How to reconnect for maximum impact

Full text

SPRING 2016
Jorge Walter
Daniel Z. Levin
J. Keith Murnighan
How to
Reconnect for
Maximum Impact
Research has found that rekindling dormant professional
relationships can offer tremendous career beneMts to
executives. But a new study shows that some reconnections
are more beneficial than others — and that executives often
don’t select the best reconnection choices.
Vol. 57, No. 3 Reprint #57311 http://mitsmr.com/1KHnFA1

18 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW SPRING 2016 PLEASE NOTE THAT GRAY AREAS REFLECT ARTWORK THAT HAS BEEN INTENTIONALLY REMOVED.
THE SUBSTANTIVE CONTENT OF THE ARTICLE APPEARS AS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED.
INTELLIGENCE
Reconnecting with long-lost or dormant
contacts can be very valuable — both
professionally and personally. But choosing
from among hundreds of former contacts
can be challenging. We find that executives,
when left to their own devices, don’t take
full advantage of their opportunities to
reconnect. And when they do reconnect,
they tend to focus on comfort and not on re-
connections that might offer the best advice.
As the nature of work and professional
life becomes more varied, people accumulate
an ever-increasing number of former
colleagues and contacts. Although the
Internet and social media have made
it fairly easy for people to maintain their
relationships, most managers find it
impossible to stay in active communication
with everybody. Inevitably, they lose touch
with many of their former contacts. When
these previously valuable relationships
become dormant for several years, they
can seem like they no longer exist. But
unmaintained relationships are not dead at
all: They can be revitalized fairly easily.
Our original study on reconnecting such
dormant ties (described in our 2011 MIT
Sloan Management Review article, “The
Power of Reconnection — How Dormant
Ties Can Surprise You”) investigated the
interactions of hundreds of executives.
(See “Related Research.”) We found that
reconnecting with people from previous
chapters of one’s life (such as former
colleagues, old friends, and other associates)
is as valuable, if not more so, than
connecting with currently active ties. There
were three main reasons behind this effect.
First, it turns out that dormant ties are great
sources of unexpectedly novel insights and
ideas. After all, the individuals were not
hibernating while you were out of touch;
they were out in the world, doing and
learning new things, so they can trigger new
ideas that are often more valuable than the
“same old, same old” from the people in
your current network. Second, reconnecting
is an efficient investment of time. Rather
than requiring lengthy conversations,
interactions with dormant ties are often
relatively short, delivering good “bang for
your buck” — obviously very good news
for busy executives. Third, we noted that
reconnecting a dormant relationship is
qualitatively different from starting a
relationship from scratch. Old feelings of
trust and a common perspective do not fade
away and are rekindled almost immediately.
Because managers typically have
hundreds or possibly thousands of
dormant ties, we designed our latest study
to explore how managers should tap into
their vast networks — specifically, how to
decide with whom to reconnect. To
investigate the value associated with
different choices, we asked 156 executives
from four Executive MBA classes — two in
the United States, two in Canada — to seek
advice on an important work project from
two of their dormant ties: their first, most
preferred choice and a second person
randomly selected from their list of 10
preferred choices. We then asked the
executives to respond to two surveys — one
taken before they reconnected with their
contacts and the other after their
reconnections. This two-stage research
design allowed us to make causal inferences
about the executives’ advice-seeking
preferences, the value of their reconnection
choices, and the types of reconnections
that were most valuable in this context.
The participants came from a variety
of industries and sought advice on a wide
range of subjects, including how to design
compensation systems, raise equity capital,
enter new markets, manage one’s career,
and handle a difficult boss.
Beyond getting a fresh perspective,
some benefits were completely
unanticipated. For example, one executive
reached out to a dormant contact for
advice on a new product design intended
for a particular customer. The executive
discovered that his former colleague not
only knew the customer but also that the
proposed design was not going to fit inside
[MANAGING YOUR CAREER]
How to Reconnect for Maximum Impact
Research has found that rekindling dormant professional relationships can
offer tremendous career benefits to executives. But a new study shows that
some reconnections are more beneficial than others — and that executives
often don’t select the best reconnection choices.
BY JORGE WALTER, DANIEL Z. LEVIN, AND J. KEITH MURNIGHAN

SPRING 2016 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 19
the customer’s packaging. Based on this
feedback, the executive was able to
redesign the product and save tens of
thousands of dollars.
Our executives assessed the value they
received in terms of the contribution to their
project performance, specifically the
contribution of different types of useful
knowledge (solutions, referrals, problem-
solving assistance, validating of ideas,
legitimacy, and overall). Prior to reconnect-
ing, executives assessed three indicators of
novel insights and ideas (in other words,
novelty): how briefly they had known their
contacts, how infrequently they had
communicated with them before their
relationship went dormant, and the contacts’
organizational rank or status relative to the
executives’. We also measured each dormant
contact’s expected trustworthiness and
willingness to help the executives on their
work project (in other words, engagement).
To eliminate alternative explanations, we
controlled statistically for a variety of other
factors related to the executives themselves
(such as their gender, age, and experience
level), their work project (for example, how
incremental vs. revolutionary it was), and
characteristics of the dormant tie (for
instance, shared perspective, physical
proximity, and perceived ability). We also
conducted a randomized experiment that
utilized 344 U.S. participants from Amazon
Mechanical Turk, an online labor market, to
examine whether anxiety about reconnecting
explained people’s reconnection preferences.
RELATED RESEARCH
J. Walter, D.Z. Levin, and J.K.
Murnighan, “Reconnection
Choices: Selecting the Most
Valuable (vs. Most Preferred)
Dormant Ties,” Organization
Science 26, no.5 (September-
October 2015): 1447-1465.
D.Z. Levin, J. Walter, and J.K.
Murnighan, “The Power of
Reconnection — How Dormant
Ties Can Surprise You,” MIT
Sloan Management Review 52,
no. 3 (spring 2011): 45-50.
(Continued on page 20)
PLEASE NOTE THAT GRAY AREAS REFLECT ARTWORK THAT HAS BEEN INTENTIONALLY REMOVED.
THE SUBSTANTIVE CONTENT OF THE ARTICLE APPEARS AS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED.

