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“Connections That Count”—Empowering Employees by Nurturing • 125

into full-fledged partnerships over time, delivering measurable results for
companies. Gallup research has shown that “those who have one or more
strong partnerships at work generate better customer scores, safety, reten-
tion, creativity, productivity, and profitability for their companies.” 2
We’ve noted that social networks have gotten a lot of press in recent years.
Twenty years ago, we all were told to go out and network professionally as
a business activity. More recently, Web 2.0 and social networking have
become fashionable, whereas social scientists have established the power
of networks by charting the social contagion of variables such as happiness,
3
smoking, and obesity. How strange it is, then, that firms have not evolved
more strategic programs for helping new hires build their professional and
personal networks. If anything, the potential payback from networking
inside a firm should exceed that offered by online social networking gen-
erally. As many people are finding, a service like LinkedIn offers somewhat
limited benefits, since the members of a person’s network often don’t feel
enough of a sense of shared interest to come forth with valuable exchanges.
Online connections are easy to make, and so networking online often
devolves into an exercise in collecting contacts (i.e., it becomes “a volume
game”) rather than what it might be—a means to truly create personal and
enterprise value. By contrast, people networking within a company have a
much stronger shared interest. If social networks provide value in the broad
environment, they should provide all that much more value within the
bounded construct of a company.

The Connection Matrix

Companies should help new hires build better personal networks inter-
nally, but they should by no means stop there. Our research and work with
clients has led us to identify two dimensions: internal vs. external and pro-
fessional vs. personal, yielding four unique kinds of networks of use to new
hires:

• Internal Professional Networks
• Internal Personal Networks
• External Personal Networks
• External Professional Networks