Why networking can make you feel grubby

Hi,

A few weeks ago I wrote about managing the relationships with your boss and those above you. This week I want to discuss building relationships more broadly across the rest of the organisation.

This is important because the networks you build are critical for helping you get things done. So, today I'm going to show you how you can build your network without feeling uncomfortable about it.

If phrases like networking and "playing politics" make you wince slightly, you won't be alone.

Casciaro, Gino and Kouchaki (2014) ran four studies, including a survey of lawyers in a large business law firm, on building relationships deliberately in support of your work. They found that it genuinely makes people feel morally dirty, to the point of wanting to wash, and that those feelings reduce how often people do it and lower their job performance as a result. The effect was weakest for people who had power and strongest for those who had least of it. So, if you are the most junior person in every leadership meeting you attend, you are exactly the person who will feel grubbiest doing this.

But that doesn't mean that we can safely ignore relationship building if we want to succeed. Quite the opposite in fact.

Productive relationship building involves political skill, which Ferris and colleagues (2005) define as the ability to understand other people at work, and to use that knowledge to influence them to act in ways that enhance your personal or organisational objectives. In 2015, Munyon and colleagues pulled together the research on political skill and they found that it related to higher job satisfaction, stronger organisational commitment, better productivity and greater career success, along with lower levels of physical strain. They also found that political skill predicted job performance, even after allowing for personality and general mental ability, which suggests it is a skill we can all learn.

So what do politically skilled leaders do differently, and how can we build relationships without feeling morally dirty or offending our own values?

Three things come through in the evidence.

Ron Burt (2004) studied managers in a large American electronics company and found that those whose relationships bridged otherwise disconnected groups received better performance evaluations, were promoted sooner, and had their ideas judged as more valuable. The effect was strongest for managers working on the boundary between two parts of an organisation.

This approach is truly effective in my experience. It is much easier to build strong relationships with your peers than where there is a power differential. You have similar experiences, your perspectives on the organisation are likely to be aligned and you can quickly become allies who will naturally help each other get things done.

But this shouldn't just be something that only you do. Cummings and Cross (2003) looked at 182 work groups and found that when a team is connected mainly through its leader, the group performs worse. So, the arrangement to aim for is one where your team members build their own connections too, rather than one where you become the hub everything passes through.

Here are two things you could try:

Lee and colleagues (2017) reviewed 49 studies on influencing tactics covering nearly 9,000 people. Rational persuasion, which is simply making the case on its merits, was the only approach that held a positive relationship with both getting things done and keeping the relationship intact, whatever the circumstances. Applying pressure was reliably associated with worse outcomes.

I have written before about how this works when you are dealing with your own manager. But it is not just the application of pressure that fails. In studies including a field experiment involving more than 100,000 people, Reimann and colleagues (2022) found that self-promotion backfires most for those who are genuinely good at their job, because it reduces how honest and well-intentioned people judge you to be.

And this is good news, because it demonstrates that we can influence effectively in a way that does not need to make us feel uncomfortable. We just need to focus on the facts and make the case for our team's work rather than our own.

In practice:

To be honest, whether you do any of this will be guided more by your sense of identity than anything else.

Raj and colleagues (2017) ran four studies on professional networking and found that the people who prioritised and built their networks were the ones who saw networking as consistent with who they are. In other words, identity fit predicted their intentions better than self-interest did. Casciaro and her colleagues found that what made people feel dirty was building ties for the sake of a task. Personal networking, where the interest in the other person is real, did not do that.

So, even if you appreciate the importance of building effective networks, it is only something you will do if it fits in with the values you already hold.

What all of this means is that you do not have to become a different person to focus on network building. You have to find the version of it that fits in with your existing values and the motivations that make you get up and go to work each day.

So, if you believe in the value of the work that you are doing, if you are keen to support your team, and you are happy to help others out in the wider organisation, it will not contradict your value system to build connections that make it easier to do all of these things. On the other hand, it probably will make you cringe if you think you have to network in order to get on.

Michael Cavanagh's point about connectedness, which I have written about in the context of leading in a complex organisation, is also important here. Your team does not exist in isolation. It sits inside a system of other teams or other organisations. An important part of your role as a leader involves paying attention to that system and understanding how it impacts the work you are there to deliver.

Approached this way, network building does not mean you need to be someone you are not. It means understanding your organisation properly and having the natural conversations with those that matter around you so that you can be more effective at doing your job.

Please hit reply and let me know if you have any other great networking techniques or conversely, any other struggles you have in this area.

All of my posts for new leaders are here.

Coaching - I have a few spots available for 1 to 1 coaching. If you want help with building your networks in a way you can live with, that is exactly the kind of thing we can work on together. There are more details here.