Selecting
working group members
When selecting people to participate
on committees and working groups, and when deciding
with whom to communicate, consideration of personal
communication networks is valuable. If people have
large networks, they will facilitate the spread of
your message. Consider the two different target individuals
in the figure below. Which individual would you rather
have on your team if your goal is to communicate as
efficiently as possible to as many people as possible?
When selecting people for working groups and steering committees, you want people who have rich interpersonal networks that cross organisational boundaries. They can help spread communication quickly.
Let's look at a more detailed example:
Consider the following organisational chart. It describes a traditional, hierarchical
arrangement of individuals within a division of a large company or an entire small
company. In this example, you are the individual at the top, the manager or director
(i.e., individual 1). You have three managers reporting to you (i.e., individuals 2, 3 and
4). Each of these managers has six people reporting to them (i.e., individuals 5 - 22).
Our task, in this example, is to consider the following diagram of the communication links between the individuals in the organisational chart above, and to select one of the managers (i.e., select one from individuals 2, 3 or 4) and three or four others (from numbers 5 to 22) to make up a working group for a change project. Our goal is to maximise the communication reach of the group by picking the best-connected, boundary-spanners available.
In the figure below, the interpersonal network of each individual is represented by the arrows connecting them to others. The circles represent groups of people who have some work in common and who frequently talk together.
Although there is no one, single best answer to the question asked above, manager number 4 provides excellent contact to all of group A. Without manager number 4, the entire group A would be left out. Person number 8 is linked to all members of group D and to someone in group C as well. With those two people alone, direct or secondary access is enabled to more than half the network. The choice of the remaining people then becomes a matter of less importance in terms of connectivity. You are now free to choose other individuals because of relevant criteria such as experience, expertise, etc.
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Holistic Management Pty. Ltd.