At some point in most of our professional careers, we get taught a lesson about the importance of networking as a means to fuel opportunities, improve credibility, and transform career growth. For me, it happened immediately in my first job out of college, where I joined as an analyst at a professional services company.
If you’ve ever worked in a large organization, you probably know that it can feel easy to get lost in the shuffle. It’s hard to keep track of everything going on, so you keep track of what’s going on closest to you, such as your team, business unit, or maybe function/organization.
What’s interesting about working at Deloitte, was that it was a private-partnership. This meant the firm itself operated very much like mini fiefdoms and kingdoms very much in medieval times. In a given country, there was a ruler or king, but there were other royal families that had power. In this case, those were the thousands of other partners and managing directors.
The same was true for a 150,000 person consulting firm. There was a CEO and a Board, but the royal families (Partners/Managing Directors) operated their own mini fiefdoms and kingdoms in the organization.
For example, there was the M&A Practice, the Retail & CPG team, and the IT Strategy group, etc. All of these, laddered up to the broader organizational leadership, but operated somewhat independently within the company.
The beauty of this is that it made what was a large organization feel a bit smaller and more intimate. If you were within a kingdom, you knew everyone and had a connection.
Learning The Power of Networking and Relationships
Having a strong professional relationship was a concept that resonated with me. When I was in high school, I launched a non-profit organization, and was able to secure funding for the organization as a result of someone I had met while caddying and during that conversation I found out that he went to business school with my Father and who my father had helped out especially when he was earlier in his career.
In college, I ended up becoming Student Body President, after after getting taught the ropes by the prior 3 student body presidents, and I don’t think i would have even made it into the consulting firm if it weren’t for the Boston College alum who advocated and encouraged the recruiting team to “take a chance” on me because I didn’t meet the GPA cutoff.
But starting my career at a large consulting firm took this to a whole new level.
So why did relationships and having a good network matter so much? Here are a few examples:
Getting staffed on projects – When you are just starting your consulting career, nobody knows you, which makes it hard to get on a project. Being able to meet other people who can point you to opportunities where there are projects is critical. As you develop and gain expertise, having the right relationships and the right network of people can help you get on the project or account that you want.
Getting the right expertise – One of the value propositions of a professional services firm is that they have expertise. While that doesn’t show up on every project, it does exist within the company. When you were on a project, one of the things you needed to do was to find the right expert within the firm who could give you guidance, insight or advice. While you could spend a lot of time in the firm’s directory, actually knowing the expert would save you a ton of time.
Finding people to staff on your project – As you get more senior in the firm, you start to get responsibilities for staffing engagements. Making sure that you have a good network of other consultants who are capable and competent is really important.
Gaining visibility and credibility for your work – In a 150,000 person company, it’s hard to be widely known as there are so many people. But if you want to accurately get credit for your body of work, or if you have aspirations for advancement or visibility, having relationships with influential leaders, decision makers, and principals/partners is very important.
My first “win’ with networking came right at the end of my first year. During the first week of onboarding training, I ended up going to a presentation given by the firm’s Chief Technology Officer who was talking about the potential of SMAC (Social Mobile, Cloud, and Analytics, I am dating myself, I know…) this was a field I was deeply interested in, and after the presentation I happened to go up and introduce myself and to ask him a few questions.
He encouraged me to reach out to him at any point if I was looking for work or wanted to connect or chat further.
About six months in, I reached out to him via email to see if he’d be open to chatting and I didn’t get a response. During the end of that year, I reached out again, and this time, he referred me to one of the people on his team, who asked if I wanted to join their internal strategy team for a 3 month rotation. I said yes, but little did I know that opportunity would alter the trajectory of my career.
Those three months ended up lasting almost a year and a half. Through that time, I went from being a lost new hire to a seasoned consultant. I worked on a number of strategic projects ranging from an M&A acquisition, launching of a new business model to strategic partnerships with outside companies.
It altered the trajectory of my career, gave me access to rooms I would never have dreamed of being in, and exposed me to parts of the business (and people) that most 23-24 year olds even at a firm like mine don’t get exposure to.
All of this happened because of a 3 minute conversation at a networking event, and two follow up emails. But that alone showed me the power of building and cultivating relationships.
While some of that was luck, I saw the value of relationships and a strong network in many other ways. While I was working on that assignment, I had a great manager (Kristi, if you’re reading this, hi!) Who in addition to doing all things that great managers do, constantly was encouraging and also consistently encouraged me into meeting other people outside of our team who were in adjacent parts of the firm.
Since the nature of our work was cross-functional and involved getting a lot of buy-in and support, meeting all these practices and groups became very useful for navigating projects.
After time passed, I soon became an expert at figuring out who to go to when I needed help. Or when we needed to get buy-in with a particular group, and often found the success of what I was doing was heavily based on my ability to cultivate meaningful relationships with other teams.
