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The Idea in Cursory

What separates successful leaders from the rest of the pack? Networking: creating a tissue of personal contacts to provide the support, feedback, and resources needed to go things done.

Even so many leaders avoid networking. Some think they don't accept fourth dimension for it. Others disdain it equally manipulative.

To succeed as a leader, Ibarra and Hunter recommend building three types of networks:

  • Operational—people y'all need to accomplish your assigned, routine tasks.
  • Personal—kindred spirits outside your organization who can help y'all with personal advancement.
  • Strategic—people outside your command who volition enable you to reach key organizational objectives.

You demand all three types of networks. But to really succeed, you must principal strategic networking—by interacting regularly with people who can open your eyes to new business concern opportunities and help yous capitalize on them. Build your strategic network, and burnish your ain—and your company'due south—performance.

The Idea in Practice

The about effective leaders empathize the differences amongst the three types of networks and how to build them.

Operational network#Personal network#Strategic networkNetwork's purpose#Getting work done efficiently #Develop professional skills through coaching and mentoring; exchange of import referrals and needed outside information.#Figure out hereafter priorities and challenges; get stakeholder back up for them.How to find network members#Identify individuals who can block or support a project.#Participate in professional person associations, alumni groups, clubs, and personal-interest communities.#Identify lateral and vertical relationships with other functional and business organisation-unit managers—people outside your immediate control—who can assist you lot decide how your role and contribution fit into the overall picture show.

Leveraging Your Networks

Networking takes work. To lessen the pain and increase the gain:

Mind your mind-ready.

  • Have that networking is 1 of the nigh important requirements of a leadership office. To overcome any qualms about information technology, identify a person y'all respect who networks finer and ethically. Observe how he or she uses networks to accomplish goals.

Reallocate your time.

  • Principal the fine art of delegation, to liberate time you can and then spend on cultivating networks.

Found connections.

  • Create reasons for interacting with people outside your function or organization; for instance, by taking advantage of social interests to gear up the stage for addressing strategic concerns.

Example:

An investment banker invited key clients to the theatre (a passion of hers) several times a twelvemonth. Through these events, she developed her own business and learned things almost her clients' companies that generated business and ideas for other divisions in her firm.

Give and take continually.

  • Don't look until you really demand something badly to ask for a favor from a network member. Instead, take every opportunity to give to—and receive from—people in your networks, whether you need help or not.

When Henrik Balmer became the production manager and a board member of a newly bought-out cosmetics business firm, improving his network was the terminal thing on his listen. The primary problem he faced was time: Where would he notice the hours to guide his squad through a major upgrade of the production process and then think about strategic issues like expanding the business? The only fashion he could cleave out time and yet get home to his family unit at a decent 60 minutes was to lock himself—literally—in his office. Meanwhile, there were solar day-to-solar day issues to resolve, like a recurring disharmonize with his sales manager over custom orders that compromised production efficiency. Networking, which Henrik defined as the unpleasant task of trading favors with strangers, was a luxury he could not afford. Merely when a new acquisition was presented at a board meeting without his input, he abruptly realized he was out of the loop—not just inside the company, simply outside, too—at a moment when his future in the company was at stake.

Henrik'due south case is not unusual. Over the past two years, we have been following a cohort of 30 managers making their mode through what nosotros call the leadership transition, an inflection point in their careers that challenges them to rethink both themselves and their roles. In the process, nosotros've establish that networking—creating a fabric of personal contacts who will provide back up, feedback, insight, resources, and information—is simultaneously one of the about self-evident and one of the most dreaded developmental challenges that aspiring leaders must address.

Their discomfort is understandable. Typically, managers rise through the ranks past dint of a strong command of the technical elements of their jobs and a nose-to-the-grindstone focus on accomplishing their teams' objectives. When challenged to move beyond their functional specialties and accost strategic issues facing the overall business, many managers do not immediately grasp that this volition involve relational—not analytical—tasks. Nor do they easily understand that exchanges and interactions with a diverse assortment of current and potential stakeholders are not distractions from their "real work" only are actually at the heart of their new leadership roles.

Like Henrik (whose identity we've disguised, along with all the other managers nosotros describe here), a majority of the managers we work with say that they find networking insincere or manipulative—at best, an elegant style of using people. Not surprisingly, for every manager who instinctively constructs and maintains a useful network, we meet several who struggle to overcome this innate resistance. Notwithstanding the alternative to networking is to neglect—either in reaching for a leadership position or in succeeding at it.

