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Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth to help you advance in your career. Today, we're delighted to be speaking with Jeffrey Beeson. He is a distinguished authority on leadership and organizational transformation with a career expanding over two decades. As the founder and chief enabling officer of Ensemble Enabler since 2014, he has been instrumental in fostering agile organizational cultures and advanced leadership practices. He's the author of Network Leadership, which by the way was a great read with all of the research. I felt like I was actually in the classroom, but that's good. Jeffrey wrote the book, Network Leadership: Promoting a Healthier World Through the Power of Networks. Jeffrey's experience includes over a decade in strategic consulting at Bain & Company and McKinsey & Company providing strategic guidance to top management across nine industries. Well, I feel like we're in the right place here. Between the way you approach networking and the fact that you come from this deep and powerful foundation in strategy, I feel like we're in the right place at the right time, so thank you for making time for us.

Jeffrey Beeson: Thank you for having me.

Anita Brick: So let's jump in. This comes from an MBA student. Since networks are dynamic, I want to shape and influence my networks to advance my own career and leverage it to help others do the same. What is a starting point for taking a strategic and action-oriented approach?

Jeffrey Beeson: A really important question. The old saying is always that it's not what you know, but it's who you know, and there's a reason why that's actually a truism. Our organizations are networks. The better that you're networked inside of an organization, the more career paths and opportunities are going to open up for you. To a certain degree, it's invaluable for an organization to have someone who's well networked, those are the people who get promoted because they know where to go inside the organization in order to get things done.

In terms of the actionable part of it, to realize that when you are in contact with somebody else, it opens up a whole new world to you and that we should look at these connections with other people as absolute assets in our portfolio. So many people who are a little bit shy about getting in touch with other people hold back for various reasons. What we're going to be seeing in the future is that this is just going to intensify. The more connections you have, the better that you're going to be. And I'm not talking about Facebook or LinkedIn connections. I'm talking about real bonding connections with other people that make a difference.

Anita Brick: Two questions, we'll take them one at a time. Another Boothy asked the question, "What is the optimal number of people in our network because more isn't always better? How do you know how many to have say in your first degree or inner circle?" And more broadly, some people think, "Well, I have many people, and it doesn't always play out that they're willing to exchange and help us." What do you think is an optimal number?

Jeffrey Beeson: Actually, that's part of the issue we're having here is that because in our society we're now faced with all these clicks and likes and personal connections require a lot of effort on people's parts. So there is a real upper limit to what your network really can be. When you're looking at networks, you're probably looking at a really close network, really intimate network, and that's five to six people that we're talking about. And then there's the next layer, what I would call good acquaintances. They're not really deep acquaintances, but good acquaintances, which you meet on occasion and then you maintain good ties. And I'd say that we're talking about a circle about 15 to 20. We are in a sense limited to the time and effort that we have at our disposal, and so it's better to have really quality relationships, certainly have connections of people with so-called weak ties. That's really important. Maintain a network of about 20 people.

Anita Brick: Okay. One of the questions that comes up is how do you get started? Is it that I go to places where other people hang out or I have the same interest, let's say career-focused interest? How do I take that random meeting at a conference and turn it into someone where we can be supportive and beneficial of one another? This came up recently in a call that I had with someone and they're like, "Yeah, I meet people all the time. Just it never turns into anything."

Jeffrey Beeson: Into anything.

Anita Brick: Yeah. How do you make that conversion?

Jeffrey Beeson: Well, I should probably here talk a little bit about what I call weak ties, people you don't know very well. It's those people who all of a sudden something comes out of, and you never know. Best way to actually deal with the weak ties is to open yourself up and to a certain degree, divulge a little bit about yourself. You don't really know about them. They don't really know about you. You don't know what the intersection is. And so instead of just saying, "I'm Joe Schmoe, then this is my job title," maybe you can add a hobby or a passion or something that you really enjoy doing in your free time because you never know what might actually stick though you open up doors that may remain closed unless... and you may never know that there were possibilities. That's a really important piece of the puzzle is that you need to be willing to really reveal something about yourself to open up those connections that aren't so strong.

Anita Brick: I like that. Theoretically, it makes total sense. I think in practice sometimes it can be a little scary for people. The other person isn't always receptive. And this actually dovetails with another question from a Boothy. In the book, you talk about energy. That can be contagious. It's clear that individuals want to be around others who energize them in positive ways. How can a person like me be deliberate about this so that they encourage others to support them or in this case me and gain more influence? So what do you do to be deliberate, especially in a world where there's a lot of things going on that could take you off point and maybe make you negative and the negativity would be contagious as well?

Jeffrey Beeson: Oh, that's right. Both are contagious. This is actually one of my favorite subjects in terms of networks, how influence or energy travels through networks, and there's the law of three degrees of influence. You can influence somebody else directly with personal contact and then they will influence the people they're in contact with. That's second degree. And then the second degree people will influence the people that they're in contact with, which is third degree. This spreads.

