Friend of a Friend . . ._Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career
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History is filled with similar examples. While we may want to categorize people into just work and personal buckets, real social networks do not seem to operate that way. And that is to our benefit. Research shows that not only does multiplexity help us become more aware of real-life opportunities, but it enhances our performance on the job—and can even enhance the performance of an entire organization.
The Multiple Opportunities of Multiplexity
Social scientists and network scientists have been studying multiplexity for a number of decades. They have found that a multiplex relationship between individuals dramatically increases trust (presumably because it raises more opportunities to demonstrate trustworthy behavior). It also makes it more likely that new ideas and fresh information will be shared. Compared to those with more uniplex networks, individuals with high degrees of multiplexity in their total network are better able to validate ideas, they have access to greater resources, and they can think more critically and gather more diverse information. As we’ll see, multiplex networks may also be able to help an entire organization more than you might think.
In centuries past, when much of the population lived in smaller village societies, multiplexity was pervasive and served as a means to keep groups together; the people you traded with were often also family members, or fellow church parishioners, or at the very least not too distant neighbors.11 Over time, as populations grew and small villages were transformed into large cities, multiplexity didn’t necessarily decrease, but it did shift. The types of multiple ties connecting individuals may have been transformed, but the research shows that humans still tend to gravitate toward certain people for more than one reason, and that the more types of connections there are between two individuals—the higher the multiplexity—the more trust tends to develop in the relationship. In the modern work environment, most often we consider a multiplex relationship as one that combines a work tie and a social tie. This sets up the first question that needs to be answered: which came first, the social tie or the work tie?
It was that precise question that the researchers Simone Ferriani, Fabio Fonti, and Raffaele Corrado sought to answer. Having seen how work and social ties (which they labeled economic and social ties, respectively) can combine to form multiplex connections, the trio decided to study how that multiplexity developed.12 They focused their research on a cluster of media companies located near Bologna, Italy—two of the three researchers hailed from the University of Bologna. But beyond this convenience, studying such industrial districts is quite smart, since the geographic proximity of the companies made the search for multiplex relationships a much more promising one. After contacting hundreds of firms in advertising, film, publishing, music, and graphic design, the researchers surveyed eighty firms and interviewed either each firm’s founder or a cofounder. To find and analyze any multiplexity among these firms (and those that they interacted with), the researchers first had to build the network.
Actually, they had to build two networks. Where a lot of prior research on networks built models that lumped any and all types of connections together, these researchers needed to sort out the economic network from the social one. To do this, they found that it was easier to draw two models and then combine them, so they could find overlaps and sift out each type of connection from one big model. First, they asked the surveyed firms to list their suppliers over the past year. From there, they could draw a rough network based on purely economic transactions. Next, they asked firm leaders to tell them who in the industry they sought out for personal advice or guidance. From there, they could build a network based on social interactions. When they laid one network on top of the other, a picture of a truly multiplex network appeared.
This new network model allowed the researchers to estimate the extent to which the presence of one type of tie increases the probability of another tie being present. They found out it is surprisingly common. When two founders of two different firms shared either an economic or social tie, it was more likely than chance that they would develop the second tie. Perhaps more interestingly, the researchers found that if two founders of two different firms shared a social tie (they sought each other out for advice or considered each other friends), they were more than twice as likely to develop an economic tie (doing business together) than if they had shared an economic tie first and then later developed a social one. To put it another way, it is more likely that personal will become business than it is that business will become personal.
Multiplex ties, these findings indicate, are more likely to develop because friends begin to do more business together than the other way around. This supports the examples of Procter & Gamble and Ben & Jerry’s. Both were companies started because an initial personal connection turned into a multiplex one when the two founders went into business together.
Taken together, these findings suggest that there are potential business opportunities and relationships to be had inside of what most of us would consider our friendship network. While we want to avoid taking an instrumental approach to all of our relationships—not judging the quality of a friendship by how well it serves our career or business interests—it is still worth considering how open we are to the idea that these self-developed categories of personal and business don’t actually reflect the reality of our network. The Bologna study proves that personal can indeed become business.
But what about making business personal? Are multiplex relationships inside of the workplace, or between two individuals who have a business relationship, a worthwhile pursuit?
That was the question that Jessica Methot, now at Rutgers University, sought to answer. Methot, along with her colleagues Jeffery LePine, Nathan Podsakoff, and Jessica Siegel Christian, studied the development of multiplex relationships inside of companies to determine if they were helpful or harmful to performance.13 In the first of two studies, the researchers surveyed 168 employees of an insurance company in the southeastern United States. The organization itself actually encouraged employees to get to know everyone else in the company by allowing them to temporarily shift positions horizontally in the organization and to work with different teams than their usual ones. The researchers asked all of the employees surveyed for the names of up to ten coworkers to whom they would go for assistance with job challenges (a work-related tie).
