Chapter Ten

ACTION 4
Increasing the Value
of Your Networks

People who Glow are skilled at increasing the value of their networks and at balancing their networks between acquaintances and close friends who are similar to them with more extensive networks of people who are very different from them. They know that sometimes the most interesting and most innovative ideas come from people whom they barely know and who are very different from them.

Your closest friends are dear to you. It is they who provide the emotional support, warmth, love, and understanding that are so important to your happiness and well-being. It is they who help you through your darkest moments, who know your idiosyncrasies and your foibles.

But if you want to increase your ability to Glow, you will have to do more than concentrate on your closest friends. It is natural to keep your friends close, but by focusing too much of your energy on them, you run the risk of severely limiting your capacity to create the sort of energy and innovation Harry did when he reached out to Julie and her network.

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The Need for Balance in Your Networks

In this chapter you will see how looking at familiarity and differences in your relationships can help you increase the value of your networks. The key is to achieve a balance of breadth and depth.

The Power of Deep Relationships

Your closest friends provide emotional support and places where you feel most comfortable and at ease. But this comfort and ease has its downsides. It is possible that you simply talk about the same topics, reinforce each other’s views, and protect your friends from hearing things they would find distressing, and vice versa. Your closest friends love you for who and what you are. They want you to remain the same, and they can put pressure on you to be consistent. In other words, although your closest friends and family nurture and support you, if they are your only major networks, they also have the potential to reduce your capacity to explore and to experiment and ultimately to Glow. You certainly need your friends, and their love is indispensable to your feelings of self-worth, but you also need to balance this with broader networks of associates.

The Power of Broad and Diverse Networks

You also need many looser connections with people from outside your tight circle of friends. These connections are most powerful when they are with people who are very different from you. These can be people who are from another generation, whose beliefs are different from your own, or who live in different circumstances or in different countries. It is these loose connections, these distant acquaintances, that bring fresh perspectives to your world.

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Your time is a precious resource, and to ensure that your networks are valuable, you want to give time to both developing and nurturing your closest friends and creating loose networks with a wide variety of people. For some, particularly people who are natural networkers, widening a network will be second nature. But for others, widening the network can be achieved only in a more deliberate manner.

How Balanced Is Your Network?

We begin exploring this action by taking a closer look at your current networks and evaluating just how balanced they are. To do this, you need to think about the people in your network in two ways:

• How well do we know each other? Is this person an acquaintance or associate, or is the person a close friend of someone with whom we have a strong relationship?
• How different is the person from you? Is this person very similar or very different?

Remember that similarities and differences can come in all sorts of guises. Your friends or acquaintances could be of the same gender, be around your age, share a your religion or culture, come from a similar background, or have a similar profession. Recall from Chapter Nine that Harry and Julie had a lot in common but had completely different work experiences. These similarities are surface similarities, in the sense that you can relatively easily identify gender, age, and so on. However, there are similarities and differences that are much deeper and less obvious yet still very important—for example, points of view, values, or habits. Both surface and deep similarities can act as powerful determinants of the impact of the type and quality of networks you form.

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FIGURE 10.1 Analyzing Your Networks

To understand how these two dimensions play out, take a look at Figure 10.1. Take a look at each of the four quadrants and in each quadrant write the names of three people. So in Quadrant 1, identify three people who are close friends who are similar to you; in Quadrant 2, three people who are close friends who are different from you; in Quadrant 3, three people who are acquaintances who are similar to you; and in Quadrant 4, three people who are acquaintances who are different from you. Once you have identified the people in each quadrant, try to give detailed answers to the questions on the axes—“How well do we know each other?” and “How different are we?”—for each person you’ve identified.

Now that you know more about the people in your networks, the next step is to understand the extent to which these people are adding value to your network and helping you Glow.

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FIGURE 10.2 Potential Value of These Relationships

What Is the Value of Your Networks?

Now for each of the twelve people you’ve identified, think about how much value they have brought to you, asking yourself questions such as these:

• Is this a relationship that fills me with joy and helps me Glow?
• Is this a relationship in which I learn new things?
• Is this a relationship in which I feel cooperative and trusting?

Figure 10.2 shows some of the benefits people typically gain from relationships in the four quadrants. In the descriptions that follow, the actions will give you ideas about how to increase the value of the relationships in each quadrant.

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Quadrant 1: Close Friends Who Are Similar to Me

History. These are people you have probably known for some time. You like each other, you have a shared history, and they may well turn out to be founding members of Hot Spots as you create buzz and energy in your work life. Since they are similar to you, the friendship arose with ease, and cooperation between you is second nature.

