There is a myth that the world is a meritocracy and the person who works the hardest wins. This is wrong for many reasons. First of all, it isn’t the person who works the hardest who wins, it’s the person who delivers the best results. You can put in 12 hours days and achieve nothing because you’re working hard at the wrong things. Companies don’t pay you to work hard, they pay you to achieve outcomes. This is what people mean when they talk about working smarter, not harder. Often there is a strong correlation between hard work and achieving objectives but not always. Make sure that your effort is actually moving the right needle.

Second, it’s not always the person who is “technically best” that gets the opportunities, it is the person who is “best connected”. Like it or not, this is what it is. There is no point getting upset about it and refusing to play the game because you think the game is silly. If you insist on sticking to the merit game, not the relationship game, then you’re going to miss out. No-one is going to wait for you to get the memo. Merit is only part of it and the importance of technical competence is going to vary with the opportunity. Even the most technically brilliant person is going to find themselves hitting a career ceiling if they don’t develop relationships.

A key tip that I give people with great aspirations is to make sure that your boss’s boss knows who you are. Your immediate line manager directs your day-to-day work, but it’s the levels above him/her that have a better strategic view and know about the upcoming opportunities before your boss does. What you want is to be front of mind at least two levels up so that when an opportunity comes along your boss’s boss says “We need to do something about X. What about Alex? What is she doing?”

Building a relationship with your boss’s boss doesn’t mean undermining your line manager. It doesn’t mean that when you are unhappy with what your boss has said or done that you run off and dob them in or bypass them. All it means is that your boss’s boss knows you by name, knows what your role in the company is and knows what you’re working on.

How do you do that? You need to take the initiative to strike up a conversation. In the lift, at the coffee machine, walking down the hall. Some senior leaders are excellent and try to know as many people as they can and they will take the initiative with the small talk, but most don’t. It’s easy for everyone to know the senior leaders but it’s difficult for them to know everyone else because in some companies there are just so many people.

Discover some common ground or something that your boss’s boss finds interesting. How do you do that? You get over your dislike of small talk and ask questions.  Start with “How was your weekend?”, or if it’s a Friday, “Do you have any plans for the weekend?” Then you can file away the answers. A two minute conversation might reveal that your boss’s boss has three kids who play soccer, loves Latin jazz and just got a new dog. These are all things that can be used to continue the small talk at a later date.

I used to have a boss that would say “what interests my boss fascinates me”. This is tremendous advice. It doesn’t mean that you turn into a try-hard brown-noser who is trying to be best buddies with your boss’s boss. All it means is that if you know your boss likes to watch the Tour de France, for example, and it’s July (when the Tour de France is held), it’s not going to hurt to make sure you’re up to speed with the latest Tour de France activity. It doesn’t mean dropping $10k on a carbon frame bicycle and showing up to working in full lycra cycling gear. It just means that when you see your boss’s boss in the break room you can ask if they’ve been watching the Tour and you’ll have a nugget or two to contribute to the conversation.

Once you’ve established the small talk connection (this might take a few interactions), ask your boss’s boss what they’re working on. This is a double winner question. First, if you know what your boss’s boss’s priorities are then you might be able to help which will look good for you. Second, your boss’s boss might ask you the same question in return so you have an opportunity to tell them what you are working on. This means you always need be prepared to explain what you’re working on in 25 words or less. If your answer includes activities that align with what your boss’s boss is working on then that is excellent. This is what will give you the edge.

The easy measure for early success is when you pass your boss’s boss in the hallway and they acknowledge you by name. If you then get an opportunity that appears to come out of left field, you can be pretty sure how it happened.

That’s the Career Advantage. Good luck!

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The thought of networking terrifies some people and makes the skin crawl on others. Just hearing the word “networking” conjures up images of slimy schmoozing, neediness, sales and being worried that people will think you want something from them. It also means that you have to make small talk with strangers which is up there with public speaking on some peoples’ list of things they hate doing.

No person can achieve success alone. You might do most of the grunt work but there are always people along the way that have made key contributions to your success. Sometimes you may not even realise it until well after the fact. It can be as little as someone making an introduction for you, loaning you a piece of equipment or letting you sleep on the couch for a few weeks. There might be many people who have helped you but one thing is for certain: you haven’t done it on your own.

