Read time: 3 mins
Using Your Network Structure to Achieve Success
How important do you think your network is for helping you achieve your personal and professional goals? As it turns out, your social network impacts your pay, job satisfaction, creativity and many other aspects that contribute to your success. But it’s not the size that matters.
In this video, Marissa King, a Program Co-designer on the Accelerated Management Program from the Yale School of Management Executive Education, explains the effect of your social network structure.
Transcript
I’d like to begin by inviting you to reflect upon how important you think your network is for your ability to achieve your personal and professional goals. What we know from decades of research, is your social network determines your pay, promotion, job satisfaction, engagement at work, creativity, innovation, and your overall ability to perform at your job. While oftentimes people think it’s the size of your network that matters, for all of the outcomes I just talked about, it’s actually your network structure, not the size of your network, that really matters.
What do I mean when I say social network? If you look at the graphic on your screen, you’ll see an illustration of a social network – a network graph. In the graph, each of the circles can represent people, it can also be representing companies, countries – really any object. The lines between the circles are denoting relationships.
By creating graphs like these, social scientists can gain a better understanding of how social relationships affect a wide variety of outcomes. Scientists in psychology, sociology, computer science, and physics have spent decades trying to understand how the different arrangements of the circles – which we call nodes – impact a wide variety of outcomes.
In thinking about your social relationships, it’s helpful, oftentimes, to think of an analogy. If you think about carbon – carbon comes in many different forms, but arrange it one way, carbon produces a diamond.
You can take the same carbon atoms, and arrange them differently, and produce graphite.
Social networks have much of the same property. You can take the same individuals, and arranged in one way, you can obtain outcomes that lead to innovation and creativity. But if you take the same team and compose them and arrange them differently, you can also achieve a quite different set of outcomes.
Your network has a huge impact on your ability to achieve personal success. But beyond you, it also has a huge impact on your team’s ability to work together effectively, and your organization’s capacity to develop and deliver goods and services effectively.
What determines what your network looks like? Context, behaviors, and choices are three factors that have a huge impact on what your network looks like.
Oftentimes when people are thinking about their own social network, they think that who you know is what really matters. But what we know is social context – or actually, where you go – is one of the biggest factors in determining what the structure of your network looks like.
Oftentimes another misconception about networks is that personality is one of the biggest determinants. Personality explains very little of what someone’s network looks like. In fact, it’s the way that they behave, how much they disclose to others about themselves, that has a much bigger effect.
And the third piece are choices. One of the biggest choices you make when you’re determining the strength of your network, and how it will shape your life, is how much you invest in maintaining your existing network, versus how much you invest in expanding, and in growing, the size of your network.