Monthly Archives: February 2016

Weak Ties, Clique Ties, Social Capital, and LinkedIn: What’s with all that?

February 21, 2016 By in Career Management, Learning, Teaching Leave a comment

Social capital is about relationships and your network and how they can help you to get ahead. Right? But what kind of relationships help you the most and where does LinkedIn fit in? Let’s think about that.

Social capital is considered to be any aspect of social structure that creates value and facilitates the actions and objectives of participants in that structure. Social network theorists dub the “ego” as the focal person in a network who is linked to “alters” in that same network and they measure the strength of the links as weak ties or clique ties. Weak ties would be infrequent and lack intensity or emotion. Clique ties are much stronger and would generally involve friends, advisers, and co workers. It’s the weak ties that form the bridges which connect cliques and form your social network.

Ultimately its the resources made available through these networks that contribute to your social capital. Access to information and visibility would be good examples of these resources. Your network, extended through weak ties, gets you access to these resources. Research suggests that weak ties are just as likely to contribute to a person finding a job or finding their next assignment. Clique ties are more likely to be sources of career sponsorship. They are much more intense but are limited in their reach. Given that we all have limited energy it would follow that the weak ties can be more valuable than clique ties. They’re the ones that extend your network.

So where does that leave us with our basic question about LinkedIn? Well here’s a thought. If you want to increase your social capital you need to build your social network and a great way to do that is by developing more ties, even weak ones, as would come from a tool such as LinkedIn. Of course you need to do much more to develop your social capital but making LinkedIn part of your plan makes a lot of sense, and not just because the good people at LinkedIn want you to think that way.

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Anchors Away: The Changing Tide of Careers…

February 20, 2016 By in Career Management, Learning Leave a comment

In the days when many baby boomers were emerging from university, a now well known scholar, Edgar Schein, published research that explored executive self-perceived talents, values, and motives in relation to career choices. He developed a model of “career anchors” and proposed that once formed these anchors become a stabilizing force in one’s career. His original study identified 5 anchors and the model was later expanded to 8 including: Autonomy/Independence; Security/ Stability; Technical-Functional Competence; General Managerial Competence; Entrepreneurial Creativity; Service/ Dedication to a Cause; Pure Challenge; and Life Style.

For years about half of the executives surveyed using Schein’s model self assessed across General Management and Technical-Functional anchors. More recent survey data suggests that Life Style is the dominant career anchor among young executives. Service/ Dedication to a Cause and Entrepreneurial Creativity are also anchors on the rise.

The model seems to have merit but what do these shifts observed by Schein say about society and what should organizations and individuals do about it? Here are a few thoughts: Smaller is getting better and better.   Larger organizations will decompose into more and smaller business units. New business models akin to cooperative movements will increase. The role of academic institutions will evolve more to become mash ups of people and businesses. Some would say this is happening now evidenced by the many incubators popping up across campuses and communities.

Then again Schein’s model takes the perspective of the individual. Maybe these individual shifts towards life style, service to a cause, and entrepreneurial creativity will be met by organizational shifts in the opposite direction. We might see more centralization and acquisition resulting in more, larger organizations where individuals carve out their careers.

In any event, the changing tide in these career anchor waters will likely require organizations and individuals to work differently and focus efforts on matching the right person(s) to the right job(s).  As you weigh anchor you’ll need to steady your career ship before you chart course.6CEFD1E54C