Holiday Parties and Networking
With the holiday season quickly approaching, you may soon find yourself being invited to many holiday parties. The article discusses the importance of attending holiday parties and how they can be an important tool to take advantage of when networking. The author describes a “growth mindset” (as opposed to a “fixed mind set”) as one where the person is motivated to better their leadship, intellegence and networking skills. When adopting this mindset, holiday parties can be an easy way to challenge yourself because they provide a networking environment. At a holiday party, you have the opportunity to meet someone you would have never met otherwise.
The article also describes how strong and weak ties come into play in the holiday party setting. One person might have ties with many friends who do not necessarily know one another. This person acts as a local bridge between many different social networks. If they decide to host a party, their guests will have weak ties with one another. Weak ties do not typically share the same information, so by bringing a bunch of people together at a party, they have the opportunity to exchange new ideas and viewpoints with one another which can be benefical in expanding ones knowledge. This reminded me of the homework problem regarding “reinforced” and “unreinforced” friends all playing an online game. The problem stated that people typically learned cheat codes (new information) from unreinforced friends. This is because you are more likely to learn new information from weak ties than strong ties because strong ties typically share the same ideas.
http://www.lowellsun.com/business/ci_30588618/why-you-should-say-yes-holiday-parties