What is your most valuable asset?
The answer is your social network. The typical answers are things like experience, education, compensation package, real estate, investment portfolio, etc. In today’s environment each of these assets has become significantly devalued or destabilized. Over the past several months, some of the world’s most powerful companies have gone under or severely slashed headcount. Walk into any coffee house at 10:30 in the morning and you’ll see a dozen executive looking dudes (or ladies) working on their resumes sipping lattes prepared by an MBA barista. Real estate has almost become a liability and with the stock market crash and credit crisis an investment portfolio is at best speculative. Bottom line is that everything we formerly used to measure the probability of success has been placed in doubt. On the other hand, the people you know professionally or personally are a resource that with proper management consistently appreciates in value.
You Don’t Get Anywhere Alone
You need people and people need you. There comes a time in your professional career where your success ceases to depend on your technical expertise, education or experience and instead depends on your ability to find someone with the right talents and expertise to help you solve your problem. This requires the development of relational skills, or in other words, the ability to develop, cultivate and utilize a social network. For many high achievers, the notion that their success depends on anyone but themselves is terrifying. When times are good, it’s easy to justify the blinders of self aggrandizement that come in times of plenty. It’s when your own carpet is pulled from under you by outside forces that cause you to turn to people for answers. You are not and never have been good enough to succeed on your own. Sun Tzu in the Art of War perhaps says it best, “When in difficult country, do not encamp. In country where high roads intersect, join hands with your allies. Do not linger in dangerously isolated positions.”
Changing Your Mindset
Studies have found that for many successful people cultivating an effective social network is the most important but simultaneously loathed processes they face. In recent years, the importance, complexion and structure of social networks have begun to be studied. In the 2007 Harvard Business Review article, “How Leaders Create and Use Networks,” this is described as follows:
[W]e’ve found that networking—creating a fabric of personal contacts who will provide support, feedback, insight, resources, and information—is simultaneously one of the most self-evident and one of the most dreaded developmental challenges that aspiring leaders must address.
Effective social networking should not be confused with its evil twin, the game of power plays and office politics. Where politics involves scheming, positioning, throwing rivals under the proverbial bus, and utilizing the knives stuck in colleagues’ backs as footholds on the climb to the top, effective social networking is, on the other hand, the art of developing and cultivating allies. True allies provide each other with a symbiotic relationship in which the strengths of one balance the weaknesses of the other and vice versa. A true alliance involves an alignment of interests, not just connections of convenience when the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
People are the ultimate resource. Resources can be cultivated and developed which requires investment, patience and unselfishness. Resources can also be carelessly used up. Effective networkers treat people like a vineyard where the grapes are cultivated for years or even decades knowing that the wine will get better year after year. On the other hand, a swarm of locusts moves in and leaves behind a barren landscape of dead fields and destroyed livelihoods.
Ask yourself a couple of simple questions … how many people can you honestly say have enjoyed working with you and would drop what they’re doing right now if you needed a favor or advice? How many dead bodies have you left in your path? When you need help from someone you know do you ever ask yourself if the association or transaction will benefit them as much as it benefits you.
This last question addresses a phenomenon that I call “Tom Sawyering.” One of my favorite parts of Mark Twain’s classic is the part where Tom Sawyer swindles every kid in town to paint a fence for him by convincing them that he’s doing them a favor by letting them do his work. Too many of us treat our social networks in a pure “what’s in it for me” mindset like Tom Sawyer or a swarm of locusts.
Conclusion
In times of economic difficulties, you can’t just muscle and hustle your way to success. It is times like these that collaboration and collective creativity become not just beneficial but crucial to success. As such, it’s now time to reevaluate those people who comprise our personal social networks and look for unique opportunities to creatively help each other solve problems and create new opportunities.
Part 2 “Understanding Your Social Network” Coming Soon
Thanks,
Be the bar: http://bethebar.com/
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