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Getting Networking Right
Rob Cross, associate professor at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce and coauthor of the HBR article “A Smarter Way to Network.”
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Featured Guest: Rob Cross, associate professor at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce and coauthor of the HBR article A Smarter Way to Network.
SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green. Today we’re talking about a subject that I think a lot of us struggle with — networking. I’m talking today with Rob Cross, an associate professor at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce. He is the co-author of the article, “A Smarter Way to Network” in our current issue. Rob, thanks so much for talking with us today.
ROB CROSS: Absolutely. Thank you for inviting me.
SARAH GREEN: Rob, I think the basic starting point here is that most of us assume we have to have a big network to be good networkers. But in the piece, you say it’s much more about quality and diversity than quantity. So break that down for us. What kind of people do we want to have in our networks?
ROB CROSS: The interesting finding that we’ve had over about a 15 year period, we’ve worked with around 300 different organizations on this, and what got us initially interested in this were so many of the self-help books on social networking that advocated just going out and meeting a lot of people, ultimately. The advice, ultimately, in those books is about the quantity of the ties and doing, in my mind, many times very surface level activities, like going to a lot of meetings, giving out cards, basic things like that. That when I reflected on what it looked like the most effective people did in organizations I was working in, in other words, the high performers, those people that get in and stay in the top performance category, never really looked like what they were doing. In fact, most of the cases, it looked like what the high performers were doing were investing well in relationships, giving before they expected to receive things. But they weren’t out kind of consistently and overtly networking as advocated in a lot of those books.
And so we started to take a very different tact about over a decade ago. And instead of trying to go out and understand people that know a lot of other people, we got really interested in saying what do the high performers’ networks look like? How is it that those people that get in and stay in the top 20% performance category in their organization, seem to distinguish themselves through the networks that they manage around them. And the base finding across well over a decade now and a lot of organizations on this is there is a statistically significant negative likelihood of becoming and staying a high performer and just knowing a lot of people. That actually starts to introduce a trap that stunts and is a real important career derailer, we find, over time. Rather, what we see is the magic tends to be built into a range of bridging ties that people tend to maintain.
And as you can imagine, this is very different when we look by role and organization. Somebody that specializes in research and development is going to look very different than somebody that specializes in sales. So typically in the work we do it within companies, we’re looking by role and profiling the top performers by role. But the important point across all of that is that the magic tends to be built in ties that are bridging different areas of an organization. It’s not the quantity of the ties. It’s more ties that are crossing functional lines, crossing hierarchical levels, crossing sometimes physical distance, or expertise capability areas, that seem to distinguish what the high performers are doing over time.
The specific profile that we see across a lot of this work is you tend to find more effective people have obviously a tie up into the boss that’s an effective one. Then usually about 5% to 10% of their ties up and laterally to other people in positions of influence in the organization. So it’s not typically more than 10%, because then you’re running into people who are playing political games and they lose the support of their peers in the organization. But it also is not less than 5%, because then you have people that are ignoring the realities of organizations and the importance of getting exposure for what you’re doing, getting political support and kind of pull in different ways.
So there are ties kind of across hierarchy that matter. There are ties across functional lines that matter in terms of getting opportunities and exposure to different ideas. There are ties outside the organization that matter for hearing about different ways of doing things or product innovations. And then there are ties down in the hierarchy that matter in terms of engaging followership. And specifically, from our work, we see it’s not so much about going out and talking to a lot of those people as it is about being somebody that we call as an energizer. Somebody that creates pull and networks and brings the best people, the best opportunities to them over time.
SARAH GREEN: I see there you mentioned many of the different kinds of qualities and kinds of people you’d want to have in your network. But you also mentioned at the beginning of that response something about the traps and different traps you see people falling into. Can you say a little bit more about that?
ROB CROSS: Yeah, one of the things that I spend most of my time working with mid to senior level executives on is there are a series of three, very prominent traps that we find derail careers. There’s three major ones and three minor ones. And I’ll hit on the major ones quickly here. The most prominent one is you find that in many cases leaders will rise in an organization based on how good they are, their individual expertise, based on how responsive they are to people, based on how they help others out, being accessible, a good person, a good expert, all these things that you think should and do make a difference.
But they hit a certain point, particularly today with all the collaborative tools that allow people to get to these people over email or other forums instantaneously, they hit a certain point where they become way overloaded. If they don’t find ways to manage network demands down, and by that I mean shifting decision rights, shifting portions of their role, enabling others to connect underneath them rather than being somebody that jumps in to answer questions quickly. And what happens is that overload tends to sneak in, and it starts to trap that leader in ways that they often times, in the most extreme cases, I’ll see leaders that have 120 or 130 people coming to them fairly frequently for information. And yet another 70 or so people in their group saying they need even more of that person’s time to be effective, to hit their goals. And the fallacy or the problem for the leaders, they often don’t experience that. They feel like they’re moving from meeting to meeting and point to point making decisions and executing on things. And they’re not aware of those one, two, or three layers out that they’re holding up, and the opportunities that their missing.
So one of the things that we’re almost always very focused on with different leaders and organizations at the middle and more senior layers is first thinking about how do you push down on those relational demands that are consuming so much of all of our time today. And usually there are structural ways to do that to avoid becoming what I call the bottleneck or avoid insularity breeding around you. There are structural ways to do that by shifting certain routine decisions you’re making or informational requests you’re getting, making somebody else a go-to person on, or portions of role, the things that are driving people to come to you that you don’t need to be involved in any more. And then there’s some behavioral things. We tend to have to find to correct with leaders whereby they, as an example, have a tendency a lot of times to jump in to solve problems too quickly. And so they start to create the path of least resistance back to themselves over time rather than building a capability for people underneath them to solve problems over time.
