How Networking in Your Office Can Help Your Career (And Help the Company's Bottomline!)

The following is adapted from Make Your Contacts Count: Networking Know-how for Business And Career Success by Anne Baber and Lynne Waymon (AMACOM Books, March 2007). If you're interested, here's what I've already said about networking inside your own office.

Professors from the nation’s top business schools (Harvard, Wharton, and Kellogg) have written articles touting the benefits – and the necessity – of networking at work. Their research substantiates what authors Anne Baber and Lynne Waymon have discovered in the last 20 years they’ve worked with organizations teaching their employees how to network.  Relationship building has become a corporate priority, as executives have recognized that networking is vital to the health of their companies. Here’s a list of the main benefits of networking at work:

• Keep getting the big picture. Things change fast. Use your network to keep up with what’s going on. What percent of sales in your organization are from products or services that didn’t exist five years ago? Employees have to stay on their toes, just to know what products their company makes.

• Bolster the bottom line. Understand that your job depends on the success of the organization. Look around for ways to link up efforts to produce income.

• Venture into the white spaces. Look at the organization chart. What do you see? Boxes linked by some vertical lines that indicate the chain of command? Now, look between the boxes. What do you see? White space? In most organizations, that white space is unexplored territory for networking. That's where you'll find the unmet needs, the undiscovered problems, the opportunities, and the connections that will enhance your career and allow you to contribute more to the organization's success.

• Uncork bureaucratic bottlenecks. If you create temporary project teams to tackle problems and launch initiatives, you’ll make a name for yourself. Increase collaboration with other departments.

• Expand your knowledge base. Figure out what resources you need and put together a network made up of people representing many different interests and areas of expertise. If you introduce your contacts to each other, you can encourage information and skill sharing among all the members of the group. As you network, you expose yourself to new ideas and ways of doing things. This “cross pollination” almost always benefits the organization.

• Create your safety net. Take responsibility for your own career self-management. Network to increase your visibility within your organization so that opportunities find you! Explore options in case your job goes away. In these days of rightsizing and re-structuring, it's smart to keep your ears open. Ask yourself, “What skills do I have that could be used in other areas of the organization?” Figure out how to showcase those skills. What can you do so that others become aware of your capabilities?

• Access inside information. Through networking you can get information before it is public. And that information comes with the evaluation and insight your contact adds – something you’ll never get from an official announcement.

• Develop a power base. In organizations, power comes from being an information broker – someone who can stimulate collaboration among many different groups and make things happen. This power has nothing to do with your place on the organization chart.

• Marshall the right skills. Put together a circle of contacts with diverse skills that broaden your ability to get things done and insure the success of your projects and initiatives.

Comments

[sam]

I had been networking at work for a little while, although at the time it just felt like being helpful and getting to know what people did and didn't feel like an effort for me as it was just part of being polite and then I got approached by someone at work to look at something he had been working on outside of work and offer him advice on how to improve it. Since then we have both given up work and now both work from home on his project, so without networking and talking to people, sharing interests and helping people this opportunity might not have surfaced.