Marissa King, professor at Yale School of Management, has studied the strengths and weaknesses of different types of social networks. She argues that most of us have a natural style of networking: we favor tight social circles, or brokering across varied groups, or having an expansive list of contacts. But she says we can also tweak the way we build relationships to meet our changing needs. For example, widening our outreach to boost creativity and innovation or focusing on trusted friends and colleagues to increase trust and happiness. King is the author of the book Social Chemistry: Decoding the Patterns of Human Connection.
ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.
We all know that networking is critical to career success. You need to meet the right people and form strong relationships to get access to the best opportunities. As the old saying goes, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
But how exactly do you build a strong professional network? Which contacts should you pursue and what type of connections do you want to make? How much time and energy do you give to everyone? What does it take to maintain those relationships, especially in a time of crisis? And, how can you do all of this in an authentic way without feeling slimy?
Our guest today has done deep research into workplace social connections. She says they’re critical to both performance and well-being, but notes that not all successful networks are built the same.
Marissa King is a professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, and she’s the author of the new book, “Social Chemistry: Decoding the Patterns of Human Connection.” Marissa, thanks so much for being with me.
MARISSA KING: It’s great to be with here with you today, Alison.
ALISON BEARD: So as I mentioned in the intro, most of us know the importance of networking. It helps us get jobs, move up the corporate ladder, find support if we want to start our own company. But it seems like the relationships that you study are going beyond what we think of as professional networks. They’re more like connections than contacts. So how do you describe the difference?
MARISSA KING: One of the ideas that you think is oftentimes misleading is this notion that if we simply know more people, we’re building an effective network, that you need to be attending the next professional event in meeting new people and connecting. But what we know from a wide variety of research is that the relationships that you really need, the ones that are going to help you get a job, that’ll help you get promoted, your health and your well-being, it’s not simply how many people you know, it’s the strength of those relationships, the quality, and the patterns that exist in your own existing network.
ALISON BEARD: And what type of research have you done to study these relationships?
MARISSA KING: Most of my research focuses on understanding what these patterns are. We’re all embedded in webs of social interaction. Whether you’re bumping into a stranger at a coffee shop or connecting with an old friend, all of these connections and moments leave tracers that are your network. Different types of network configurations have different benefits, and most of the time we’re focusing on, what are those positive benefits? Of course, they have trade-offs. But the idea really is to think of your network as a map and understanding what those contours are that really arise from where you’ve been and how you’re living your life help you understand where you are at the moment, but also predict what your likelihood of success is going to be in the future.
ALISON BEARD: But if you have strong connections, no matter what your map looks like, that means that you’ll perform better, you’ll be more creative, you’ll be more engaged, you’ll be happier?
MARISSA KING: Yes and no. So if you think about some of these outcomes that you would care about, having deep, stronger relationships, those really close ties, provide more emotional support. They help guard against burnout. They help increase trust. But there’s a whole different type of connection that we care about if you’re thinking about innovation and creativity. It’s oftentimes not that people in your closest network and your deepest relationships that are going to provide those benefits. So understanding what some of these trade-offs are, depending on what type of relationship you are, having stronger ties is going to help with trust, it’s going to help guard against burnout, but it’s really, if you care about innovation and creativity, it’s a different type of connection that’s going to be really important.
ALISON BEARD: So it seems like you’re saying that people can be successful networkers in many different ways. we don’t all have to follow the same model. What are the models that you’ve studied?
MARISSA KING: If we think about the decades of research that we have, we know that there are essentially three different network signatures. I refer to these as brokers, conveners, and expansionists. Conveners really focus on maintaining their existing ties and devote their energy to maintaining existing relationships, and as a result, they have a lot of trust in their relationships and they have a lot of emotional support as a consequence. A second type of network configuration that we frequently see are brokers. Brokers have really unusual career paths. They’re good at giving impromptu speeches about things they know nothing about. And because they often span different social worlds, this allows them to be much more creative and much more innovative. And the third type, expansionists, are who we think of as the quintessential networkers.
