Social Network Analysis

Female interviewer: Many of us are used to seeing the structure of our organisations mapped out in formal charts and documents where relationships are often only expressed in terms of reporting lines. But what about the relationships and connections that exist at work outside this formal structure? Social network analysis is concerned with uncovering and mapping out these connections to provide leaders with a better understanding of how employees really work together to get things done.

Here we speak to Rob Cross, a Professor of Management at the University of Virginia and a pioneer of social network analysis.

I began the interview by asking Professor Cross to explain the distinction between formal and informal networks within organisations.

Professor Cross: The formal is usually dictated by a hierarchy process flows, kind of predefined relationships in an organisational chart whereas the informal tends to be the information linkages that occur around that and so often times we will take how we define networks and how we can assess and see them in terms of information flow and collaborations within an organisation, and actually pull out the formal structure from that and see where we have excessive workarounds or where there are gaps in connectivity and things like that. But it is that more natural fluid flowing of information, of decisions, of even more subjective things like trust or energy that we tend to focus on in terms of the informal side of the organisation.

Female interviewer: What type of situations at work require people who aren’t connected formally to be connected informally?

Professor Cross: There are an increasing number of things that people don’t really even recognise sometimes that require informal collaborations to get work done and that often are not well documented in terms of roles and responsibilities or process flows.

One common example is product development. In most organisations there can be tremendous process for use and accountabilities established when you look at it from a formal structure but then if you go in and say, ‘Okay, who do you really need to talk to to get your work done?’ you see the different members within the product development teams reaching to all sorts of pockets of the organisation and at the same time they are also more successful because they are reaching into the clients in unique ways.

Often times, very few of the relationships that matter for their success are dictated by a formal structure but much more dictated by, you know, people with expertise that they have come to rely on, informal people in higher positions of the organisation that they can get approvals from and things like that.

Female interviewer: Can you explain what social network analysis is?

Professor Cross: For me, it’s a set of tools that allow people to assess relationships within organisations, between organisations or even entire communities. For me, the way that I would tend to define it, it is a method for both eliciting and understanding what kinds of relationships are holding a group together and what kinds are missing and then instead of analyticals that let us visualise that, certainly through diagrams and other mechanisms to understand work collaboration is happening, but also quantitatively, i.e., using graph theory and other mathematical routines to be able to count numbers of legs, who sits on bridging paths between others, really that mathematical side that allows us to create really predictive models and show that yes, the network improvements in an organisation are having a big impact on cost reduction on revenue growth or things like that. And so for the first time being able to tie traditionally soft ideas of culture or team building or team work to a more tight business outcome.

Female interviewer: And what else can social network analysis tell us?

Professor Cross: The basic points are where and how silos exist in a network that you care about and that are undermining you. You never want to go in and expect to see an entire unit or organisation where everybody is connected, we are all overloaded beyond belief as it is, but what you do want to make sure of is that points in that network that you are requiring for effective collaboration to be able to execute on innovation trajectories and for market segments, you want to make sure that those groups are collaborating well and quite often there are disconnects that really affect an organisation that occur across geography, so people doing similar kinds of work in different divisions that aren’t sharing best practices and you are not getting good leverage of expertise globally within an organisation. Usually there is a set of four or five junctures in an organisation where integration is important for strategic objectives and if we can see where this disconnection is happening and connect well-connected people in each area across those lines, it has a really national integrative effect in helping to get things done.

There are also generally points in networks where overload is happening. It is very common for us to see that, as an example, leaders in some places rise to a certain level of prominence in the organisation by virtue of being good at what they do. They are fast at answering questions, they have a lot of knowledge and expertise, they are fast on their feet, and so they create networks that draw to them. At some point in their careers this forms an overload. They are not physically able to keep up any more and a lot of them don’t quite know how to get out of that network position and so in those cases we are actually trying to see how do we de- layer and understand where these overload points are in networks and de-layer those places by shifting decision rights, portions of roles and then also behavioural programmes that let these leaders be more responsive, more aware of how they need to push down on their work demands to make themselves more effective as well as their units.

Female interviewer: So what can leaders do to de-layer if they need to?

Professor Cross: It sounds a little bit abstract but it is actually very simple. These leaders, what we are doing is sitting down with them and looking back through their calendars over the course of a month and getting them to reflect on three structural solutions.

So one is what information do you hold that people are routinely coming to you for that you don’t need to be the go to person on any more? Usually we are able to isolate out four or five kinds of informational requests that these people get that could either be set out on a website, could be published through a blog or could be the domain of new ‘go to’ people deeper in the network that they are trying to cultivate.

