Networking and Pay-It-Forward
I attended a webinar recently hosted by Leeds University and presented by Heather White of The Career Farm[1]. The title was “How to Network effectively in a Socially Distanced World”
I have a fairly extensive network of the many people with whom I have worked or played over the years. My network started through playing league squash and almost every week I would meet someone I had never met before. Then it was golf and it was business. Working for the Zimbabwe Institute of Management put me into contact with many students, and equally, many presenters, some of them from the UK and the USA (who I shall not name here) maybe not all that rich but most certainly some of them are famous.
Then came Linked-In and my network grew all the more. Added to that I have worked with the Institute of Leadership and Management and that too has grown my network.
But my hour with Heather made me realise how little use a network is unless one works it with a little more savvy than I have done over the years.
She started by asking us a few questions. Name five people on your network. How about ten? And then the clincher: Do you have a network STRATEGY?
Huh? A network strategy? It had never crossed my mind. I just know people, some of them well, some of them vaguely and some on my Linked-In network, not at all.
Then Heather introduced us to something really valuable: What can you bring to your network? What do you want to take from it? You cannot have one without the other. She introduced us to the concept of ‘Pay it Forward’. There is a movie of the same name and I remember watching it years ago.
I have a personal experience:
In the early 1990’s I was working towards an MA in Business Economics with Leeds University. I was a mature student and I was researching how different people learned to use and program computers. I gathered a massive sample of data over a 2-year period. One of my friends then told me that because I ‘knew nothing about statistics’ my efforts were likely to fail. This was a bit of a shock.
Then I met Professor David Wilson from the University of Zimbabwe. Amongst many other talents David was a statistician. He took me under his wing. He helped me turn my data into valuable information. He ran reports for me on the university computer and one day I flew to Leeds with reams of statistics printed on 120 column eyeliner paper. Remember it? It weighed a lot!
In time I wrote and presented my thesis to a panel of professors at Leeds and I was awarded my MA.
Back in Zimbabwe my wife, Cherie, held a party to celebrate my success. David could not make it.
I met him some weeks later in the supermarket. I thanked him for what he done for me and told him that without him I would never have achieved my goal. What could I do for him, what could I pay him for all the time he had given freely to me?
“Do what I have done for you for others”, said David. “That’s all I ask.”
I have lived with that purpose ever since. I have probably not yet done enough. I shall do more. This is a start.
What can you bring to your network? What do you want to take from it? Time perhaps to create a networking strategy if you haven’t done so.
[1] https://thecareerfarm.com/?doing_wp_cron=1624851519.7769999504089355468750