If you ask them how many people they know named Adam or how many people they know named Rachel, they know two or three. So they have extraordinarily large networks. They give them a lot of influence and a lot of reach. So by understanding what different type of network configuration you have, you can either maximize those benefits, if that’s what you need, or thinking about changing your network to try to utilize different network approaches to get different benefits.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I’d love to dig into each of those in turn. You talked about some of the positives of being a convener, but what are some of the negatives?
MARISSA KING: Well, the benefit of being a convener is there’s a lot of trust and a lot of reciprocity. The downside is that conveners often fall victim to group think. They tend to have friends who are friends with one another, so they essentially can be in an echo chamber. And oftentimes those echo chambers are composed of people who have similar ideas to them and also look similar to them, and as a result they really can oftentimes be really sealed off from new ideas.
ALISON BEARD: And what about being a broker? That to me sounds totally transactional.
MARISSA KING: Yeah, and the research is consistent with this. The benefits of brokerage really are also contingent on how the broker interacts. So if you think about where the benefits from this particular network configuration come from, it’s by spanning different worlds. That also puts you at a place where you could be either transactional or you could also just simply be exploitative. So for this type of configuration in particular, a lot of research has focused on the importance of having an empathic and trustworthy broker, if you’re thinking about not just the broker benefiting themselves, but what that implies for the companies that they’re embedded in.
ALISON BEARD: And then the third, the expansionist model, that seems super fun and interesting, but I can imagine that sometimes it doesn’t feel all that rewarding, because you’re not really close with anyone.
MARISSA KING: It’s funny that you say that it seems like it would be fun, because to me being an expansionist was just exhausting as someone that doesn’t work a room that well. Expansionist, it can be extremely rewarding for people who really thrive on having interactions with strangers and getting to know new people. But the consequences, regardless of what type of network you have, you’re essentially making a choice between, do you want a smaller number of deeper connections or do you want to know a lot more people? But necessarily just because of time constraints, those connections are going to be much thinner. So the downside of expansionism comes really that they’re oftentimes surprisingly lonely despite having this extraordinarily large network.
ALISON BEARD: You studied lots of interesting real-world examples, brokers like Yo-Yo Ma, conveners like Anna Wintour. Who was your most interesting networker?
MARISSA KING: Vernon Jordan is a classic example. He has been called the Rosa Parks of Wall Street. He was instrumental in bringing together the Black community and the business community. He was also known famously as Bill Clinton’s first friend and closest ally. And he in many ways exemplifies all of these different properties. He started out with very little. He was the grandson of a sharecropper. His first job was acting as a chauffer to Robert Maddox, which he thought because he was excluded because of his race from working at an insurance company. And over time he built an extraordinary range of connections, so he had a really large network. He also had this property of brokerage, which was really central to his ability. He spent a lot of time in the Civil Rights Movement and working to improve the conditions for African-Americans, and because of that, he had deep ties into that community that he could then bring to the business community.
And that connection allowed him to sit on more corporate boards than anyone else at the time and that he was known as the shortest link between any two corporate boards on Wall Street. And so he has all of properties in his network and they allowed him to be creative, but it also exemplifies one of the trade-offs that people will say, essentially, “What did he actually do? What’s his job?” And the downside is that people can think of it like, “Well, he was just simply networking and what value is there to that?” And there has been extraordinary value in that it’s transformed racial relations and representation on Wall Street, and he’s had a profound influence in politics. But at the same time, he’ll also report that he himself feels lonely. So his case, in very many different ways, exemplifies both the opportunities and drawbacks to all of these different network positions.
ALISON BEARD: Is it okay to just network and form connections in the way that feels natural and organic to you? Or are you suggesting that some of us need to consider trying these other strategies in order to succeed?
