Social Capital

These readings got me thinking about so many things! The Gladwell article on Six Degrees of Lois Weinberg inspired me to update my LinkedIn profile, where I am connected with many of my weak links, and start emailing them to make sure everyone knows that I’m relocating in a year and will be looking for work. I’m thinking of sending a link to the article along with these messages, as a gift and food for thought for those who may not have read it yet.

In Six Myths About Informal Networks, Cross, Nohria and Parker write that “engineers and scientists were roughly five times as likely to turn to friends or colleagues for information as to impersonal sources.” This immediately rang true in my mind (though of course I'm not an engineer nor scientist, just a geek) – in my workplace, the people I rely on for assistance are the ones I consider friends.

However, it also occurred to me that the people I like and consider friends in my workplace are largely people who I feel are my equals in terms of dedication to our mission and work. Those co coworkers I don't consider friends or at least friendly, I go to with problems as a last resort, and they have become coworkers of last resort in my mind because of their general unwillingness to be helpful and sometimes, unfortunately, due to their lack of knowledge. I am often, as predicted in the article, closer with people similar to me in age, though oddly not in gender – I think that’s just a function of there not being many women working in IT from which to pick.

I run a service desk in a medium sized IT department: we are the customer facing side of the organization, and when there are problems with systems, infrastructure or applications; our customers call my staff and me to let us know they are having problems. My staff and I have the responsibility to identify and then notify the person in charge of the problematic system. Because of the complexity of our systems, the initial diagnosis is often tricky. With some programmers and administrators quick to say it’s not my problem, we sometimes have to provide proof of the cause, or cajole them into reviewing logs on their systems before they investigate possible problems.

In The People Who Make Organizations Go – or Stop, Cross and Prusak discuss how informal networks can help a company function, and a few roles (central connector, information broker and boundary spanner). They present these networks as a new way of operating – I’m not sure they’re right about them being new, as the cliché “It’s not what you know but who you know” probably wouldn’t be the chestnut it is, if it were just us Gen Xers and Millennials that started forming and using informal networks in the workplace.

In my workplace, we have some substantial internal boundaries, due to various past events, leadership differences and restructuring. Across those boundaries, wariness and mistrust is more common than collaboration. Some of my colleagues who have worked for the organization twice as long as I have don’t know the names, let alone roles and skills, of people on the other side of those boundaries.

I’m not sure if I’m a central connector or an information broker – I lean towards the former, but arguments could be made either way – but it’s a part of my work that I really enjoy. I think I’m effective at it partly because of my nature as an extrovert and partly because management largely supports me in what I do. A year ago, a newly hired executive started telling anyone in our IT group “we all work for the service desk,” predictably winning my support!

However, regardless of how you label how I do my job, when I approach programmers and administrators, more than a few will good naturedly say “Uh oh, here comes the service desk,” essentially inviting me to interrupt whatever they are doing to let them know about a problem with one of their systems. More often than not, I’m just stopping by to gather information or say hello, but for those who get what I do and respect my connection with our customers, it makes my work easier and more pleasant.

These days, coworkers come to me with a wide range of requests, knowing that while I don’t really run any particular system nor am I a programmer, I do usually have a good idea of who can answer their question or fix their problem. I’ve noticed that lately, my coworkers have even started coming to me with questions about things outside our IT department, such as HR and other organizational policy. Because I have built good relations outside of our group, I can usually direct them to the right place.

I will be sorry to leave! In a short time, I’ve built a great network of people here I know and trust, and I’m dreading not only abandoning them, but rebuilding my network at a new organization, and making all the gaffes and faux pas that I need to make to learn my way around. I hope I will feel so connected and trusted so quickly in my next position.