• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 428 0

is a great venue bringing influential people together, but they don’t want or need many such places or meetings because they have limited time. Once Karen started her summits, or Ivan began his public–sector, public-policy lectures at the consulting firm, there was no need for others to do so and almost no possibility that a competing effort would get much traction. So, doing what these examples illustrate often works if you are first off the mark. And taking initiative to create resources by finding speakers, organizing meetings, making connections, and creating venues where people can readily meet others, learn interesting things, and do business brings appreciation for your efforts, even as you create the resources to help you on your path to power.

Bringing people together entails your taking on a brokerage role and becoming central in social networks. Networking skills are important and the networks you create are an important resource for creating influence, as we will see in the next chapter.

6

Building Efficient and Effective Social Networks

IN THE 1980s, Heidi Roizen was the CEO of the spreadsheet software company T/Maker and president of the Software Publishers Association. After her company was purchased in the 1990s, Roizen became vice president of worldwide software developer relations at Apple Computer. After leaving Apple, she became a partner at the venture capital firms Softbank and, later, Mobius, serving on boards of high-tech companies and making investment decisions about which companies and technologies to back financially. Nothing unusual about this career in software and high technology, except maybe for the level of success—that is, until you realize that Roizen’s bachelor’s degree was in creative writing and her master’s was in business, not computer science, engineering, or mathematics. Roizen’s success was built on her intelligence and business competence combined with her ability to build strategic social relationships—to network—both inside and outside her employers. Her first job following her undergraduate years was editing the company newsletter at Tandem Computer. That was a great starting position as her job required her to interact with people throughout the company, including those at senior levels, who came to know her and appreciate her talents.

The subject of a Harvard Business School case study, Roizen is often used as an example of someone who succeeded on the basis of her networking abilities.1 Students are often perplexed and even upset that a person could hold senior positions in important software organizations and even lead the major industry group without a technical background. Holding aside Roizen’s considerable substantive business skills, people miss the point: some jobs are mostly about networking and everyone can benefit from developing more efficient and effective social networks and honing networking skills.

A DEFINITION OF NETWORKING AND NETWORKING SKILLS

If we’re going to talk about networking, we better define it and, in that process, describe the behaviors that you might consider doing more frequently. Two German professors, Hans-Georg Wolff and Klaus Moser, offer a good definition of networking: “Behaviors that are aimed at building, maintaining, and using informal relationships that possess the (potential) benefit of facilitating work-related activities of individuals by voluntarily gaining access to resources and maximizing…advantages.”2 Their study of more than 200 people in Germany developed some scales of networking behaviors that demonstrate what actions are required. These included:

1. Building internal contacts (e.g., “I use company events to make new contacts.”)

2. Maintaining internal contacts (e.g., “I catch up with colleagues from other departments about what they are working on.”)

3. Using internal contacts (e.g., “I use my contacts with colleagues in other departments in order to get confidential advice in business matters.”)

4. Building external contacts (e.g., “I accept invitations to official functions or festivities out