Two is what kinds of decisions are you routinely making that you don’t need to be involved in? And so very frequently for us we will find that, as an example, travel approvals may go down unholy heights and we will find that with those sorts of things if we can again either create a different go to person or we can embed it in a policy or procedure, we can just increase the capital expenditure levels to a certain amount, that is justified leverage in the network. Doing things like that takes those routine decision-making interactions out of the network and is again another ability to free that leader’s time.

And then third, we’ll ask, are there portions of your role that you can let go of and use of developmental opportunities for other people that you are trying to cultivate in very targeted ways? And we find if we focus on those things, the routine informational requests, the routine decision approvals and portions of their role that they don’t need to be involved in as much, and we either get those into policies and procedures or we create other ‘go to’ people or other forums for the information to be shared; it has a magical effect in allowing the leaders to let go of things that aren’t central to them so they are not going to fight the process. And then it also magically helps drive other people that they are trying to cultivate in the network. It is things that people have to revisit, you know, as projects, maybe on an annual basis or something like that. But it has a really magical effect in getting rid of overload points and also making the leaders themselves more effective.

And then there is also a set of behaviours. We are also coaching leaders on themselves to make sure that they are letting go when they should and they are not reinserting themselves or doing other things that unintentionally over time put them back into that bottleneck position.

On the expertise side, it happens to be that people are heavily sought out because they know a lot about a certain client, then those are different things you are trying to solve. There you are trying to devolve alternative sources of expertise and so you may solve that by hiring and then asking that person to mentor the newcomer or just looking deeper in the organisation and say, ‘How do we take some of our emerging talent and make sure that they go on client calls with you?’ and that then tends to create alternative experts in the network. And it also makes the organisation far less susceptible if these high end experts decide to leave and go somewhere else. Again, when that happens they not only take what they know but they really affect the organisation overall by virtue of the number of people that relied on them.

Female interviewer: You’ve written that different types of organisations derive value from different types of informal networks. Can you tell us a bit more about this?

Professor Cross: There really is no universal network archetype that every company or organisation should be shooting from. That is almost always one of the first questions I get asked from executives is, what is the right answer? And the right answer for me is always dictated by the strategic objectives or business goals in the given group that we are looking at. So the group is trying to innovate along a certain trajectory or being tractioned in a certain market, what kind of collaborations does that require at a high level, both inside and outside the organisation? And then we bore all those down in the interactive forms to create a kind of ideal map and understand where the key linkages need to be that support that organisation’s strategic objectives.

Now, if we take that approach and we say that it is not a big network or a certain kind of network we need but a network that is aligned with business objectives, then there do tend to be archetypes that we see out there, really on two extremes. One, are those organisations or those units in organisations that tend to be trying to drive value through innovation or through cross-selling in various ways where you are actually trying to get a good intermingling of networks across skill sets, expertise domains and so in this context you are really trying to see where are the cross-unit collaborations, how do we ensure more cross fertilisation of ideas?

In other contexts, where work is more routine and more process-based, what you are actually looking for is greater fidelity between what the network looks like and what the process flows look like in an organisation. So when I say routine domains, this can be manufacturing, it could be call centres as an example, places where you don’t want people executing the process through three or six or nine different paths in the network. You want to get better consistency in terms of how people are getting answers, solving problems.

Female interviewer: What are energisers and de-energisers and how can they affect the performance of an informal network?

Professor Cross: Most of us, if you think about it, have had the experience of being in meetings or conversations with somebody that sees a vision or a possibility and getting enthused and getting engaged about something that could be accomplished. And so for me, energisers are people that have an ability to create a kind of vision of possibilities and enthusiasm in groups towards certain, and they are not necessarily cheerleaders or even necessarily high key or charismatic in the traditional sense that many people think about, in fact you are as likely to see, in the work that we have done, somebody be fairly low key, also be considered an energiser to the equal degree of somebody that is traditionally charismatic and takes the room by storm. But the energisers for me are very kind of positive, proactive change agents and kind of people accomplishing different things in organisations in a very productive way.

In contrast we have all had the reverse experience too. Those people, through comments or through the way they take control of the meeting, have a very negative effect and so we are very focused on seeing who are those people that kind of decrease or detract from getting things done in the organisation overall. And we found over time is we can actually map these networks and we can again tease out where pockets of energy are associated with projects that are moving ahead or equally where energy is lagging and causing negative friction points between two functional areas that we care about.

Female interviewer: How can leaders go about analysing the informal networks within their own organisations?

