Last year, BBC Radio 4 broadcast the excellent, Networking Nation (still available), presented by Julia Hobsbawm OBE.

In 5, 15-minute episodes, Ms Hobsbawm encouraged us to think about what networking means.

 

I’m intrigued by brilliant networking. I think we should all do more of it (see Around my kitchen table (04 October 2015) and yesterday’s Note to self: networking). When done well, for the right reason, it’s a powerful tool in business. Yet you may not realise that you’re doing it already.

Ask yourself. Where do I already network well?

• Perhaps it’s Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, WordPress, email, FaceTime, texts or a blog?
• Maybe you have a huge circle of contacts
• You might be good at spreading knowledge or news by word of mouth, or in writing, within your existing work culture
• Perhaps you’re comfortable letting others know when you’ve done a good job?

If you do all of these, and do them well, maybe you’ve already understood the power of networking, and that essentially it’s about building human relationships, and the exchange and transfer of information.

But the joy, and real success of networking, to me is in going a stage further, and not being complacent about what we’ve got. Networking works if some effort is put into it to get it going, and then gets better if it’s maintained.

Sustainability is key.

So, if you’re doing the above, well done! In addition, could you perhaps shake things up a little? Ask . . .

• What might explode my world view and allow me to see things through a different lens?
• Could I be brave enough to allow an outsider to peer in to see what I’m doing?
• How can I get diverse people together to share ideas and be innovative?
• What influence could I exert over someone in my organisation who holds the lever to long-term change to think more about the importance of networking?

I read somewhere (please don’t ask me where – I’m too busy networking) that we each spend 10,000 days working in our professional lives, during a typical career. Which made me wonder . . . isn’t how we respond to networks and networking therefore important to our productivity? Aren’t there multiple benefits to be had from a better-networked place of work?

If you’re still thinking that it might be difficult to change how networking is perceived in your workplace, think about, conversely, what might happen if it doesn’t change. And ask yourself, honestly, if you think you might have been operating in a silo only because you were busy, or might it have something to do with your reluctance to collide with the unexpected?

Take the banking profession, for example . . . it strikes me that there’s a very salutary lesson to be learned from there. A profession which not so many decades ago was run largely by people of a similar profile; which slowly, from the ‘80s onwards, was forced to open up to competition and foreign investment, to numbers of amazing people who computerised the profession, and to networkers from all over the world. And the benefit? It became a global network, run by people from diverse backgrounds; networks no longer operating in silos or run by closed shops; networks that could see a world perspective, a bigger picture. And importantly . . . outsiders peering in to question what they were doing . . . and to demand answers.  Think Crash of 2008.

In the past few days I’ve come across 3 wonderful examples of networking at its best:

• Someone I know has 3 mentors – each in different roles and at different levels of seniority; she sees this not as a conflict of opinion or ideas, but as a workable network where each person in it can provide something different for her, and more than that, is her ready-made group of go-to people

• Elsewhere, a colleague identified through a networking opportunity I’d set up for them, that this networking could pay forward into the future . . . when he has a colleague who needs some support, he can now easily point them towards the person I introduced him to: a person who has amazing knowledge in her field

• A colleague on a leadership event spoke eloquently about a challenge in her area of work; at lunchtime, another colleague came to talk to her to suggest he might be able to offer some ideas from his experience of the issue. I checked today – yes, he’s been in touch again . . . he’s followed through on his promise. The start of a beautiful relationship.

And not a cocktail glass or business card in sight.

So I repeat . . . networking, when done well, is fabulous. It works. It benefits both/many sides. It’s not a one-way street.

 Try it.

 It might open up a whole new world.