Hey you. Yes, I’m talking to you. You need to network more
Let me start off by clearing something up: Yes, I am in fact talking to you.
This piece is dedicated squarely at a certain type of person. That type of person is a “somewhat ambitious, possibly introverted, and most likely in business” person.
How do I know that’s you? You’re reading week 7 of a blog, written by a 30-something Principal from a boutique strategy firm. You’re kind of in a niche segment.
Now that I’ve got your attention, and probably offended a portion of my very fragile reader-base, I’ll explain why I think you should network more.
Being the ambitious person you are, it’s likely that you aspire to take on more significant leadership roles. Networking plays an important role in helping you achieve that goal.
Leadership, if you strip it down to its basics, is as simple as having people want to follow you. They choose to listen to you and they genuinely want you to succeed.
That is a pretty impressive feat, and it does not come easily.
If you simplify it, leadership is a factor of two variables: Depth of Trust (T) and Number of People (P) you Influence
This means that to increase the leadership value, you must raise the values of T or P. Ideally both.
If we use this definition of leadership, we can visualize different leadership roles. To simplify further, I’m equating the complex concept of ‘trust’ with ‘the magnitude of decisions people are comfortable with you making for them’.
If you plot the different types of leaders, you can start to see a trend. The larger ‘classically defined leadership’ roles, have higher values of T and P.
Given you have ambitions of higher leadership roles, that means you’ll need to increase your values of T and P. How? Let’s break it down.
What it means to increase T:
Trust is a complex topic. I am not going to go anywhere near attempting to define it in its entirety. For now let’s break it into 3 elements:
Strength of Relationship
Confidence in Judgement
Consistency of Action
While each of these elements is different, they do have something in common.
You need to have lots of interactions with people to increase them. The more they understand you, and see you in action, the more they can trust you.
To create those interactions with people outside your immediate sphere of influence requires you to network and manufacture those interactions.
I’d hazard a guess that your trust value is not something that is in question when people do get to know you.
Let’s lock your trust value in around the 80th percentile and move onto the P value before I go down a wormhole of trying to ascribe a mathematic formula to the concept of trust.
What it means to increase P:
Now I will be the first to admit. The P value is an exhausting one to amass. It’s easy to keep your P value above 0, with friends, family, and close coworkers. But if you really aspire to larger leadership roles, your P value must be much higher. You’ll need to influence many people in your direct organization, and likely many people outside of it.
To make matters worse, every single day it shrinks. And for you – a possibly introverted person – your P value declines even more steeply because influencing people is especially exhausting.
That means raising your P value requires much more networking and human interaction than you’re probably comfortable with.
But what other options do you have? After all you are somewhat ambitious. That means that you are predisposed to feeling that if you are not expanding the surface area under your Leadership function, you are ‘falling behind’.
To take on larger leadership roles, you’re going to need to invest time and effort in increasing your P and T values.
Increasing either of these values, requires ongoing positive interactions with a larger group of people than you currently do today.
This is why you, a “somewhat ambitious, possibly introverted, and most likely in business person” need to network more.
Inspired to grow your network? A great way to do that is by sharing content with your social network:
