« Where is My Network When I Need It?
Your Career is An Asset: Don’t Let it Depreciate »

Contacts, Colleagues and Comrades: Know Your Network

December 16, 2008 | Author: Promise Phelon | Filed under: The Networking Habit

My last post talked about identifying the people who — if you nurture relationships with them now — won’t ignore your calls and emails should the downturn hit you personally.

The way I see it, you have three groups of professional friends, each of which contributes to your success and helps you down your path:

  1. Contacts: This is the largest group, including any number of folks you know but who don’t make a significant contribution to your professional success or advancement.
  2. Colleagues: The second group, an inner ring of up to 150 people, includes anyone you may have talked to, emailed, or run into at a corporate event. These are people in your industry or people who share your role in an adjacent industry. Your colleagues can help you get into companies, gather information and keep your finger on the pulse.
  3. Comrades: The last group comprises a circle of seven or so people who are more than colleagues or contacts. It’s often hard to draw a line between personal and professional with these people — you’re friends, fellow travelers. They are close to you and can be honest about your path and how you plan to get there. In fact, you’re so close to your comrades that your success is a reflection on them.

In this last group are the people who can help you most, the people whose duty it is to enable you to be the best CEO of Company YOU!

Here’s how your fellow travelers can help you (and vice versa):

Solidify your go-forward story. How many laid-off people have you heard spending 15 minutes bashing their last boss or not effectively talking about their time with their most recent employer? Use your fellow travelers as a sounding board to make sure your career story is clear.

Action item: Ask your fellow travelers how they would describe you to a senior member of their network.

Clarify what you should learn from recent history. We all know people who take the same mistakes from job to job. Their personal shortcomings plague them and limit their careers — many times because no one told them.

Action item: Ask your fellow travelers to share one career blunder they think you’ve made, or if they can identify an area of weakness because of something you’re missing or what the universe now demands. You might be surprised at others’ perceptions. Their insight will help you approach weaknesses, not to mention to frame mistakes (we’ve all made them) in positive, growth-oriented terms.

Provide perspective on your strengths and areas of exposure. Most managers and leaders are incredibly overworked and distracted by the number of priorities on their plates. Most don’t have time to give good feedback or to condition or mentor us.  The community we build for ourselves must enable this, helping us see not only areas of weakness, but also the new muscle we’re developing.

Action item: Ask your fellow travelers to peer into their crystal balls and suggest at least one out-of-the-box position they think you’d succeed in tomorrow. You might discover an entirely new, fulfilling career path you might not have considered otherwise.

Related Resources:

Try UpMo’s Network Readiness Evaluator

Where is My Network When I Need It?

Five Lessons From Successful Networkers

Share/Save/Bookmark

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 and is filed under The Networking Habit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

xygoxen

No comments yet.

feel free to leave a comment

Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

All fields marked with " * " are required.