Network to a new job

Having a good network of people and being well-connected is probably key to successful job hunting and job progression.

Australian Ross Dawson, the author of Living Networks and founder of an international consulting firm that helps people work better with each other, says people have to deal with a huge range of networks - people they know socially and professionally, the ideas they generate or work with, and the commercial and economic relationships they are part of.

"There is this idea of the global brain, this big space where ideas flow and are connected," Dawson says.

Understanding how networks work is important even before you get a job. To develop a career, people need to develop broad networks and deep networks at different times.

A ground-breaking 1973 paper, The Strength of Weak Ties, by Mark Granovetter, now at Stanford University, wrote about good job-hunting practice.

Dawson says, "Granovetter looked at how people had found jobs through contacts, and his somewhat surprising conclusion was people mainly found work through people they didn't know well.

"That is a time when you need to make use of broad networks. It makes sense mathematically - there are only so many people you can reach close to you."

Many employers are learning to value the strength of broad networks in finding new staff, and some organisations pay bonuses to staff who recommend people.

Recruiting costs are lower and retention rates are higher for people hired through such an internal tip, even if those hired didn't know the tipster well.

Once inside the organisation, people need to develop deeper networks so they can get the specialised help they will need.

Dawson is a fan of the work of Virginia academic Rob Cross, who, with Andrew Parker, wrote The Hidden Power of Social Networks - Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations.

Cross and Parker argued that most managers didn't understand their workplace, so they wasted a lot of time and money promoting collaborative activity that didn't work.

"The visible organisation is the organisational chart - who reports to whom. That is a poor view of work actually done in knowledge-based organisations," Dawson says.

"The questions they should be asking are who communicates with whom, who depends on other people for information, the way work is handed off to other people, so they need to take a network perspective."

He says people need to be aware of energy flows in organisations - some people add energy to the situations they are in; others suck it out.

Some people are information brokers - they may have deep knowledge about subjects, or know where to go to find out.

Others are boundary spanners, people with multiple ties across different divisions or across to other organisations.

"Once you see those roles in play, you can look at interventions. How do you enhance the positive ones?" he says.

Leaders in organisations, he says, need to communicate a compelling vision, set and acknowledge quality, make and fulfil commitments and connect people.

"One of the key things for any career is to be a connector. If you focus on connecting other people, you become connected to more people yourself. The richer and more connected your own network is, the more central it is to you."

There is a downside to connectedness as organisational boundaries blur.

Dawson says many organisations are struggling to put appropriate boundaries around information sharing, particularly in areas such as supply-chain planning where the efficiency of the supply chain can be increased if everyone involved has visibility across it.

"There are three major categories of information. There is what we want to make available, such as who we are as an organisation. There is information we will share with trusted partners, such as clients or suppliers, and there is information we do not share.

"Answering what we want openly available can be one of deepest and most powerful questions which defines what an organisation is like. Being more transparent is a different business model, which companies are just beginning to struggle with," Dawson says.

He says the increasingly knowledge-based focus of organisations makes ownership of intellectual property an important issue.

"You need to take a career-long perspective. People do have ideas, they want to get value from them, and at different stages of their career there will be different strategies appropriate to protect and leverage their intellectual property.

"A lot of employers are very specific that when you join a company, any intellectual property generated on the job is the property of the company. If you are coming into a job with considerable previous experience or outside projects you still want to do, you might need to try to specify the intellectual property you already own, and set parameters on how you can use that," Dawson says. "You can always negotiate, but if you are not up front you stand to lose."