations. It is what brings people together to collaborate, identifies the right people for the next project or opportunity, amplifies an idea that turns into the next new product or solution into a big hit, and ultimately what your employees need to get things done.
So why does social capital matter at work? A number of reasons:
Organizations are just people that are working toward shared goals - Organizations are just a bunch of people working toward shared goals. We all need one another to be productive at work. In 2015, Rob Cross found that the amount of people working on collaborative work had increased over 50%. The reality of our world of work today is that people work on teams and in a cross-functional nature. What is needed then, is some elbow grease, to bring these people together, and to enable them to work effectively
Employee Engagement and Satisfaction - When people have social capital, they have the relationships they feel connected and engaged. In a survey of 5,902 U.S. workers, researchers at the Pew Research Center found that high satisfaction with workplace relationships plays a major role in workers’ overall satisfaction with their jobs.
We need relationships to advance in our career - Your success in your career is correlated with the amount of people who want you to succeed. The degree to which you have social capital, and relationships to grow and advance, the more likely you are in fact to grow and advance.
There is a connection and loneliness problem - Since the pandemic, 65% of workers say they feel less connected to coworkers, and 59% report a decline in human connection (Workhuman). Peer relationships are the top driver of employee well-being—and impact engagement, satisfaction, and retention. On the flip side, BetterUp found that when managers actively build relationships, they feel more connected and report stronger workplace friendships.
Why Should Leaders Care About Social Capital?
During the pandemic, McKinsey did a research study on social capital and found that social capital had waned as a result of the pandemic. And while social capital had waned the people it hurt most are arguably the people who needed it most.
When people aren’t getting the relationships, norms, and knowledge that help them connect and engage with the broader system, it can hinder them as well as the organization. It can be easy to say that this just means that employees need to work harder, make more connections, or take ownership of their career. And all of that has a place.
But the reality is that while that may work for some people (a lot of time who already have social capital) it excludes a wide array of professionals who may not have social capital either due to their background and upbringing, or because of the nature of the systems that they step into were just not made for them.
As a manager, one of your most important jobs is helping your employees succeed—and that includes making sure they have the social capital to grow and thrive. Social capital fuels performance, development, and opportunity. But how can you actively help your team build it?
Here’s a simple framework I use with managers to guide that process:
Relationships – Connect employees to key people they need to succeed: stakeholders, mentors, or senior leaders.
Opportunities – Advocate for them to get on the field and into the game so they can showcase their strengths
Exposure – Be their amplifier. Highlight their work and impact so it’s seen and valued.
Resources – Help them get the support, budget, or approvals they need to perform at their best.
Helping employees build social capital not only accelerates their career growth, but also fosters a more equitable workplace—one where everyone has the chance to succeed.
How You Can Build Your Own Social Capital
Intentionally Build Relationships With Your Peers - Most employees intuitively understand that having positive relationships with peers and colleagues is helpful and important, unfortunately it is easy to not make time to actually do this, outside of just working together with someone. Instead, one way to do this is to intentionally set aside time to connect with your peers and colleagues. To do this, identify 1-2 people each quarter who you want to improve your working relationship with, and set aside a chunk of time that quarter to get to know them better, focusing on getting to know them, their goals, their key projects, as well as learning how to best engage and work with them. Doing this helps strengthen the relationships you eventually need to work on cross-functional teams.
Share Your Knowledge and Expertise - If you’re doing great work, others should know about it. Making sure that you are sharing your work, and your expertise with other people is critical to building social capital at work. This can be challenging for some people as it may seem as “braggy” or too much “self-promotion” but the reality of this is that while hard work is important, it’s not enough. Making sure you are making others aware of what you are doing is not just critical for standing out and advancing, but it’s actually also helpful to other people. When other people know about what you are working on, as well as your strengths + expertise, they can call on you for opportunities or when they can use your support, or recommend you for opportunities or to other people.
Help Other People - We help and support other people that we know, like and trust. One way to build social capital so that other people want to help you is to be someone who is helpful and resourceful to other people. Helping other people makes you interact with the “outside world” and takes you out of just executing tasks. This in of itself, increases your surface area for opportunities and connections to form. But simply going around just helping everyone in sight, while laudable, probably isn’t the best use of time. One way you can do this is through a simple practice of doing “5 minute favors.” This concept is borrowed from Adam Grant, but the general principle of this is to find ways to support someone in a small amount of time that means a big deal to them. This could be offering to provide someone feedback on something they are working on, helping someone prepare for a key presentation, or just taking the time to coach someone through a challenge they are facing.
“Draft” Off of Managers and Leaders - While you can always build relationships on your own, another way you can build relationships is through getting introduced to key leaders and stakeholders that are recommended to you from your manager or leaders. Going to your manager or leader and asking them to help you identify 1-2 people outside of your day to day work who would be important to know, and then asking your manager to help make an introduction is a way to start developing your weak ties, and laying the foundation for further opportunities for growth and development.
Build Your Career Team - If you talk to successful leaders and ask them what made them successful, eventually, all of them will point to other people who helped them out by lending a hand, giving them an opportunity or advocating on their behalf.
What these leaders have is the social capital needed to advance in their career. And while each individual is responsible for their own career, we all need the support of others around us to help us grow and advance. Building out your “Career team” or people who are supporting you in your career is one way to do this. To do this, start to identify the people who are currently supporting and helping you grow and advance in your career today, and write down how they are helping you do that. Then, start to identify how you want to continue building those relationships with those people, so they can continue to support and guide you in your development and growth. From there, you can also start to identify the type of other relationships and people who might be helpful to you right now.
We Need Each Other to Succeed in Today’s Workplace
Social capital is one of those things that is really important to succeeding and working effectively with others in the workplace but is often hard to pin down and define. Taking time to define what it is, and to have your managers and your employees actively cultivating it ensures you can make your people connect with each other and work together to achieve shared goals.
And as employees, when you are actively taking responsibility for developing your social capital, you are putting yourself in a better position to contribute to the organization while developing your own capital you need to advance toward your definition of career success.
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