20 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW SPRING 2016 SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
INTELLIGENCE
Maximizing Your Benefits
Some of our new findings were fairly
straightforward. For example, older
managers reported receiving more value
from renewing dormant ties than younger
managers did. The average reconnection by
a 30-year-old manager yielded a rating of
5.16 (on a 1 to 7 scale) for value received,
but this increased to 5.60 for a 50-year-old
manager — probably because older
managers had so many more dormant ties
to choose from. Executives also rated
face-to-face interactions as more valuable
(5.63 on the 1 to 7 scale) than phone
conversations (5.29).
However, the new research and additional
analysis were especially revealing, as our
executives displayed a strong bias to choose
potential reconnections that turned out
not to be the most valuable. Specifically,
we found the following:
• The most valuable reconnections were
people who provided novelty and engaged
fully. Generally, it was better to reconnect
with higher-status contacts and people
the executives had not spent a lot of time
with in the past; this allowed for more
novel insights. In addition, participants’
expectations of who would care about them
and be willing to help turned out to be
predictive of the value they received, as
this engagement allowed for authentic
and productive conversations rather than
just a shallow catching up. Although
nearly all reconnections (94%) provided
at least some valuable advice, our
executives got significantly more value
from dormant ties with high levels of
expected novelty and engagement. (See
“Reconnections Done Right.”)
• Respondents exhibited systematic biases
that resulted in suboptimal reconnection
decisions. Rather than reconnecting with
contacts who would provide the best
available advice concerning work projects
— in other words, focusing on how to
achieve engagement and novelty —
respondents systematically preferred
people whom they saw as less intimidating
and more familiar. In other words, they
chose the more comfortable rather than
the most effective path.
• Emotions played a bigger role than we
expected. Many of our executives were
generally anxious about reconnecting,
and this diminished their willingness to
consider new options. When pressed,
they gravitated toward contacts with
whom they had extensive histories of
prior interaction, even if that meant
missing out on potential value.
• Ironically, the anxiety that managers
felt about reconnecting was usually
misplaced. We asked executives after they
reconnected whether — apart from any
value received — they enjoyed it and had
fun reconnecting. They were resoundingly
positive about their reconnection
experiences: 90% enjoyed the experience
and had fun, 6% were neutral, and only
4% did not. One respondent concluded:
From a personal standpoint, I believe
that I completely underestimated their
reactions to assisting me with my
project and hence was worried for no
reason…. Though nervous at first, I am
now looking forward to maintaining
both these connections, since I believe it
will be beneficial for all of us — on a
business and personal level.
One year later, this manager was still in
touch with — and benefiting from — her
reconnections.
Reconnecting with dormant ties in your
social network can lead to enduring value,
often more than you can obtain from your
active ties. It can also be enjoyable. However,
to get the most out of reconnecting, you have
to seek out former contacts who are likely to
engage with you and to provide you with
novelty. To achieve more novelty, this may
mean going outside your usual comfort zone
and reaching out to higher-status people or
to people you didn’t know very well to begin
with. But these are exactly the kinds of
reconnections that can best point you in a
new direction, tell you something you don’t
already know, and help you make the most of
dormant connections in your network.
Jorge Walter is an associate professor
of public policy at the School of Business
at George Washington University in
Washington, D.C. Daniel Z. Levin is a
professor of management and global
business at Rutgers Business School —
Newark and New Brunswick at Rutgers
University in New Jersey. J. Keith Murnighan
is the Harold H. Hines Jr. Distinguished
Professor of Risk Management at the Kellogg
School of Management at Northwestern
University in Evanston, Illinois. Comment
on this article at http://sloanreview.mit
.edu/x/57311, or contact the authors at
smrfeedback@mit.edu.
Reprint 57311.
Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
2016. All rights reserved.
RECONNECTIONS DONE RIGHT
Asked to rate the value of advice received from an average reconnection on a work project,
executives were somewhat positive. But they said they got the most value from
reconnecting with people who offered high levels of both novelty and engagement.
How to Reconnect for Maximum Impact
(Continued from page 19)
(Contributed
very positively)
(Contributed
positively)
(Contributed
somewhat
positively)
(Contributed
neither positively
nor negatively)
Contribution to your performance on your work project
(on a scale of 1 to 7)
4 5 6 7
Average
reconnection
High-novelty,
high-engagement
reconnection