I just read a Fast Company article by David Teten and Scott Allen View image (oh, I like that effect... Scott's the one with the beard!) on networking, which reminded me I promised to rewrite one that I wrote some time ago, but which was lost at the unfortunate flick of a switch.
I was told what follows by the then Head of Recruitment at PwC (he may well still be there) at a seminar. At the time I thought he was being extremely calculating, but now five years on, I can see where he was coming from.
He started the seminar by saying he was going to teach us all we needed to know about networking. From what I recall, these were his instructions:
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Take a large (A3 at least) piece of paper and divide it into four columns. In the first column (let’s follow Western cultural customs and call it the left hand one), list all of your family and closest friends. In the second column, write all of the people who you consider to be good friends and contacts, in other words people who would return a phone call if you rang them. In the third column, you want to put all the people who you used to know quite well, but, with all of the pressures of modern living, etc., etc. you’ve allowed them to slip off your radar. Finally, in the right hand column, list all the people you ever wanted to meet, including potential bosses, or heroes, or anyone else you can think of (if your goal is purely professional, this might limit your ambitions, but personally I think that’s slightly boring).
You now have a personal networking tool that you can use. The goal is to move people from the right to the left and you can use any communication method you like to do it (pen and paper, email, phone, SMS, carrier pigeon – it really doesn’t matter as long as it is appropriate). What the PwC consultant suggested was that if you are in work, you should contact at least five people on the page every day. If you want to change jobs (or if you think that your job is on the line) you should raise this to ten a day. If you are actively looking for work, e.g. if you are unemployed, you should look to be contacting no fewer than twenty people a day. Every day.
If we followed this method, we were told, we would never be out of work again.
He also said that nobody in the room would follow his instructions (something that he had every reason to be happy about, given his job).
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As I said, at the time I thought he was being cynical. Then I thought about it and realised that in actual fact, it is just a very good way of managing one’s network of contacts. What’s wrong with sending an email to someone you haven’t seen for a while, or a postcard, or ringing them up out of the blue? Nothing. Does it matter that you are doing it in a vaguely systematic way? Not a jot.
What’s more, with the Fast Company article in mind, this approach to managing your contacts is a lot healthier than some of the ‘meet-as-many-people-as-you-can’ arguments that are being bandied about… personally speaking, I don’t want to be just another name in someone’s increasingly cluttered address book. Contacts are people. People you know deserve respect. The best way to show respect is to stay in touch, even if you don’t speak to them every day… or even every year!
Getting in touch with people only because you want to flog something to them, or because you want them to help you get a job is not particularly respectful, unless that is the professional relationship you have with them. By dropping people a note to say hello, you are demonstrating that you value knowing them.
I only wish that the PwC chap hadn’t been right about his prediction; I’m far too lazy and disorganised to follow his instructions…
/Dom
I clicked on your blog from a networking arena, and found this article on "networking." I found it quite interesting. Have you talked to anyone who attended the same seminar? I wonder how many people actually followed through with the suggested plan. I'm much as you are: a bit disorganized for this sort of thing, though I make a lovely chart.
Posted by: Pamela Hawkins at April 16, 2005 5:48 PM