Becoming famous to the family

We don't want to be famous to everyone, just to those people who matter to us. Famous, that is highly valued, seen as an expert...but to fewer people.

Seth Godin, I think, coined the phrase. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. But to me, when I see that phrase, I picture Seth. And that's the point. When I want to write a blog title about networks, Seth is the first person I think of. Why does any of this matter?

It matters because technology and the internet have completely reshaped the opportunity of human networks. It matters because now we have infinitely more visible choices on who we can call on for expertise and value. Just like a spirits’ manufacturer recognises the importance of 'brand call' when a customer asks the bartender for his or her favourite drink, 'brand call' as an employee within a company is just as important. Jeff doesn't want his departmental head asking to find someone who can join a team looking at the company's portfolio strategy, he wants s/he to ask for Jeff by name. That's until Jeff becomes a victim of his skills and gets over-committed to too many of these types of projects. A demand:supply model creates winners and losers and some winners become losers. If few speak up, experts will be drowned in increasing workflows and the quiet ones will be drowned out. The market is continuously moving, so how does a company understand the flow of its available talent? How do our talents become more visible?

We are nodes in various social networks

We are nodes in various social networks, communities of practice, with different types of relationships between them. The most efficient networks are small world networks, which have high clustering and short path lengths. Tight clusters can be a force for good (yes silos are good) because they encourage trust and collaboration but they are often less good for diversity of ideas because people in the cluster tend to share the same information. Yet we know that access to external information is highly correlated with performance. New information and ideas need to come from outside of the group. This is the strength of weak ties, ties that create ‘a small world’ by linking us to other clusters and ideas.

Using a network visualization and analysis tool, I can visually see my Linkedin professional network as a map. The tool can tell me that my professional network size relative to other Linkedin members is average on most dimensions. The total number of contacts I have, the unique number of clusters I am connected to, the density of my network are all average.

You can see here that people in my network are part of different clusters (typically they have worked in the same organisation) and some are connecters to other clusters. The ‘small word’ in my personal map are the people who connect me to different clusters.

Who is the ‘go-to’ guy or girl?

Previously I talked about how companies measure talent and cited Whirlpool, who had undertaken the effort to analyse who in their company are central to the social clusters. These ‘connectors’ are having conversations with different clusters and are playing a unique role. It is highly likely that they have different, hopefully more holistic perspectives. But not all experts are great connectors. Some experts may be central to a cluster but not spread their expertise beyond the cluster.

So how do we find these experts and connectors? We can do so by moving new problems into the knowable space and making the system the star

The shift here is change how we work and how we communicate. In ‘Collaborating in a social era’ Oscar Berg discusses how the bigger a company gets, the harder it becomes to know people who work for the organisation as well as to communicate and collaborate with them. He points out that “our ability to collaborate depends heavily on how we communicate”.

He cites 5 principles that help to bring about more effective communication in a company and are at the heart of collaborative cultures:

Oscar talks about not allowing people to be anonymous, to design systems and processes to lower the threshold to participation and not to exclude people by default. By using an open platform to post requests, we are not limited to the size and skills of our immediate cluster. Whilst these seems very obvious, currently defaulting to open and transparency are not yet ingrained behaviors of many corporate cultures, and many companies are not yet going as far Whirlpool in recognising the contribution of the people who are the oil in the engine that make the system the star.

Reaching the collective potential – smarter together

18F is an office inside the U.S Government that helps other federal agencies, creating cultural change by working with teams inside agencies who want to create great services for the public.

They have an ecosystem of internal volunteer groups working on different organisational challenges. Their Working Groups and Guilds have helped many of these groups become more productive and visible thanks to writing 18F Guides on various topics which have even attracted public reviews – defaulting to open provides access even outside of their company to help anyone in the world to see what great knowledge sharing looks like.

18F themselves acknowledge that a difficult question is measuring whether this style of working is having any impact on the organisation. To answer that, many groups have set up quarterly Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to measure the impact of this way of communicating. Impact propels the flywheel and reduces resistance for others to participate in this multi-player network.

The action for a company is to first get a cluster working in this way. Facebook’s entry strategy took a clustered approach (get Harvard) before rolling out to other clusters (e.g. Stanford) but focused on increasing engagement in the network by using timelines, relationship status to get people invested in the site.

Becoming a key player in a multi-player network

I’ve talked about the organisation needs to create the conditions for success but let’s return to the individual. How do you increase your visibility?

Work on your reciprocity style

Wharton professor Adam Grant believes that whilst talent, effort, persistence, and drive are all important, a person’s reciprocity style is very important in succeeding in our goals. Adam says that in our professional lives, we tend to be either givers, takers, or matchers and that most of us are matchers. We’re willing to give but we expect something in return. Grant has found that the people who occupy the top of the success ladder are givers.

Work Out loud

A great way to do that is to switch your behaviour to work out loud and adjust your behaviour beyond collaboration (working together on a problem) to cooperation (sharing without any specific objective).

Find your 10%

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute identified the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority option They found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will be adopted by the majority of the society. If you want your ideas to shine out, focus on getting 10% of your audience to believe in your position.

In summary, yes we don't want to be famous to everyone, just to those people who matter to us. But in the social network, those people who can make a difference to you may be different to those who you think matter to you now.