The topic of networking comes up quite often for our early career alumni and our MEM students. I like to emphasize that networking is about relationships. This means it is about giving and receiving value from another person. It is about sharing information and experiences. It is not about how big your contact database is or how many business cards you have collected. Unless you are just building a distribution list, it is more important to have a limited number of strong relationships than innumerable unknown contacts. On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with having different levels of relationships: acquaintances, colleagues and perhaps close friends may be one way to classify them. You probably have parallels in your personal life. In fact, as the relationships get closer, the line between friendship and business relationship can tend to blur (there are dangers to this but I’ll save that for a future post). Building these relationships, even high quality acquaintances, requires that you have a genuine interest in the other person. I have a number of acquaintances who I do not see often, not even once a year, but when we do get together it is wonderful to catch up and hear about what they have been up to and share experiences. I learn a lot from these interactions and I believe it is mutual.
Which brings me to the most frequently asked question I hear from early career alumni and students – How do I bring value to a relationship with someone who has much more experience and responsibility? First a word of caution. Don’t force the relationship. Let it evolve naturally and if it does not, then let it go. It is not a task that needs to be accomplished; it is an exploration. So back to the question. Below is a list derived mostly from students have provided to me at times even when my experience vastly overshadowed theirs (i.e., I was old, they were young!). Sometimes these have led to continued interactions and sometimes to simply an occasional (but enjoyable and fruitful) contact between two acquaintances:
• Articles of interest to your acquaintance
• Information about the school they would not otherwise know if you are both from the same school
• A comment about how their company is perceived by your peer group
• An experience you had with one of their competitors that they might like to hear (obviously this should be an open, public experience, not something the competitor reasonably thought was going to protected or private)
• Information about a person of interest to them you may have read about in the media, especially if it was not broadly publicized and was something they are likely to have missed
• A new product of interest that you observed or even that you tracked down (i.e., from a start-up or university such that they would not have seen it)
• A market of interest they may have missed, for example, in your home country where they do not have significant presence.
With today’s social media and various organizations’ databases, the logistics of keeping up with people is easy but the relationship building is as hard as ever, maybe harder given the demands on our time. Utilize the social media before you need it and don’t expect the media to build the relationship for you. (For our MEM alumni, I hope that you take a moment to join our Linked-in group and the MEMPC Linked-in group – but not because you expect it to do your relationship building for you!).
