I have made the personal journey from shrinking violet to life and soul of the party. But unless you have been through this journey yourself, you might be thinking “Why bother? Yes, I can see how perhaps I too could come to love networking, but I don’t see that I need to.”
My journey to understanding why networking is for everyone, not just salespeople, started with a fundamental shift in how I viewed the world. For everyone, our training for the real world starts in a schooling system, almost all of which operate in a way that is, it turns out, not at all like the real world. If you help your friend to study and get an A grade, it doesn’t help your marks. Worse, most grading systems are relative, so by helping your friend to get an A you are actually reducing your chances to get one.
Lots of people operate with a win-lose mind-set. If your colleague wins the promotion, you don’t. If everyone in your organisation becomes more talented, you become less valuable. If a similar company to yours makes a sale, your market share diminishes.
It is natural to think this way. In the formative years of the human race, resources were scarce. Human beings were very often in the situation that if someone else ate, you did not. You had to be prepared to fight to stay alive. There are also situations today that are win-lose. If you are competing against others, for example in a professional sport, only one person can take home the gold medal. However, nowadays the win-lose situations are mostly artificially constructed. School, sports and political elections are systems that we have created to function in this way. Remarkably, once you start to think in the opposite way to win-lose, which is win-win, you will start to see that win-win applies to almost everything in your life.
What if… your colleague winning a promotion means that you now have a useful friend in a more senior position who can help you with your agenda? What if… everyone in your organisation becoming more talented means that collectively you achieve more, win more clients and gain an improved professional reputation? What if… your competitor makes a sale, does a great job and as a result increases the total market available for everyone?
Win-win is the concept that, I can get what I want by helping you to get what you want. Win-win is a common negotiation strategy for ongoing relationships. Rather than beating down a supplier to a price that is uneconomical you instead want to negotiate a deal that works for you and for them, so that they want to continue working with you longer term.
When you deal with other people with a win-win rather than a win-lose attitude you are much more likely to get to a solution.
If you are working together you can trust each other and pool information and contacts, making you both at least twice as likely to make progress towards your goals.
In reality it will often be more than twice as likely as information does not combine in a linear fashion – for example two pieces of information put together may uncover a third.
Zoe
Tech Talkfest 