COMMUNICATION
Networking: the golden rules
Judith Perle offers some thoughts on effective networking ‘N
etworking’ is one of those terms that gets bandied about rather loosely. Many job advertisements contain a line saying something like ‘must
have excellent networking skills’, and official data from the Office for National Statistics shows that 27 per cent of respondents got their last job through hearing from someone who worked there. Conference brochures routinely reassure potential attendees that there will be ‘ample time for networking’, and research undertaken by Rob Cross of the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce shows that “what really distinguishes high performers from the rest of the pack is their ability to maintain… personal networks”.
So, networking is important. But how many of us have actually been told how to do it or what it means? It’s assumed that by the time we start to climb the career ladder we have all the communication skills we need, and that these skills include the ability to network effectively. Yet everybody involved in management training knows that isn’t quite the case. I’ve spent much of the past decade helping people find ways of networking more effectively and, crucially, helping them feel more comfortable
“What really distinguishes high performers from the rest of the pack is their ability to maintain… personal networks”
48 September 2015
www.trainingjournal.com
doing so. Every time I run a workshop (whether for a company, a professional organisation, a business school or a university), one or two people stand out from the crowd. What is it that makes those people memorable? It has nothing to do with their professional ability (about which I know nothing) and everything to do with the way in which they engage with the people around them. But don’t mistake that for meaning simply that these people are somehow just the ‘life and soul of the party’ types: that’s not what makes a good networker. Some years back, PricewaterhouseCoopers did some research into what made people good ‘rainmakers’ (generators of new business), and they discovered that it wasn’t a simple question of personality type. What they did find were certain shared attributes: their best rainmakers were optimistic, systematic, tenacious, good problem solvers and (most interesting) good listeners… all so-called ‘soft’ skills that people like me spend their working lives trying to impart to people whose mindset is often that the ‘hard’ skills are all they need to get their place in the sun.
Order qualifier or order winner?
In the late 1990s, I signed up for the Sloan Masters Fellowship programme at London Business School. One of the core modules was entitled ‘Operations Management’, the key lesson of which remains with me and which I’d like to share with you. In any new business ‘pitch’ whether formal or informal, there are ‘order qualifiers’ and ‘order winners’. An ‘order qualifier’ is a feature of your product or service of which you might justly be very proud, but which ultimately only gets you as far as the beauty parade. The ‘order winner’ is that unique attribute which gets you the business, the job, the funding or the promotion. The fun starts when individuals and businesses mistake their ‘order qualifiers’ for ‘order winners’. Think about it: every accountancy firm pitching for new business has near identical ‘hard skills’ in their ability to conduct an audit, for example.
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