What no-one tells you about the true power of networking

By Neil Patrick

How and why personal networks actually work has not been widely discussed outside of academic theories. Much of the available research is also too old to reflect the critical impact of social media.

So this weekend I have been reviewing the research evidence to try and produce some insights which I hope are helpful.

Most of the material I found talks about the benefits and tactics of effective networking, but very few writers discuss exactly HOW and WHY it works from the perspective of growing our career opportunities.

Many of my own professional contacts misunderstand the value because they don’t grasp the mathematical and social forces that they can unleash. Yes that’s right, I said mathematical.

If you understand this aspect, I guarantee your thinking about networking will be transformed.

Networking is largely misunderstood

Most people think of networking as a heavy investment of their time and energy. And since we have too little of both usually, it gets deprioritised as a task. This is a mistake and it reflects a misunderstanding of what networking is, what is involved and how it creates value.

The critical thing to understand is the power and value of weak ties

A strong tie (or link) is someone who knows a lot about you and who you are in frequent contact with (say at least once a month). A weak tie is someone who doesn’t know you that well, but knows a little about you and has an interaction with you say every 6 months or so.

Most people think that only strong ties can be of value to them in their careers. After all, if someone is only vaguely aware of you, how much value can that relationship really have?

Big mistake.

Now the math bit

This is where it gets interesting. No-one can have a very large number of strong ties. Around 200-250 or so is probably the maximum. There are just not enough hours in the day to manage much more than that.

Weak ties however are a different matter. You can quite easily maintain thousands of these. And social media is a powerful tool that helps you do exactly that.

So unlike strong ties, with weak ties and social media, you can easily grow your network to many thousands.

Now of course, only a small fraction of these might be of benefit to you.

But because you are just one person and with a little effort, your weak ties can be grown steadily, the number of potential opportunities available to you expands in proportion with the growth of your network of weak ties.

And of course the most valuable of your weak ties may well mature into strong ties over time.

But that’s not all

I like to think of what I call the “snowball analogy” when I think about weak ties. Imagine you are standing at the top of snow covered hill. You pick up a handful of snow. This is your current network. The rest of the snow on the ground is all those people you are not yet connected with.

You compact the snow into a ball and place it on the ground. Now you start to push it down the slope. At first not much happens. The ball slowly gets a bit larger and as it does so, its circumference increases. This increased circumference means that with each full turn, the ball picks up much more snow.

Once the ball gets to a certain size and depending on the degree of the slope, it reaches a critical mass. At this point, the ball’s own weight propels it down the hill faster and faster with you doing absolutely nothing at all.

Now with each rotation, the ball is picking up many times more snow than the original handful you held in your hands.

Exactly the same thing happens with social media networks

Most of us have a core of strong ties that we rely upon for our professional network. But this is a huge error.

Strong ties might seem instinctively to be more valuable than weak ties. In some ways they are. But they have limitations too:

• Typically, they are a subset of the people you have encountered in your day to day life. This means they tend to be restricted to your own social and professional areas of activity. And that means they are not only limited, they also will have significant duplications of knowledge and contacts with yourself and each other.

• They carry a degree of obligation which can be counterproductive. For example, if your employer is looking to fill a new more senior position, would they attach much weight to a colleague’s opinion about you that they knew you had a friendship with?

• But most of all, they are finite as mentioned at the start of this post. There’s not too much space left in your life to add many more strong ties, unless they are really valuable to you.

And that’s the magic of understanding network mathematics.

If you devote a proportion of your networking efforts to continually expanding your number of weak ties, your network will grow increasingly quickly. And you'll need to invest much less time.

And whilst these may be weak ties that individually only deliver a small return for you, that return is more or less constant, whether your number of weak ties is 100 or 10,000.

So 1% of a hundred weak ties will not deliver many opportunities for you. But 1% of 10,000? Now that’s a very different matter…