Value. These are great relationships in which you can understand each other’s insights and knowledge and share what you both know. Since you know these people so well and spend time around them, they are typically the ones from whom you pick up new habits. Recall that some of my writing habits were a result of spending extended periods of time with my dear friend Tammy. In a sense, this is the prototype relationship for the mentor-coach model, in which you work with people for a long time to get a deep sense of what they do and how they do it. Think back to the founding members in the chocolate-scented spray deodorant story. Because John, Harry, and Joan already knew each other well, it was easy for them to work together with ease and later reach out to Julie and her team.

Actions to take now to bring more value to close
relationships with similar people

Begin these actions by taking a look at the three value questions and drilling down on them in two ways, asking, “Am I investing enough time in my relationships? And am I investing in the right relationships?”

Action 4.1 Investing enough time in maintaining close relationships. The capacity to build deep and enriching relationships is crucial to Glow. Here are three insights that might really make a difference:

These relationships are important to you, so they are worth investing in regular conversations.

Friendships deepen and become more valuable when you are both engaged in a similar task or activity. Make sure that you and your friends plan to spend time together engaged in common activities. For example, my friend Tammy and I always put aside at least a week every year for me to visit her on the farm, and during that time we always plan to write a short piece together. Without spending time together we could easily drift apart.

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Rituals are wonderful ways of deepening friendships: the weekly lunch date, the monthly trip to the movies, brunch on Sundays—all are ways of strengthening the bonds of friendship.

Action 4.2 Investing in the right relationships. It is odd but often true that you can invest more time in antagonistic relationships that cause you grief than those that you find satisfying and rewarding. Are you investing too much time in unsatisfactory and conflicting relationships rather than in positive and life-enhancing ones? Here are three insights that might really make a difference:

• When you are with the other person, think about how you feel and whether you feel as if you are Glowing. If you do, this is a relationship worth investing in. If not, you have two options:
• If this is a relationship that is very precious to you but has gone sour, you may decide to keep on investing in the relationship while trying to shift it from unsatisfactory to satisfactory. Review Action 2, mastering the art of great conversation, particularly the portion on emotional conversations, and have a conversation about feelings.
• If this is a relationship that you have little hope for, now is the time to bring it to an end as decently as possible. Remember, you will never Glow if too much of your time is spent with people who drain your energy.

Quadrant 2: Close Friends Who Are Different from Me

History. These are people who are different from you and who over time have become close and precious. Like close friendships with people who are similar, these relationships are a valuable source of support and insight. The added bonus they bring is that since the person is different from you, his or her knowledge, insights, and habits can provide a valuable source of variety for you to expand on. Think back to our discussion of heuristics in Chapter Nine. Close friends who are similar to you are likely to have many overlapping heuristics because you have so much in common. Close friends who are different from you have fewer overlapping heuristics and hence more variety, and since you know and trust them, you are in a better position to learn from this variety rather than simply rejecting it.

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Value. When you develop close relationships with people who are very different from you, it gives you a unique perspective on the world and provides the opportunity to explore and appreciate others’ perspectives. Through this exploration, both of you are able to broaden your own understanding and increase your tolerance of variety and diversity. By developing close relationships with people who are different from you, you will become more tolerant, more open to differences, and therefore more skillful in the habit of cooperation.

Actions to take now to bring more value to close
relationships with people who are different from you

Again, begin these actions by taking a look at the three value questions and drilling down on them in two ways, asking, “Do I have a well-rounded network? And is there a balance in the length of time I have known people?”

Action 4.3 Creating a well-rounded network. It’s easy when you are reaching out to people who are different from you to bias your relationships toward people in certain networks and positions. Here are three insights that might make a real difference in ensuring that you are reaching out to a wide range of people who are different from you.

• Reaching out to some people who have higher status and power— these can be valuable contacts when important decisions have to be made, resources have to be acquired, and political issues come into play.
• Reach out to your colleagues and peers—these can be valuable contacts for brainstorming and information sharing.
• Reach out to younger, less skilled people—these can be valuable contacts for mentoring and coaching.

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Action 4.4 Balancing familiarity. Typically, you open up your networks with people who are different from you at certain times in your working life—perhaps when you first went to college or joined a company and met others during orientation or when you worked on a particular cross-business task. Take a look at the people in your network. Are the majority of them people you have known for a long time? If so, chances are that you have become more and more similar over time and are unlikely to hear new ideas and insights from them. Or are the majority of people in your network new friends? If this is the case, you could be lacking a sounding board and an empathic listener. Here are a couple of actions that could make a difference:

• Look at the names in Quadrant 2, and determine how long you have been friends with each of them. If they are all long-standing relationships, think about how you might open up your networks over the next year. Action 5, jumping out of the boundaries that constrain you, will show you how best to do this (see Chapter Eleven).
• If the relationships in Quadrant 2 are all relatively new, you may want to consider how to keep these relationships going over time. You may want to reflect on what it is you have done in the past that resulted in heritage relationships and lost contacts.

