Thirty years ago a landmark academic study demonstrated that most people who get new jobs through networking with others almost always get those jobs not from their closest friends or colleagues, but from those they didn’t really know as well. This principle, known as the “strength of weak ties,” has become famous as social networks have proliferated and people have struggled to understand how to extract value from them. LinkedIn’s own Co-Founder, Reid Hoffman, referenced the principle in his post last year, about the two types of professional relationships you should maintain: allies and acquaintances.
If you’re looking for a new job (and half or more of LinkedIn members apparently are), then the weak-ties principal is worth paying close attention to. In fact, it’s worth knowing about for a lot of other reasons, also. If you’re a sales person looking for leads, or a venture capitalist looking for investments, or a corporate board looking for new director candidates – knowing how the weak-ties principle works can make the difference between success and failure.
Social networks are actually networks of networks. Your own social graph is connected to many other people’s graphs, but you and your closest friends’ graphs will have a great deal of overlap, because you know many of the same people. It is the connections between more distant, largely non-overlapping networks that are critical to making a network robust and resilient.
Albert-László Barabási, a highly regarded network theorist, used a massive trove of data to examine how easy it would be to disrupt a network. When he and his team analyzed the anonymous call records for a mobile operator serving about 20% of the population of an undisclosed European country, they found something very interesting. You won’t significantly damage a network’s ability to share information throughout the population by eliminating the most connected people. But you can significantly disrupt a network if you take out those who have the most connections outside their own immediate communities – that is, those who constitute the most network-to-network links.
The reason distant connections are more likely to connect you with your next job opportunity is similar: You and your closest friends and colleagues already know about many of the same opportunities. To discover new opportunities that you don’t already know about requires you to reach out to people who are not in your own immediate circle. You need to make connections to other networks, beyond your own.
The weak-ties principle has many implications for how you go about discovering opportunities for your business, beyond just a personal job search. For instance:
- One study of successful entrepreneurs found they were more likely than others to have “deliberately exposed themselves to different sources of information, by striking up conversations on trains, for example, or maintaining a diverse range of acquaintances, to increase the odds of stumbling upon an interesting opportunity.”
- Private equity investors who share information with others about possible investment candidates are able to access a wider network of candidates themselves.
- Venture capital firms concentrated in technology centers (like Silicon Valley, Boston, or NY) do better competitively because they are able to “cast a wide, public net” – in effect, harvesting their weak ties.
In future posts I plan to explore how this principle can be applied in more detail. We’ll talk more specifically about how to apply the weak-ties principle to getting a new job, getting a higher salary, finding a B2B sales prospect, generating more innovative ideas, hiring a new professional employee, or even recruiting a new board member. So stay tuned!
Article by Don Peppers
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