Andy Green and Russell Todd, founding Directors of Grow Social Capital, explain how a Social Capital approach to going online during the Coronavirus lockdown will reap benefits once it’s lifted.
The obvious response to working from home, social isolation, and the Coronavirus lockdown has been to move online. Denied face-to-face meetings, online technology is providing a ready alternative. You can still connect with your mass of people, harnessing a fantastic range of free or low-cost, easy-to-use, readily-available tools.
A no-brainer.
But are you really getting the engagement, communication and influence you would do in the now, much overlooked and increasingly lamented, offline stuff that you failed to appreciate at the time, or realise its true potential?
Do you need another, potentially smarter approach than just doing everything online? Does the disruption created by the response to the Corona crisis also provide an opportunity to tackle a much-neglected area of your social interaction?
A Social Capital Approach
At Grow Social Capital, we believe that what can be called a Social Capital approach could offer you with more than a substitute for enforced changes. It gets you doing stuff you should have been doing anyway; stuff that really should be your priority.
There’s a story about how the former US President Richard Nixon was approached by his two successors in the Oval Office, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. They were anxious about Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy to China and wanted Nixon to agree to a joint declaration expressing their disquiet.
Although sympathetic and agreeing with their concerns, Nixon declined to act. His excuse being that he found it difficult to publicly criticise Reagan who had just recently called to wish him happy birthday.
If a busy President of the United States, with all the burdens of running a super-power, can find time to make a personal connection, what excuses do you have?
The usual ones are a lack of time or preoccupation with dealing with the immediate or the urgent. But are these simply a cop-out? One that overlooks critical relationship-investing and building?
Instead of trying to cope with the many, could you instead focus on the few? Should you be dealing with the important people in your life, attend to their needs, show you care, demonstrate you have a quality relationship?
The C19th Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto’s eponymous ‘80:20 Law’ is well-known.
How 20% of your customers could be providing 80% of your wealth. Or conversely, how 20% of your customers provide 80% of your grief.
Instead of trying to reach as many people as possible should you just focus on fewer, higher quality relationships? Maybe as few as just twelve.
You need a network of twelve
Twelve is a magic number. It’s not a religious point I’m making here, but someone 2,000 years ago created a world-wide movement with an army of only twelve.
Twelve gives you a degree of scale, a small critical mass, but is also perhaps the limit of your resource to invest in maintaining high-quality relationships.
The response to the Coronavirus is a double-barrelled approach of, yes, going online, but also fostering and nurturing your few high-quality, direct relationships.
In your social networks you have ‘Connectors’: people who, unprompted and of their own volition, put your name ‘in the frame’; recommend you; or be alert to new opportunities for you.
The success of your life is arguably down to the quality of your Connector relationships
Word of mouth remains the most powerful form of communication: it’s authentic, credible and can be personally tailored to the wants and needs of the person you are seeking to connect with. Connectors have the keys – through their knowledge, experience and contacts – to instantly unlock the opportunities you desire, by connecting you with others; some of whom it would be difficult, even impossible, to reach, take your call, or say ‘yes’ to your plans.
Connectors allow you to ‘tap’ their world-view and connections. They see the potential in you, and most importantly, potential links with members of their network. As a brand new social enterprise, a key part of Grow Social Capital’s strategy is to place our Connectors at the pinnacle of our social networks.
To do this we are investing significant time in identifying, cultivating and nurturing our Connector relationships. If you were to audit how many Connectors you have in your life – those performing the role outlined above – how many would it be? A handful?
If it is less than twelve, perhaps you are failing to invest in identifying, cultivating and nurturing your Connector relationships. But during Corona lockdown you probably have time – or the ‘headspace’- to make a renewed start on building the quality Connector relationships in your life.
You need to network. Networking is usually done badly because people ignore its first rule:
You give before you can take. Networking is fundamentally about giving. In networking you reap what you sow.
But by understanding Social Capital you understand and emphasize the centrality of relationships and interpersonal connections. Yes, go and broadcast online, connect to as many people as you can, but also invest in creating a network of twelve Connectors. Here is our five step plan for building that network.
Stage 1 – Identify
- Identify your existing Connectors. Who is it that requires no prompting in recommending and connecting you with others; sings your praises; or quietly nods to encourage you to move on up? Who are they? These people are the first names on your list.
- Identify, cultivate and nurture potential Connectors. Who is out there who could be a good connection, ally or friend? How can you reach out to them? What are they interested in? What, and how, do you give them something that helps them or their cause?
Stage 2 – Engage
- Listen harder to their needs and priorities. Don’t just hear.
- Identify new or more things you can do for them, how you can invest and build your relationship
- Identify with which of your contacts you can connect them
Stage 3 – Ask
- Make specific asks of them. Don’t ask for vague favours
- Focus engagement through your existing Connectors i.e., can they connect you with your target list of potential Connectors
- If it’s appropriate, nudge them to connect with their contacts
Stage 4 – Active feedback
- Ask for feedback from your Connectors. And listen!
- Demonstrate you have acted or taken the feedback on board in some way
Stage 5 – Review
- Revisit, review and revise your list of existing Connectors
- Revisit, review and revise your list of potential Connectors
- Consider whether there is any need to deepen or extend relationships?
- Redo steps 1-5
The immediate future
By adopting a double-barrelled approach to responding to the Corona pandemic you can both overcome immediate short-term challenges created through social isolation and the lockdown by going online.
But you can also build a better platform to go forward. A platform that addresses any previous neglect of your Social Capital – and how you are seeking to change your world with the help of your Connectors.
Hopefully, this has helped you. If it has, pay it forward – is there anything you can do for others?
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