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That seems counterintuitive, right? You want to be chasing strong ties and strong relationships, no?
No.
Here’s why, as explained somewhat by Stanford University research (and FSU research):
Recognize that weak ties are more valuable for job performance and careers than stronger relationships. That’s because weak ties provide you non-redundant information, while the people to whom you are most strongly tied, close friends and colleagues, probably know approximately the same things and the same people as you do. Therefore, they do not add as much additional value.
That actually makes a lot of sense. It’s kind of tied up with two related concepts:
1. If you want to be better at networking, the first thing you should do is stop networking.
2. The reason a lot of meetings are failures is similar to this concept: meetings often bring together a lot of people with mostly the same information, and then they trade around and wallow in that information, as opposed to proposing new things or putting forward concepts that can be evaluated and considered. (The meeting leader typically should have more information, but because work is largely about protecting your turf and pockets of information, sometimes meeting leaders don’t even share the information they have.)
