Seven Rules of Power 5: Developing Social Relationships
Seven Rules of Power 5: Developing Social Relationships
The fifth of Pfeiffer’s rules of power is that you need to be persistent in building a social network. Power is a game based on ‘people’ and you need to know and draw on many, many people. A social network can inform you, it can help you find collaborators, and it can get you key votes.
Several studies have shown that the ability to network is one of the most important political skills you can have for income, promotion, professional prestige and job satisfaction.
But social networking is another item that honest people don’t like. For example, one of the words that I particularly dislike is “networking” - to me, networking is the same thing as human mining, which means using people as tools. Your friends and family or colleagues or peers, if you say “we should be good relationship ah, you are my network!” You’d be furious.
One study found that those who believe in the usefulness of social networking spend an average of 6.3 hours a week networking, while others spend less than 2 hours. And the researchers’ recommendation is that you should spend 8-10 hours.
Not only are we not spending enough time, but we’re also socializing with the wrong people.
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The truth is that as pack animals, we like to socialize with people. But we spend most of our time with family and friends.
Sociologists have long studied and understood that from the point of view of obtaining useful information and getting opportunities for growth, you should spend more time with ‘weak ties’ - that is, people who are farther away from you and located on the fringes of your social network. The reason for this is simple: the people you spend time with know things that you know; you should socialize more with people who know things you don’t know.
Some people have examined and found that the biggest difference between successful people and average people in socializing is that successful people spend more time on people who are far away from them on social networks than those who are close to them. They don’t go home to their wives right after work, and they are more interested in people they don’t know well.
I heard that Lyndon Johnson, when he was young, once caught up with staying at a hotel with young political elites from around the country for an event. He came out to the public restroom five times a night to brush his teeth - because he wanted more opportunities to meet and talk to people. I also heard about an official in China who had three dinners a day with different people.
So you might say, is that right? Isn’t it obvious that they are trying to take advantage of each other? Isn’t it awkward to force a relationship between two people who obviously don’t know each other well?
Because you resent it, you always socialize at work all the time as a last resort to get things done and not as a skill to develop, so your social network doesn’t work.
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Traditionally, we sometimes even think that being “socially inept” is a cool trait. For example, we used to think that intellectuals were supposed to be nerds, and scientists were supposed to hide in their labs and do research all day ……
The truth is that nowadays scientists have to socialize a lot because you always have to collaborate with people. A typical paper nowadays is often done by two or three groups, e.g. one group for experiments, one for theory, and another for numerical simulations - often the three groups are not part of the same research organization.
You need to talk to all kinds of people on a regular basis. Especially those scientists who are in charge of a section spend most of their time in meetings and discussions. It’s like we’re traveling around like jaded people. Not only do you have to know all the important people in the field, but you also have to know what everyone is up to, who could be your collaborators, who might team up with you for funding, who are your competitors and who are your enemies. Let’s not forget that the Internet was invented by physicists at the Western European Nuclear Center (CERN) to communicate with their peers around the world.
This is especially true of companies, where the CEO probably spends most of his time not dealing with internal matters, but going out and doing external relations, meeting and chatting with peers or people in other industries to make friends and talk about the big strategy. This is just like the president can’t spend all day thinking about his own people, he has to go out and join forces internationally to do so. Often the attitude of outsiders is more decisive in determining whether you can get to the top and whether your power is secure.
Do you see a major difference between this kind of socializing and what people think of as “making connections”?
In my opinion, the most critical reason why honest people don’t want to engage in social networking is because they have the wrong idea about social networking.
Intuitively, when we think of social networking, we think that we need to establish some kind of “emotional relationship” and imagine social networking as “relationship networking”. In fact, emotional relationship is only between acquaintances, to put it bluntly, whether we are “good enough”. People who are not related to each other will often make some “emotional investments” in order to quickly establish an emotional relationship, such as drinking heavily, observing people’s behavior and even flattering them, which is indeed embarrassing.
Furthermore, some people interpret social networks as “networks of love” or “networks of benefits”. If I give you a favor today, I expect you to give me a favor in the future, treating the interaction as depositing and withdrawing money into an emotional account. This is pure mutual exploitation, and certainly something a gentleman would not want to do.
But one of the insights I gained from reading Pfeiffer’s book is that the kind of social network we really need at work is neither a network of relationships nor a network of people - it’s a network of cooperation and information. It’s a new kind of relationship that only exists in modernized work scenarios: we separate work exchanges from emotional exchanges and exchanges of interest.
Work is work, life is life; cooperation is cooperation, personality is personality. We are all people with multiple identities [1]. We only need to invest a limited amount of emotion and engage in a limited amount of competition.
Once you figure this out, there is no embarrassment and you will be proactive in building your network.
Specifically, there are about four ways to build a social network.
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- The first method, and the simplest and most fundamental, and the prerequisite for all working relationships, is collaboration. *
I’ve heard that your group recently had an experimental result and I happen to have a theoretical tool, can we collaborate? No one would turn down such an engagement, and a conference call could be arranged immediately. That’s because collaboration is beneficial to both parties; it’s a win-win.
You can think of collaboration as an end in itself, but you can also think of it as a means to build relationships. Studies have shown that collaboration creates cohesion. When people work together to do something, it naturally brings them closer together.
It’s called the IKEA Effect. You know that IKEA doesn’t sell ready-made furniture, they usually give you a bunch of wooden boards and you have to put them together yourself like building blocks. The IKEA Effect says that this process of assembling your furniture improves your opinion of that furniture - because you feel like it’s your own creation.
