\u201cThe Power of Six Degrees\u201d recently re-ran on the Science Channel here in the U.S.\u00a0 The basic premise of 6 degrees was that you can connect yourself to any other person in the world, not matter how remote, with only 6 steps.\u00a0 What the show revealed was that in choosing that 6 step path, it is important how you direct each step.\u00a0 In other words, 6 degrees is not a random act, but should be quite premeditated.\u00a0 When applying this to business and HR, it is not the number 6 that is important, but the hubs and how they are used.\u00a0 In fact, 6 degrees seems outrageously far in a business sense and would in fact be quite wasteful.<\/p>\n
The Network:\u00a0 In the business world, if you are trying to find a source of information, the most direct way is not usually the mass e-mail that everyone ignores.\u00a0 The hope is that you have some sort of sense regarding the organization and you have a network of people that you can use as guides.\u00a0 6 degrees works quite well in these cases where (for example) a technology salesperson needs to find out about what enhancements will go into the next release.\u00a0 She might contact her manager, who puts her in touch with the marketing manager, who then refers her to the analyst working on product enhancements.<\/p>\n
The Digital Network:\u00a0 However, when one talks about global businesses with multiple business units and countries, a technology sales person in the U.S. may not have a reasonable and obvious connection to a construction project manager in Japan.\u00a0 In this case, your global network needs to help bring organizations and people together.\u00a0 The employee directory is nice, but simply not enough \u2013 it does not tell anyone how they are connected by interests, competencies, or any other business commonality.\u00a0 While I certainly realize that we\u2019re not looking for direct matches, we should be striving to identify the hubs \u2013 people who can direct traffic because they either know a lot of people, or know people who know a lot of people.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d suggest that even in the most complex of business environments, you are striving to keep your hops to no more than 2-3 degrees of separation.\u00a0 Any more than that and you just have lots of wasted energy as people fail at finding collaboration opportunities.\u00a0 Somewhere approaching 4-6 degrees of separation and you actually have silos of thinking, people who have gotten tired of looking for people with common interests who go out and develop their own thing concurrently with others in the same organization.<\/p>\n
I think that the moniker of \u201cTalent Management\u201d is about over.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the job HR has of helping businesses collaborating through connecting people\u2019s competencies and interests seems to fall nowhere else at the moment.\u00a0 Still, 6 degrees (or less) is about connecting people attributes in an efficient manner and belongs somewhere in HR.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cThe Power of Six Degrees\u201d recently re-ran on the Science Channel here in the U.S.\u00a0 The basic premise of 6 degrees was that you can connect yourself to any other person in the world, not matter how remote, with only…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[45,8,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collaboration","category-strategies","category-hr-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1080"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1081,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080\/revisions\/1081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}