None of us achieve long lasting career success on our own. Somewhere along the way we all need someone who can open a door, make an introduction or share some honest feedback or advice. We all benefit from professional help outside of our immediate team.
Having a network and getting help from it though, are two different things. Here are the four things that can stop your network working for you.
1. You haven’t made external connections in the first place. Busy jobs and operational requirements mean that leaders often are very internally focused. They build relationships through the lens of their current role success and stop there. But long term, your career progression is never just about your immediate team. You need a wider network too – people outside your day job who know what you’re capable of and might one day be able to help. This is the first mistake I see time and again in my coaching work. Don’t wait until you have a job crisis like redundancy to start building an external network. This earlier blog shares seven benefits of networking.
2. You’ve made connections but never deepened them. Does this sound familiar? You met someone at a conference and had an interesting conversation. You connected on LinkedIn. And that’s it. You’ve never followed up with them since (and neither have they). If you recognise yourself in this, scroll through your LinkedIn DMs. You’ll probably find plenty of people in there you met once, personalised an invitation to, and never spoke to again! Pick a couple and send a proactive message to reconnect. Something that makes this easy is to personalise your LinkedIn connection requests with a message that will remind you both of who each other are. Something along the lines of ‘it was great meeting you at the CIPD conference and talking about marathon running, let’s connect’. It makes those reconnection messages even easier.
3. You’ve got a good network, but you never actually ask them for anything. Perhaps you’ve seen a Trustee role you’d love to apply for, and you know somebody who works at the charity, but they probably don’t know you are considering trustee roles, and you don’t like to bother them, so they don’t recommend you. I’ve also written before about how to get more out of the professional relationships you already have. If this is you, be brave and reach out to them. Be specific about what you need help with, whether that’s an introduction or a recommendation, rather than staying friendly and hoping something comes of it. People aren’t psychic. They are also busy. Once you have invested the time to build a relationship, people don’t mind helping. But you need to ask.
4. You ask for help, but you ask the wrong person. I’ve been caught out by this one myself. I asked somebody I admired for some help and never heard back from them (and this made me a bit less confident about asking other people). Looking back, although she was well connected and did a lot to help others, personally I’d never had any real warmth from her, nothing that told me she wanted to help me or deepen the relationship. I call these buying signs, the small, unprompted things people do that tell you they’re genuinely open to helping, before you’ve even asked. Contrast that with a woman who once sat down next to me at a conference because she liked my pencil case, and by the end of the day had introduced me to everyone she knew at that event. She gave me every buying sign going, long before I ever asked her for anything. Look for those signs before you make the ask, not after.
Building your network is only the start. To benefit from it you need to deepen the relationships and be thoughtful about which door you knock on. Identify which stage is most applicable to you and take a small action to move it forward.
