29 min
The Surprising Value of Weak Ties - Issue #301 Invincible Career - Claim your power and regain your freedom
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- Careers
Looking for a new job? Your weak ties may be more helpful than your close friends.
Want to start a new business or grow your customer base? You’re probably better off building new connections with acquaintances than tapping into your colleagues.
What is a weak tie? Well, it’s someone you know, but not very well. Or, you were close a long time ago but haven’t been in contact for years or decades.
These weak ties in your network have faded with time and distance. They could be:
* A classmate from high school.
* Your college roommate.
* One of your favorite professors.
* A coworker or boss from one of your early jobs.
* An old neighbor.
* Someone you met at a conference years ago.
* People you bump into at your local coffee shop or gym.
Contrast these types of relationships with the ones where you have strong ties. You have a much stronger and fresher connection with your current coworkers and manager. You are obviously very close to your family. Your good friends talk with you often and probably travel in similar social circles.
They know you very well. Perhaps too well.
That’s the complexity of strong ties. So many more factors come into play when friends and close colleagues make introductions, recommend each other for jobs, and provide testimonials. They don’t want to risk their reputations, but they also don’t want you to get burned. It’s a tricky balance.
Yes, these tight relationships are valuable for many, many reasons. Your close friends, family, and partners will help you, perform favors, make introductions, advise you, and maybe even hire you.
However, since you overlap so much, you will rarely be exposed to entirely new information or people. To learn and grow, you have to expose yourself to thoughts and ideas outside your bubble.
To expand your network and increase its diversity and value, you have to stretch yourself to seek out entirely new networks that are far away from your friends, family, and colleagues.
Seven ways that weak ties are valuable:
* Discovering new opportunities.
* Sharing new information.
* Exposure to new points of view.
* Improved cultural understanding.
* Increasing the diversity of your network.
* Increasing the power of your network.
* You are viewed as unique.
1. Discovering new opportunities
“Mark Granovetter surveyed people in professional, technical and managerial professions who recently changed jobs. Nearly 17% heard about the job from a strong tie…. But surprisingly, people were significantly more likely to benefit from weak ties. Almost 28% heard about the job from a weak tie. Strong ties provide bonds, but weak ties served as bridges: they provide more efficient access to new information.”— Adam Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success (my affiliate link)
Within your stronger and closer networks, many of the people have already heard about the same opportunities. I remember this phenomenon when I was a young designer starting my first solopreneur agency.
When I talked with the designers in my Silicon Valley network, they often shared the same connections and potential gigs. They knew the same people at the same companies.
However, when I reached out to my friends in engineering, marketing, program management, etc., they were aware of completely different opportunities. They would bring me into companies to work on projects that my design peers didn’t know existed.
2. Sharing new information
When you want to learn new things continually, you’ll often discover that your weak ties in your broader network are a better source than your strong ties. How often does a friend or colleague share something with you, and you say, “Oh, yeah. I read that article this morning.”
It frequently happens to me. It’s perhaps not surprising. My close friends and colleagues all tend to read the same news sources and publications. We all work in the same general industry.
However, my weaker ties often share new information that I would neve
Looking for a new job? Your weak ties may be more helpful than your close friends.
Want to start a new business or grow your customer base? You’re probably better off building new connections with acquaintances than tapping into your colleagues.
What is a weak tie? Well, it’s someone you know, but not very well. Or, you were close a long time ago but haven’t been in contact for years or decades.
These weak ties in your network have faded with time and distance. They could be:
* A classmate from high school.
* Your college roommate.
* One of your favorite professors.
* A coworker or boss from one of your early jobs.
* An old neighbor.
* Someone you met at a conference years ago.
* People you bump into at your local coffee shop or gym.
Contrast these types of relationships with the ones where you have strong ties. You have a much stronger and fresher connection with your current coworkers and manager. You are obviously very close to your family. Your good friends talk with you often and probably travel in similar social circles.
They know you very well. Perhaps too well.
That’s the complexity of strong ties. So many more factors come into play when friends and close colleagues make introductions, recommend each other for jobs, and provide testimonials. They don’t want to risk their reputations, but they also don’t want you to get burned. It’s a tricky balance.
Yes, these tight relationships are valuable for many, many reasons. Your close friends, family, and partners will help you, perform favors, make introductions, advise you, and maybe even hire you.
However, since you overlap so much, you will rarely be exposed to entirely new information or people. To learn and grow, you have to expose yourself to thoughts and ideas outside your bubble.
To expand your network and increase its diversity and value, you have to stretch yourself to seek out entirely new networks that are far away from your friends, family, and colleagues.
Seven ways that weak ties are valuable:
* Discovering new opportunities.
* Sharing new information.
* Exposure to new points of view.
* Improved cultural understanding.
* Increasing the diversity of your network.
* Increasing the power of your network.
* You are viewed as unique.
1. Discovering new opportunities
“Mark Granovetter surveyed people in professional, technical and managerial professions who recently changed jobs. Nearly 17% heard about the job from a strong tie…. But surprisingly, people were significantly more likely to benefit from weak ties. Almost 28% heard about the job from a weak tie. Strong ties provide bonds, but weak ties served as bridges: they provide more efficient access to new information.”— Adam Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success (my affiliate link)
Within your stronger and closer networks, many of the people have already heard about the same opportunities. I remember this phenomenon when I was a young designer starting my first solopreneur agency.
When I talked with the designers in my Silicon Valley network, they often shared the same connections and potential gigs. They knew the same people at the same companies.
However, when I reached out to my friends in engineering, marketing, program management, etc., they were aware of completely different opportunities. They would bring me into companies to work on projects that my design peers didn’t know existed.
2. Sharing new information
When you want to learn new things continually, you’ll often discover that your weak ties in your broader network are a better source than your strong ties. How often does a friend or colleague share something with you, and you say, “Oh, yeah. I read that article this morning.”
It frequently happens to me. It’s perhaps not surprising. My close friends and colleagues all tend to read the same news sources and publications. We all work in the same general industry.
However, my weaker ties often share new information that I would neve
29 min