The 4 Key Steps To Better Business Networking

February 21, 2011 by 3 Comments

Sharp IslandI don’t believe in miracle solutions for career or business development, but if I believed in one, it would certainly be business networking.

I think your professional skills aren’t worth very much unless people know about them and they know about you. This is where business networking comes in.

As a communication coach, I’ve seen highly capable professionals who weren’t going anywhere because they lacked a solid network. I’ve also seen less capable professionals who were going places because they were doing businesses networking effectively.

Please notice the word ‘effectively’, since networking by itself is often not enough. Running around at business conferences spreading business cards won’t take you very far. It’s essential that you network the right way, and this is why in this article, I’m providing you with the 4 key steps to better business networking.

Step 1: Have a Plan

There are so many professionals out there you can meet and so many opportunities for networking that unless you focus, you’ll be running around like a chicken with its head cutoff.

If you want results, you need to have a plan for networking. Sit down with a pen and a paper (I’m old fashion with this one) and write down the kind of professionals you would benefit the most from meeting. Profile them accurately in terms of profession, position and personality. Then, pick networking opportunities correlated with this profile, so you’ll make the best use of your time and energy.

Step 2: Approach!

I like to go to a networking event together with at least one other person. I also like to go to events where I already know some people and use them to introduce me to other people there. But you know what? That’s not always possible; especially when your web is still small.

This is why I believe one of the most important abilities in business networking is the ability to approach. This means going to people you don’t know at a business event and initiating conversations with them. You probably won’t find this comfortable at first, but I can tell you from experience that the more you practice it, the easier it will become.

Step 3: Make Big Small Talk

Even the most meaningful business relationships start with small talk and simple conversation starters such as: “What do you do?”, “How do you like your job?”, “What do you think of the speaker?” and so on.

If you’re not good at it yet, learn how to make small talk at business events and do so. At the same time, keep in mind that small talk doesn’t mean talking about things you really don’t care about and hoping something positive will come of it. Rather, it means starting simple in a conversation and turning it into something big.

Step 4: Focus On Building Relationships, Not On Selling

Whenever I ask various persons what they hate about going to business events, they often tell me they hate people who approach them and start selling them something out of the blue. Whenever I ask them what they enjoy, they often tell me the enjoy meeting new people who are authentic, interesting and good conversationalists.

You want to be this second person. Sure, light conversation may turn into a huge business deal, but it starts as light conversation with a focus on getting to know each other professionally and building a trust-based relationship. Keep in mind that relationship comes first, selling comes second.

More than anything else, effective business networking is in my perspective a matter of practice and patience. Know your goals, go out there, be sociable and don’t take business networking too seriously just because the word ‘business’ is in there.

Once you reach a certain threshold, the results will begin to manifest and soon, they will blow your mind.

Eduard Ezeanu is a communication coach who teaches people how to start a conversation and helps them put their best foot forward in communication. He also writes on his blog, People Skills Decoded.
Creative Commons License photo credit: rmlowe

Filed Under: Self Development Tagged With:

On Dreams, Fear Of Failure, and Not Facing Up To Reality

February 17, 2011 by 21 Comments

A light bulb but no (good) ideas... (17/365)Your precious dreams. You share them with me so sincerely. You tell me how unhappy you are about the current state of your working life. How you feel unfulfilled. Punching below your weight.

You list out your ideas for change. At times I get seduced and equate your talk with action. But weeks, months, years pass without seeing any major difference.

Of course there’s always some reason why not.

  • You’re not quite clear yet on which one of your ideas to go after first.
  • The economy is not the best. No-one in their right mind would rock the boat on their working lives till things get better.
  • You have a bonus coming, or a stock option maturing, in another year or so, which you’d be crazy to miss.

All sensible, logical, understandable reasons on the face of things for stalling on that breakthrough.

But could something more sinister be lurking under the surface?

Fear Of Failure

“I suppose it’s fear of failure,” you tell me, smiling.

And I smile back at you and nod. That old thing, we seem to say. In the new age shorthand, we both recognise that we have something in common. Some vulnerability that allows us to relate to one another more easily. And we talk about it for a while.

I notice how tempting it is to sit here and stew in our shared weakness, allowing it to define us, like the victims of abuse often do. How it gives us plenty to talk about on the one hand. And makes sure we never move beyond it on the other.

But if you were to reach beyond the phrase, and the euphemisms that get spouted along with it, like not really fearing failure but fearing success, what would it look like? And how does it serve you to identify with the label?

As much as I want to know your answers, I feel a sudden, pressing need to get curious about my own fear of failure. I’ve been aware of it for some months now. So, how come I still haven’t cracked it? It’s that, not you, that’s really making me angry.

My coaching business, this thing about being on a mission to support people find a way to make work fit life rather than the reverse, is doing okay. I’ve built this blog to a certain level of grooviness. But the honest truth is that my ambition was always not that it do okay, but that it excel. That the blog become a business in its own right.

