Learn to trust...
Dr Karen Stephenson, an internationally-renowned social network theorist and corporate anthropologist, says the emerging field of network analysis has not yet been ‘commoditised' for the business education market. She believes forward-thinking South African managers should learn how to recognise and make use of the webs of relationships and trust within their organisations.
Dr Karen Stephenson: helping managers find and use their teams' invisible strengths.
“Network analysis is essentially about the relationships between people in an organisation. These relationships create the real pathways of knowledge - the actual power of an organisation exists in the structure of a human network and not in the architecture of command and control superimposed on it,” explained Dr Stephenson.
She says that today's highly competitive and ever-changing business environment requires leaders who do more than just issue forth orders - it needs leaders who understand the knowledge networks at play within their companies and who can harness them to achieve greater organisational strength and improved business performance.
“Managers understand the realm of authority; they live and breathe the hierarchy. What they don't grasp so easily is the network of relationships that riddle their hierarchy. This is because these knowledge networks are built over time from trusted relationships and relationships are not in a rolodex or a file, but invisible.
Hailed in CNN's Business 2.0 as “The Organisation Woman”, Dr Stephenson – formerly of the Harvard School of Design - currently lectures at the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University.
