networking

In 1914, electricians were noticing a rift in the career advancement of themselves vs. their peers. Some electricians were given easier jobs and greater job prospects because they were friends with managers, owners, and/or other people in power. These electricians were not given these opportunities because of their electrical prowess, but rather because of their relationship with those that mattered.  In May of 1914, The Electrical Worker published that electricians were adopting the phrase “it’s not what you know that counts so much, as who you know!”

This rift the electricians were feeling begged the questions: How do we get to know the right people? Who are the right people? Will people give me any time if they know nothing about me? Are my only connections my family connections?

These questions are just as relevant today as they were in 1914. Tony Robbins has said that “70% of every experience a person will have will come from his/her network”. I don’t know if this information is factually proven, but it seems to make sense and back up the claim that “it’s not what you know that counts so much, as who you know!”

For a professional entering a new industry, a recent college graduate entering the working world, or anyone that is seeking to have more relationships, building a network can be difficult. If you are a person who is seeking to meet new people, it is easy to ask yourself “what do I have to offer?” Without any knowledge, connections, and resources, it is easy to write yourself off as somebody that has nothing to offer.

What you may not realize is that you have a ton to offer in terms of your time and willingness to listen.

PEOPLE LOVE TO TALK ABOUT THEMSELVES!

By seeking to understand another person’s story, you are showing them respect and empathy towards the decisions that person has made in his/her life. Essentially, by listening to another person talk about themselves, you make them feel valued because you care about what they are saying and it is deeply personal to them. No amount of money, connections, or knowledge can make a person feel as great as having someone take the time to listen to them.

Another thing you may not realize is that no matter how famous, wealthy, or powerful a person is, you are not annoying until you receive a response. Thus, be persistent as “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” This could mean sending multiple emails, phone calls, showing up at their place of work, or even writing a handwritten letter.

The people you should be reaching out to are the people in positions that you aspire to be. Jim Rohn once said that “you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.” If you aspire to be in a leadership position at a company, you should be spending time with people who are currently leaders at the company.

After you know the right people, who those people are, and have taken the time to listen to them, you can then easily transition to being understood. The key to being understood is to clearly and concisely convey what you are interested in doing. You can typically count on the 5 to 1 rule. What this means is that you have to give somebody roughly 5 times as much active listening as they will actively listen to you. So if you have taken 15 minutes to listen to somebody’s story and talk about himself, he will give you roughly 3 minutes of actively listening to what you have to say. Therefore, be concise and clear about what you are interested in.

However, there is a trick to the 5 to 1 rule that can give you more active listening time. If you ask questions to the person you are connecting with on the topic of what you are interested in, you are showing that person respect. By asking questions, you are conveying that you care about what they have to say and value their response. At the same time, you are actively engaging them to think about a response to your question as opposed to just listening to you.

Ultimately, by asking the right questions and conveying your interests clearly and concisely, you are making it possible for that person to recommend other people to you. This is how a network grows.

Whether you are a professional entering a new industry, a recent college graduate entering the working world, or anyone that is seeking to have more relationships, these are some tips to getting your foot in the door. Strictly relying on your friends and family’s relationships for connections is a lot of eggs to put in one basket. Also, since it takes significantly more effort to build relationships on your own vs. via friends/family, you will likely value relationships you built on your own more than those you received from friends/family.  

“It’s not what you know that counts so much, as who you know!” is very true today. However, there are many ways to get to know the right people. Utilizing family connections can be extremely valuable, but the ability to build relationships on your own is paramount to expanding your network.

The concept of networking is kind of like the concept of riding the biggest, scariest roller coaster at an amusement park. Engaging a stranger in initial conversation is kind of like the part of the roller coaster where you are being carried up and all you hear is the “clunk clink clunk clink clunk clink” of the belt carrying the roller coaster to the climax. It is similar because you are nervous for what will happen next. You have no clue how that person will react from you approaching them just like you have no clue how you will feel once hitting that huge drop on the roller coaster. For the most part, you will end up satisfied and happy that you reached out to that stranger because you not only proved something to yourself that you could do it, but you learned something new or made a new connection from doing so. Occasionally you will end up with a headache at the end (similar to a rusty old wooden roller coaster) because the stranger you reached out to is annoying and won’t stop talking about something you are not interested in. But never will you end up with a negative outcome from networking.

Networking leads to careers, business partnerships, and friendships. These seem like outcomes people would seek in their lives, but why do most young professionals and college students employ networking only during times of desperation? To prove my point, think about the first two weeks of college. For the most part, every other freshman you met was super nice and friendly to you. Why? Because they (and you) were desperate for friends in a new and unusual environment. In a professional setting, attending alumni networking events and professional development seminars did not seem very attractive when you were happy in your job, but once the job started to become monotonous and you didn’t see yourself in a future at that company, those networking and development events became more attractive to attend. When you are less desperate to change, you are less likely to network.