Watching our emerging leaders approach this daunting chore, nosotros discovered that iii distinct just interdependent forms of networking—operational, personal, and strategic—played a vital role in their transitions. The first helped them manage current internal responsibilities, the second additional their personal development, and the third opened their eyes to new business organization directions and the stakeholders they would demand to enlist. While our managers differed in how well they pursued operational and personal networking, we discovered that near all of them underutilized strategic networking. In this commodity, we describe key features of each networking class (summarized in the showroom "The Three Forms of Networking") and, using our managers' experiences, explain how a three-pronged networking strategy can become part and parcel of a new leader's development plan.

The Iii Forms of Networking Managers who remember they are expert at networking are often operating only at an operational or personal level. Constructive leaders larn to employ networks for strategic purposes.

Operational Networking

All managers need to build adept working relationships with the people who can assistance them do their jobs. The number and breadth of people involved can be impressive—such operational networks include not only straight reports and superiors but too peers within an operational unit, other internal players with the power to block or support a projection, and key outsiders such as suppliers, distributors, and customers. The purpose of this type of networking is to ensure coordination and cooperation among people who have to know and trust ane some other in order to accomplish their firsthand tasks. That isn't always easy, but it is relatively straightforward, because the chore provides focus and a clear criterion for membership in the network: Either y'all're necessary to the job and helping to get information technology done, or you're not.

Although operational networking was the form that came most naturally to the managers nosotros studied, near every one had important blind spots regarding people and groups they depended on to make things happen. Once, Alistair, an accounting director who worked in an entrepreneurial firm with several hundred employees, was all of a sudden promoted by the company's founder to financial director and given a seat on the board. He was both the youngest and the least-experienced lath member, and his instinctive response to these new responsibilities was to reestablish his functional credentials. Acting on a hint from the founder that the company might go public, Alistair undertook a reorganization of the accounting section that would enable the books to withstand close scrutiny. Alistair succeeded brilliantly in upgrading his squad's capabilities, but he missed the fact that merely a minority of the vii-person board shared the founder's ambition. A year into Alistair'due south tenure, give-and-take about whether to take the visitor public polarized the lath, and he discovered that all that time cleaning up the books might have been better spent sounding out his codirectors.

I of the bug with an exclusive reliance on operational networks is that they are unremarkably geared toward meeting objectives as assigned, not toward request the strategic question, "What should we be doing?" By the aforementioned token, managers exercise non practice as much personal selection in assembling operational relationships as they do in weaving personal and strategic networks, because to a large extent the right relationships are prescribed by the chore and organizational structure. Thus, nearly operational networking occurs within an organization, and ties are determined in large part by routine, short-term demands. Relationships formed with outsiders, such every bit board members, customers, and regulators, are direct task-related and tend to be bounded and constrained by demands determined at a college level. Of course, an private manager can choose to deepen and develop the ties to different extents, and all managers exercise discretion over who gets priority attending. Information technology's the quality of relationships—the rapport and common trust—that gives an operational network its ability. Nonetheless, the substantial constraints on network membership mean these connections are unlikely to deliver value to managers beyond assistance with the task at hand.

As a manager moves into a leadership office, his or her network must reorient itself externally and toward the future.

The typical manager in our grouping was more concerned with sustaining cooperation within the existing network than with building relationships to face up nonroutine or unforeseen challenges. But as a manager moves into a leadership office, his or her network must reorient itself externally and toward the future.

Personal Networking

We observed that once aspiring leaders similar Alistair awaken to the dangers of an excessively internal focus, they begin to seek kindred spirits outside their organizations. Simultaneously, they become aware of the limitations of their social skills, such as a lack of knowledge near professional domains across their ain, which makes it difficult for them to observe common ground with people outside their usual circles. Through professional associations, alumni groups, clubs, and personal interest communities, managers proceeds new perspectives that let them to advance in their careers. This is what we hateful by personal networking.

Many of the managers we written report question why they should spend precious time on an activity and so indirectly related to the piece of work at hand. Why widen one's circumvolve of coincidental acquaintances when there isn't time even for urgent tasks? The answer is that these contacts provide important referrals, information, and, oft, developmental support such every bit coaching and mentoring. A newly appointed manufacturing plant director, for example, faced with a turnaround-or-close-down situation that was paralyzing his staff, joined a business concern—and through information technology met a lawyer who became his counsel in the turnaround. Buoyed by his success, he networked inside his company'south headquarters in search of someone who had dealt with a similar crunch. Eventually, he plant 2 mentors.

A personal network can also be a condom infinite for personal development and as such tin provide a foundation for strategic networking. The experience of Timothy, a principal in a midsize software visitor, is a good case. Like his father, Timothy stuttered. When he had the opportunity to set up for meetings, his stutter was non an issue, just spontaneous encounters within and exterior the company were dreadfully painful. To solve this problem, he began accepting at least 2 invitations per week to the social gatherings he had assiduously ignored before. Earlier each event, he asked who else had been invited and did background research on the other guests and so that he could initiate conversations. The hardest part, he said, was "getting through the door." Once inside, his interest in the conversations helped him forget himself and main his stutter. Every bit his stutter diminished, he too applied himself to networking across his company, whereas previously he had taken refuge in his technical expertise. Like Timothy, several of our emerging leaders successfully used personal networking as a relatively safe mode to expose problems and seek insight into solutions—safe, that is, compared with strategic networking, in which the stakes are far higher.

Personal networks are largely external, made up of discretionary links to people with whom we have something in common. As a consequence, what makes a personal network powerful is its referral potential. Co-ordinate to the famous six degrees of separation principle, our personal contacts are valuable to the extent that they help us accomplish, in as few connections equally possible, the far-off person who has the information nosotros need.

In watching managers struggle to widen their professional person relationships in means that feel both natural and legitimate to them, nosotros repeatedly saw them shift their time and energy from operational to personal networking. For people who have rarely looked outside their organizations, this is an important beginning step, one that fosters a deeper understanding of themselves and the environments in which they motility. Ultimately, however, personal networking alone won't propel managers through the leadership transition. Aspiring leaders may find people who awaken new interests but neglect to get comfy with the ability players at the level above them. Or they may achieve new influence within a professional community just fail to harness those ties in the service of organizational goals. That's why managers who know they demand to develop their networking skills, and make a real effort to do so, nonetheless may cease upwardly feeling like they have wasted their time and free energy. Equally we'll run across, personal networking will not assist a manager through the leadership transition unless he or she learns how to bring those connections to bear on organizational strategy.

Strategic Networking

When managers brainstorm the delicate transition from functional manager to business leader, they must kickoff to business organization themselves with broad strategic bug. Lateral and vertical relationships with other functional and business organization unit managers—all people outside their firsthand command—become a lifeline for figuring out how their ain contributions fit into the big picture. Thus strategic networking plugs the aspiring leader into a set of relationships and information sources that collectively embody the power to reach personal and organizational goals.

Executives who oversee management evolution know how to spot critical inflection points: the moments when highly successful people must change their perspective on what is important and, accordingly, how they spend their time. Many organizations still promote people on the footing of their performance in roles whose requirements differ dramatically from those of leadership roles. And many new leaders feel that they are going it solitary, without coaching or guidance. By being sensitive to the fact that most strong technical or functional managers lack the capabilities required to build strategic networks that advance their personal and professional goals, human resources and learning professionals can accept steps to help in this important area.

For case, Genesis Park, an innovative in-business firm leadership evolution program at PricewaterhouseCoopers, focuses explicitly on building networks. The five-month program, during which participants are released from their client responsibilities, includes business case evolution, strategic projects, team building, change direction projects, and in-depth discussions with concern leaders from inside and outside the visitor. The young leaders who participate end upwards with a strong internal-external nexus of ties to support them every bit their careers evolve.

Companies that recognize the importance of leadership networking tin also do a lot to help people overcome their innate discomfort past creating natural ways for them to extend their networks. When Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn sought to break down crippling internal barriers at the company, he created cross-functional teams of middle managers from diverse units and charged them with proposing solutions to problems ranging from supply costs to production pattern. Nissan subsequently institutionalized the teams, non just as a fashion to solve bug but also to encourage lateral networks. Rather than avoid the actress work, aspiring leaders inquire for these assignments.

Most professional person development is based on the notion that successful people acquire new role-advisable skills every bit they move up the hierarchy. But making the transition from manager to leader requires subtraction every bit well as addition: To make room for new competencies, managers must rely less on their older, well-honed skills. To exercise so, they must modify their perspective on how to add together value and what to contribute. Eventually, they must too transform how they think and who they are. Companies that help their acme talent reinvent themselves will better prepare them for a successful leadership transition.

Operating beside players with diverse affiliations, backgrounds, objectives, and incentives requires a director to formulate business organisation rather than functional objectives, and to work through the coalitions and networks needed to sell ideas and compete for resources. Consider Sophie, a manager who, afterwards rising steadily through the ranks in logistics and distribution, was stupefied to larn that the CEO was because a radical reorganization of her function that would strip her of some responsibilities. Rewarded to date for incremental almanac improvements, she had failed to notice shifting priorities in the wider market and the resulting internal shuffle for resource and ability at the college levels of her company. Although she had built a loyal, high-performing team, she had few relationships exterior her grouping to help her anticipate the new imperatives, permit alone requite her ideas about how to respond. After she argued that distribution issues were her purview, and failed to be persuasive, she hired consultants to help her prepare a counterproposal. But Sophie's boss simply concluded that she lacked a wide, longer-term business perspective. Frustrated, Sophie contemplated leaving the company. Only after some patient coaching from a senior manager did she understand that she had to become out of her unit and first talking to opinion leaders inside and outside the company to form a sellable programme for the hereafter.

What differentiates a leader from a manager, research tells united states, is the power to figure out where to go and to enlist the people and groups necessary to go there. Recruiting stakeholders, lining up allies and sympathizers, diagnosing the political landscape, and brokering conversations amongst unconnected parties are all part of a leader's job. As they step up to the leadership transition, some managers accept their growing dependence on others and seek to transform it into common influence. Others dismiss such piece of work as "political" and, as a result, undermine their ability to advance their goals.

Several of the participants in our sample chose the latter approach, justifying their choice equally a matter of personal values and integrity. In i case, Jody, who managed a section in a large company nether what she described as "dysfunctional" leadership, refused even to try to actuate her extensive network within the firm when internal adversaries took over key functions of her unit. When nosotros asked her why she didn't seek assistance from anyone in the system to stop this coup, she replied that she refused to play "stupid political games….You can but practice what you think is the ethical and correct thing from your perspective." Stupid or not, those games price her the respect and support of her direct reports and coworkers, who hesitated to follow someone they perceived equally unwilling to defend herself. Eventually she had no option but to leave.

The key to a good strategic network is leverage: the ability to marshal information, support, and resources from one sector of a network to achieve results in another. Strategic networkers apply indirect influence, convincing i person in the network to get someone else, who is not in the network, to take a needed activity. Moreover, strategic networkers don't just influence their relational environs; they shape it in their own image by moving and hiring subordinates, changing suppliers and sources of financing, lobbying to place allies in peer positions, and fifty-fifty restructuring their boards to create networks favorable to their concern goals. Jody abjured such tactics, merely her adversaries did not.

Strategic networking can be difficult for emerging leaders because information technology absorbs a significant amount of the time and energy that managers usually devote to meeting their many operational demands. This is one reason why many managers drib their strategic networking precisely when they need it most: when their units are in trouble and only outside support tin rescue them. The flim-flam is not to hide in the operational network but to develop it into a more strategic one.

I managing director nosotros studied, for instance, used lateral and functional contacts throughout his firm to resolve tensions with his dominate that resulted from substantial differences in style and strategic approaches between the ii. Tied down in operational chores at a distant location, the manager had lost contact with headquarters. He resolved the situation past simultaneously obliging his directly reports to take on more of the local management effort and sending messages through his network that would help bring him dorsum into the loop with the boss.

Operational, personal, and strategic networks are not mutually exclusive. One director we studied used his personal passion, hunting, to run across people from professions as various as stonemasonry and household moving. Nigh none of these hunting friends had anything to do with his work in the consumer electronics industry, yet they all had to bargain with one of his own daily concerns: customer relations. Hearing about their problems and techniques allowed him to view his own from a different perspective and helped him ascertain principles that he could test in his work. Ultimately, what began as a personal network of hunting partners became operationally and strategically valuable to this managing director. The key was his ability to build within-exterior links for maximum leverage. But we've seen others who avoided networking, or failed at it, because they let interpersonal chemistry, not strategic needs, determine which relationships they cultivated.

