The Surprising Power of Weak Ties
“A person’s weakest ties were the most helpful for career advancement.”
We all know that our strong ties, our family, and close friends are valuable members of our network. They are the trusted advisors we rely on for advice and support. But many people don’t know that weak ties—those mere acquaintances we have in our life—are unexpectedly powerful. A weak tie might be the barista at your local coffee place who greets you by name. Or that person you always see and say hi to at your local gym. Or maybe they are someone you meet at a conference who says, ‘please join me on LinkedIn’. (And you do!) Surprisingly, they all can be an important part of your network. Here’s why.
Fifty-year-old research with 70,000 citations
At Shepa Learning Company we have been talking (for decades!) about research done in the mid-1970’s by Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter where he looked at how people got their jobs. Granovetter found that their “casual connections and acquaintances were more helpful than their strong ties in helping them find employment.” He published his findings in a paper called, “The Strength of Weak Ties”, and it has become a classic in the social sciences literature with almost 70,000 scholarly citations.
As explained by Granovetter in a 2022 interview with the BBVA Foundation, “Your weak ties connect you to networks that are outside of your own circle. They give you information and ideas that you otherwise would not have gotten. You’re more likely to get information about new jobs from people that you’re only weakly tied to, your acquaintances, than you are from close friends because you already know pretty much what they know.”
Is this “weak tie” phenomenon still relevant?
Granovetter’s research is fifty years old, and things have changed dramatically since then! We have so many social networks and ways to connect. In 2022, researchers from Stanford, MIT, Harvard Business School and others conducted a massive study to see if Granovetter’s weak ties theory still made sense. The study utilized 20 million people on the LinkedIn social network over a five-year period. The findings, published in Science, showed that it did: “A person’s weakest ties were the most helpful for career advancement.”
Networks are more powerful when you recognize weak ties
Granovetter’s work has been instrumental in changing how we at Shepa Learning think about networks and mere acquaintances. In fact, our own book, Work the Pond! ended up being published by Penguin Random House (New York) because of a chance encounter with another author at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland who introduced us to his agent.
Weak ties are important in your life, but it requires initiating a conversation with a person whom you barely know, or who you would consider a stranger. Avoid thinking “we probably have nothing in common”. Instead, travel through life with this philosophy: All connections have value. By starting the process of building a connection with them, you open yourself to the opportunities they may provide, and you may provide to them.
Personal connections matter even more today
Even in this world of increased automation and artificial intelligence, Granovetter believes that the human connection is increasingly important. He says, “There will always be more knowledge to be gotten from personal contacts of individuals than you can get from any kind of informatics.”
Our personal experiences have proven to us that the most important relationships we have made in life and work have been two and three degrees removed—in other words, weak ties.
Want to know what other ties are important?
Read our previous blog post: Your dormant ties can surprise you!
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Gayle Hallgren and Judy Thomson
Image at top: Image by Brian Merrill from Pixabay
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