By the same token, when you work with a few collaborators on a job, not only do you have a high opinion of that job, but you also feel a strong sense of identification with your collaborators, with you as a team.
To put it bluntly, doing things together is the best way to bring people closer together, and it’s much stronger than drinking or anything else. If you can’t work together for a while, participating in an activity together or going out together can also enhance your relationship, but experience shows that such activities should be new and interesting, and can make a deep impression on people.
Academia has an inherent advantage in cooperation, because we are all famous, which school you come from, what papers you have published, others will know it when they go online, and there is a strong social trust here.
But there is a trust issue in general working relationships. If you rashly tell someone that you want to cooperate, their first reaction will be who are you and why should I trust you? This leads us to the second method.
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*The second method is to find common ground and a sense of community. *
The most common way to do this is to get someone you both know to introduce you. For example, if you have an investment deal you’re looking for someone to work on, and your former college friend happens to know that potential partner, you can ask him to match you up.
A key piece of knowledge here is that even weak commonalities can quickly build trust. Maybe that college friend of yours hasn’t been in touch in years, it doesn’t matter, it works just as well. This is because we are always willing to trust people who are similar to us. Relationships like alumni and fellow townspeople have an innate sense of closeness, not to mention a connection to your identity in the community.
So if introductions are so important, why don’t you make them? Wouldn’t your status be important if you could make introductions to both sides of the aisle on a regular basis? Indeed.
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- This leads to the third method, becoming a ‘broker (Broker)’. *
Ronald Burt, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, developed an idea called ‘bridging structural holes’, which is also translated as ‘structural holes’, meaning that two groups that are otherwise unconnected need an intermediary figure to connect them.
A real estate agent connects buyers with sellers, an investment banker connects those who need capital with those who have it, and a headhunter connects vacancies with talent. …… These are all intermediaries. By becoming an intermediary, you not only contribute to both groups, your own importance increases.
The best people to be intermediaries are those who belong to both circles at the same time.
There is a nuclear energy company in Japan, and there are two kinds of people in the company. One kind of person knows technology, and the other kind of person is in business, and they don’t usually talk to each other. There is one person in this company who is the only one who has an MBA degree in nuclear energy and the only one who has a degree in nuclear energy in business, and he speaks very good English and is the only one in the company who is in constant contact with foreign countries. So he’s at the intersection of three circles, so of course he’s very important.
The company can’t do without him, and will give him priority in promotions. This is the hub of the social network.
In his previous book “Power”, Pfeiffer told me a case that impressed me a lot. There was a college student who hadn’t even graduated yet, and he interned at a company. He happened to meet one of the company’s executives and learned that the executive would love to lecture at his university, probably because it would be very prestigious. This incident was actually quite easy, because this student happened to know a professor, and that professor happened to want to invite an outside executive to give a lecture.
The student then half-jokingly says to the executive, if I can connect you with the opportunity to lecture at the university, can you set me up with a formal position that gives me access to the CEO. The executive immediately agreed. The student easily convinced the professor to offer the lecture and he got the position.
What is this called? It’s called intermediation.
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That student must also know * the fourth method of networking, which is to approach the centers of power. *
There was a fellow, an immigrant, who might not be very familiar with American culture, might not know how to drink and chat and make friends, and did not have much business skills, but he had a very favorable position. His duties required him to report frequently on behalf of his group to the top management of the company on the progress of his work, which enabled him to attend board meetings; at the same time, he had to interact with many departments of the company, from which he had to pass on all kinds of news. As a result, he was easily promoted.
Being close to the center of power has at least two benefits for you. One is that the top brass can see you. The second is that you have access to a lot of key information and you know how the company is run. That’s why it’s important to choose a position that gives you as much access to the core as possible.
This means you’d better go to a real power department that holds key resources, or a business department that solves key difficult problems. For American companies, the financial sector is usually very important and prone to leadership. Another example is the current Microsoft CEO, Nadella, an Indian who joined Microsoft on a work visa. Don’t you usually struggle at the grassroots level with such qualifications? How come he became CEO at a young age? Because he was in Microsoft’s cloud computing department before, he turned the cloud computing into Microsoft’s most profitable department. If you enter the VR glasses department on the day you enter Microsoft, you may just catch this wave of layoffs.
For power games, location often outweighs ability.
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Do you see that? All of these ways of building a social network in Pfeiffer don’t require you to lose your personality to harden your relationship with someone. You don’t need to engage in some kind of emotional bribery; good relationships are the result of both parties working together to nurture them. We can even say that a good relationship is actually a by-product, the result of working together on something. What after work every day to find someone to drink, I’m afraid that is the least efficient way to socialize.
*What you need to try to find is not how to “fix” someone, but to get to a position where you can do something. *
The final caveat of this talk is that social networks are not as big as they are. If you can find the right person for everything, that’s pretty much it.
Whereas personal branding is about people knowing about you, social networking is more about you knowing about people first, and you initiating contact. But as I understand it, personal branding and social networking in the Game of Thrones are essentially about two things: whether you know them or not, and whether you can trust them or not. If the key players know you and trust you, your social network is the best it can be.
Comments
[1] Persons with one identity and persons with multiple identities
Highlight
Power Rule #5: You have to be persistent in building a social network.
Four ways to build a social network:
- collaborate
- find common ground and a sense of community
- become an ‘intermediary’
- Approach centers of power
One caveat: Social networks are not as big as they are.