Thanks for signing up to all the new readers! Here are some nuggets about how networks shape your wellbeing, relationships and community to help you actively cultivate yours.
Wellbeing
For a small number of us, nothing really changed over this past year. At the other extreme, a few of us are entering yet another strict lockdown. For the majority, we are experiencing loosening of restrictions and increasing social interaction. The U.S. Is Opening Up. For the Anxious, That Comes With a Cost. talks about the spectrum of social anxiety and how common it is to feel anxiety about re-entering the social world.
If Humans Are Social Creatures, Why Did Social Anxiety Evolve? explains the most common theories around social anxiety:
The first is a model based on social competition, which says that social anxiety evolved while our ancestors were living in social structures with clear dominance hierarchies between members.
A second theory is based on a model of social exclusion, where social anxiety would have served as a warning signal to the individual that they’re at risk of rejection or exclusion, regardless of whether the group existed in a dominance hierarchy.
The new model suggests social anxiety evolved to develop during childhood as a conditional adaptation, a type of adaptation that prepares the individual for future conditions.
Relationships
What a Year of WFH Has Done to Our Relationships at Work highlights a series of studies that Microsoft has completed about how the pandemic has impacted social capital at work. In line with other research I’ve shared, they had several key findings:
the shift to remote work shrunk people’s networks
companies became more siloed than they were pre-pandemic
the number of people posting chats in a Teams channel — designed to include the whole team — have decreased by five percent. In contrast, the number of people posting small group or one-on-one chats has increased by 87%
Community
While Community-Led Growth Is Taking Tech by Storm might be a bit of an exageration, there is definitely momentum behind community building after more than a year of relative social isolation. Below are three nuggets from the article that really resonated with me:
In five years, predicts Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, “more than half of the top-500 publicly traded companies are going to have a chief community officer.”
You might also think of community-led growth as a remix of the concept Chris Dixon popularized several years ago — “come for the tool, stay for the network”…When it’s put front and center, community can be an acquisition channel, product feedback mechanism and brand differentiator, not just a retention tactic. In other words, come for the community and tool, stay for the community and tool.
For now, he suggests tech companies think of community building like an apple tree: Plant the seeds, water it, nurture it, protect it and know that it’s going to be a while before you see any apples. “But once it bears fruit,” he said, “it’ll bear fruit for a hundred years.”
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About The Reliants Project
Reliant is my word for a person that someone depends on, an essential component of our social networks. With each edition, I’ll share useful nuggets about how networks shape your wellbeing, relationships and community to help you actively cultivate yours. Whether you want to cultivate your relationships, make better introductions, or activate networks to make an impact in the world, let me help you reach your goals.
You can find more about The Reliants Project here.