Your Best Network
Recently (but it’s happened to me several times), an individual I met once in a Zoom call pinged me on theBoardlist asking me to recommend them as a board director on the platform. My first and immediate thought was “Yikes, what do I do now? I may encounter this person again and they’ll be offended if I don’t respond.”
But my thought immediately after that was “Why did this person ask me? I know nothing about them that would make me a great recommender of their skills and talents. Am I really the best person in their network to ask?”
Welcome to the joys and pitfalls of networking. We’ve been taught to aggressively network with others and be ready for serendipity to provide our next opportunity. Indeed as I write about in Choose Possibility, I’ve been lucky many times in my own career to cross paths with someone who gave me a chance. But there is a power law to our networks as well; too often we overestimate the power of “powerful” people we may encounter once or twice and underestimate the power of our most proximate and deep network.
I think about our best network as the people who know us most closely at work and who have seen all that we are capable of doing and delivering. They have seen us at our worst yes, but also at our absolute best. Most likely they are the people we have worked for, or the people we have worked most closely with as colleagues. Our best networks are not floating up above us in the sky and waiting to bestow benevolence; they have been in the trenches with us. Our best networks are ready to answer the questions:
How deeply have you worked with this person?
Are they in the top 1%, 5%, 10% or 25% of people you’ve ever worked with?
What are their superpowers?
Would you work with them again?
If I hire this person and want to make them more successful what do I need to know now about their areas of development?
Whenever I do a reference call, these are the only questions I want to ask and want answered. Whenever I offer someone as a reference or recommender, these are the questions that I want them to be able to answer about me comfortably, knowing I’ll have a pretty good idea of what they’ll say because we’ve worked deeply together.
Our best networks are also the most likely to pass us along to people we wish to connect with but don’t know, accompanied by the single magical line: “I worked with Sally for 3+ years on ____ and think she’s absolutely worth chatting with because...” It’s this one sentence that actually might deliver the connection we’re hoping for.
Confusion about how to effectively use our networks long ago led me to stop giving LinkedIn endorsements as a rule. I continued to find that the people asking me for references were not those for whom I could authentically answer the above questions. As a result, I often felt I would be the opposite of what they were seeking: a poor recommender, rather than a great one. I would potentially do them a disservice when asked such questions. An earnest series of “I don’t knows” when asked the above questions in a reference check diminishes most of the power people hope I can deliver when asking me in the first place.
When building our careers, it’s more than fine to aggressively seek new connections: This is how sales pipelines are built, how we might get our next job interview, and how serendipity happens. But even more, remember that our best networks, the people who will advocate the strongest on our behalf for that next great job opportunity, are those with whom we’ve already done great and gritty work. It’s ok to build out all our networks of opportunity, but remember it’s our deepest networks that will come through for us time and again.