This is not to say that all young professionals and college students only network in times of desperation, but a large quantity of us do.

The trick is to look at networking like this: networking is not a transaction. There is no clear outcome of what will occur from taking the time to speak with somebody. Just because a person’s expertise or insight does not interest you now, does not mean that their knowledge is worthless to you. Young professionals and college students know that some of the outcomes from networking include landing careers, business partnerships, and friendships, but those don’t typically stem from the first meeting one has with a stranger. More likely than not, it is a person recommending you to meet someone else that they know. Therefore, as opposed to trying to attempt the home run of landing a job from a stranger you met at a cocktail party, a better tactic could be to just build a positive working relationship where they know about you and what you are looking for and potentially recommending somebody for you to connect with. Recommendations are one of the leading ways people land careers. You can’t receive any recommendations if you don’t go out and network.

In the end, networking is something that should be done all of the time by everyone (especially young professionals and college students). Keeping a keen track of those you are connected with is important because although you may not value a person’s expertise now, you may value it later. Plus, if you are only networking when you are desperate, it is very likely evident to the other person you are speaking with that you are desperate. Those that want to work with desperate people want to work with desperate people because they are likely desperate themselves to work with anyone. It is ironic how desperate people attract other desperate people because desperate people are the last types of people a desperate person is trying to attract.

As humans, we have an inherent drive to be accepted and liked by others. Why? Where does this drive come from and how do humans go about achieving this acceptance? If you don’t believe or aren’t certain humans have an inherent drive to be accepted or liked by others, think about your first day at work. Were you nervous? Did you try to not screw up or ask dumb questions? Did you try to do extra tasks to convey your work ethic? If so, a primary reason you did one, some, or all of those things is because you have an inherent drive to be accepted and liked by others (in this example, your colleagues). The ability to build acceptance with those around you is the ability to build rapport.

Up until about the mid-1990’s, the only way to gain this acceptance was through your actions with others and how you communicated with others verbally. But in the 1990’s, amazing technological advancements allowed us to communicate and build acceptance from others nonverbally. How convenient? Why attend conferences and meet others in person to convey a message you are trying to get across to many people when you can just as easily write a blog? Why thank somebody in person when you can send them a thank you text just as easily? Technology has allowed us to communicate in ways we never thought possible 30 years ago.

I have interviewed over 1,000 professionals this past year and asked them what skills they think recent college graduates lack after graduation. Far and away the most common answer was recent graduates lack the ability to communicate. But why? With all of the technological know-how and all of the additional forms of communication, how can recent college graduates lack communication skills?

Has technology discouraged us to communicate face to face?

From these responses, yes! Today, you are considered weird and deemed socially awkward if you start a conversation with a stranger without some sort of goal or objective from the conversation. It is almost as if the efficiency that has been provided in technological communication has permeated into social communication. It feels as if physical conversations are a transaction and if the transaction is not apparent to both parties then nothing positive can be gleaned from that conversation.

Is this right? Can society function with purely technological communication and only communicate face to face “when needed”? I don’t think so.

Leadership is an aspect of work that is about to have a major overhaul. It is a skill hardly covered in higher education, yet people are expected to step up when their name is called to fill in management positions. 

Many universities have downgraded Management from being a standalone major to a co-major or a minor. When I was a student, I didn’t think much of this at the time, except for the fact that this decision dissuaded fellow business students from pursuing the field of study because it meant doing just as much work as a normal major but having the label as “co” attached to it, making the degree seem less significant. 

From my understanding, their reasoning was that most college students aren’t hired for management roles right out of college, so other degree fields are more immediately relevant to employers making hiring decisions. The notion was that these young professionals will learn and develop management skills as they enter the workforce and be ready to step up.

The issue with this mode of thinking is that most companies promote based on individual contributions within their role, and they provide little guidance to middle-management on how to be an effective leader. On top of that, the skills that make somebody a great individual contributor are not the same as the ones that make somebody a great manager. The result is burnout, and not just for the managers. Both employees reporting to untrained managers and the managers themselves suffer from the stress. A new manager that’s in over their head can go wrong in a variety of ways. They might expect their new direct reports to all perform at the same high level that the manager (thinks) they did at the time. On the other hand, they might fall prey to ruinous empathy. They want to be the cool, approachable manager, but they lack the skills to maintain discipline and have direct, potentially uncomfortable conversations with team members. This stress feedback loop between managers and direct reports rapidly degrades engagement and company culture. 