Then they asked the same employees to list the names of up to ten coworkers whom they considered to be friends (a personal tie). From there, just like the researchers in the Bologna study, Methot and her colleagues were able to turn the two lists into networks and the two networks into one multiplex picture of the organization. They also asked employees questions about emotional exhaustion and the work environment itself. Then, four to six weeks after the survey was completed, the researchers asked the employees’ supervisors to fill out a performance appraisal.
Putting it all together, Methot and her colleagues (some of whom she’d probably label as friends) could examine the network of the organization and also see how that network affected performance, burnout, and how positive or negative the overall environment was. They found that multiplex relationships—having a lot of coworkers who eventually developed into friends—significantly increased employees’ performance (as judged by their supervisor). But this came at a cost. Multiplex relationships also triggered a higher rate of emotional exhaustion—keeping up with more and deeper relationships can be tough. While the emotional toll itself decreased performance, the positive gains from having a coworker who was also a friend more than outweighed the negatives.
In a follow-up study, this one conducted across multiple companies in multiple industries, the researchers found a similar effect. Becoming friends with our coworkers might be a little more draining emotionally, but it makes us far more productive overall. “Workplace friends influence performance over and above purely instrumental or pure friendship-based relationships,” the authors write.14
So friendship connections often become work connections, and at work
, coworkers can become friends and everyone’s performance is boosted. But does multiplexity—specifically, a mixing of business and personal relationships—benefit companies themselves, beyond the individual boosts in performance that Methot and colleagues found? It turns out that it does. Beyond productivity, multiplex connections also appear to enhance the innovation and knowledge-sharing inside of an organization.
Evidence for this comes from a trio of researchers in the Netherlands led by Rick Aalbers.15 The team studied how formal and informal relationships in organizations, as well as multiplex relationships that are both formal and informal, can affect the sharing of innovative knowledge. While it has been well known for some time that every organization has both a formal network (the lines and boxes of the planned organizational chart) and an informal network (the actual personal relationships that are built, including across departments and functions), the researchers were investigating the role of multiplexity (a single relationship represented through both formal and informal ties) in how information was shared.
To do this, they studied two organizations in the Netherlands, one being an electronics and engineering subsidiary and the other a financial services provider. The researchers conducted interviews with various employees at both companies. As in similar studies, the researchers asked questions about friends (informal ties) and work colleagues (formal ties) and used that information to draw a rough set of network maps (formal, informal, and combined). They also asked questions related to conversations about new ideas, potential innovations, and product and process improvements (to measure knowledge-sharing and information). Lastly, they consulted a wealth of written materials like project plans, meeting minutes, and anything else that helped them better understand who was connected to whom.
Surprisingly, the researchers found that both the formal and informal networks somewhat explained the pathways taken by ideas and knowledge through the organization. But these networks didn’t tell the whole story. Only when they also considered multiplex ties, those friends and informal contacts who also had a formal relationship, did the researchers get the most accurate picture of how good ideas spread. “Relations that combine formal as well as informal aspects into a single relation between two persons have a genuinely distant and significantly positive effect on innovative knowledge transfer within organizations,” they wrote.16 These “rich ties” are a huge benefit to organizations of all shapes and sizes.
Taken together, these studies are just a portion of the knowledge we’ve acquired about multiplex ties, but they are enough to push back against the notion that business and personal are two different categories. Humans are humans, and the mechanisms behind their relationships don’t seem to change depending on the setting. Multiplex relationships—business that is also personal—help individuals make decisions about whom to do business with, help employees perform better because they have friends at work, and even help the broader organization take better advantage of good ideas. More than that, sometimes multiplex ties can create once-in-a-lifetime opportunities and shape an individual’s entire career.
From Pianist to Venture Capitalist
When she first walked into the offices of Smith Barney to apply for the sales assistant job, a fancy title for what was essentially a secretary, no one would have seen Whitney Johnson as the future head of an influential investment firm.17 But that is exactly what she became. She had graduated from college in her late twenties, and with a degree in music. She had never taken a finance or accounting course, but she was an accomplished pianist—those evaluating her application probably just figured that meant she could type fast. She was hired and expected to be a great assistant. But she quickly developed a desire to exceed that expectation. Rather than just assist the action, she wanted to be a part of it.
