A powerful way to improve executive effectiveness or promote connectivity in an organization is to work through each employee’s personal network. Research has shown that people in more diverse, entrepreneurial networks tend to be more successful. Providing executives and employees with a means of planning their personal network development is an effective way to promote connectivity. Such feedback can help employees identify biases in their networks and understand why they might want to invest more in some relationships and less in others.
There are many ways to assess the composition of your network and its impact on performance, learning and innovation. For example, sociologists commonly look at the effect of certain similarities between people-such as age, race, education, and gender-on clustering in networks. But these demographics do not always illustrate the subtle means by which one’s contacts affect learning. In many coaching sessions with managers at all levels in organizations, we have found at least six dimensions of personal networks to be consistently important.
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