And of course, if someone has a lot of contacts that can affect a lot of people. And it's important to understand that kind of dynamic. Your attitude, your way of dealing with people will affect people that you never meet and also vice versa. I mean, you can have that same kind of effect coming from people that you haven't met going through your contacts. This is just the way networks function and it's a really powerful lever that people have. We always gravitate towards those leaders who no matter what, always seem to have a bright disposition and it just something about being next to them that really feels good, contagious, and it moves into the team is just one of those, I would call it even leadership skills that make a huge difference and being able to somehow bring that about despite difficult situations.

Anita Brick: So not to interrupt, but to interrupt for a second, how do you do that? That's sort of like the secret sauce. How do you pivot in the moment so you don't bring more negativity into the workplace? Especially if you're not feeling that great, what do you do? How do you do it? How do you bring that to your network?

Jeffrey Beeson: It's a complicated subject.

Anita Brick: It sounds like this is a deliberate, almost a practice to identify something of value and the people that you work with, even if you're not the leader correct?

Jeffrey Beeson: That's true. And there's another aspect here that I think I should mention, and we seem to just take everything for matter of fact. We realize just what an amazing thing a person is and remind ourselves on a daily basis. If you can put yourself into that frame of mind, I think it helps.

Anita Brick: I would agree with you. What you said is very important that if you take a pause and think about, "Well, this person actually has made my life better because of this, that or the other," and you come from that place of curiosity, it can make it a lot better.

Jeffrey Beeson: Absolutely. Most people are trying to do the best they can. One of the ways I look at it, they don't go into work to try to damage the team or the organization or whatever. They may make mistakes as all of us do. If we support them in that, they're going to rise to the occasion.

Anita Brick: I agree. One person you mentioned in the book, and this is someone who I don't think had a lot of hope because he couldn't give away his company to his kids, and that's Ray Anderson, but he did a complete turnaround and actually grew his business and made it sustainable when no one thought it could happen and he did it through networks. Maybe you can walk us through that a little bit. I just find it a fascinating story.

Jeffrey Beeson: I think it should get a lot more attention than it does. Ray Anderson was really an amazing human being, and he was a very successful businessman, and he found himself in a situation in which his company Interface was very profitable, but he was confronted by the employees. Apparently this was my one person in the company who basically indicated that they had a horrible carbon footprint, and it really hit home with him. There was an epiphany that changed his whole orientation. He says, "I can't run a business that's damaging the environment. I need to do something."

Anita Brick: And it was a carpet company and all the carpet and padding would go into a landfill.

Jeffrey Beeson: Right.

Anita Brick: Right. Okay.

Jeffrey Beeson: And well, not only that, he was also making it in such a way that there was a lot of carbon emissions being made as the manufacture was taking place. And he said, I got to do something about this. But he didn't know exactly what he was determined to make it happen, and he believed in his employees and his stakeholders and he involved them. He involved them in a process in which they were invited to offer solutions. Of course, he backed up with investments over the years, but it was just a culture that was built on sustainability with everyone being asked to have all hands on deck and company became net-zero certified in 2019 due to his leadership, but he didn't live to see it unfortunately. But the amazing thing is that it's actually lived on into the next CEO who is equally passionate about reaching those targets and reaching those goals.

Anita Brick: And he mobilized his networks to do that, and he created something. If you go into many places that have carpeting, you'll see his footprint, no pun intended there because he developed carpet tiles and they weren't around before that. He even mobilized his competitors to take away all of the padding and stuff that was going to be done, and he recycled it, which allowed him to have a company that was even more profitable when the price of oil skyrocketed and people were tanking. He had greater profitability than ever. So I love the fact that he was highly profitable and also the social impact.

Jeffrey Beeson: He actually gave a speech, which you can see, I mean there's a recording of it where he says he doesn't understand his fellow CEOs who are so against environmental initiatives, what he's founded in his business at least, that he's become more profitable than he was before, and that it's actually really good for business.

Anita Brick: I think that that's great, and I think it shows that sometimes we have these goals that seem unrealistic, but either unrealistic if we are trying to do it alone, rather than mobilizing our network who may want to help. They just don't know that it's even an option.

Jeffrey Beeson: They don't even know how to do it or where to contribute, but when they're being asked, people will come up with ideas and if you're willing to listen, there's some really good ideas in there.

Anita Brick: Oh, there are. A lot of good ideas in your book too. One of the things you talk about the difference between a change agent and an impulse catalyst. So here's the question. How can I move from being a change agent to being an impulse catalyst and being even better able to leverage significant change that can change my life, my team, and much broader than that?

