How to build social capital

During one of the breakout sessions at a recent Healthcare MBA conference at the University of California-Irvine business school, the group was tasked with sharing ideas to help create career satisfaction, success and happiness and restore the joy of medicine.

One of many ideas is to build your personal and professional social capital and rediscover the lost tribe of medicine.

Encyclopedia Britannica defines social capital as the professional or personal relationships people develop to "secure benefits and invent solutions to problems through membership in [these] social networks." There are both personal and professional reasons why you should build social capital.

PERSONAL REASONS

You should build personal relationships at several levels because it is good for your health and will make you happier.

Here's the Surgeon General's perspective.

Here is another view of why people are either unwilling on unable to build their social capital.

The single best determinant of happiness is the quality of the relationships with people in your life. Heaps of research suggest that social connections make people happier. Satisfying relationships not only make people happy, but they also are associated with better health and even longer life.

Here's why friendships are important.

But making friends as you get older is hard.

In recent research published in Personality and Individual Differences, researchers conducted 30-minute semi-structured interviews on 20 participants in a university laboratory seeking to discover what makes adult friendships difficult to create. Once the interviews were complete and coded, an open-ended survey on the matter was conducted on 108 new participants to further probe and validate the responses given in the semi-structured interviews.

The following 40 reasons were revealed, structured into six broad categories:

• Introversion
• Fear of rejection
• Pragmatic reasons
• Low trust
• Lack of time
• Too picky

Aristotle is mostly known for his influence on science, politics and aesthetics; he is less well known for his writing on friendship. Here is what he had to say.

PROFESSIONAL REASONS

Social capital can be categorized in three ways, according to Social Capital Research:

1. Bonding – This is usually found between members of a tight social group, hence their social bond. As research says, "Bonding social capital is often associated with local communities where many people know many other people in the group (network closure). Bonding social capital is often associated with strong norms, mores, and trust which can have both positive and negative manifestations and implications for social exclusion."
2. Bridging – Many types of social capital are found between people who are not part of the same general circles. For instance, you may hang out with co-workers and also with friends who live in your city but aren’t part of the same industry. Each of you is technically connected to other people within the groups of the people you know. You can visualize these connections like a bridge, where your connection might lead to a new one.
3. Linking – Although this is similar to bridging social capital, it differs in one key way. Social Capital Research says this type is formed via "networks of trusting relationships between people who are interacting across explicit, formal or institutionalized power or authority gradients in society.” For example, an elected official might have ties to the local community. They may also have deep roots in education, activism, or the entrepreneurial world.

There are many professional reasons why you should build your social capital:

1. It reduces burnout
2. It helps you get a job, including a non-clinical one
3. It helps you advance in your current job
4. It contributes to creating new ideas, collaborations and innovation
5. It builds trust and accelerates getting things done
6. Networking helps you get, keep and grow customers
7. It is a vehicle to give back and pass it forward and share gratitude, but don't be afraid to be selfish.
8. It helps you build your personal brand and business model canvas
9. It is harder when working remotely and needs to be earned, invested and spent
10. It is a way to monetize your connections

Here are some networking tips and how to meet up at a Meetup

Invest in building your social capital. The returns are likely to be much better than US treasuries notes over the long run.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs