Author: Mary Ila Ward

“The moment you partner with somebody, you tap into something you never had access to before. You gain their knowledge, experience, influence, and potential. When you are already achieving at a highly efficient level, you don’t gain a great increase by getting significantly better yourself.  You gain it by partnering or connecting with other good people who bring something different to the table.  And that makes you better.” John Maxwell, Intentional Living

John Maxwell points to a great truth in this quote.  We can only make ourselves exponentially better through partnerships with others.

As we round out a focus on social capital, here are the key people I believe we need to collaborate with in order to build:

1. People who share your values.

John Maxwell goes on in Intentional Living to expand the quote above to say, “…If the partnerships you make are with like-valued people, there is no limit to the difference you can make.”   Are you surrounding yourself with people who share your values?

However, being of like values doesn’t mean the people you build with have the same personality, demographics, or even opinions. Quite the contrary. Once values are shared,your social capital expands by capitalizing on differences.  Start by playing on the same field for the same purpose, and then make sure you have a winning team by involving:

2. People who complement you. We’ve all got strengths and weaknesses in our skills, talents, and personality.   Are you building relationships with people who complement you in your challenge spots?  For example, when it comes to skills, one of my challenge spots is HR compliance and law.  I don’t like it, so I don’t take time to learn it.  You better believe I have a couple of good labor attorneys on speed dial.

3. People who challenge you. I love this quote from Talent Anarchy, “In any group you are either going to have disagreement or dishonesty. Which one would you rather not have?” Make sure there are people around you who will challenge and disagree with you.  This is also quite often the person who won’t let you quit.

4. People who the world would label as being able to do nothing for you. One of my favorite thoughts about leadership is to gauge a leader by when he/she first walks into a crowded room or group of people.  What does he/she do first?  How does he/she treat or seek out the people who the world would tell him/her can do nothing for him/her?  Do they look for the most “powerful” person in the room first or do they seek the “outcast”? I’ve watched my dad do this right for years.  He usually is the first to approach the most unlikely person in the room that no one else is talking to, and the person who oftentimes appears to be the most different from him.

For more on this, check out: Leaders Notice the Unnoticed

5. The person who you want to be. Who do you admire most? How much time are you spending with them?  If you don’t know them personally, why haven’t you made every effort to become a part of their circle and you a part of theirs?

6. The people who are connectors by nature. Everyone has core strengths, and I’m finding more and more, that some people’s core strength is that they are connectors of people (People who have done StrengthsFinder know these people by the key strength of “Connectedness”). They have the social capital game down. They don’t need steps to know how to build it, they just do it naturally. If you don’t know who to call for help, I bet there are one or two people that come to mind that you know you can pick up the phone and call because they know whom you need to call for help. Check in with these connectors regularly because they can connect you to people when you need it, but more importantly, they will connect you to people of like values when you are needed.  And that is social capital at is finest.

Who do you need to be connecting with to multiple your significance?

Like this post? You may also like this one from Talent Anarchy: Social Capital HR’s Secret Weapon Party 3

Due to technical difficulties last week, we are sharing this topic again. We have made a few changes and added some additional tips and tools. We hope you enjoy the read and find the information beneficial!

One competency you need to be building, regardless of who you are and what you do, is social capital. But creating a to-do list or development plan for building this competency is not something that comes naturally. For most,it’s like something that grows organically and exponentially once you do it. And to a large extent, this is true.

But like all good things that need to be done, doing it with intentionality leads to better results. Try this list of steps to get you started on an intentional focus for building your social capital:

1. Realize the WHY behind your building. Social capital, by definition is about building relationships that result in us doing things for each other because of the law or norms of reciprocity. It’s human nature that if you do something to help someone, they want to in turn, help you. So…

2. Start helping others. Look for ways and opportunities to volunteer to help others through your expertise or connections. Make a list of three people at least once a week that you can reach out to or meet with to see what you can do for them, not what they can do for you. Respond positively when people seek out your help.

3. As you are reaching out to help people, Assess your network. – Look up, down, left right, inside your organization, industry and community and outside of it. Where are the gaps? Here’s a link to help you do this.

4. Set goals to plug the holes in your network. Set no more than three goals to plug the holes in your network. Some ideas to do this include committing to joining at least one group outside your box and attending at least one conference or event outside of your wheelhouse this year. Also, just simply going to a place you don’t normally go at least once a week can be powerful if you stimulate conversation with others while there. Actually, just making conversation with someone where you frequently go may do the trick. Next time you walk into Starbucks for your routine cup of joe, pay attention to who is there and talk to them.For more on setting good goals and tracking them, these posts may help:

Goal Setting – A Series

Goal Setting – Diminishing Returns

Goal Setting – Feedback

5. Finally, be self-aware. Examine your environment regularly to make sure you aren’t limiting the potential exponential power of social capital. Maybe this should be a separate post, but I think it drives home this point. I have been sitting in on several community meetings about the need to improve the community I live in. In every meeting, everyone is white, middle to upper middle class, business professionals. My community isn’t just white, college educated, professionals. In fact, like most communities, there are more people who are not college educated than those who are, our community is racially and ethnically diverse and we have the gamete of income earning. In one group, there is a diversity of gender and age, but in another, I’ve been one of two women at the table. While I’m extremely humbled to be sitting at the table with these successful people- more often than not I don’t feel worthy to be doing so- I wonder if we could make a difference more if we had people around the table that don’t frequent the same circles we frequent and think like we think?

For you, what is hardest part of building social capital?

Like this post? You may also like to check out Talent Anarchy’s blog posts on social capital.

If you missed us last week, check out our first post on social capital.

For those of you who want to keep moving along with this post, know that social capital

“…refers to the collective value of all “social networks” [who people know] and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other [“norms of reciprocity”].”

Now, more than ever, you need to be developing social capital to bring your A game to work.  Why?

1. Strong social capital saves you time.As a part of a few HR groups, it is rare for a week to go by where I don’t get an email that says something along the lines of…”we are looking to update our policy on xyz, does anyone have one they could share with us…” or something like, “we are looking at changing our payroll provider, does anyone have feedback on the provider you use and if you would recommend them? Or, “We are thinking about doing an employee engagement survey, what would you recommend?”This doesn’t even begin to capture how much this happens on social networks like groups on LinkedIn that tap you into an even broader range of people with resources and brain power you need, which leads to….
2. Social capital makes you smarter than you really are.You can’t possibly know it all.   Google helps a lot with this.   But, truth be told, there are experts out there on just about anything (all the info out there on Google is from somebody) and when experts are experts, they like to share their expertise.  Don’t you like to share yours?   So to increase your brainpower, find others around you with big brains and learn from them.
3. Social capital can save your marriage (or maybe this is just the combination of #1 & 2 above)….At a conference a few months ago, a woman told a pointed story about working long, hard hours when her husband asked her, “Did your job put a ring on your finger or did I?”  Ouch.  She went on to say that she realized she had to work smarter not harder and did it by harnessing the power and knowledge of the people around her.  She realized with a strong social network, answers were a phone call away instead of hours of endless research away.

How does social capital give you a competitive advantage?