From our recent survey aimed at students and graduates, we asked how important is networking in building a career? The average score was 79 out of 100. Students and graduates understand the importance of networking when it comes to building and developing a career, so why is it often such a challenge to grow your network? It’s particularly difficult when you’re starting out as you don’t have an established network and your status is seen at the bottom of the imaginary career ladder.
Here are some of the reasons behind these challenges beyond the actual skill of networking:
Advice with a pinch of salt…
Everyone always has advice to dish out when it comes to things like networking but how helpful is it? Sometimes tips can be great when it comes to finding ways to create a networking opportunity or approaching someone in your desired career field who you’d like to connect with. However, advice offered, such as from a recent Harvard Business Review article, ‘How to network with powerful people?’, perpetuates some of the reasons why networking is a challenge. Of course, there are some useful tips in this article but the fact that the first token of advice is to ‘come recommended’ which only emphasises that to grow a network, you already need to have senior people in your network. This mindset only exasperates the socio-economic divides we have created and should be looking to break, in order to create equal opportunity and enable diverse thinking.
Encouraging students and graduates to try to connect with ‘powerful’ people suggests that power and status are an important criteria. We should be advising those emerging into the world of work that they should find people they can build meaningful relationships with and connect through shared passions and interests. These types of relationships will create far better opportunities in the future. The skill of networking is not about looking up the ‘ladder’, but about finding people at all levels who want to connect for mutual learning and development.
Job titles & hierarchies
Our traditional organisational cultures tell us that having a good job title and being higher up the hierarchy are a sign of success. We’re conditioned to thinking we should keep climbing that ladder and not look down. This causes many missed learning opportunities for those with experience as they narrow the perspectives they surround themselves with. Those at the beginning of their career often have a fresh perspective, a new way of viewing a problem and innovative ideas that given the opportunity to contribute, can make a real difference.
However, students and graduates often find the prospect of trying to connect with more established professionals daunting, unsurprisingly. It’s up to those with more advanced careers to be open, give some of their time to others and avoid using their job title and status to create imaginary barriers. Our advice shouldn’t be to those trying to break through some of these barriers we’ve created but to those who start to believe their perspective is more important than others.
Barriers are the antithesis of networking
In today’s more forward thinking organisations, they are moving towards creating networks of teams. Removing the hierarchical barriers, encouraging cross-functional collaboration and emphasising the skills for the future which enable better innovation to happen. Yet when it comes to networking to build a career, we are still rooted in these traditional barriers we have created. We attempt to create more balanced approaches such as ‘reverse mentoring’ which even by it’s terminology suggests that it’s ‘backwards’ to learn from emerging talent. What does this say about our mindset?
If we want to ensure that our leaders of the future have the skills that will be required to collaborate, network and continually learn then let’s start to remove the barriers from the beginning. Let’s be welcoming, encouraging, give time and be open — not just to connecting but to building balanced relationships that are based on multi-directional learning and mutual respect. Power and status aren’t prerequisites for being knowledgeable nor having the best ideas. In fact, they usually get in the way!
Career-stage diverse networks
How diverse are your networks in terms of spanning career-stages? This is something we should question ourselves on from time to time. If they’re not, then the learning opportunities you create for yourself will be limited. Do you think of your peers as being at the ‘same level’ as you or those that challenge your thoughts as their perspectives offer something new?
“We begin to see intelligence as not merely built upon the intellectual brilliance of individuals but upon their collective diversity. We understand that innovation is not only about the insights of particular people, but the networks that permit their recombination.” Rebel Ideas, Matthew Syed
Students and graduates have not been immersed yet in the organisational structures we’ve created around us over decades that may feel like they protect us but in actual fact, inhibit us. It’s up to working professionals everywhere to remove the barriers to networking that emerging professionals experience, to avoid the advice that tells them to follow the rules we created, to promote challenging other’s ideas regardless of their job title and to take the time to connect to others regardless of their status. Not only is it critical for continued learning and development but it will expand their own capacity to be knowledgeable and innovative for the future.
By Lara Plaxton, CEO & Co-founder @ GotDis
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