A recent Gallup report found that burnout for people managers increased from 27% in 2020 to 35% in 2021. The effects of manager burnout are distributed across a whole company. Frequent turnover and changes in leadership completely erodes psychological safety in employees, which in turn contributes to more turnover. These feedback loops are insidious problems and only grow more difficult to fix as they gain steam. 

The point is that companies need to begin thinking about increasing their training and development resources for their mid-level managers if they want to be a viable business in the years to come. The cost of hiring, training, and then re-hiring digs too much into the narrow margins most companies have allocated for maintaining long-term profitability. And for companies that are breaking even, getting started now is imperative!

When reviewing whether the company found the right manager (hired or promoted), sometimes you find it didn’t work out. It is too easy to simply chalk it up to “poor fit” or that the person did a bad job. This lets the company off the hook for their hiring choice when there’s another side to this story. The manager that didn’t work out in that position may think that “the company didn’t give me the resources to be a good manager and put me in a position to fail”. 

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. 

I believe that being a really good manager isn’t some inherent skill that people pick up naturally. It is a learned skill that can be developed and honed over time. And this skill can’t be learned in sprints; it’s learned through a marathon of consistent, focused practice on improvement. Consistency is the key. 

When people talk about their boss being a “bad manager” and vent about all the bad things that their boss is doing, I would care to argue that in almost every case, the manager is not intentionally being a bad manager. Nobody comes to the office thinking “how can I ruin your day?” and then just go ahead and do it. Pure intentions can’t hide the effects of poor execution. 

People have off-days. 

Whether they are burned out from work, stressed out from something personal, or just on edge and unsure why, people have off-days. When you are an individual contributor, having an off-day is easier to keep to yourself. It’s easier to mostly contain that negativity, or at least keep it from being an issue for your coworkers. 

But, when a manager has an off-day, there is a magnifying, exponential effect because they have an opportunity to negatively impact everyone that reports to them.

If you string enough of those off-days in a row together, you create a toxic culture. And, unsurprisingly, toxic cultures don’t make off-days less frequent. If you are a new manager, and things aren’t going how you planned, this can be deeply frustrating. You didn’t intend to create a toxic culture, and your work style and preparation didn’t change from being a great individual contributor, but your performance as a leader of people continues to dwindle. The most important thing you can do is to start working on improving it now.

So, here are a few things you can do to maintain your A-Game as a leader.

To know what a good leader does on a regular basis, it is important to learn from those that have studied the best leaders. There are about a million of these books, but to get you started I’ll share a few that have influenced my thinking. I am a big fan of Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership, Brene Brown’s Dare To Lead, and Kim Scott’s Radical Candor. Eventually, you’ll have your own list of the books that most influenced you on your path to becoming a great manager. 

Executive Mastermind Groups can vary based on industry and title, but in general, they are a group of leaders coming together to learn from each other, share their challenges, and identify solutions to the challenges they are facing. They are a great outlet when you want to have a sounding board outside of your spouse, friends, or coworkers. My company, Ambition In Motion, actually runs executive mastermind groups, both for executives and middle managers – if you are interested in learning about them, feel free to reach out. The way I look at it is that we, as leaders, are all scientists testing hypotheses and trying to find the best ways to lead our teams. 90% of what we try probably won’t work, but these mistakes teach us how to get better at finding that last 10% that’s your key to success. If we can all bring our failed and successful leadership experiments together, we can exponentially improve our leadership and speed up our learning curve.

In my last article, How to Have An Effective 1:1 with a Direct Report, I wrote about how to have an effective 1:1 and what metrics can help you understand whether your message is getting through to your team. You need to be sure that your message is being received the way you intended. If you can understand how your team is receiving you as a leader through data, you are much more likely to make tangible improvements as a leader over time than if you aren’t measuring anything at all.

Getting an executive coach can give you a ton of personalized attention and focus to pinpoint the exact area you are challenged with. Executive coaches can question your way of thinking and acting and reframe your leadership style to serve your team in more impactful ways. 

You can also combine all of these suggestions together to give yourself the best opportunity to improve.

Overall, leadership is undergoing a major overhaul and as current or future leaders, we must take steps to prepare ourselves for what is to come so we can lead our team the best we can.

 

In the United States, 45% of businesses don’t make it past five years. 65% don’t make it past ten years. Yet everyone who ever starts a business backs themselves to beat the odds. Is it possible to predict if a business will be a success or a failure in its future? 

Recently, there have been many layoffs in the US, specifically within technology companies. There are 159 million people currently employed in the US, and in the past month there were 1.3 million layoffs.

