An illuminating new piece of research about attitudes to networking by the ei consultant and executive coach, James Caplin, and executive search firm Veni Partners, has just been published. A study of nearly 300 men working in financial services showed that 75% of them would like to add ‘more senior’ people to their network whilst not really valuing any other kind of networking, other than the ‘get on’ kind (59% said networking was “quite useful” compared to 23% who found it “not useful” and 19% who said it was in fact “very useful”).
So what is “very useful” networking? I read a sociological paper from the last century which talked about ‘vertical networking’ which is code for ‘Climbing the Greasy Pole’ and matches the behaviour of those surveyed. But this is only one rather blurry bit of the whole picture. Clarity comes with seeing networking in a much wider context than just getting a job (although 53% of people found their got their job through networking and 73% expect to find their next one this way, what the sociologist Mark Granovetter calls “Weak Tie” theory).
Weak ties also means something the corporate world doesn’t feel very comfortable with: the tangential, the beneficial but hard-to-measure in terms of quarterly profits. The pleasure of exchanging ideas, which may lead to something positive, fruitful, interesting. Connections made between people of all levels of seniority and specialisms which might yield ‘results’. Results are not necessarily vertical in terms of sales but lateral – a different quantum altogether. This is the new world. The professional landscape is not a single upward march through promotion levels, but a horizontal, open-minded navigation. Human and social capital is a vital part of capitalism but it is following new rules.
Companies like Cisco and indeed now Linked-In are pioneering new ways of social networking which are not just about old silos – single subject groups, but plural, lateral, broader ones which bring lots of different ideas into the mix.
Stay on the greasy pole at your peril: you are more likely to slip down the pecking order this way than rise up through your connections.
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