Are you devoting sufficient time to your network to help you achieve your goals? 2
Selected excerpt from the HBR Article How to revive a tired network
Published 5 February 2015
How you differentiate yourself from others who are as smart, hardworking, or expert as you are—depends on your capacity to connect people, ideas, and resources that wouldn’t normally bump into one another.
When developing your network consider theses 3 key attributes:
- Breadth: Strong relationships with a diverse range of contacts
- Connectivity: The capacity to link or bridge across people and groups that wouldn’t otherwise connect
- Dynamism: A dynamic set of extended ties that evolves as you evolve
What can a network do for you? It can keep you informed. Teach you new things. Make you more innovative. Give you a sounding board to flesh out your ideas. Help you get things done when you are in a hurry and you need a favor. The list goes on.
In sum, as Malcolm Gladwell illustrated in his book The Tipping Point, networks run on “connectors,” people who are linked to almost everyone else in a few steps and who connect the rest of us to the world. Connectors can see a need in one place and a solution in another, a vacancy in one area and a talented person in another, a discovery from a different discipline and a problem in their own, and so on, because they’re just one or two “chain lengths” away from the issues. That is, you can reach connectors through someone you already know or through someone who knows someone whom you already know.
Read the HBR article “How to revive a tired network” to learn many valuable insights you can use to develop a high-impact network.