Business Networking and Sex - Ivan Misner [32]
Today I teach a lot of basic networking classes, and they are almost always filled with women. Whenever I ask the room what it is they want to get from the program, there is at least one woman in the room who says, “I was a stay-at-home mom before this and never had to network, so I just need to know how to do it”.
Now more than ever, there are networking experts everywhere, along with blogs, books, and podcasts that all teach the art of networking. There are organizations like the Referral Institute that teach the deep skills of building business by referrals, as well as how to develop a successful network.
Of the 12,000 people who were surveyed, more than 91 percent of them said that networking played a role in their success. That shows how important it is to develop our skills. Developing a network and referral generating are not taught in most universities or schools. It is up to women to find the programs that best fit their needs and schedules. You have to learn more to earn more, and developing a strong network of contacts is key to many aspects of that, from finding jobs and making yourself highly visible to fulfilling your business needs.
Ladies, learning to build and leverage a strong network takes a lot of education, and none of us are born with a networking gene. Dr. Ivan Misner wrote a book called The World’s Best Known Marketing Secret. How can something be best-known and still be a secret? We all know it is important, as you can see, and say it is part of our success, but there have been very few formal opportunities to learn the skills it takes not only to build a network, but to leverage it as well. Women are great at building networks, and now it’s time to learn that it is OK to leverage them. Leveraging your network is a “Givers Gain®” activity, with both sides benefiting when we learn to do it well!
While men, indeed, do learn to network on their own, there is still much left for them to learn, too. Learning to develop stronger relationships that go beyond transactions, slowing down and building trust, and setting up systems that generate consistent business are things that men need to learn to do better. We all need to learn, but women just have a different starting point than men do.
Regardless of how much each of the sexes believes they know about networking there is always so much more to learn. Like anything else, networking, and referral systems are always evolving and we must continue to evolve, too, so that we can look back at women who are trying to learn and reach out a hand to mentor them, having just blazed the trail. We can teach our daughters the importance of networking. When our daughters go to school, leave home, go to college, and get jobs, they will have the advantage of having been taught the skills that are naturally passed on to boys. More women and moms are in the business world than ever before, and they should pass that business acumen on to their daughters as fathers do to their sons.
The Survey Says . . .
Attitude About Networking by Success
One of the findings from the study worth discussing involves attitudes about whether networking has played a role in respondents’ success levels. The 95 percent of respondents who said that networking played a role in their success were at least somewhat to very comfortable with networking.
On the other hand, almost 70 percent of the respondents who said that networking had not played a role in their success were only somewhat comfortable to very uncomfortable.
It’s hard to say whether it’s the chicken or the egg with this finding. Do people who love to network achieve more success in their businesses? Or is it their success that fuels the comfort with the process of networking?
We’ve met people who say, “I want to get better at networking, but I’m just not very good at it.” Isn’t this really a self-fulfilling prophecy? How can you get better at something when you don’t do it? To paraphrase my friend Michael Gerber in the E-Myth Seminar, “You don’t try to get people to feel motivated so they’ll do better.