A good network includes people that will share information, knowledge, ideas and be sounding board to help you be successful and navigate the “office politics” of your organisation. According to a Harvard Business Review articlei high performers have strong ties to four categories of people in the organisation:
People who offer new information and expertise e.g. to
- Increase market awareness.
- Share best practices.
- Inspire innovation.
Informally powerful people who can
- Influence on their behalf.
- Help coordinate projects.
- Support with navigating politics at work.
Formally powerful people who offer
- Mentoring.
- Sense-making.
- Political support.
- Resources.
People who offer
- Developmental feedback.
- Challenge their decisions.
- Push them to be better.
How does your network look? How did your network help you be successful until now? What can you do as a mentor to help your mentee build a strong network that will help them be successful in their career?
Ideas and recommendations for networking
Networking is a topic that always come up in mentoring programmes, no matter which level of mentees the programmes focus on. Mentees often ask about how to network and why to network – it can be a challenging topic especially for introverts or for the younger employees. Also, mentors, are keen to talk about networking, how networking has helped them in their career, and how they can support their mentees in developing their network. Here, of course the roles of Networker, Door Opener, and Sponsor from the Mentor’s Many Roles are truly relevant and the focus for more training of the mentors.
We have collected networking ideas and recommendations from mentees during the many workshops and trainings we have held with mentees from all over the world. Here you have twenty-nine of them for your inspiration:
- Start connecting with individuals in spontaneous calls.
- Have virtual coffee with a person from your team.
- Schedule informal calls every second day with colleagues from around the organisation.
- Use camera more often.
- Be more active networking with the other mentees.
- Do coffee calls – with no agenda.
- Be intentional about reaching out to people with whom you do not work directly – make the extra effort!
- Make connections via new colleagues.
- Find commonalities to have reasons to network.
- Invite for a virtual drink – reach out to new people and introduce them to your colleagues.
- See webinars as an opportunity to build new connections.
- Join external webinars to meet new people.
- Mentoring workshops also provide networking opportunities.
- Get networking on the agenda for your mentor/mentee meetings.
- Reach out to colleagues in a straightforward way via Teams.
- Help to connect others when they approach you for help.
- Work structured with developing and maintaining your network.
- Pick up phone and call instead of sending e-mails.
- Block time for networking.
- Reflect with mentor about potential network opportunities outside own organisational unit.
- Propose and set up recurring touch-bases with selected colleagues.
- Reach out to a person that you do not know to gain new knowledge.
- Find someone you have not talked to in a while and reach out to see how they are doing.
- Continue to be open to talking with new people.
- Call up colleagues that you rarely hear from
- Reach out to people you know but do not have daily business connections with.