And I’ve done tons of work on stuff that should help me get to the next level. I’ve been studying the whole guest posting thing, and figuring I could write some cool articles for top sites that would help take my traffic to the next level again. I’ve also played with and drafted some information products to add to the site: an eBook for subscribers, a virtual workshop, and a interactive learning environment to offer a community-based life-changing experience.

But I’ve hedged.

Coaching, sure, I’m tried, tested and pro at that. But the information products that could set me apart? Who would want them? Who would buy them? What if I dared to put heart and soul into developing them and they bombed?

Would people laugh at me? See me as a complete fool for trying?

Of course all of this allows me to continue to play at being an amateur, good enough business blogger. But it also allows me to never be anything more than that.

Why am I sharing all of this? Well, first I want you to know that even the best of us hesitate, and that it’s okay.

Not Facing Up To Reality

But what’s not okay for me is thinking that that’s where it ends. Because, the insight I’m having as I write is that my fear is not just about failing. It’s about having to confront some of my own realities and limitations too. If I sit here with my dreams and do nothing beyond a certain point, well, I still have my dreams. And they can keep me cozy on tough days.

But if I dare to see my fear of failure as a call to action, I have to really dig into myself. I have to stop being ambivalent about things that matter to me. I have to focus down on the few actions that will make a real difference. I have to stretch myself to learn new skills and to express myself in different ways.

And if I’m going to fail, best I fail fast. Because that’s how I’m going to learn what will work in the longer term.

The choice is that or turning hesitation into an art form.

You and I can hesitate all we like. We can tell ourselves we haven’t yet chosen what it is we’re doing. But even in that place we’re choosing. We’re choosing to hesitate.

In that case, I’d be choosing to be an okay, also-ran sort of blogger. Is that REALLY what I’d choose for myelf?!

Hell, no.

So, I’m going to get over myself and face the music. Come with me?
Creative Commons License photo credit: LifeSupercharger

Filed Under: Self Development Tagged With: ,

How Not To Give Feedback At Work: Part Two

February 14, 2011 by 4 Comments

SamHave you ever wondered about the source of poor management behaviour?

I’ve always believed it comes from the top. The board or its equivalent. Set a bad example and you give your more junior people leaders licence to copy you. On the weekend, I witnessed a sad but true endorsing example.

You may recall that last November I was talking about an experience in my local coffee shop of the store manager belittling a member of her staff in front of a client. Me.

Well, yesterday, in the same shop, I stood at the counter, ordering a couple of Americanos, as the franchise owner questioned one of the store’s supervisors on something she hadn’t done.

“Why is the sign board not out on the pavement?”

“I tried to put it up when I put the tables and chairs out first thing, but it kept blowing down.”

If you live in the South East of England, you’ll appreciate it was both windy and rainy yesterday morning. Understatement.

“The sign board should be out.”

“I know that, Paul, but I reckoned it was a safety hazard. It’s blowing a gale out there.”

Paul harrumphs, marches to the front of the shop, and puts the offending board out on the pavement anyway. The supervisor meets my eyes in a WTF kind of way and gets on with making my coffee.

I take my coffee and me and my man sit and watch as the board gets blown down several times, being rescued by kindly passers by. We wonder whose insurance is going to pay out if the board blows into one of the cars parked on the road right beside it.

Paul disappears as the Sunday morning coffee traffic picks up. Eventually the supervisor reasserts her own good judgement and brings the board inside the shop.

I did giggle about this. But I do think it’s just a little crazy.

What do you think?

Creative Commons License photo credit: KelseaGroves

Filed Under: Corporate jobs Tagged With: ,

When Work Becomes Love (And Why That’s Not Always Healthy)

February 9, 2011 by 10 Comments

Ever have the feeling that work is playing a bigger role in your life than it should?

You know, that haunting sense that you’re expecting more of it, and it’s demanding more of you than seems healthy? That it’s got your psyche by the balls, dulling your ability to attend to anything else?

Of course, you’re a seasoned professional and have understood the dedication and sacrifice that come with the territory of having a career as opposed to just a job. Careers need heart and soul immersion, right?

So, how come you sometimes find yourself asking why you can’t push back on it, and manage it with the same kind of work life proportions that you see other people doing?

Yeah, I know you think you’re just tired and that the answer is to book your next holiday, and put yourself on a time management course.

But could the answer lie in facing up to the relationships – or lack of them – in your life?

