Social Networking Lessons – A class and a movie

I am pursuing a mini-MBA program from UW, and one of the classes we had recently was about social networks and how important they are for career growth and getting things done. One of the most basic lesson was that you should have open-ended network (networks where your people in your network do not know each other) when you are in brainstorming/information-gathering mode because it helps in faster information flow and diverse ideas, but should have a clique-like network (where your friends/network nodes know each other too) since they help in better execution.

Interestingly, I got another lesson on social network (a more subtle one) when I was watching a totally unrelated movie: Never Been Kissed. In case you haven’t seen it, the story is about a reporter who enrolls in her high school again to report undercover about today’s high school, finds it incredibly tough (again) to break into the network of  pretty girls and handsome boys, falls for a teacher and is then asked to shred him to pieces in her article.

There are the scenes when the protagonist fails to get into the social network (a clique) she wants to desperately get into, and has to get her brother’s help to get into one. The way her brother helped her get into the network was fascinating: he gets into it by being a natural at getting into such networks (he was part of such a network in his school), and then shows everyone how the protagonist is way cooler than him, and thus creating enough buzz for her to be accepted in a few days (of course this was a movie!).

This is very typical of a clique network: it is very tough to get into one of these if you are an outsider. One way of getting into these is to create (or revive) a link with one of the members of the network who can then help you get into the network, but this works very slowly. In workplace, you can find this phenomenon at work when there is a high-performance, well-knit team, and a new person gets hired or (worse), a new group needs to be part of this team. It is very tough to get these two to work together well, and many times it causes frustration for the new person/group. I can vouch for it from more than one experience. Managers can help create such a link first and slowly the new person/group can be accepted in the clique.

Do you have any experiences with such behavior?

Are all communication problems same?

This is the article I published in The Smart Techie magazine in Nov ’06, you can find the original article here. Following is a slightly modified version that I had in my draft that I submitted:

As managers in multinational companies we have to communicate with teams across different geographies. I present two instances of cross-site team interactions I witnessed recently, and then discuss some solutions briefly:

1. Joe from US office wrote a long, complaining mail to a peer Kris in India office, and copied it to the entire team. Kris and local team in India spent quite some time trying to understand why this complaining mail was sent and that too to everyone. The team decided Kris should call up Joe and talk about it rather than thinking too much. I also decided to talk to my peer there to understand what went wrong. I also asked Joe if he needed any help in resolving the issue. It turned out that he wasn’t being ‘heard’ by Y, talking to his managers locally didn’t help, and so he vented that frustration over the mail. After Joe and Kris spoke. I talked to Kris, and then again to Joe, and both said that they talked a lot, resolved their issue and were happy with the outcome. Multiple communication lines helped.
2. In another instance, the team was stuck with a process issue on an important project across sites (India and US). The discussions went on with lots of late night and early morning meetings involving the entire team, apparently with no results and lots of stress. Finally the team decided to try a different approach: each site would designate a representative who would discuss on team’s behalf and whatever these two agree upon would be binding to both the teams. This brought amazing results and they quickly came to an agreement and the teams were happy with the outcome.

I categorize these as different communication issues.

The first happens because we tend to read between the lines and get anxious. This happens more in cross-site situations, because you can’t go and talk to the person if you do not understand something (and picking the phone may not be practical due to time zone differences). Natural inclination becomes to try and get more information from existing data (the mail in this example) and they end up over-analyzing. Sometimes waiting for more data helps solve the problem.

The second instance is an example of large team sizes causing more (communication) issues to themselves: larger the team, greater number of communication lines exist between two members, and hence more chances of a line or more going wrong. If you look at it from a mathematical perspective, a team of size N will have ~N² different 1-1 communication challenges. In case of the cross-site, this problem magnifies since most of these communication lines are created using phones and emails (analogous to low-speed and lossy satellite link in a communication network, compared to face-to-face local communication lines). In this example, by selecting representatives to interact with each other and cutting on other cross-site communications, results were obtained because communication lines were optimized (continuing the analogy: use the slow communication link optimally by having only 2 people use it).

In my opinion, all the communication problems are different and need to be treated differently in order to solve them. Often, companies fall into the trap of solving all communication problems by imparting communication skills training and then getting frustrated when it doesn’t work. Hopefully, next time when you face a communication problem, you will pause and dig deep into it to identify the root cause and then solve it accordingly.

Trust at workplace

I came across an interesting post on this on Cheri Baker’s blog: Trust in the workplace. It is a good read if you are interested in discussing how trust plays a role in workplace when you go talk to HR  about some issues and HR has to take it up with your manager. My experience has beeen slightly different, and I feel we should do much more to preserve employee-HR trust relationship, even at the cost of manager-HR relationship. Otherwise system of checks and balances breaks down and if there are some organizational issues where manager is the culprit or untrusted by employees, HR doesn’t get involved early enough to help out. Given the fact that manager-employee relationship hinges on lots of daily/weekly interactions and can breakdown in a heartbeat, it is important to make sure HR-employee safety valve exists at all times.

What do you think?