Cross & Parker's "Hidden Power of Social Networks" really made me think. Social networks are all around us, but we (or at least I) rarely actually pay attention to them. The book was particularly centered around social networks in business settings, so it naturally made me think of work.
I used to work for Barnes & Noble, and in my years with them I was cross-trained in all of their different departments. Thus, I could cover receiving when the manager was gone, or fill in a cafe shift, work in the music department, kids department, main floor, etc. Because of this, a lot of my coworkers would come to me for information. On one of Cross & Parker's social network diagrams, I would probably have had a lot of lines coming and going. Usually I would think of this as a good thing. Who doesn't want to be a bit of an "expert," even if it is just in book selling?
However, Cross & Parker bring up an interesting point that it is not always a good thing to be centrally located. Sometimes it overloads the person who has become a network "hub," and their work performance is compromised because they end up meeting a lot of needs that aren't a part of their job description. Other times a person is centrally located because they like to dominate and control information, rather than helping it to flow freely throughout the network. Cross & Parker called these scenarios "bottlenecking," and suggested a careful analysis of these centrally located figures to ensure that they really were in healthy positions, and if they were not, to help them share their workload and information in more constructive manners.
So was I a bottleneck? Probably at least in some aspects. Although I liked to think of myself as an essential part, it may be that I was not helping as much as I thought I was. It's food for thought for a sometimes-over-achiever.
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This reminds me of working @ Target. For the first few years there, I got cross-trained in pretty much every area possible. To my peers, I was a center of information, because in many cases people go to the manager as a last resort. I experienced this when getting promoted to a manager. The network changed. The same people were no longer coming to me, it was now people at my peer level, and this was much less often because there were less of us and we all kind of knew the same things, with a few exceptions. It's an interesting dynamic to see a network change within the same setting, with the same exact people.
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