TRAFFICKING IN TRUST

The Art and Science of Human Knowledge Networks
by Karen Stephenson

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She had been mentored by the very best. It was all because the CEO had had an epiphany. He had looked around his company and seen that he was wheeling and dealing mostly with men-where were the women in the equation? Why weren't they involved? And then he realized that he was the sole party responsible for both the absence and silence of women. In a quiet promise to himself, he decided to change the context and shift the equation. And he did-she was now CEO. But the appointment alone was not enough to garner the impact he sought. Oh sure, he saw the press rally 'round her-both praising and picking. But that's not the kind of recognition he was expecting for his new successor. Instead, what he saw was that the male managers within the enterprise didn't trust the new female CEO-perhaps because they had difficulty trusting any woman. Quite frankly, he had not spent much time in nurturing those relationships to get past that ol' familiar "gender issue." He also saw that women managers did not trust the new woman CEO either! Did she sell out? What did she do that they had not done or would not do? Surely her promotion was not the result of mere meritocracy! If time is appropriately spent in building collegial relationships in the leadership network, gender issues can become irrelevant. But when leaders don't do their homework and fail to establish their networks, then other factors, like gender, take center stage. In the final analysis, merit matters, but only when networks are nurtured.

Why are relationships so important to succeed in the business world? I have spent my entire professional career in hot pursuit of this single question. I've come to realize that the only way to inspire change, stir activity, or get anything done at all is to explore the hidden world of social networks-"grey markets" of rights, riddles, and rituals. Such social networks exist within your organization. And if you are a woman leader, these are forces that you should not and cannot ignore. Indeed, because women leaders have so long been on the outside looking in, they need to understand the various sources of power that exist within an organization. It's not just about simple and straightforward hierarchy anymore. It's also about social networks. Recognizing, understanding, and leveraging these social networks are critical for women leaders who want or need to secure power within their organizations.

I am talking about how the relationships between people in an organization create the real pathways of knowledge, for the actual power of an organization exists in the structure of a human network, not in the architecture of command and control superimposed on it. My work is about making invisible workplace relationships visible by computer modeling the web of social exchange. And the data always reveal some significant answers to a host of significant questions: Who is talking to whom (before and after the formal agenda-driven meeting)? Where do ideas get bottlenecked, and how do they get widely dispersed? Who has the authority, and who has the ability to make things happen? Why are the top salespeople effective and what does that have to do with their proximity to customer service? Which candidate for CEO has a finger on the pulse of the organization, and which candidate has merely grabbed the current CEO's ear? Who among the senior partners is informally mentoring a younger generation of potential successors, and what does that have to do with their smoking habits? Why is the merger, which looked so promising on paper, failing to gel? Why did the latest middle-management layoffs, less severe than in previous rounds, leave the organization so much more decimated? Why did one factory plant become so efficient as compared to two identical ones?

> Part 2

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