“There have been several thousand high-profile layoffs in the tech sector in the past couple of weeks. While this is unfortunate, it is useful to keep in mind that the labor market is significantly larger and has been overall healthy,” Bledi Taska, chief economist at labor market consulting and research firm Lightcast, said.

Today’s economic uncertainties have fueled an unstable job market and created an unsettling environment in the workplace – where the lack of transparency, internal politics, the growing number of siloed departments and hidden agendas have made it more difficult to trust yourself, let alone others. What appears to be an endless path of disorganized chaos is now “the new normal.” As such, we must become mentally tough and learn to anticipate the unexpected. 

Employees must approach the workplace through a lens that can detect potholes of distrust while staying focused on seeing and seizing the next opportunity.

 

There is no one formula that companies use when they need to let go of staff to cut costs. Some organizations may subscribe to the “last one in, first one out” model. Management prefers to keep the long-time staff and pink slip the new employees who just started at the company.

Leadership wants to field the best team. They’ll protect the “A-players” and let go of those who are not top performers. People with highly specialized skills that are hard to replace may be overlooked for dismissal, whereas workers that possess talents that are easily replaced are not safe.

 

            If you are in a revenue-generating division, the odds are high that you’ll be safer than the people working in a cost center. It’s a cold reality that employees and groups that bring in the money generally have more leverage than others who can’t point to adding dollars to the bottom line. In tough times, businesses need people who can ring the register. Those who may be terrific workers, but are not revenue-centric, may have a more challenging time holding onto their job.

            Human resources may weigh in on decisions of who stays and who will be shown the door. They’ll search through personnel records to review performance reviews, look for any recommendations and see if a person committed infractions, violated rules or has a history of causing problems.

            The chief financial officer and accounting team may crunch the numbers and determine that senior employees will be culled. Older workers, on average, tend to earn more than younger staff members because of years of experience. It's not fair, but their higher compensation places a target on their backs. 

It's convenient for the company to say they are just dissolving a unit that has many senior people with sizable pay packages. The business can downsize to fewer highly compensated professionals instead of many mid to junior staff members.

There needs to be a better way for employees to make more strategic evaluations of their employers. From an operational and business perspective, you should be able to predict that your employer will be able to pay your salary, commit to the number of hours per week that you sign on for, and be able to maintain your employment given the success of the company. 

 

 

Even though initiating conversations with current employees might feel a bit awkward at first, the payoff is well worth it. Talking with them is the absolute best way to discover if a company’s branding/messages are accurate and trustworthy. Plus, you’ll get a chance to learn if their interview promises align with their everyday actions.

For example, you might expect your potential employer to provide updated training to any employees affected by automation or innovation.

Don’t just network with your soon-to-be boss or hiring manager. Reach out to potential co-workers. Those who are in the trenches will be able to share if leaders follow through with employee feedback, honor their mission, fulfill promises, etc.

 

Every prospective employer is vying for top talent, which means they’ll try to make the business look as appealing as possible. Many are doing this by expanding their employer brand and focusing on something all candidates agree on, making the world a better place. 

If you browse the company’s social feed or website, you might see stories sharing how they’ve served the local community, or posts featuring employees’ opportunities for volunteering. But it’s important to understand that they’re creating the narrative they want you to see. What’s their true societal impact?

Social media is good at distorting reality. So, turn to Google and do your own digging: Research the company’s title, leaders’ names, etc. to learn if your prospective employer presents accomplishments in an honest, trustworthy manner.

 

3. Compare reviews to the career site 

Piggybacking off the idea that businesses want to appear as appealing as possible, be wary of company career sites. Each one is designed to draw you in and make you feel connected. A prospective employer will share its best features, such as:

 

●       Competitive pay

●       Amazing benefits

●       Flexibility

●       Work-life balance

●       Paid time off

 

But before you get too excited at the thought of having found your dream job, check out a few review sites. Glassdoor, for example, is a great place to find company reviews from current and former employees. Compare those reviews to the career site promises to measure the truth behind employers’ claims.

 

The interview isn’t just about proving how well you fit with the company, they also need to prove that they’re a good fit for you. Use the time you have together to let them know that employee-employer trust is a critical factor in your decision-making process.

Be direct in your questions and focus on what’s most important to you. For example, if you want to know you can trust the employer’s promise to deliver career development and opportunities to advance, ask for specific examples of how they’ve done this in the past. Then, take things one step further and ask how they plan to provide the same to you (should you receive an offer).

Trust is a two-way street; be transparent in what you have to offer, and your prospective employer will likely do the same.