Leaders Create and Maintain Social Support Networks

A minister friend once told me that the difference in success rates between close friends and mental health professional in helping those struggling with psychological challenges was statistically insignificant. Whether this is precisely correct or not has been debated, but it does serve to illustrate how important social relationships can be to our mental health and well-being. By extension, one can see that social networks in the workplace setting can play an important role. Moreover, leaders have a responsibility to help create social support networks among constituents to help recognize contributions and celebrate accomplishments. The result from encouraging the formation and expansion of social networks among employees is better performance, health, and well-being for those who would otherwise not have an opportunity to achieve maximum performance.

Email, blogs, and internal discussion forums can provide the means for fostering internal corporate social networking. However, many companies have yet to establishing policies on external and internal communication issues surrounding blogs. Software and networks typically have important operational uses and unique security concerns that preclude use their use for social networking in the corporate context. Employees also have tasks to perform that should preoccupy them.

Some of the benefits of maintaining social support networks to exchange information in both official and informal interactions are described by Kouzes and Posner (2002):

• Coworkers can help one another avoid work burnout.
• Those with low self-esteem can be encouraged and made to feel that they are an important part of the work team, which they are.
• High quality social support can enhance work productivity, psychological well being, and physical health.
• The California Department of Mental Health reports that social support enhances wellness and buffers against disease when cases were subjected to stressful situations.
• There were benefits of friendships that were not documented completely but apparently resulted in a lower incidence of deaths in those who had a number of friendships.
• Social networks enhanced collaborative efforts and facilitated amiable interpersonal relationships. Group interaction provides courage to survive tough physical and stressful times.
  

Reference

Kouzes, J.M., & Posner, B.Z. (2002). The leadership challenge (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.