Jeffrey Beeson: We've had a certain kind of change management philosophy for decades, and it's fairly linear. You come up with a vision and you implement a plan and then somehow you push it through the organization. This may have worked maybe in the 20th century. This is not the way networks function. And what I say in my book is that organizations are basically structured around network patterns. That's what network science reveals, and therefore their organizations are networks and networks are non-linear the way that they function because their feedback loops and interactions amongst the people in networks that happen all the time, and they either enhance signals or decrease signals depending on how the information travels through the network. They're not linear. This whole idea of pushing change through an organization is completely antiquated and it's not in keeping with reality of how organizations function. And of course, we've seen a lot of these change initiatives face tremendous amounts of resistance from all quarters, and that's partially because they're trying to do something linear in a non-linear world.

Jeffrey Beeson: So how do you deal with that? Because I mean, change is required and they're moving at an unbelievable speed. As a leader, you definitely have to be able to support change, but not in this planned march through the organization, but what I call an impulse catalyst. What you want to do as a leader is keep challenging people to think past the status quo, and you can do that across your entire network or as many people as possible. Let's take the example of Ray Anderson again. He challenged his people to think of ways of doing business that were environmentally friendly and that they weren't doing at the time. That's what an impulse catalyst does. It doesn't necessarily tell you, "Here's where we're going, but let's not be satisfied with whatever it's we're doing. There's always something we can do better."

Anita Brick: All right, so how do we put that into practice in a practical way?

Jeffrey Beeson: Well, that's the entire issue of experimentation. Challenge people to think differently. When they do think differently. You look at small projects you don't need take full risk right away and to see what works, what sticks, what doesn't before you go into a full scaling mode. The key here is that you need to leave a certain amount of room for people to experiment and to fail and to be comfortable with that. And the more that you can be comfortable with that and get people to be involved, the more that they're going to do it. It's also a role play in the sense that when something is presented, you don't necessarily satisfied with it and you question could it be better? This is a sense of dissatisfaction. You just have to keep pushing yourself. And so it's a habit, but it's a habit in terms of not just yourself, but getting the people around you to have the same kind of feeling.

Anita Brick:
Well, I like that. I think it could also be applied to someone who wants to build their network. There's someone who has their people out there who are likely going to get more attention because they have more credibility and influence. These experiments can be done on a one-on-one basis. Let's just say I wanted to meet you. I'm like, "Well, I don't know. I don't know that he would reply to me. I can choose someone else." I'm building that muscle. I experiment. Some of it's going to go well, some of it's not going to go so well. And then I take what's working and I build from there. So it could be done on an individual basis, a team basis, or organizationally. It sounds like you just need to in the one-on-one, you have to give yourself permission to make mistakes. In the organizational level, the leadership needs to allow for a certain amount of acceptable mistakes, otherwise it can never work.

Jeffrey Beeson:
Oh, that's right. Otherwise, you kill experimentation because people aren't going to experiment if they're always has to turn out right. That's the nature of experimentation. Some things are not going to work and that's why you keep the project small because I mean you don't want to take a unnecessary risk. You need to completely be on board with failure, potential failure.

Anita Brick:
You're absolutely right. And I think you look at companies that have grown, they've really accelerated their growth and it's through this having a minimally viable product. And then you experiment, you keep iterating, and when they stop doing that, people become less prone to allow for mistakes. Not only do they stop accelerating, they actually can decline. I like to go back to something we were talking about that change when there are acquisitions often that integration doesn't work because it is viewed, like you said, as linear. People balk at it. We go back to the nonlinear nature of what you were talking about, and you also talk about serendipity in the book. I was thinking about it because not a lot of people who've been at Bay and McKinsey talk about serendipity, serendipitous things happen a lot. How do you open up the aperture of your lens? How do you see and accept and take action on things that seem to be kind of random, but they're really serendipitous.

Jeffrey Beeson:
You need to open the opportunity for serendipity to occur. The best way of getting serendipity to occur is to connect people that are not necessarily connected. Connecting people, and that's one of the things I also talk about extensively, is one of the most important things leaders can do because you never know what might come out of it. Current managers, a lot very often shy away from is they don't somehow don't think that this is productive. One of the things that you can do with networks is circumvent the regular pathway. And if you go right to the person who has the answer, you're going to actually save tremendous amount of time. There are many things that you can do and certainly one of them is being open to new connections and seeking them out. But in terms of organizations, one of the things that I often recommend is what I call large group gatherings.

I mean, that's one of the reasons partially we have conferences. Doing events in which people are in contact with people they're not normally in contact with is probably a really good practice for organizations. Things can come out of it that no one can foresee. And so by creating those kind of opportunities for serendipity push innovation and you also improve collaboration, and interestingly enough, you also create a sense of belonging and that can be very strong in terms of the impact on a business. There was a study by the Harvard Business Review said that employees who stated a strong sense of belonging in the organizations they were working for were 50% less likely to leave the organization. So it's not just new ideas and innovation, which of course serendipity helps, but creating those new connections creates a sense of belonging and has an impact on other aspects of the business.

