Smart companies, managers and employees know the importance of having a broad and high-quality network to support the success of their employees and their organizations.

Janie works for a large multinational organization’s HR department. On a Monday morning, she arrives early to lead a cross-functional meeting. Later that morning, she facilitates another meeting where, without having formal authority over them, she is influencing executives and non-executives to adopt a new approach. 

In the afternoon, she writes a number of reports, papers and e-mails covering a variety of subjects, from finance to internal marketing. Finally, before heading home, she scripts a presentation on how her department supports the core business and designs the slides she will need for that senior executive discussion. 

In just one day, Janie has been a leader, facilitator, decision influencer, reporter, speechwriter and visual aid designer. This represents less than 25 percent of the skills she employs in her role. Tell her you think this is amazing and she will tell you she is targeting a new role that will require her to employ even more skills, some of which are missing from her present tool kit. Ask Janie how she gets all this done and expects to do even more and she simply smiles and replies, in a paraphrase of a Beatles song, “I’ll get by with a little help from my friends.”

Janie is not alone. She is not that different from you or other people you know. The range of skills required to do her job and grow her career are just as complex as those required of people in other companies and function areas. From entry-level to the most senior-level jobs, work today is very complex. The days of workers operating under a formalized division of labor in the classic pin factory that Adam Smith wrote about in 1776 are a long-faded memory. 

In fact, companies today have gone from the era of the specialist and generalist a few short decades ago and zoomed right through the era of the versatilist, who was a specialist in a number of fields, to the era of netilists.

A netilist is someone who frequently depends on others for information and assistance in doing his or her job and building his or her career. Netilists are versatilists squared. They get by with a little — and sometimes a lot — of help from huge networks of friends. Smart companies, managers and employees know the importance of having a broad and high-quality network to support the success of netilists and their organizations.

One resource that provides netilists with the opportunity to connect with other skilled people in the workplace and beyond is the employee resource group (ERG). Today, ERGs can be found in almost every Fortune 500 company.

“These networks originally started as social activism efforts to bring people with similar social-bounded identities that were underrepresented in the company together so that they could feel and become more included,” said Philip Berry, president of Philip Berry Associates and author of the forthcoming book Being Better Than You Believe. 

These early networks connected scattered people who were similar in a key aspect of their identity and provided them with a “home and hearth,” Berry said.

As a result of this early drive, many of these networks became hubs for individuals who shared one or two social-bounded identity traits, but they also became bridges, since many of the members came from different functions. A typical employee’s network could be composed of people from sales, HR, IT, marketing and finance. Over the years, many savvy members of ERGs, like Janie, recognized how to leverage these relationships in jobs that were becoming increasingly complex. 

Forward-thinking ERG leaders and company executives, seeing the growing value of this cross-pollination of functions, began building up what social network experts like Christian Baldia, managing director at Virtcom Consulting, called their corporate “social capital.” They did this by networking together those hub ERGs built around one bounded social identity.

KPMG, an international audit, tax and advisory firm, took an active role in driving the networking of its networks. Management and network leaders remove silo mentalities between their social identity group networks so they learn from each other, said Kathy Hopinkah Hannan, national managing partner for diversity and corporate social responsibility at KPMG.

In some cases, KPMG developed networks designed by people specifically to support another identity group, like the Straight Allies of GLBT network. In effect, KPMG is networking its social identity networks by strategically interconnecting these identity hubs across groups and increasing the reach of talent and skill that each of these networks offers its members and the company.

Similarly, recognizing the value of building connections between people at many levels and in many countries, Siemens recently launched the Global Leadership Organization of Women (GLOW) to connect executive women. On the heels of this move, a number of Siemens organizations are launching their own countrywide women’s networks to connect their local company’s women’s networks under one umbrella and link them to the global network. These networks bring together a variety of skills as well as second- and third-level connections to other networks of skill and knowledge across the globe.

According to Baldia, this development of social capital through the expansion of the network reach of each employee is “gradually becoming as important, if not more important than the development of individual human capital.” Leaders today don’t just want a highly trained, smart person; they want a highly trained, smart person who is connected to a diverse network of other job- and career-relevant highly trained people. 

So what can network leaders, executive sponsors and company executives do to drive support for their netilist organizations through networked-networks?

1. Encourage the development of more employee networks through policy framing and counseling. Berry sees limitless opportunity for identity group networks to form in companies. Some of his suggestions include: immigrant networks for people newly arrived from other countries; common language networks for people whose native language is different from that of the country where they currently work and live; and white male networks. These new identity group networks provide a hub that can plug participants into the larger pool of networks. A clear policy that supports the formation of networks, combined with the other steps listed here, can effectively encourage the building of hubs that serve as bridges to other networks.

2. Connect employee networks across bounded identity groups. According to Baldia, “People who advance the fastest in companies are people who are connected to networks of people who are unlike them.” While it may be important to connect with people who share certain characteristics in order to get a sense of belonging, benefits also come from bridging these networks and giving members access to people from other groups. Through these network-networks, an African-American woman can find a Hispanic or white male mentor with the right skills and experience to help her get to the next level. Or a Hispanic man can connect with an Asian colleague who possesses a skill he needs from a function area where there may not be any Hispanic men or women. “Diversify the ERG and make it a network-network,” said Simma Lieberman, president of Simma Lieberman Associates. “That’s the way to get the best results.” 

3. Connect employee networks across organizational hierarchy levels and geography. Berry points out how the interconnection of ERGs globally across levels — such as Siemens’ GLOW, country GLOW and local networks — enables organizations to use these networks to address global opportunities and challenges. “For example, an African-Peruvian network connected to an African-American network can serve as a transition supporter for an African-American expatriate stationed in the company’s office in Peru,” he said.

4. Teach employees and managers to value employee networks and networking. According to many experts, some managers view employee participation in networks as a non-work extracurricular activity. Smart managers realize that building and participating in network hubs that connect to other networks of talent is not extracurricular. It is a core part of building the social capital that makes these employees more effective and valuable to their company and teams in the short and long term.

5. Make employee network building and participation a core competency. “Teach everyone in your workforce how to be good networkers that seek out and build [the] targeted relationships they need to do their jobs and build their careers,” Lieberman said. This can be done through online network development training courses, in-person training or training offered by the networks themselves.

6. Encourage individual employees within ERGs to expand and diversify their networks beyond the confines of the company. Experts agree that to increase competence, innovation and out-of-the-box thinking, out-of-the-box networking must be encouraged and supported. Today’s electronic social networking tools as well as various professional and industry functions make this easier then ever.

It is safe to predict that the structure of work will continue to increase in complexity. This will continue putting most jobs, even at the entry level, way beyond the individual skills of even the most gifted versatilist. It is also more than likely that employee networks, like rock ‘n’ roll, are here to stay. In today’s complex world, we need each other’s similarities, differences and tensions in order to succeed.

While some of today’s hub networks built around a specific social identity may evaporate, others will be created. In a world of ever-increasing complexity, organizations that have the best networked employees will have a growing competitive advantage over those that rely solely on hiring and developing individual superstars. Welcome to the age of the netilists living in the networked organization.