Trust, Relationships and Nuance: How to Cultivate Social Capital for Thriving Communities and Workplaces

When you hear the word segregation, you probably don’t think of good things. But new research shows that in the right context, non-mandated segregation is key for strong community ties to form.

Neal’s 2015 study published in the American Journal of Community Psychology is called “Making Big Communities Small: Using Network Science to Understand the Ecological and Behavioral Requirements for Community Social Capital.” He created a model that put four variables at play: community diversity and segregation, and community members’ tendency toward homophily (bonding with similar people) and proximity (bonding with folks nearby).

Neal wanted to find out what ingredients are required to create the potential for social capital to develop in communities. Social capital is social relationships and the results of the interactions of those relationships. Things like trust.

“Strong relationships, most managers will agree, are the grease of an organization. Business gets done without them, but not for long and not very well.” — Prusak and Cohen, Harvard Business Review

Neal explains that social capital is both a process (relationships) and a resource (trust). Capital is a “type of resource that facilitates action.” We need to take action in order to make change in our communities and organizations. So we need to learn the nuances of social capital and how to cultivate it in helpful ways.

In Neal’s study, there are two types of social capital. Bonding social capital arises from deep community bonds. It’s the cohesion within a group. Bridging social capital happens when groups interact with each other to share resources and information. It’s the ties between “otherwise socially disconnected groups.”

When a network or community has both bonding and bridging social capital then there is the potential for it to become a small world network. That means there are small, tightly bonded groups within a community that easily share information and resources with other tight knit groups.

Think about the community you live in or what your workplace is like. Are there lots of tight knit groups? If they don’t interact, that means your environment has low bridging social capital. Or is everyone on their own? Lots of parties of one. That means there is low bonding social capital.

In those cases, it is hard for social capital to flourish. It’s hard for creativity to flourish too.

Neal found that when communities are highly diverse, highly segregated and people have a strong tendency toward homophily (forming relationships with folks like them) the potential for social capital development was the highest. This looks like a city with lots of small, closely bonded neighborhoods that interact with each other easily. In a workplace setting, it could look like many small, highly bonded teams that communicate fluidly with other groups organization-wide.

People can live and work “in big, diverse communities that feel small and familiar.” Instead of erasing differences in an effort to create a “colorblind, placeless community,” Neal advocates for the opposite. Respecting and recognizing differences.

He offers historically black colleges and ethnic enclaves as examples of positive segregation. This is not segregation mandated by law. Rather, in those specific contexts, people can build community around “shared social and demographic characteristics including race, religion, ethnicity, or social class.” It is a supportive, rather than oppressive, environment.

Each community or workplace can begin to implement ideas to improve their potential for social capital. Neal explains that solutions need to be tailored to each community’s environmental reality (segregation, diversity) and behavioral tendencies (homophily, proximity). You can meet your community where it’s at. The goal is to create conditions that foster both bonding and bridging social capital.

• If you want to increase community diversity, Neal suggests mixed-use and mixed-income developments “that attract a range of people.” That diverse range means folks will bring “different skills and perspectives, and thus represents a vast pool of talent.” Learn more about the science behind diversity’s key role in collective intelligence here.
• If the community is highly segregated, Neal suggests identifying “a single promising basis for cohesion in the community (e.g., a common local issue or a common local meeting place), and focus on building relationships around it.” That will create bridging social capital.
• If a community is relatively integrated, then people’s tendency to form relationships with who is closest to them physically (proximity) is most important to foster. To encourage those relationships, Neal advocates for building common public spaces like parts or community centers.

Neal notes that these measures only create the potential for social capital. Learning how to activate that potential is the next phase. We need to then implement systems that water those seeds.

In the Harvard Business review article “How To Invest in Social Capital”, Prusak and Cohen offer the following tactics to nurture social capital within an organization:

Enable trust

• Instead of doing trust falls or belaying a coworker at the rock wall, the authors emphasize the importance of building trust into the structure of an organization. Those one-off experiences build temporary, not long-lasting trust.
• “[T]rust thrives where managers give employees no reason to distrust — where there is transparency and where employees have confidence in the rule of law.” For example, make it clear how folks are promoted to avoid the “special treatment” pitfall.
• “Trust employee judgement”. Instead of micromanaging, enable folks to make decisions and take action in their specific role.
• “Trust responds to rewards.” Promote trustworthy people to show which values are valued.

Foster cooperation

• “Give people a common sense of purpose.” In B Corporations, the quadruple bottom line of people, planet, profit and purpose is built into every business system. It is required that all four are considered at every level, at every step.

Authenticity in management

• “Don’t do any of this for the sake of appearances. Invest in social capital only to the extent that you believe in it.” Trust grows organically over time. If you’re faking it, you’re not going to make it.

Social capital is another term for healthy relationships, which are the key to team, organizational, community, and societal success. We can organize communities and workplaces to reinforce and perpetuate the formation of healthy relationships. When we create those small world networks, networks of tightly bonded groups that communicate easily between groups, we create potential for social capital.

“In our organizations, just as in our neighborhoods and nations, our ability to recapture community and build social capital will determine our progress.” — Prusak and Cohen, Harvard Business Review

Do you need to work on bridging or bonding social capital in your communities and workplaces? Let us know in the comments. Here’s to the long term, fruitful work of building small world networks.