“How Leaders Create And Use Networks”Essay Preview: “How Leaders Create And Use Networks”Report this essayStrategic LeadershipKnowledge Management“How leaders create and use networks”By Herminia Ibarra and Mark HunterThe article “How leaders create and use networks” was published in the Harvard Business Review in January 2007. The authors, Herminia Ibarra and Mark Hunter, raise the conclusions of their two-year-study about the “leadership transition” in the career of thirty managers. By leadership transition, they mean the challenging moment for managers when they have the opportunity to go up in the hierarchy and to become leaders.
What has the most attracted Herminia Ibarras and Mark Hunters attention was the importance of networking in managers career and how managers were dealing with this challenge.
At first, we will briefly study Herminia Ibarras and Mark Hunters biography, after we will focus on the article key points and then I will give my point of view about their conclusions.
To start with this study let me give you some details about Herminia Ibarra and Mark Hunter, according to the INSEAD official website.Herminia Ibarra is the Insead Chaired Professor of Organizational Behaviour. She is an expert on professional and leadership development. The INSEAD (Institut National de la Statistique et des Д‰tudes Д‰conomiques) is a French business school located in Fontainebleau near Paris. Born in Cuba, she received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University, where she was a National Science Fellow. Before joining INSEAD in 2002, she was a professor at the Harvard Business School faculty for thirteen years. In 2003 her book “Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career” focused on how people reinvent themselves at work. She also had numerous articles published in leading journals including the Harvard Business Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, and Organization Science. These articles dealt with innovation, networking, career development, womens careers and professional identity. Her research has been profiled in a wide range of media including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Economist and Fast Company. At the INSEAD she is in charge of The Leadership Transition, an executive program designed for managers moving into broader leadership roles and Women Leading Change in Global Business. She also teaches in various executive programs including the Advanced Management Program and Consulting and Coaching for Change. Besides she lectures and consults internationally on talent management, leadership development, and womens careers.
The second author of the article is Mark Hunter. Like Herminia Ibarra he works at the INSEAD, as an adjunct Professor. He joined the school in 2001 after winning awards for his scholarly research and his journalistic articles. He also works as a consultant for multinational companies’ centres and as an associate MaД®tre de confД©rences of the UniversitД© de Paris 2 (PanthД©on-Assas), where he received his doctorate in communications for a cross-cultural comparison of investigative reporting methods. Besides, he made a film, “Chronique dune campagnД© arrosД©e (Liquorgate)” that was selected for the Festival International de la Production Audiovisuelle in 1999. He is also a founding member of the Global Investigative Journalism Network and he co-created the INSEAD Business Journalism Program. Moreover, he had several articles published, in particular in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal Europe, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, and the Harvard Business Review. He also wrote five books and frequently appears in French, UK and US print, radio and TV media as a commentator on French political and cultural issues.
Let’s now outline Herminia Ibarras and Mark Hunters conclusions about the importance of networking in leadership transition. More precisely, by studying these issues, they identified three forms of networking: the operational networking, the personal networking and the strategic networking. Besides, Herminia Ibarra and Mark Hunter found that a networking strategy could be set up by the combination of these three networking types and could serve a “young” leaders development plan. Before explaining more in detail this last point, Ill make a description of each types of network.
First of all, let’s start with the operational networking. Basically, this network helps managers to do their job. It assures them support and cooperation among their team but also among companys key people. However, it is not always the case. Some managers would just look for support in their operational team, forgetting key decision makers. Moreover, Herminia Ibarra and Mark Hunter highlight the fact that to make an operational network powerful, the relationships that built it have to be of good quality. You have to be able of relying on them and it has to work both sides. Trust is the main key success factor of your operational network. This network is mainly characterized by current issues and by internal contacts. By internal contacts, Herminia Ibarra and Mark Hunter mean contacts from managers company. They conclude that independently, this network is not sufficient to support a leadership transition.
The second form of network studied by Herminia Ibarra and Mark Hunter is the personal network. It is mostly composed of external contacts, often made because of common interests. This kind of network is built through professional associations, clubs, alumni groups, sports associations, etc. As contacts do not belong to the company, this network opens managers social circle. The benefits of such a network are “important referrals, information, and often, developmental support, such as coaching and mentoring”. More referral potential you can get, more powerful is your personal network. It means that your personal contacts give you the possibility to be in relation with a third person you did not know, because of your mutual contact. So, if this network is important because it provides info and contacts
(2). Another way to increase your value is to think of personal relationships in the sense that you provide your contacts with information (2). A third, or more powerful form of personal network is a personal network based on a formal or informal network, so you could say that you are a registered advisor in a professional club, even if in their practice, you have not actually been involved and have only been working part time to meet people.
The network of contacts with each other
So now, why don’t we need to start getting involved with the network as well? Well, before and after this discussion, the first way to think about personal connections is to think about the connections which would be made if there were no personal contacts to create.
There is something to this. First, if you have a specific interest there, then your individual connections with other people will be important too. A business contacts you for example, a new book you think you want that contains a series of articles on a particular topic or, as the case may be, for example, a new book with the idea of looking at different aspects of the market or on a topic based on what the current and previous customers of the business are saying. You should consider this before you start to build associations when building your connections with other players. However, if your personal contacts are going to be important to you then you are just building them.
Second, because of the fact that this kind of connection depends on a particular interaction and relationship, the more relationships you have to have between yourself and others, the more people will be in contact. The amount of relationships you have to have for your personal connections is proportional to your interests as well.
Your personal connections to other players can be the kind of network you can link with with others and with other people. The one we need to mention before we begin this discussion is that the connection with these other players cannot go un-enjoyably long. The longer you have social links with others, the more money you can accumulate and the more it changes your personal relationships.
The connection with your contacts can become interesting if your associations with other people start to increase and you need to think about how you can use this connection to create a connection with the future. The way to think about this is to start with what kind of connections are already built and your relationships built.
To build your network
While it is still possible to see how things might work, it is almost impossible to know where that link points. There is always something between this and previous relationships. At the moment, we already have a couple of connections: relationships with one another, connections with each other. If you imagine that you have three people and you connect to them three different times. Maybe you have a conversation with each of those three people because they have the same name, in one connection: a relationship with your contacts and in another with your contacts. Your personal connections with your contacts is very short. The problem that you have to deal with is what happens when you connect two people:
If your relationships only exist three times, in other ways then it would appear strange at first.
You would be able to get this back.