This week’s blog will look at the impact of networking and making connections, which has been inspired by recent meetings I’ve had in addition to an excellent book I’ve read called The Content Trap by Bharat Anand.
I have been very lucky in the past few weeks to have met many interesting and highly successful people who are global experts in their field. Often, these meetings have emerged as a result of being introduced through key people in my network. What struck me was the similarities they had with each other in terms of their work experience, their current projects, and their aims and desires with regards to making improvements in particular areas of business. My first thought after these meetings was to try to connect these people to each other, so that they can share ideas and possibly work together to concentrate their abilities and energies to solve the problems that they are seeking to address.
What I learned from this was that we need to actively work harder to connect people together and become “business matchmakers” (kudos to the person I met recently who coined this phrase!) We also need to be more open to connect with other people and learn how to leverage social media more effectively.
I often see people complaining on LinkedIn, for example, that they receive many connection requests from people who are simply trying to sell something. I agree – this is irritating. But this should not result in developing a negative, or even a cynical, attitude towards accepting requests from others with whom you may share interests with, and who could afford opportunity to expand your network. Likewise, becoming too insular and tentative characterised by a lack of willingness to reach out to potentially new contacts as a result of previous negative experiences, is self-defeating. Likewise, if you meet someone face-to-face that’s been introduced to you by a matchmaker in your network, work quickly to make the online connection so that you can maintain contact, and possibly even work together in future.
A lack of networking and connectivity can often result in duplication of effort to tackle the same or similar problems. This was revealed to me recently as a result of various events that were taking place in the West of Scotland. I won’t mention what the events were, and who the individuals involved happened to be, but it was striking that the events seemed to want to address the same issue. The people involved didn’t seem to be aware of what their peers were doing elsewhere at other events that were focused on the same problems! The reasons for this were unclear, but it was such a missed opportunity for collaboration and sharing of ideas and resources.
All these experiences echoed excellent insight from Bharat Anand’s book, The Content Trap. Bharat explores, using various case studies, the outsized impact on organisational performance by means of producing products and services that allow consumers to make connections with each other. Bharat makes the point that organisations that focus primarily on the quality of the content of their products and services, and less on the ability of those products or services to facilitate connections between people, are less likely to be successful. As a leader, have you given consideration whether your products are services are effective at connecting people? The quality of your products and services are important, of course – but have you focused too much on these aspects at the expense of other important aspects? In other words, have you fallen into the content trap?
The key takeaways are:
Be a matchmaker by actively linking together people in your network.
Be more open to connecting with people whom you don’t know or may work in a different industry or sector.
Reflect on how your organisation can improve connections between employees and its consumers.
Photo by Conny Schneider on Unsplash