"How Leaders Create and Use Networks"
Harvard Business Review
January 2007, pp. 40-47
The authors of this study followed a cohort of 30 managers over two years. They identified three general forms of networking:
- Operational networking—This form of networking involves developing working relationships with people who can directly help you to do your job. The research showed that people tended to be more focused on maintaining cooperation within their existing network than with building relationships to face future uncertainties or challenges.
- Personal networking—This form of networking involves developing relationships with individuals who can enhance one's personal and professional development. These personal networks are mostly external to the manager's organization, and they also provide referrals to useful information and contacts.
- Strategic networking—This form of networking involves first determining one's own future targets, priorities, and challenges. The key to good strategic networking is considered to be the ability to employ resources in one sector of your network to achieve results in another sector of your network.
The article provides a set of tips or lessons learned for increasing the gain of networking:
- Find a good networking role model so that you have a living example of the benefits of the time and energy needed to do good networking.
- Find a common task or shared purpose in order to make contacts with senior people outside your function or business unit. Personal interests or professional groups are common sources of commonality for contacts.
- Re-allocate your time so that you make time to have multiple informal contacts with people who are not in your functional or task group.
- Take every opportunity to interact with your network, to give and receive. Doing anything, large or small, to get in the habit of using the network.
- It takes a while to reap the rewards of networking, so stick with it.
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