Close friends are crucial to your capacity to Glow. Acquaintances can also be valuable resources, since they require less intensive maintenance than close relationships, so you can have many more. In fact, you can have hundreds or even thousands. This “cloud of acquaintances,” as I called it earlier, provides a huge potential pool of ideas and diversity. Are you making the most of your acquaintances?

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Quadrant 3: Acquaintances Who Are Similar to Me

History. These are networks you have developed with people who are similar to you. When these relationships form a community of people who have similar interests, they are called communities of practice, in the sense that they have been built around common shared interests or experiences. These communities of practice can be marvelously exciting places that enhance your ability to Glow.

Value. These are great networks to help you learn more about the topics you are interested in. For example, I am a member of a network of people who are interested in positive psychology (you will find some of their works in the Recommended Reading section at the back of this book). This is an informal network of a couple of hundred of people around the world who communicate mostly through blogs, newsletters, and e-mail. Occasionally, we also meet to spend a couple of days together. This community is really important to me. I enjoy being part of it, and it is easy for me to interact with, since we all have the same interests and the same value sets. This conserves my emotional energy, in that I don’t have to invest in finding and then learning to cooperate with people who are very different from me.

Communities of practice are a potentially important resource for you, and in Chapter Eleven you will have an opportunity to take a much closer look at how you can gain greater value from your current communities of practice and also reach out to other communities.

Quadrant 4: Acquaintances Who Are Different from Me

History. These are likely to be people you have met through a friend of a friend or you have bumped into. They form the networks you create when you are in flâneur mode, giving time to meeting people who are very different from you. They differ from relationships in Quadrant 3 in the sense that at the time of meeting, you probably did not have anything in common to bring you together.

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Value. These relationships are created through classic jumping across worlds. Recall that in the example of the chocolates Orial and I designed, it was the combination of different ideas (chocolates and books) that was a real source of energy and innovation. The same was true for Harry and Julie—they Glowed because they had made an unusual combination (chocolate technology and spray deodorants). Each jumped across worlds—the chocolate maker and the writer, the taste specialist and the deodorant marketer. What’s interesting about both these networks is that they had a strong unplanned, serendipitous aspect to them. I did not go out to find a chocolate maker, in the same way that Harry did not go out to find an expert in fragrances and essences.

There is a measure of serendipity in both cases—the unexpected, the unplanned, the random. That’s why the metaphor about wandering around—becoming a flâneur—is such an important part of the creation of these networks. Take a look at Action 5, jumping out of the boundaries that constrain you, to see how you might get greater value from these types of networks (see Chapter Eleven).

Balance and Value

The networks that help you Glow and help you find, create, and flourish in Hot Spots have a balance between similarity and difference. When you become too embedded in relationships with people who you know very well, you leave little space in your working life for serendipity to open up the possibilities of meeting other people. And when you overemphasize similarity, you surround yourself with friends and acquaintances who have the same experiences and point of view as you have. This severely limits the heuristics at your disposal and will result in your becoming too narrow, less innovative, and ultimately less likely to Glow.

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Key Points in Chapter Ten
ACTION 4
Increasing the Value of Your Networks

When you create valuable networks, you balance tight networks of acquaintances and friends who are similar to you with more extensive networks of people who are very different from you. Often the most stimulating and most innovative ideas come from people you barely know.

The most valuable strategy you can adopt to increase the value of your networks is to deepen your relationships with strong, trusting, and cooperative friends while also broadening your networks to encompass a wide variety of associates.

Your networks fall into four quadrants—close friends who are similar, close friends who are different, acquaintances and associates who are similar, and acquaintances and associates who are different .In this chapter we looked closely at the actions to take around two of these quadrants.

Close Friends Who Are Similar

These are people with whom you have a shared history, who can often be a source of energy in your life to help you Glow.

Action 4.1 Investing enough time in maintaining close relationships

Action 4.2 Investing in the right relationships

Close Friends Who Are different

These people are a valuable source of support and insight, and since they are different from you, their knowledge, perceptions, and habits can broaden your perspectives and ideas.

Action 4.3 Creating a well-rounded network

Action 4.4 Balancing familiarity

The key is to create value by achieving a balance between closeness and distance and between similarity and difference.