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🤝 Strategic Connections - Dive into McKinsey & Company's proven methods for crafting relationships that last and drive business growth.
💼 LinkedIn Leverage - With LinkedIn Learning, transform your social media presence into a powerful tool for business expansion and brand visibility.
🏙️ Community-First Approach - Explore the Brookings Institution's insights on how community engagement can be the cornerstone of your business strategy.
🌟 Branding with a Purpose - Learn from Fortune 500 companies how social capital can elevate your brand's market position.
🤲 Local Alliances for Global Impact - Economic Development Research showcases the impact of local partnerships in scaling your business.
🚨 Crisis Navigation - Stanford University studies provide a playbook for using your network to manage crises with agility and confidence.
👥 Customer Loyalty - Harvard Business School presents cutting-edge techniques for engaging and retaining customers through authentic interactions.
🔄 Feedback to Forefront - Gain actionable insights with Columbia Business School's approach to utilizing community feedback to shape strategic decisions.
🌱 Maintaining Momentum - Discover MIT Sloan Management Review's strategies for nurturing and growing your social capital over time.
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How to Invest in Social Capital
Every manager knows that business runs better when people within an organization know and trust one another—deals move faster and more smoothly, teams are more productive, people learn more quickly and perform with more creativity. Strong relationships, most managers will agree, are the grease of an organization. Business gets done without them, but not for long and not very well.
Scholars have given a name—social capital—to the relationships that make organizations work effectively. The term nicely captures the notion that investments in these relationships return real gains that show up on the bottom line. In fact, it all sounds pretty simple and straightforward. Managers need only get their people connected with one another and wait for the payback. Easy, right?
Wrong for two reasons. First, social capital is under assault in most organizations today because of rising volatility and overreliance on virtuality. More simply put, social capital is under assault because building relationships in turbulent times is tough—and tougher still with many people working off—site or on their own. Second, social capital is under assault because few managers know how to invest in it. Knowing that healthy relationships help an organization thrive is one thing; making those relationships happen is quite another.
For the past three years, we have explored managerial activities and techniques that constitute investments in social capital. Our research probably won’t stun anyone with its originality—we have found that managers know more about social capital than most scholars—but we believe it is useful in its specificity. In the following pages, we will look at what managers can do to encourage connections among their people and enable trust to flourish. But first, a few words about the enemies of social capital: volatility and virtuality.