Why network?

“Acquaintances, in sort, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.” Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point

If you work in a profession where you need to close business – as a salesperson, recruitment agent or lawyer, for example – you are probably reading this thinking that you already know why you network. It’s to find a client, or meet someone who might one day introduce you to a client. You will have a good idea of why you network, who you network with and what the benefits are.

If you’re networking in this way, that’s great and you’re definitely a step up from someone who doesn’t network at all, but you’re only getting a fraction of the benefits that you could be getting. For some reason, it seems very clear to us that we need to meet new people in order to get business, but we often don’t realise all the other, less direct, benefits that we could be achieving if we changed our networking style slightly.

These indirect benefits are the reason that you should be networking even if you’re not in a profession in which it is usual to network. In business today, we are used to working in a calculated, rational way. We make plans, set goals and break down our strategic vision into concrete step by step paths that will take us to our ultimate objectives. This is great and I am all for planning, but networking is not something that works like this.

Antifragile – Taleb

Something that we are coming to have a better understanding of is the idea of a complex system. Since the work of the great Mandelbrot in the 1960s, the areas of chaos theory and complexity have come to be more widely studied. My favourite recent book on the subject is Antifragile by the banker Nassim Taleb. Complexity theory best explains my understanding of the effects of networking. By making more and more connections and sending out your actions through these channels, there will be associated reactions. You can better shape the results of networking by choosing which of these to act on, than by aiming for a specific outcome since, like the butterfly flapping its wings, you cannot control the outcome.

To take a simple example, imagine that you are in need of a graphic designer, at a good price because the work that you need done is not yet revenue generating. If you have a small network (and you are not a designer yourself), you will need to get lucky – perhaps someone’s sister is just starting out, or perhaps a friend has recently used a designer that he can recommend. But if you have a network of hundreds or thousands of people, the numbers are large enough that you don’t need to be lucky – someone you know will be able to help you.

Zoe Cunningham

@zoefcunningham

 

With a little help from your friends

You may still be sceptical of networking. “Surely”, you will say, “sometimes people are your competitors and that’s the end of it?” I truly believe that if you can learn to start to look at the world through the lens of win-win, you will find that situation happens much less often that you would think. Even when two people are applying for the same job, they often do so with very different aims – one may want to switch departments and position themselves for a more senior role, while another may be looking for a management challenge and a payrise. If you are lucky you may work for a company where you could suggest a different split of the role to get you both what you want. But even if not, suppose that you get the role? You will always need good people around you, so having thought about what your competitor wants, you may be able to use your new position to find a role for them that benefits you both.

There is very little that you can want from life that you won’t need someone else’s help to achieve. Every modern job relies on a series of intertwined organisations in order to make it possible. Take my previous role as a coder. That role wouldn’t have existed without the sales team to close business, or indeed without the clients to demand it. It also would have been a lot more painful and less fun without payroll software, administrative and support staff and our office chef!

Networking allows you to reach the people who can help you best. It allows you to make contact with individuals who you would otherwise have not had access to. Most of all it allows you to uncover serendipitous opportunities that you could not have planned for, for the simple reason that you were not aware that they existed.

Understanding who you are is central to being a successful networker

While you do not have a very developed network, the easiest way to begin to expand it is by meeting people at events, whether these are purposely designed for networking, or just a place where lots of people are gathered. This can be the most difficult and nerve wracking way of networking, much more pleasant is to network over a coffee or glass of wine with an engaging and influential person.

That is how we recommend you do it at Tech Talkfest. Being able to ask for specific introductions to relevant people, walking into a room full of people, many of whom you already know. They, in turn, will make introductions to some of those you don’t know.  The conversation flows and the trust grows.

Zoe

@ZoeFCunningham

No longer ‘I win, you lose’

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

@zoefcunningham

Advice to my younger self

After completing a mathematics degree, I started working as a software developer. For five years I talked to machines, in their language, or to my colleagues who were also coders. I socialised with people I knew; I was terrified when I had to sit at a table without my husband at a friend’s wedding because he was the Best Man.

I hadn’t heard of networking, and if I had I would have been appalled by it. I would have understood networking to be cold calling but in person – truly horrifying!

Gradually as my career developed my role expanded and I took on responsibility for talking to clients, eventually heading up the support team. I talked to clients on a regular basis, but in a support rather than a sales role. Working in support I was helping people, whereas in sales they were trying to get things from people. I knew that sales was what paid my salary, but I considered it a kind of necessary evil rather than genuinely useful.

My first experience with the sales function of the company came in the form of “technical sales”. As I worked more closely with the sales team, a lot of my fears diminished. Sometimes the work could be high pressure and nerve wracking, but the emotional rewards of winning a contract more than made up for this. Further, the “real” sales work that the sales team, rather than the technical team, did seemed to not be work at all. A lot of it was lunches, coffees or just general meetings with clients and everyone seemed to be having a lot of fun. I decided that maybe I would give it a go.

The move to the sales team was the smartest of my career. Everything I had previously thought about sales was incorrect. I learned a new phrase “consultative selling”, you are on the customer’s side. What’s more, learning how to solve other people’s problems using the skills and services that you have available (which is how I would now describe the sales process) is applicable to almost every scenario where you want to achieve a specific outcome. Which, it turns out, is almost always.

However, true to my expectations, the first few networking events I attended were horrifying. I remember following around my manager and mentor Justine Solomons (now founder of Byte the Book) like a lost puppy. I remember really clearly Justine giving me a pep talk as I was clinging to her coat-tails. “You need to go and meet people. Off you go. Shoo!”

Hundreds of events later, I have learnt from the hard master of experience how easy networking can be if you approach it with the right attitude. I’ve learnt how to make meaningful connections by being myself. Most of all I’ve found not only that I can have fun at networking events, but also that having fun makes me more successful.

If I could go back in time and tell myself this ten years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it.

Zoe

@zoefcunningham