The Tell-Tale Signs

  1. Work is your life. If anyone asks you who you are, you struggle to define yourself beyond what you do for a living.
  2. Weekends are for sleeping and getting ready for Monday. You don’t plan anything because Saturdays and Sundays are about recovering from one week and getting yourself in gear for the next. You have long lies, you go to gym, or spa, or laundry. You shop for office clothes, catch up on lost reading, and even do that presentation you know you won’t get done in the office.
  3. Work dominates most of your waking head space. The first thing you do in the morning is check your smart phone for email or the state of the markets overnight. Your commuting time is spent on calls. Or on replaying conversations from the day that you wish had gone better.
  4. Your romantic attachments are difficult to non-existent. You may be married or living with someone. You may be dating or having an affair. Or you may be single. Whatever, there’s no sense of “happily”  in any of it. You may do a good job of putting on to the outside world that everything’s good and sorted, but you know there’s baggage you’re avoiding.
  5. You lurch between elation and disappointment at work. You want work to love the shit out of you. When something great happens or you get good feedback, you’re puffed up and proud or yourself. When something bad occurs you can feel devastated. You may translate it all into what sounds like logical business talk, but it all feels very raw and personal.

So What?

I know this isn’t territory that most executive coaches would bother to venture into, but I will.

In the UK and US business and the economy dominate our cultures. Add to the mix the changes happening to communities and families as a result of the increasing pressure on city living, and it’s not hard to see why work becomes the one thing that, for many, we can relate to as a kind of constant.

So much so that work has become a substitute for love.

Remedy

Changing the picture is far from a quick fix. Let’s face it, if it were easy to learn how to navigate good relationships, and to confront the personal learnings from doing so, you’d have cracked it by now. But it takes time and commitment. It needs to be worked at.

A good first step, however, is to have some empathy for yourself about where you’re at.

How come that it’s safer, easier to love the inanimate being of your work, than it is a person? Whatever, the answer doesn’t come by crapping on yourself, but by being sad for the part of you that has made that decision.

Then do something about it.

Many seriously smart people struggle in relationships because their smartness has come about by the development of their logical selves to a level that’s far beyond their emotional selves. But just because there has been a gap doesn’t mean there always will be.

A lot of the solution comes from building your awareness, and being ruthlessly honest with yourself, together with experimenting with new things. Friends for brunch on the weekend? Quitting an affair because you’re ready to value a committed relationship? Having an honest conversation with someone close about something that you resent?

Loving work is an ideal that I buy in to.

But work is not love.

If it has become so for you, don’t you owe it to yourself to separate the two?

So, what are you waiting for?

Photo credit:  All rights reserved by mr_moremi

Filed Under: Self Development, Thriving @ work Tagged With: , ,

How Safe Is Your Brilliant Career From Delusion?

February 3, 2011 by 9 Comments

What makes for a brilliant career? Many people will tell you it’s about the quality of their CV: the brand names they’ve worked for, the job titles they’ve had, the progression they’ve made through the ranks; the businesses they’ve driven to success.

But if you buy into this picture, could you be deluding yourself?

Once upon a time, I had a brilliant career. HR Director for an über brand, corner office, good salary, bonus and stock options. What’s not to love about that? It was great going to parties or networking events and when people asked what I did, watching their approving nods. Approval felt good.

Envy, of course, was better. And admit it, don’t you love flaunting it when you have something other people desire? I certainly did!

Knowing that I was doing very well in society’s eyes made all the effort and sacrifice okay. While my CV screamed of academic successes and lust-after job titles, it didn’t matter that inside I felt hollow. Because outside was all that mattered.

Except that after a while it became a little weighty to keep propping up this picture, perpetuating my own myth. And, although at the time I could not have articulated it with this clarity, I came to intuit that I was deluding myself on a very important point.

Having a brilliant career is not the same as doing a life’s work.

The former, I have come to see, is pretty superficial and is guided by what the world judges as good. The latter is all about working from a soulful place and with purpose and meaning. I’m not saying that these two things are mutually exclusive. I’m sure there are lots of people in all lines of business that work in a meaningful way and have brilliant careers as judged by the world.

But don’t delude yourself that one is automatically the other.

In my case, I decided that I wouldn’t be able to do my life’s work while working for a corporation, and so after a while I quit. Besides knowing that I wanted to do coach and psychotherapy training to deepen my ability to work incisively with people I had only a fuzzy picture of how things would unfold. Being a former control freak, that was scary. What if I ruined my fabulous reputation and there was no way back? But I began freelancing to give myself the safety, funding and space to find out.

My work has morphed over the years that I’ve been self-employed. I’ve earned more or less, depending on all kind of things, not least of which are the decisions I’ve made about the directions to go in or not. Now, I’m happy that I work as Christine. In whatever guise you encounter me, it’s me you get. Do I still have a brilliant career? Some folks would tell you that they think I’m a role model for carving your own thing, others that I lost the plot some time ago. They’re both right.

What’s important now is how it feels to me. So long as it feels real and I feel alive in what I’m doing my career is brilliant on my terms. And that’s the difference.

What delusions might you be spinning in your own career? How might you break their spell and start building a brilliant career on your terms?

Image: Chris Halderman

Filed Under: Corporate jobs, Self Development Tagged With: , ,