Author: Mary Ila Ward

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?

I find that the trouble most people have with “networking” boils down to two things:

1. It scares the-you-know what out of them.

   Someone recently came to me seeking advice on how to advance his career. This happens a lot, but his response was interesting.  I told him to start networking. He responded that under no uncertain circumstances was he going to do that because it just wasn’t his personality.  He went on to say that if he had to be someone he is not to get ahead, then he shouldn’t do it. He wasn’t going to try to kiss you-know-what to get ahead.  I think manipulative, political behavior and networking were somehow synonyms to him; it seemed like it was some moral issue for him the way he presented it.  In other words all that he was saying was, networking scares the-you-know what out of me, so I’m not going to do it.

2. The second reason stems from the first and is also seen in this example.  It’s quite frankly that people see networking as something it is not.  It is not about kissing up to someone, being entirely self-centered, or coming across as a used car salesman.

So let’s get rid of the word networking.

Now I tell people to develop their social capital.   What is social capital you say?  Google it and this is what you get:

“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”].”

So social capital is whom you know and whom they know, and the inclination of those who know each to do things for each other.

It’s not a one-sided thing; it’s a win-win thing, and unlike “human capital” that we talk a lot about and is related to what one person brings to the table, it is not what you know as an individual, but whom you know and what they know (or whom they know) that makes the difference. John Donne told us this quite a while ago before social media was even around, “No Man is an Island.”

From a job search and hiring perspective, it indicates that what some people refer to as the “good ole boy network” is still much needed to get a job and advance- let’s hope with a lot more diversity to it these days- but it also, and maybe more importantly, relates to how good you can be at your job. You can’t know it all.

Social capital gives us all a competitive advantage. How are you building your social capital to create win-wins?