Professor Cross: So, for me there are very simple approaches to doing it. So, you know, we have a software in the consortia that I run here at UVA that has been developed. It is about a 15 minute web-based survey that allows one to go out and fairly quickly, you know, for very minimal effort, get some tremendous insights that are often very big surprises in terms of how teams are connected, where collaboration breakdowns are happening and just a range of things that give leaders a lot of opportunities to make some subtle shifts that have a big impact on their organisation.

If you don’t do that and take on a network analysis at some level to be more systematic about it, then I would, what I find with the more successful leaders is that they tend to do a lot of things that try to keep them informed on the network. In fact, one of the things I see that is most interesting to me, if I ask leaders to predict who is going to be connected to whom ahead of doing these network analyses, you actually find that there is a real big range of variability in terms of who is more accurate in being able to predict who is connected to whom and what the network looks like.

And so what I tend to see with the leaders that are more accurate in being able to tell me what the networks are going to look like, number 1, that’s a really important predictor of success, that accuracy alone. But what I also see with those people that are more accurate is that they are just more open, they are inquisitive about the results that I can produce and when I do interviews about them you find that they tend to be inquisitive and asking questions about who is contributing to efforts. They tend to have mechanisms that help them get informed, not just about their inner circle but also about who the rising stars are deeper in the organisation.

And of course the problem for most of us in that game is that we all tend to lock in on our favourites quickly, people in the troughs to people that we like, and if you don’t fight of that tendency to continue to turn back to those people over and over again, then you are going to have, number 1 you are going to have biases around who you are personally relying on that are going to hurt your performance over time, but you will also have a very inaccurate view of what is going on in the network.

Female interviewer: Are there any specific connections leaders should expect to see within informal networks?

Professor Cross: Usually what defines who should be connected is strategic vision, you know for that group, or operational visions that they have. So if it is efficiency that that organisation is striving for, then we are trying to actually systematise most collaborations and trying to keep excessive connectivity from building into the network. And so that may actually focus more effort on understanding how much time is being spent on different interactions and how to decrease connectivity. And if it is innovation or new product development team cycle time we are trying to reduce, then that may dictate, for example, in those contexts, very specific kinds of interactions amongst the team, but then also very specific kinds of interactions back into the larger organisation so that they are getting input from the right scientific bodies, from the right legal bodies, the right market segments at points that help them, you know, most productively in designing a viable product or offering.

Female interviewer: And finally, what are the best ways for us to maximise our own effectiveness within informal networks?

Professor Cross: One is fighting of insularity and so there is a common tendency for all of us to begin to circulate with people, number one, that look like us and number two, that care about the same things we do.

So a lot of times what that means is you are not getting different perspectives or ideas and so the more that you can ensure that the people that you talk to are not themselves all talking amongst each other, the more effective we know people are over time. It doesn’t necessarily mean diversity in the sense that we think about it a lot of times in terms of gender or ethnicity, it means diversity in the sense of the networking, making sure that you have ties reaching into different areas that are important to you over time.

Number two, is continually looking for ways to decrease connectivity and making sure that you either are not overloaded in certain ways that are hurting your or your followers’ performance or you are not biased. So one of the most common things I will see from a leadership perspective is leaders will rise in the organisation and continue to hold the70% of their trusted ties back in the unit that they came from. When need to be structurally diverse into different functions, different geographies that the groups that they are starting to run or inherit, they have this massive anchor in of thinking.

Number three, would be to continually cultivate networks in ways that extend your expertise over time. So a lot of times what we will find is people fall into traps by virtue of relying on three or four people around them for way too much. They start mistaking trust or friendship or accessibility or just liking for real expertise in different domains.

Four, it would be the energy idea that we spoke a little bit about earlier. Across all our work what we find is people that manage more open networks do better over time. It is a very strong predictor of success. It really matters with some fairly simple behaviours in terms of creating networks that are not just big but networks of people that are enthused to be around you and want to bring opportunities or other things like that to you.

And the fifth, that is really from work that we have been doing more recently, focused on psychological wellbeing or what healthy people’s networks look like. So there are a couple of interesting things that we have been finding. One is, in general, it seems that the higher people go in organisations that we have been studying, if we look at their happiness or their wellbeing, their satisfaction, the higher they go, the less happy they are, in a lot of those measures, more sophisticated measures than just, you know, thinking about happiness unless they are using networks in a way that brings balance into their lives, you know, so they are investing in philanthropic groups or religious associations or sport, those kinds of activities, things that slingshot them into different areas and keep them from becoming inter-dimensional and so completely consumed and tied up with results at work at a given day or given week over time. So thinking about, you know, not just connections internally and from a performance perspective, but also from a balance perspective and creating connections that get you broader exposure and help you be a different kind of person and also hold you accountable for, you know, health-related activities or things like that, turns out to be something important both for wellbeing as well as performance over time.