The Myth of a Self-Made Person
One of the most important lessons about networking and relationships and the impact on careers that I learned at the firm was that the self-made person is a myth. We’ve valued rugged individualism and championed the idea of the self-made man. We’ve believed that if I just work hard enough and take enough ownership I will eventually be successful.
What working at a consulting firm taught me, is that while we should take ownership, of our work, actions and careers, the way that you become successful in the workplace relies on having good relationships, a strong network, and a deposition and outlook that acknowledges that you will go both further and farther when your work with and through others.
If we study people who are successful and engaged in their work, you’ll usually find that they had an entire constellation of companies, organizations, communities, schools, of people who shaped them, helped them, and gave them opportunities that led to exponential growth. That, coupled with their work ethic and talent helped get them to where they were.
If individualistic career thinking gets you linear growth, collective career thinking gets you exponential growth.
Watching all of this play out helped me refine my thinking on networking. It helped me move beyond the familiar tropes of “business cards” and “used car salesmen” to one of
- building meaningful connections
- mutually exchanging value and support each other’s’ goals
- sharing ideas, information, knowledge, and connections.
- Spotting patterns and facilitating opportunities for others when they aligned
Instead of looking at things as a zero sum game, or a “me-first” mindset, I began to think abundantly about the connections, opportunities and ideas that could come from getting to know others and sharing and collaborating with them.
Seeing how to succeed and thrive in a 150,000 person company taught me how people in a business that relies on people and networks cultivate relationships, share ideas and concepts, and collaborate with others forever helped me develop a different mindset and set of intentional practices that I still use to this day that have helped me create my own opportunities, exposed me to rooms I would never have gotten in, and opened doors I couldn’t get into on my own.
Here are a couple best practices
1) Map Your Constellation
One of my favorite places to start is with something I call the constellation exercise. A constellation is defined as an assemblage, collection, or group of usually related persons, qualities, or things – this is a great way to think about you, your network, and the many connections and affiliations that are in your orbit.
The exercise simply asks you to map out visually all of the professional affiliations, communities, networks and nodes that you are connected with. These can be colleges, communities, industry affiliations, personal networks, and anything else in between.
Doing this should show you just how connected you are, as well as the power of connection. If you reflect on it, I am sure you can see how some of those groups in your constellation got you to where you are today, and for some of those groups and communities may have had an outsized influence on who you are.
As Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn says, These days, who you know is what you know, how you’re known, and who you become. Seeing and revisiting not only how your constellation has influenced you, but how you can continue to leverage it moving forward is a powerful activity.
2)Find and Invest in Your Third Place(s)
The third place is a term coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg and refers to places where people spend time between home (‘first’ place) and work (‘second’ place). They are locations where we exchange ideas, have a good time, and build relationships.
Originally, the third place was meant to be a physical place where people could physically congregate, socialize and spend time with one another. But as time and society evolved, so did the idea of what a third place could be, as well as its application in our lives.
In our always on and fast changing world, we have more abilities to connect, but yet, we can also feel so distant. This is also why the concept of a third place became so important – We naturally crave connection and belonging, and we need spaces in our lives to breathe, ideate, connect with others, think, and explore.
Being able to find your own third place, physical or digital, where you can go to bounce ideas off of, connect with like minded peers, get best practices, or share knowledge is a critical way to manage your well being as well as your professional success. Some of my best ideas and professional opportunities have come from being able to congregate with various “third places” outside of my core day job, which allowed me to generate ideas or make connections as a result of a like minded person with a diverse perspective.
3)Always have something in your back pocket to share
Consulting gives you a chance to work on a lot of diverse projects and clients. This also means that once a project ends, you need to find a new one.
The best partners always had ideas in their back pocket, in case the opportunity presented itself to pitch them and sell their next project. While I wasn’t a partner, I took this to mean that I should always have a few things that I was working on in my back pocket. That way, as I was having casual conversations with people, I could share these ideas, to get feedback, but also to potentially turn something into a workable opportunity, like my next project, a new connection, or another initiative.
4) Find the forums/modes that work best for you
A common challenge with networking is that sometimes the most popular methods are not the ones that are appealing to us. The goal for making this a practice is finding the ways that work for you. The beauty of this is that there is something for everyone, but you have to be intentional and thoughtful about the forums and modes that work for you.
Natalie, a former colleague of mine, is a self-proclaimed introvert, who doesn’t love networking, but she understands the importance of personal brand and relationships and focuses on two areas, monitoring and lurking on LinkedIn, and trying to facilitate connections within her network. Jessica graduated from a top undergraduate and graduate institution, and as a result, does know a decent amount of people. But facilitating introductions, even if she isn’t present, has allowed her to stay engaged with people and create opportunities for herself, without feeling drained or awkward.
Starting my career in a large professional services firm showed me the power of networking as well as developed a mindset of investing proactively and continuously into building relationships with other people.
At the end of the day, we are all but one person in a big world, but as one person, we are capable of doing something big. To achieve that goal, it starts with investing in and cultivating your network.