A
lot of work has been done in the past couple of years in the field of
Social Network Analysis (SNA) -- the assessment of the real
person-to-person links in and between organizations and groups, as
distinct from the ones that you might expect to see from the 'official'
organization charts. These analyses have already provided some
interesting insights -- identifying who in organizations are the 'loners', where
the knowledge-sharing 'bottlenecks' and 'roadblocks' are, and the types
of networks that people tend to form, which can be described (according
to SNA Guru and my fellow KM specialist Valdis Krebs,
from whose site the illustration above is taken) using attributes like degree centrality
(the number of connections), betweenness
centrality (the number of connections to the
otherwise-disconnected), and closeness
centrality (the shortness of the average path to others).
This insight can then be applied to other network theories like
Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping
Points: Which network nodes indicate the critical communication
roles -- mavens, connectors and salesmen? (Heather in the illustration
above has what Valdis calls a high betweenness centrality, and is
likely what Malcolm calls a connector, while Diane could be either a
connector or a bottleneck, or both).
 The advantage of the data that
is used to construct SNA maps like the one above is their objectivity:
Generally, this data is highly quantitative, and is collected by
polling e-mails or telephone calls or other evidence of the presence of
links. Even the terms 'strong' and 'weak' ties are defined in ways that
are objectively verifiable -- they refer simply to the number of
degrees of separation between the nodes. The popular expression 'the
strength of weak ties' (the fact that most of the value in your network
tends to come from people two or more degrees of separation away) is a
bit of a misnomer: It might be more accurately (if unpoetically) called
'the power of large numbers of more remote ties'. I have argued that
because of the high degree of 'signal loss' both going out to and
coming back from these more remote links, this power is heavily diluted.
The next step, then, is to explore this 'signal loss': What causes it,
and why is it greater in some situations (e.g. when you try to get an
e-mail through one filter or intermediary to a celebrity) than in
others (e.g. in successful viral marketing, where information spreads
like wildfire).
A new book
entitled The Hidden
Power of Social Networks by Rob Cross and Andrew Parker
suggests that organizations would be wise to 'surface' and support
these de facto
networks, instead of ignoring them in favour of the formal hierarchical
ones. Management can do this, the authors say, by:
- Bridging strategically important disconnects between
departments or organizations
- Improving a network’s ability to sense and
respond to opportunities
- Aligning the organizational context to energize and
support networks
- Identifying overburdened employees and redistributing
workloads
- Eliminating information bottlenecks
- Recognizing and supporting key
“connectors”
- Pulling in peripheral people who represent untapped
expertise
To do this effectively, they say your organization needs to look beyond
the objective quantitative attributes of network links (the frequency
of connections) and survey you and everyone else in the organization to
get your assessment of each of the following 16 qualitative attributes for each person you're linked to
- The perceived value of information received from each person you're linked to
- The
extent and sophistication of problem-solving and decision-making
through collaboration with each person you're linked to
- The extent and quality of ideas and innovations you get from each person you're linked to
- The degree of awareness of your skills by each person you're linked to
- The degree and quality of your access to each person you're linked to
- The degree of engagement with you exhibited by each person you're linked to
- Your perceived level of safety of communication with each person you're linked to
- Your perceived quality of conversations with each person you're linked to
- The extent to which you think your productivity is improved by each person you're linked to
- Your perceived sense of the extent of power and influence of each person you're linked to
- The degree to which you like each person you're linked to
- Your perceived degree of closeness with each person you're linked to
- The extent to which each person you're linked to supports achievement of your career goals
- The extent to which each person you're linked to supports achievement of your personal goals
- The extent to which each person you're linked to energizes (or exhausts) you
- The extent to which you trust each person you're linked to
What
could you do with this information? Imagine you could recast the SNA
map at the top of this article with a second map that showed the
perceived quality of information transfer (each way) between you and
others in your network, and a third map that showed the perceived
degree of trust (each way) between you and others in your network? If
the perceptions each way, or between the three maps, were markedly
different, this could be startling and potentially very useful
knowledge. Unlike the authors of The Hidden Power of Social Networks,
however, I think in the hands of management it would be dangerous, disruptive, and perhaps even abusive. But suppose the perceptions of you by others (how 'well' you do in each of the 16 qualitative attributes above) was available exclusively and privately to you? This, I believe, could be astonishingly valuable as a self-assessment tool.
Recall
that Peter Drucker, who is consistently rated as the most universally
trusted and respected business adviser of this generation, has argued:
- that
it is presumptuous of managers to tell knowledge workers what to do
when today almost every employee knows how to do their job better than
their boss does (in fact it is likely their boss has never done this
job and is almost completely ignorant of how it should be done); and
- that
the greatest management challenge of this century will be to achieve
significant improvements in the effectiveness (productivity) of
knowledge work
What better way to communicate how well each
employee is doing at their job than by giving them a map that shows how
well they are perceived to be supporting their networks? Suppose for
example you got this map, and
it showed that your peers rated you extremely highly, but your boss
rated you low. Imagine what eye-opening conversations could result:
Does this mean your boss is an idiot, or does it mean you're doing all
this work helping others do their jobs at the perceived cost of getting your own essential work done?
And if management perceives it is the latter, are they right or are you
just under-appreciated and suboptimally employed, and should you in
fact have your job description changed so that helping those people who rate your help so highly becomes your job?
As long as management is kept out of this evaluation process, I think this would allow each of us to self-manage our jobs and careers,
and hence to become dramatically more effective in our work. It could
tell us that we're doing the wrong job. It could tell us that we're
working for the wrong organization. It could tell us why we're not
getting ahead, why we're not happy, and what we need to do to turn
ourselves around, to fine tune our performance, and to leverage our
perceived strengths in the organization.
It could employ The
Wisdom of Crowds to solve Drucker's 'greatest management challenge of
this century'. But ironically, and delightfully, it could solve it with no involvement from management at all.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
