The Organizational Sweet Spot: Engaging the Innovative Dynamics of Your Social Networks
by Charles (“Kalev”) Ehin, PhD
Publisher: Springer
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What Is The Organizational Sweet Spot?
- the place where formal and informal elements (such as conversations and personal relationships) overlap or converge within an organization (also known as the “shared access domain”)
- where the most productive and innovative work of an organization takes place
- In this space, both the interests of individual workers and the formal system coincide, leading to the expansion of people’s skills and talents through emergent relationships in the process of pursuing opportunities and solving organizational problems.
- The sweet spot is relatively small in most businesses because they don’t encourage informal relationship building; instead, they focus on formal structures, barely tolerating or not tolerating the natural need for people to interact informally
Benefits To Promoting the Expansion of The Organizational Sweet Spot:
- increases worker’s productive voluntary engagement
- enhances worker motivation through involvement and personal commitment
- allows spirit of interdependence to dominate, rather than just self-interest; strengthens accountability of individual workers
- accommodates and facilitates change
- permits mutual benefits for worker and organization to occur simultaneously (“win-win”)
- it is the wellspring for innovation