MARISSA KING: No, I think it’s absolutely critical to network in a way that is comfortable to you. There’s great research that was done by Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino at Harvard, and Maryam Kouchaki at Northwestern that’s actually looked at what happens when people engage in types of networking that feels inauthentic to them. And a lot of their research is focused on why networking feels dirty. And what they found throughout the course of their work is that t’s a particular type of social interaction, what they call an instrumental work-focused networking. The idea that I’m going to go to an event and meet someone to try to get something out of that particular interaction. And in their work what they found is that when people engage in that type of network building that they often have this moral aversion.
And this makes perfect sense. If we think about our social connections, in many ways, they are the most sacred thing we have, so thinking about being purposeful about them or inauthentic actually causes people to shut down. And when they feel that, for the close to two-thirds of people, what we know is when they experienced that they then will just simply not engage in building relationships or networking.
ALISON BEARD: Have you seen people successfully shift their style?
MARISSA KING: Our styles are shifting all the time, and I think that that’s one of the things that is so exciting and has so much possibility. If you think about research that has looked at network size, our networks are largest when we’re 23. So this early period in our life, actually, we have extraordinarily large networks that would meet the criteria for expansionist. But over the course of our careers, we know that early parenthood is like falling off a network cliff. Our ties shrink and focus inward. And so these natural life changes and phases have strong imprints on our network. So everyone’s network really is changing all the time. Some of this is unconscious, we’re just at the fate of life transitions without thinking about it. But what I really hope to call attention to is that we can be more thoughtful about how the choices we are making impact our networks, and so certainly they can and do change all the time.
ALISON BEARD: What about some people who just aren’t very social at all? Can they learn to be one of these types? Do they need to?
MARISSA KING: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s one of the greatest opportunities. And also, what we know is that one of the greatest difficulties most people have when they’re thinking about this, for lots of different reasons, the idea of being purposeful about our social relationships is often off-putting. But beyond that, there’s a wide variety of research that shows a lot of people feel the exact way that you described, that they simply don’t know how to do this. And it’s funny, in a lot of different areas of our life, we oftentimes think we’re better than average, these better than average effects. We think we’re smarter than average, we think we can drive better than average, but consistently when it comes to social relationships, research by Erica Boothby and Nick Epley has found that actually people think that they’re worse at building social relationships and connecting socially than they really are.
And so having this confidence is really key, and part of that confidence can also come from realizing that there are ways that we know that are much more effective for being able to build relationships. So understanding, for instance, Alison Wood Brooks has talked on this podcast about the importance of followup questions, the importance of listening, you’ve also talked about. We can think about, if you’re trying to enter a room, where do you go when you enter a room, understanding that it’s going to be much easier to go to an odd number group, it’s going to make that much easier. So by starting to understand that many people feel like they don’t know how to do this, but by understanding some pretty basic rules about human connection and how they work can help increase people’s confidence and make them feel much more comfortable for building social relationships.
ALISON BEARD: You and other authors are suggesting that we should do more of the socializing build stronger bonds in our professional world, so ranging from casual acquaintances that we can introduce to each other to serious friendships. But isn’t there a danger in focusing our social energy in our professional life, because you’re making your entire identity about work? Isn’t it okay to totally compartmentalize and have a social life that’s totally separate from work.
MARISSA KING: Absolutely, and there are huge benefits to that. One of the things I found in my own research comparing different types of network structures is that we’ve actually found that brokers who tend to keep their social life and their personal life separate actually have much more work-life balance. And while I think that it’s important to think about relationships in general, I think that there are huge advantages actually to keeping our work lives and our social life separate. And the idea is just to give the understanding about, what are the trade-offs between making these choices and to think about them in a way that is thoughtful and allowing them to create a set of relationships that’s most supportive for what they need, either that’s for their health or well-being, which I spend a lot of time focusing on, or their professional lives. And it doesn’t need to be that we need to focus most of our energy on our professional lives. And for a lot of people, I actually think that, that could have negative consequences.
ALISON BEARD: We do tend to gravitate to people who are similar to us, whether it’s inside work interests or outside work interests. So how do we develop a more strategic mindset about this, figuring out the right people to put our time and energy into without being or coming across as Machiavellian? You’ve talked about that a little bit, but I still have this sense that people will say, “Oh, it’s just not me,” and I don’t think people will appreciate that kind of behavior.
MARISSA KING: No, I completely agree. And if there’s anything that I try to emphasize again and again in my work is that it’s networks, it’s not networking. We all have networks. It’s just our existing set of relationships. And what’s key really is figuring out how to use those in whatever it’s most supportive to you, but also to the people that you have relationships with. And so it’s really, really critical I think to realize that there’s a profound difference between thinking about, here’s the set of social relationships I have, here’s how I contribute and here’s how that’s helping me. But in contrast to the idea of networking, which I oftentimes think of, and you were talking about, Alison, how I need to go out so I can meet this one person. Based on everything that we know from science, that idea is really, really misguided.
So if I have an idea that I’m going to go somewhere and I’m going to meet a specific person and then that specific person is going to help me, the chances of that happening are really, really low. But instead if I’m saying, “Okay, I want to switch careers. I at least want to learn about a new industry,” a much better strategy is thinking about, how am I spending my time? Is there somewhere I could go? Could I attend a webinar that is speaking to this idea that I’m interested in? And by starting to spend my time differently, the chances are that you will meet someone who may be able to help you down the road. But it’s very unlikely that you can specifically reach out to a person with an idea of getting something out of that in mind.
ALISON BEARD: If I’m a manager and I see that one of my employees needs some social growth or a better network, how do I encourage that? Or is that too much intrusion?
MARISSA KING: I think it’s really the responsibility of a manager to help all employees in this regard. If you think of what your job is as a manager or a leader, if it’s developing talent, then it’s also helping your employees develop the social skills that are going to help you, but also them and also other people in the company. And I think that’s the goal, really. We all are trying to learn in this regard. If you take one of the most simple skills, seemingly simple skills, that’s absolutely critical, the ability to listen, if you ask most people, the vast majority of people will tell you that they’re a really good listener. But if you’ve ever spent any time working at a company, you know that most people don’t listen at all. And so starting to think about, okay, how can I help encourage the development of this skill, is going to have extraordinary dividends for both employee, but also for the group as a whole.
ALISON BEARD: How have you seen organizations try to help groups of employees and especially their leaders be better at making social connections? What works and what doesn’t?
MARISSA KING: So at a very high level, people spend a lot of time measuring and thinking about human capital, but they spend far less time thinking about social capital. So if you even ask most managers, “What does the network of people in your company look like? Alan, is he a broker or an expansionist? What type of network does he have?” Managers are really, really poor at understanding what type of networks exists within their own company. And that’s a basic starting point. If you’re trying to think about how to build social relationships, you actually need to understand what relationships you have within the company as a starting point.
ALISON BEARD: Now, the inevitable question, how does all of this change, has all of it changed, because of COVID?
MARISSA KING: During COVID, I have done research, and my colleagues and I have found a couple of key changes and what has happened to people’s networks pre and post-COVID. One of the biggest changes is that we’ve seen the outer layer of social networks shrink. So, by our estimates, this external layer of social networks have shrunk by close to 17%, which is a pretty striking change, but it’s also consistent with what we know from research, that networks tend to shrink or turtle in, in times of uncertainty and crisis. And part of that is because they’ve made a natural adaptation. In any type of network, there’s naturally going to be this trade off between, are you focusing on your time, it’s a fixed commodity, are you focusing your time on your closest relationships or are you spending it more on acquaintances? And what we’ve seen in research is that people are focusing much more on their closest relationships and spending far less time maintaining these weaker outer ties.
ALISON BEARD: So I’d love to talk about some ways that people networked pre-COVID and might go back to, and then also what we’re doing now, and you tell me if it’s a thumbs up or thumbs down.
MARISSA KING: All right. I like this.
ALISON BEARD: Okay. LinkedIn?
MARISSA KING: LinkedIn, I think it’s a thumbs up. LinkedIn has a couple advantages. Any social media, whether it’s LinkedIn or another platform, is great for maintaining existing relationships, if that’s the goal. But one of the things that I’ve found most interesting about what happens on LinkedIn as a platform, if you look at social interactions that are happening there, they actually tend to be more diverse than our face-to-face social interaction. So if you’re looking to try to increase the workplace and have it been more diverse and more inclusive, surprisingly, LinkedIn is helping to contribute to that.
ALISON BEARD: I’m going to group these together, because they’re the more social, social networks. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram?
MARISSA KING: Oh. It is not my personality to say thumbs down to anything, but I would say use them sparingly. And what we know from research is that, even simply having a phone on the table if someone’s not even using it during a conversation, is it makes the conversations that we’re in less enjoyable. If you have kids at home right now, I’m with my kids all day every day, but I don’t feel like we’re actually connecting in the way that we would if everyone were on devices. And I think that social media is giving the illusion that we’re staying connected and deepening our friendships, but in reality, it’s making us distracted from the people that we’re with.
ALISON BEARD: So it’s faux expansionism.
MARISSA KING: At best, yes.
ALISON BEARD: An industry conference?
MARISSA KING: Oh. Industry conferences are good depending on what your goal is. I think the best industry conferences are ones that are small when you actually have the time to learn from one another and spend time with other colleagues. But when they’re unstructured, that it’s let’s all go to the ballroom now with our name tags on and just awkwardly stand in the corner and try to figure out where we’re supposed to go, is not as helpful. So they’re helpful, particularly when they’re well structured.
ALISON BEARD: Virtual industry conference?
MARISSA KING: I like virtual industry conferences better, for a lot of different reasons. I think it allows more people to participate, and it gives you a lot more flexibility about how you’re structuring those social interactions. It allows for people to actually engage more who wouldn’t as frequently engage and it allows us to connect in ways that we normally wouldn’t connect. So I think that there’s a lot of possibility there and I think it’s beneficial both from an inclusion standpoint, but also allowing us to be more creative about how we’re structuring these types of events.
ALISON BEARD: Cold email?
MARISSA KING: I’m going to say thumbs down. Email just generally gets thumbs down. It’s very hard to connect with people over text in general. I will say that in our study one of the really surprising findings to me is that people who emailed strangers were less lonely than, for instance, people who are emailing acquaintances. I’m not sure what they’re doing when they’re emailing strangers, so I think there may be some benefit to that. But one of the few emails that I think can be really impactful right now is to reach out to someone without an agenda. We spend so much time on email getting asked it just drains energy from that type of interaction. But simply reaching out to someone right now because of that and saying just, “Hey, I don’t have an agenda. I just wanted to say hi,” I think that that’s one potential positive use of it.
ALISON BEARD: Cold call?
MARISSA KING: Cold call I like better than the cold email. And my colleague Michael Krauss has done really interesting work showing that voice conveys empathy in a way that other mediums can’t, and this is one of the reasons I don’t like email so much. And I think right now more than ever just hearing a voice can have an extraordinary impact. And so I think we all want to spend more time on the phone and less time on email and video, so I think that that’s a better way to go.
ALISON BEARD: One-on-one coffee?
MARISSA KING: Thumbs up. I think if you want to build relationships, one-on-one interactions, there’s no substitute. So big thumbs up on coffee or tea.
ALISON BEARD: One-on-one Zoom?
MARISSA KING: One-on-one Zoom, Zoom is tough right now. And it’s tough for the same reason that it’s hard to have interactions with a phone. It’s just distracting. And so I think Zoom can be helpful, but if you’re going to do it, keep it short.
ALISON BEARD: Marissa, thanks so much for joining me.
MARISSA KING: It was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.
ALISON BEARD: That’s Marissa King, a professor at Yale and the author of Social Chemistry. This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our Audio Product Manager. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Alison Beard.