SARAH GREEN: So it sounds like that’s actually a case of perhaps being over networked.
ROB CROSS: Yeah. As we’ve seen it evolve, as I said, we’ve been at this overall for about a decade and a half, but particularly over the last five or so years, as we’ve been through the recession and there have been layoffs and more work inherited by more people. And we’ve also seen continued explosion of these collaborative applications and things that help people get in touch almost instantaneously. The importance of finding ways, not just to go build a network, but first to prune it and think about how and where can I shift some of these demands off of me. Not that you’re going to go dump your best friend out of your network or somebody that is important to you. But rather, you think carefully about where that collaborative time is getting absorbed and ways of shifting that to create space to build and maintain a vibrant network is turning out to be a really big deal, a consistently stronger and stronger predictor of the effective leaders over time in ways that it just wasn’t 10 or so years ago.
SARAH GREEN: Now you mentioned pruning your network, and earlier you mentioned the importance of having people with good energy as part of your network. I know in the article you have some surprising findings, at least surprising to me, about the disproportionate negative impact of bad energizers on your life and your network. What is that impact, and then how do you go about getting those people out of your life?
ROB CROSS: So we have, just to set context on that, we have, just like we’ve mapped information flow in groups or decision making interactions to see how and where leaders fall into traps or how they excel by managing certain things differently ways. Again, about a decade and a half ago, we started also assessing this idea of enthusiasm and mapping either individually for a leader or an entire group who is creating energy for whom. It’s something we all intuitively resonate with. We’ve all been around other people that have the ability to inspire us, to create energy, and get us engaged, in what we’re doing in a certain organization. And then to your point, we’ve also all had the reverse, those people that drain us or just don’t inspire us in different ways.
But across all this work, the really interesting thing there is we found that this informational network that I mentioned before that’s rich in those bridging ties is a big predictor of success over time. But being an energizer, being somebody that creates enthusiasm in these networks, that roughly, across all these organizations, turns out to matter four times as much as the bridging ties statistically when we look at the likelihood of ongoing success. Not just surging and getting into the top performance category and falling away, but continuing to excel throughout your career.
And so that’s been a big deal that we’ve spent a lot of time focusing on. We know energy is not just– energizers, I should say–are not just people that are charismatic, are extroverted or take a room by storm. You’re as likely to see them be low key as high key in many instances. But the consistency is their presence. When they’re with you, they are fully present. They’re showing the importance of what you’re up to through their body language, through the way they react to your ideas, things like that. So we know there are nine pretty specific behaviors that are associated with energizers, people that create enthusiasm that can be taught and cultivated in different ways.
And so when we see the de-energizers, and to your point, the energizers have a very significant, positive effect on innovation, on the likelihood of being a high performer, et cetera. The de-energizers usually have more than twice the negative impact that the energizers do on a positive front. And so you’re very interested, even though the number of de-energizing relationships in most organizations is much fewer, they still have a greater impact. So you’re obviously very interested in seeing how you can shift that. In our work, most of what we see is that about 5% of the people account for about 90% to 95% of the misery in the interactions that we have.
And so part of what we might do is focus on the behaviors. Sometimes you find that the de-energizers are just doing one or two things wrong. They’re criticizing an idea early, and they’re not exposing their own thinking. And so they think they’re doing a great service for the organization, but they don’t really sometimes see the impact they have on enthusiasm. And so if you can get it at that level, there are actually things you can do culturally to shift behaviors and actually get a good impact in an organization through different developmental opportunities.
But when that’s not possible, the other constant area that I’m focused on with leaders, is to think about how to either minimize the interactions with those people, to shift or restructure work or role to do that, or at a bare minimum, to alter your reaction to them. We all have a tendency, at least I did I know until I got into this work, we have a tendency to think we just have to endure those people. And a lot of times that frustration or anxiety goes over into the next set of conversations we have and sometimes even home with us in different ways. And so the coaching that I’ll focus on as much as I can is to say, gosh, first think about are there innovative ways that you could spend less time tied to those people? And a lot of times people see different ways of restructuring work so that they’re not brought in contact to them that much, if they can’t shift the relationship itself. And if they can’t even do that, then the question is can you personally handle that better. You find ways to distance yourself from the interaction rather than internalize it, and allow it to consume you in different ways.
SARAH GREEN: So as we’ve been talking about this, we’ve been mostly focusing on what we hope to get out of networking. And I think we’ve also been talking about this in a structural way. But what I hear you saying is that if you want to be a good networker, you really have to be the kind of person people want to network with. You have to kind of do unto others.
ROB CROSS: Yeah, and I think that’s been one of the nicest twists that we’ve seen in this work, especially when you think about people like the introverts or the engineers or scientists. That they hear the idea of social networking, the last thing they want to do is go out and just meet a lot of people. It just not built into who they are. And basically what we’re seeing here is that that’s not what the better performers are doing. That’s what’s in all the self-help books, but it’s not what the better performers tend to be doing. Rather, they tend to be people, they don’t have to be high key or charismatic, but they, in general, tend to be people that create pull in networks. They’re people that others want to be around. And over time, they benefit from that in the sense that the better opportunities come their way, the better talent migrates their way, and the success accrues from that as you evolve in an organization. So that’s been a neat twist for me, because it’s showing us that having a good network is not just about reaching. It’s also about creating pull, being somebody with integrity, that’s trustworthy, a range of things like that, that we know creates enthusiasm and energy and interactions.
SARAH GREEN: Well Rob, I have to say, I think editors probably fall into that category of introverted, lone workers, too. So as someone in that category, I think this has been very helpful. Thank you so much for talking with us today.
ROB CROSS: Yes, absolutely. Thank you.
SARAH GREEN: That was Rob Cross of the McIntire School of Commerce. The article is “A Smarter Way to Network.” For more, visit HBR.org.