Anita Brick:
So I have a tricky question and the tricky question is you can put people in the same room whether it is preferably in person, and if you ever go to some of these events, people gravitate toward people they already know.

Jeffrey Beeson:
That's right. That's right.

Anita Brick:
How do you create an environment or how do you incentivize an individual to meet with someone who may think differently than they do and not chalk it up to, "Well, this is a waste of time"? How do you help someone get past the obvious superficial differences to actually have an exchange? And I know that's the trillion-dollar question, but I'm going to ask it anyway.

Jeffrey Beeson:
You have to really fight against that because it's a tremendous tendency. If you have the opportunity to design the facilitation yourself, then you can do all sorts of things to ensure that that happens. One of my favorite ways of doing that is sort of the World Cafe style in which you're changing dialogue partners on a regular basis and doing that randomly and suggesting that people sit with people they don't know. And the more that you do that, the better for your organization. And you're absolutely right. You can have a huge gathering of people together and they may meet one or two people and that's it. And that's a shame.

Anita Brick:
So let's just say that you and I have a very different world view, either functionally or on whatever dimension, and you and I are partners. This is a big question. How do you suggest that someone keep an open mind long enough to actually be able to hear what the other person says because that's a really big barrier, not only in the world at large, but even within teams? How do you teach someone or how do you get someone to be patient enough to listen and potentially have their mind changed?

Jeffrey Beeson:
So it depends on what the difference is because if it's a difference in terms of content or experience or whatever, that's easily bridged. It's just a matter. But if it's a difference of values, if it's a difference of world view that's more difficult.

Anita Brick:
Let's just say we're different functions. I'm IT and you're strategy. We just have very different objectives and incentives and deliverables. I'm on the tactical side of IT, and you're looking at corporate strategy. How would you get me to listen to you when I'm in the weeds with things and you're at 30,000 feet?

Jeffrey Beeson:
That's a very, very, very good question. And a lot of times we don't hear what other people are saying, no clue as to what world they're coming from. One of the most important things that people today can do is to develop their social-emotional competence. It's a field that has many aspects to it, but one of them is the ability to deeply listen. Social-emotional competence means is that you're able to listen to someone else, not necessarily agree with them, but be able to take in what it is that they're saying. And there are many ways that you could train this capability.

Anita Brick:
I think that that might also be experimentation as well.

Jeffrey Beeson:
Absolutely.

Anita Brick:
Yeah.

Jeffrey Beeson:
I think it's one of the things that organizations should prioritize.

Anita Brick:
Agree, agree. So do you have time for one more question?

Jeffrey Beeson:
Absolutely.

Anita Brick:
What are three things that you would advise someone to do to increase opportunities to really mobilize their network for themselves and others?

Jeffrey Beeson:
The first rule is sort of a bit of a surprise for a lot of people. You can't enter into this assuming that you're going to get something out of it. That's not the way networking works. Networking works by giving and taking, and you have to be willing to give in order to receive. One of the very first things that I would suggest and recommend to people is what can I bring to other people's networks or to other people and how can I support them? And the amazing things that you'll find is that the more that you're willing to give, the more that you're going to get back. There is a certain golden rule around that. So often I think that people are thinking of networks in terms of what can I get for myself? When people feel that as the motor behind it, then it somehow backfires or can backfire very quickly.

And so that would be the first thing is that realize is that this is a give and take situation, and that the more you give, the more you're going to get back. The second piece of advice would be look for people that are not like you because that's going to open up worlds to you that you would not normally maybe have an opportunity to see. That is going to create very strong apparatus for you. Diversity in your network is really, really critical. Then open yourselves up to new possibilities. Connect with people that you would never thought of connecting with. You never know what positives may be, and have that attitude and realize that this is an amazing opportunity to enter another world. One of the quotes that I put in the book is that connecting with other people opens up or can open up a whole new world to you. And to think of networking in that way.

Anita Brick:
I love it. And I would say that the thing that wraps around all three of those things is open-mindedness, appreciation, and experimentation. So I really appreciate that you wrote the book and that you put so much scientific backing in it. Because I think sometimes networks and networking, it can come across as platitudes, but you substantiate why you say what you say, and that's very powerful. So thank you for doing that.

Jeffrey Beeson:
Well, thank you. Hope that everyone in Chicago finds this is helpful.

Anita Brick:
Yeah, there's some people who listen who maybe live a lot closer to you than Chicago. Yeah, since our audience is pretty global. Anyway, thank you again for making the time and I wish you all the best and hopefully we'll be able to reconnect sometime in the future.

Jeffrey Beeson:
I certainly hope so.

Anita Brick:
All right. Thanks, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey Beeson:
My pleasure.

Anita Brick:
And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.