Ties That Bind (and Blind)

It wasn’t just Harris’s own lack of readiness that slowed his move. Early in the process, when pressed to explain why he didn’t just look elsewhere, Harris acknowledged that he couldn’t yet imagine leaving his firm. Thanks to a natural experiment during his three months at the helm of his division, he modified his perception that he was too weak in finance and cross-functional experience to be a good general manager. But to continue making progress toward his goal, he needed more than the growing confidence that comes with experience. He had to consider his social context, the web of contacts in which he was enmeshed.

Harris’s problem was in part a lack of outside information. The demands of the immediate job, combined with family obligations, made it hard for him to keep his radar tuned to the marketplace. He didn’t know what the CV of a small-firm CEO looked like because his knowledge was circumscribed by Pharmaco and the very regulatory circles he was trying to escape. Although he had vowed to stay in touch, after six months his network from the executive program had become inactive. He also lost contact with people who had “grown up” with him at Pharmaco but who had left the firm for greener pastures.

Yet an even more significant part of his resistance to change came from the people around him who were invested in his staying and who mirrored the view that he wasn’t yet poised to take the leap. Harris had access to the power center of his firm. But his five mentors made not a gateway, but a fence that blocked the moves that would lead to career change. By talking only to people who inhabited his immediate professional world, who thought inside four walls about what opportunities he might move into, Harris seriously limited himself. Furthermore, those coworkers could no more let go of their ten-year-old image of Harris than he himself could. His story illustrates well just how much shifting connections is a necessary, though difficult, part of every career change.

In times of change and uncertainty, we take comfort in enduring ties with friends and family. Yet, as Robert Lifton writes, “These same sources of larger connectedness can be viewed as traps, as barriers to experimentation.”^[1] It is nearly impossible to change careers without altering our social and professional circles. To break the impasse, Harris had to distance himself from the core of his network while building up contacts at the periphery. Friends and coworkers had started to leave, creating, as he later realized, new sources for him to tap into. When the prize was taken from him a second time (with no substitute in sight), Harris got moving by contacting the people he used to know from Pharmaco.

In the mid-1970s, a Harvard sociologist named Mark Granovetter published what became the landmark study of how people get jobs.^[2] What he found and others have confirmed, is still true today: Most people find their jobs through personal connections.^[3] What surprised Granovetter—and hence the name of his famous “strength of weak ties” study—was that those personal contacts were neither friends, family, nor close work associates. They were distant acquaintances. Among those who got jobs through personal contacts, the great majority had interacted with that contact only occasionally or rarely.

Gary McCarthy, the would-be scuba diver turned Virgin capital-portfolio manager, illustrates this principle. He used his firm’s network of alumni, calling people he once worked with as well as former MCG employees he didn’t know. It was an ex-employee of his firm—a person he didn’t know personally, but from whom he was two steps removed—who got him in the door at Virgin. Likewise, Harris’s exit strategy came via a person he met casually at a professional conference, someone with whom he spoke no more than twice a year.

What makes a contact useful for a job change, argued Granovetter, is neither the closeness of our relationship with them nor the power of his or her position. It is the likelihood that the person knows different people than we do and, therefore, bumps into different information. The acquaintances, neighbors, and coworkers who operate in the same spheres as we do can rarely tell us something we don’t already know because they hear about the same things we do. Of course, having an Ivy League, Oxbridge, or Grande École connection can dramatically improve one’s prospects for moving into certain closed circles. But even members of elite tribes need “weak ties” to connect to worlds outside their immediate experience. Yet most people, like Harris, wait until they have been stuck for quite some time before starting to look outside their core circle of friends and colleagues.

Taken From: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career