“I was lucky because I had a boss who was willing to promote me from assistant to the professional side,” Johnson explained. “Which is really rare for the industry, and especially rare for a woman, but I was determined.”18 She started taking business and finance courses at night and proved her mettle to become a professional. She got the promotion, but she still wasn’t done. In trying to grow her career and strive for the brass ring, she had a competitive advantage. She was fluent in Spanish, having spent over a year as a missionary in Uruguay, and she parlayed that skill (along with her newly learned finance and accounting skills) to become an investment analyst, studying media and telecom companies in Mexico and developing financial models and trend analysis for the institutional investors making high-stakes investment decisions. She was good at it. After just one year, she found herself ranked number three by Institutional Investor magazine, which surveys investors and ranks analysts on the quality of their information. After that she was ranked number one in her niche for eight years straight, except for one year. “I had a baby,” Johnson joked.
But in achieving so much, Johnson also felt that she had hit a ceiling. There wasn’t really a path that led higher. She realized this as she and her husband were moving from New York City to Boston so that he could accept a faculty position. She commuted back and forth to her work in New York, but after a while she found that it wasn’t worth the effort anymore, so she left and started exploring other options. She wrote a children’s book that didn’t get published. She pitched a television show in Latin America that didn’t get developed. She also started volunteering more. Johnson found herself on a committee at her church that sought to increase engagement between religious and business leaders. The head of the committee was a Harvard Business School professor named Clayton Christensen.
Christensen was renowned in the strategy and innovation world as the mind behind the theory of “disruptive innovation.”19 Put simply, innovative companies often start at the low end of the market, capturing customers that larger, entrenched companies don’t find worthwhile. Fueled by success on the low end, eventually these innovators move up-market and overtake the entrenched companies (as Netflix did to Blockbuster, or Amazon did to Borders), and the result is disruptive innovation. Johnson had seen disruptive innovation play out when she was an investment analyst, and she was familiar with Christensen’s work. She had even written to Christensen a few times to show how his theory explained the shifts in Latin America’s telecommunications industry.
But in truth, she had not really established a relationship with him. Now, serving with him on a church committee, she developed a personal friendship with Christensen. Eventually the head of the committee, who had recruited Johnson to join, left, and Johnson became the head. In addition to growing their friendship, the committee gave Christensen a chance to see how Johnson worked firsthand.
“I got to know him. He got to know me,” Johnson recalled. “He saw that I was capable and competent.”20 Over the course of working together for almost two years, Johnson also got to see what Christensen was working on. Alongside his son, who was about to graduate from business school, Christensen was beginning to apply the theory of disruptive innovation to investing. (Christensen had previously invested his money in Netflix and had also bet against Blockbuster in the market.) The pair had already received some positive feedback about how their theory guided investment decisions (including the cold emails from Johnson years before) and were investigating starting an investment firm. But Christensen didn’t have experience in finance, and neither did his son. So they knew they needed a partner or two who could bring that knowledge to their operation.
Fortunately, Christensen was sitting across the committee table from such a person every week. As a professor at Harvard Business School, Christensen could have used his professional contacts to find several well-qualified financiers. He could have used his status as a professor to recruit a dozen high-energy MBAs. He could have mounted a nationwide search for a company president. Instead, like the entrepreneurs in the Bologna study, he chose to reach out to a personal connection and grow it into a professional one. He asked Johnson to join them as the third founder-partner of what would become Ro
se Park Advisors. They raised capital for their flagship “Disruptive Innovation Fund,” and Johnson took on the role of president of the firm in 2007. Under her tenure, the fund brought its investors a rate of return almost ten times higher than the market average. While it’s unknown how they would have fared had Christensen selected a different professional contact, it is safe to say that the whole team was grateful they took a chance on a personal connection and turned it into a multiplex relationship.
While founder friendships like Ben and Jerry’s, or family partnerships like Procter & Gamble, or even friendships turned business connections like Bill Gates or Whitney Johnson, exist everywhere we look, we still have a tendency to separate business from personal. But actual human networks are much more complex and complicated than simple mental models imply. A significant portion of our relationships are multiplex, and significant opportunity lies in growing solo ties into multiplex ones. Whether it is business success that grows from personal connections or lifelong friendship that develops from working alongside each other, the return on relationships is great—as long as we are willing to invest and grow them into richer, deeper, multiplex ties.
From Science to Practice
Whether you are an entrepreneur, an employee, or a hopeful future employee, the research on multiplexity in social networks strikingly contradicts our typical assumptions about how connections are categorized. While we might separate our “business” contacts from our “personal” ones and think, “It’s not personal, it’s just business,” personal relationships quite often become business (and vice versa). In addition, as with Whitney Johnson and Clayton Christensen, personal friendships can become long-lasting and valuable business relationships. If you have been thinking you need to maintain separation between your friends and your colleagues, then it’s time to rethink your assumptions. Start by opening up your perspective about your friends and coworkers, and then start widening your relationships. Here’s how: