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Personal networking: how to make your connections count, by Mick Cope, FT Prentice Hall, 2003.
Time to own up
OK, it is time to be honest. Are you an effective networker? Is investing time and effort in keeping in contact with people who could help you progress and prosper something you value? Are you ambitious? Are there areas of your life where you would like to be more successful? Do you know how to network effectively? Is it a priority for you? Have you got the time to network or are you just too overloaded? Is it one of those things that would be nice to do if you had the time? Do you feel guilty that you do not do it sufficiently?
Most executives that I work with do not network anywhere near as much or as effectively as they could and should. My challenge to them and to you is: What are you doing that could possibly be more important than networking? Certainly, there is one class of people who always take networking seriously and find the time to make it work for them. Put simply, it is a common trait of all the highly successful people I know or have ever met. In other words, effective networking is a precondition of fully realising your potential in almost whatever endeavour.
Recent growth
In recent times there has been a growth of interest in networking. Pre-eminent in this has been the increase in social networking websites. Facebook is now one of the most popular websites on the planet. For those more interested in networking for career rather than social purposes, there are also a number of highly recommendable sites. Examples of good sites in this area would include:
o LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/
o Plaxo - http://www.plaxo.com/
o Naymz - http://naymz.com/
For those who prefer the human touch, there are also a growing number of networking groups. These include trade and professional associations, special networking groups such as BNI and NRG, traditional community based groups such as Rotary, The Round Table and Lions groups, along with the invaluable Institute of Directors.
Becoming more proactive
Useful though these services are, however, there is more to networking than just this. Getting involved with any of these options can provide great value, but only as part of a well balanced diet. Internet based networking is especially popular, but along with the great advantages it offers are substantial disadvantages and drawbacks. It can become time consuming and addictive, and it can lead you to falsely assume that you have thereby ticked the networking box.
It must be remembered that first and foremost networking is about connecting and interacting with real people. In my view, the more human the means of connection, preferably eyeball to eyeball, the more effective it is likely to be. As with all effective marketing methodologies, the important point is develop a whole range of contact points and approaches, both formal and informal. Sometimes it is as simple as dropping in briefly to see someone on the way to somewhere else, catching people in corridors or just remembering to pick up the phone. Personally, I would recommend that you actively use around ten such methods. Perhaps you should take the time now to list how many you currently use, decide how you can use them more systematically and then decide what methodologies you are going to add.
The riches that networking can provide
In what is becoming an increasingly virtual, networked world, it is difficult to underestimate the value of networking. With the growing economic uncertainty, we all need to take networking seriously, whether this be to find a job with another company, Cope says 70% of such jobs are gained this way, or developing your career where you currently are.
In this very practically focussed book, Cope highlights the importance of interdependence and stresses that it is now about span of connection for leaders rather than the traditional span of control. As part of a process of gaining autonomy and self control, he says that we need both to build a network that gives access to a broad spread of potentially useful people and know how to work this network and leverage the connections. He talks about maximising your social capital, by which he means access to: Ideas, leads, business opportunities, financial capital, power, influence and emotional support. Proactively working your network in this way, he claims, will give you:
o speedily access to needed resources
o an early warning radar for business and market problems
o access to hidden and hard to get at knowledge and data
o career security through who you know rather than what you know
o a means of augmenting your personal weaknesses with the strengths of others
o visibility with the people who can help you
o a link to people who can make things happen
o your own personal learning community
Building your personal investment portfolio
Cope starts from the principle that networking is about making a hard-headed investment in the future. He advocates making deposits: that is, giving freely without asking for return so that you can draw on your investments later. Like all hard-headed investment decisions, this must be guided by clear criteria. You need to start by carefully and repeatedly asking the question: Who can help me? It also helps to start thinking in terms of groups of people and populations, just as with any other marketing campaign. He provides some guidelines and suggests that you develop others for yourself. These include: do not rush a relationship, give it time to grow, look for synergies and link up with good people early on in their career.
The book provides a framework and set of tools for effective networking. It may appear to some to be a little mechanistic and formal in its approach, but it does provide discipline and process. Following his guidelines to the letter, you should be able to make a pretty good fist of proactive networking.
The whole structure of the practical part of the book is based on three dimensions:
o affective or “heart” aspects
o cognitive or “head” aspects
o behavioural or “hand” aspects
Affective or “heart” aspects
Each of the three dimensions is made up of two elements, for the affective domain these are “emotions” and “motivation”.
Emotions – creating social abundance
The guiding principle here is that of “give to get”. Cope presents what he calls his shared success model, through which he emphasises the importance of balancing constant enquiry with personal advocacy. By constant enquiry he means trying to understand people from their viewpoint, taking an interest in what matters to them and trying to understand their goals and dreams. It is about genuinely wanting to know, being curious and remembering.
As far back as the 1960s Dale Carnegie pointed out in “How to win friends and influence people” that the best way to achieve the goal set out in his title was to take a genuine interest in others and make sure that you first talk about them, not yourself. Sound advice that has more than stood the test of time.
This is followed, never preceded, by personal advocacy. That is, having the courage to tell people what you want and making sure they know how they can benefit you.
A high enquiry, high advocacy relationship is what Cope calls a “shared” relationship and he adds that, once such a relationship is established, effort should be made to move it from being based on compromise to synergy. He explains that this means creating something bigger than the sum of the parts.
He also helpfully points out that we need to make an effort to network with people we do not like but who can help us.
Finally, he explains that abundance is also about creatively using the concept of degrees of separation to slingshot you into other people’s networks. He recommends drawing up a slingshot map that shows how you can move from one network to another to get closer to specifically targeted individuals or corporations.
Motivation – building a bridge
This section is all about the importance of getting into rapport and understanding difference. He uses a simplified Myers-Briggs classification to explain this, using the extravert – introvert and the thinking – feeling continua to give four types of people we should take the trouble to adapt to. These types are:
o The sage – a combination of introvert and thinking
o The rock – introversion and feeling
o The judge – extravert and thinking
o The star – extravert and feeling
Although simplistic, this can be a useful classification by which to guide your interactions with individuals. You need to think of it as a means of segmenting your networking marketplace rather than a rigid classification that describes people as they are and will remain.
Cognitive or “head” aspects
This time the two elements Cope identifies are “thinking” and “believing”.
Thinking – chart your network connections
Cope urges his readers to chart out all their network connections. This can be done on a large sheet of paper or via mind mapping software (try for example http://www.freemind.sourceforge.net ). Having drawn out all the connections, you should then classify them. Cope suggests that the criteria you use should include: strength of tie, similarity or difference of interests, and intrinsic (personal qualities) or extrinsic (role or who they know) qualities. Once the chart has been completed, you should work to fill in the gaps and correct the imbalance.
Believing – dare to be different
This is about being appropriately noticed and remembered, about being front of mind for your target populations. Cope calls this “personal stickiness”. It is all about how you create value in your chosen market, how you craft your value proposition. He recommends that you consider four factors when so doing: symbolism, singularity, simplicity and sincerity. In addition, you should have a personal elevator pitch that falls readily to mind when needed.
Behavioural or “hand” aspects
The two behavioural elements are “activity” and “doing”.
Activity – build trust
Building trust in this particular context means building your personal brand. As most professional marketers will know, a brand is essentially an encapsulated promise. We have to be careful how we trade in trust, as mistaken steps can devalue our brand. As usual, Cope offers a framework to help you analyse your manner of making trust choices and to make amendments and changes where you feel they are required. Once again, he uses two continua. This time they are: explicit – tacit and gut – head. This gives us four trusting styles:
o Exposed – explicit and heart
o Considered – explicit and head
o Gut – tacit and heart
o Snap – tacit and head
He says that there are advantages and disadvantages to each style and that the important thing is to be aware of your habitual style as a first step to consciously choosing a style that is appropriate to a given situation and context.
Doing – maintain your network
Once constructed, a network immediately starts to decay and fall into disrepair. This is the universal principle of entropy. Cope advises understanding each relationship as an S-shaped curve that builds and then slowly tails off. The trick here is to manage each S-curve individually and work to build a series or repeating S-curves by reframing and taking the network operation to a higher level. In more prosaic terms, this means setting aside time to maintain your network.
| Related stories: |
 | Living Leadership: A practical guide for ordinary heroes, by G Binney, G Wilke and C Williams, FT Prentice Hall, 2005 | | Simply Strategy: The shortest route to the best strategy, by R Koch and P Nieuwenhuizen, Prentice Hall, 2006 | | Relationship Marketing, by Regis McKenna, Century Hutchinson, 1992 | | The Leadership Pipeline, By R. Charan, S. Drotter and J. Noel, Josey-Bass, 2001 | | Change, Watzlawick et al, W. W. Norton and Company, 1974 |
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