All of your dreams lie on the other side of fear, so you need to acknowledge the necessity of networking to achieve your dreams. If you can’t get past associating networking with sleaze, then think of it as building relationships instead. The magnitude of your success will be a direct function of the quality of your relationships. Every successful person in the world will tell you that there were a handful of key relationships in their life that got them to where they are today. If you can manage to build many high quality relationships then you will be unstoppable!

Bill Clinton was a phenomenal networker. In one of the great books on networking, Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi, Ferrazzi tells us the story of a man named Jeffrey Stamps who met Bill Clinton at a party in 1968, when Clinton was only 22 years old and at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. Upon meeting Stamps, Clinton pulled out a black address book into which he promptly entered Stamps’ name and the fact that Stamps was at Pembroke on a Fulbright scholarship. When Stamps asked Clinton what he was doing, Clinton announced he was going into politics to run for governor of Arkansas and therefore was keeping a record of everyone he met. Each night Clinton would record on index cards the names and other vital details of everyone he’d met during the day. Clinton then went on to become President of the United States from 1992 – 2000.

Whipping out a notebook partway through a conversation to turn a person into a diary entry is probably going too far for most people. If things are going well and you’re both getting along you might elect to make a LinkedIn connection at the time. LinkedIn is a terrific way to keep track of people but it shouldn’t be your only method as it doesn’t let you store additional information. The great contacts management feature of LinkedIn in the profile photos as the older you get the more people start to look the same!

In addition to LinkedIn, collect business cards where possible (although business cards seem to be disappearing quickly) and when you get home make some notes. Index cards and address books are a little last century so create a spreadsheet or database so you can record additional information, such as the date and place you met, anything interesting that you learned about them. There are apps for photographing business cards and having the details turned into a contact on your phone, although these aren’t perfect so always check the details have been taken off the card correctly and a “5” hasn’t been recognised as an “8”, for example. Another trick is to save the business card as the profile picture in your phone contacts.

Next level networkers follow up on everyone they meet. If you don’t do an in-person LinkedIn connection then this allows you to send a personalised message with your connections request. For maximum impact do this in the next 24 hours. If you met at a conference or some other event where there was a lot of general networking going on, then make sure you include in your follow-up a reference to a notable point or topic from the conversation you had.

If you want to go the extra mile, keep an eye out for something that may be of interest to people in your network. If you subscribe to any newsletters, newspapers or magazines and you see an article that might be relevant then send it through to your connection. If it’s behind a paywall don’t assume that your connection has access. Instead of just sending them the link, do them the courtesy of turning the article into a pdf and sending it through. Your connection may already have seen it but it’s likely they’ll recognise and appreciate the gesture. If they ignore you then it doesn’t matter. No harm, no foul. Don’t take it personally, people get busy. Don’t give up on the relationship because one gesture went unacknowledged.

On the flip side, you don’t want to turn into an unintentional spammer. What you’re doing is looking for touchpoints to show is that you listened to what they have to say and you’re there to help. There are more ways to do this than interesting media articles. Just make sure that the touchpoint is meaningful not generic.

Another example I have used personally is meeting a man at an event who mentioned that the company he worked for had just been acquired. His division was closing down and he was about to be made redundant. A few days later I saw a job ad that he might be interested in and sent that through to him. I assumed that he had seen it and sent it anyway as a touchpoint but he hadn’t seen the job and was very interested in it, so you never know.

Zig Ziglar, motivational speaker extraordinaire, used to say “You can have anything you want as long as you help enough other people get what they want.” This is so very true. Instead of framing networking as how other people can help you, look for how you can help other people. There are plenty of things that you can do that require very little effort on your part that will help others out tremendously, such as making an introduction. You will be surprised at how a little favour over here will pay off in a massive way other there. Don’t look for transactional payoffs (i.e. I do a favour for you and now you do a favour for me – this isn’t the mafia) just look for ways to pay it forward.

Your investment in your network is the biggest career investment you ever make – yes, bigger than your professional qualifications. Some people get the memo early but too many of us have had to figure this out for ourselves and after spending 20 years shunning the idea of “networking” realise that our rolodexes (contacts list for the younger generations) are a little anaemic. Networks take time to develop and maintain but it will be worth it.

Thank you for stopping by Career Advantage. In Part 2, well will talk about how to find people to connect with.

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