TRAFFICKING IN TRUST

The Art and Science of Human Knowledge Networks
by Karen Stephenson

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What does all this mean for the individual woman leader? Among other things, it dictates that her effectiveness and power depend not on her position or title but, instead, on her connections to others in a variety of intertwined networks. As a woman leader, you have to pay attention to those many and varied connections. And you have to make sure that those relationships are infused with trust. Only then can you fully access the many important strands of knowledge existing in your organization's social networks.

Despite the perceived authority of the formal hierarchy, an organization's real value is at the mercy of its social networks. Let's take three examples that evidence the impact of relationships, trust, and social networks in everyday work life: mentoring, contract law, and office politics.

Mentoring is one of the oldest forms of knowledge transfer and, in many ways, still the most efficient. Mentoring programs that thrive do so because they rely on the building of a real relationship between mentor and mentee. Mentoring programs that fail do so because they force the relationship on the participants without the understanding that trust is the foundation for the real connection. It is the quality, not quantity, of reciprocal exchange that is proportional to a high level of trust.

Contracts that adjudicate between organizations fill a void where trust has not yet formed by controlling for the costs of transactions across organizational divisions. At the same time, when trust is present, contracts ensure that there is clean separation between transaction costs and trust so that the relationship may continue unfettered.

In terms of office politics, how many successful executive underlings have found that it is critical to gain the trust of the CEO's administrative assistant? Without tacit knowledge of the CEO's time constraints, meeting availability, priorities, and moods (which the top executive assistant can choose to share or withhold), it is unlikely that one will succeed in effectively communicating with the CEO.

I have personally conducted many network analyses. And I have done so as an anthropologist. My goal here has been to decipher what real working knowledge is. People in organizations, are intimately familiar with their own context, while the anthropologist is not. To a real extent people are right about what they are describing to me-it is their reality. But they know too much and see too little. That's where an anthropologist's interpretive eye serves as a corrective lens. What do I mean?

Every time I step across the threshold of an organization, I remember the research done on children's art. Most children draw what they know, not what they see. Similarly, when the untrained eye of a leader draws a picture of the organization, he or she does it on the basis of what he or she knows. The resulting image is usually a flattened organization chart, distorted in perspective; long on opinion and short on reality. To draw what you see, you must forget what you know. You must erase any preconceived notion of what the object is and draw only what is there. If all of us can do this, then we truly see.

The sad fact is that what people usually see inside their organizations is what they know-an explicit structure-in exactly the same way that we walk into any building and see its physical architecture. What they do not see is the shape of an invisible culture that fills the organization, in much the same way that people can't see the shape of the space that fills a building. Although there is safety, security, and certainty in the explicit hierarchical structure of organized work, there is precious little representation of another, equally valid, and very real worldview of its hidden culture. By connecting the dots revealed by network analysis, an anthropologist can bring into focus an emergent, shadow world beneath the formal one.

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Karen Stephenson, a contributor to Enlightened Power: How Women Are Transforming the Practice of Leadership, is the President of NetForm and a Professor of Management at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. For more information see www.linkage-inc.com.

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