Simply Do Information technology

The word "work" is role of networking, and it is not easy work, because information technology involves reaching outside the borders of a manager's comfort zone. How, then, can managers lessen the hurting and increase the proceeds? The play a trick on is to leverage the elements from each domain of networking into the others—to seek out personal contacts who can exist objective, strategic counselors, for example, or to transform colleagues in adjacent functions into a constituency. Above all, many managers volition need to change their attitudes about the legitimacy and necessity of networking.

Mind your heed-gear up.

In our ongoing discussions with managers learning to amend their networking skills, nosotros often hear, "That's all well and good, merely I already have a day job." Others, like Jody, consider working through networks a style to rely on "whom you know" rather than "what you know"—a hypocritical, even unethical mode to get things washed. Any the reason, when aspiring leaders do not believe that networking is one of the most of import requirements of their new jobs, they volition not allocate enough time and effort to run into information technology pay off.

The best solution nosotros've seen to this trap is a skilful role model. Many times, what appears to be unpalatable or unproductive behavior takes on a new low-cal when a person you respect does it well and ethically. For example, Gabriel Chenard, general manager for Europe of a group of consumer product brands, learned from the previous general director how to take advantage of branch visits to solidify his relationships with employees and customers. Every flight and automobile trip became a venue for catching upwardly and building relationships with the people who were accompanying him. Watching how much his boss got done on what would otherwise be downtime, Gabriel adopted the practice as a crucial part of his own direction style. Networking effectively and ethically, similar whatsoever other tacit skill, is a matter of judgment and intuition. We learn by observing and getting feedback from those for whom information technology'south second nature.

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Work from the outside in.

One of the about daunting aspects of strategic networking is that there often seems to be no natural "excuse" for making contact with a more senior person outside i's function or business unit of measurement. It's difficult to build a human relationship with anyone, let lonely a senior executive, without a reason for interacting, like a common job or a shared purpose.

Some successful managers find common footing from the outside in—past, for instance, transposing a personal interest into the strategic domain. Linda Henderson is a good example. An investment banker responsible for a group of media manufacture clients, she e'er wondered how to connect to some of her senior colleagues who served other industries. She resolved to brand time for an extracurricular passion—the theater—in a way that would heighten her concern development activities. Four times a year, her secretary booked a cafe dinner at a downtown hotel and reserved a block of theater tickets. Key clients were invited. Through these events, Linda non merely developed her own business only also learned about her clients' companies in a way that generated ideas for other parts of her firm, thus enabling her to engage with colleagues.

Other managers build outside-inside connections past using their functional interests or expertise. For instance, communities of exercise exist (or tin can easily be created on the Internet) in almost every area of business from brand management to Six Sigma to global strategy. Savvy managers reach out to kindred spirits exterior their organizations to contribute and multiply their knowledge; the data they glean, in more cases than not, becomes the "hook" for making internal connections.

Savvy managers reach out to kindred spirits outside their organizations to contribute and multiply their cognition; the information they glean, in more cases than not, becomes the "hook" for making internal connections.

Re-allocate your time.

If an aspiring leader has not even so mastered the art of delegation, he or she will find many reasons not to spend time networking. Participating in formal and informal meetings with people in other units takes fourth dimension away from functional responsibilities and internal team affairs. Between the obvious payoff of a task accomplished and the ambiguous, often delayed rewards of networking, naive managers repeatedly cull the former. The less they practice networking, the less efficient at it they become, and the savage cycle continues.

Henrik, the production manager and lath member we described earlier, for example, did what he needed to do in gild to fix for board meetings but did not associate with fellow lath members exterior those formal events. As a outcome, he was often surprised when other board members raised issues at the heart of his role. In dissimilarity, effective business leaders spend a lot of time every day gathering the information they need to run across their goals, relying on informal discussions with a lot of people who are not necessarily in accuse of an event or chore. They network in order to obtain data continually, not just at formal meetings.

Ask and you shall receive.

Many managers equate having a skillful network with having a large database of contacts, or attending loftier-profile professional conferences and events. In fact, we've seen people kick off a networking initiative by improving their record keeping or adopting a network direction tool. But they falter at the adjacent pace—picking upwardly the phone. Instead, they wait until they need something badly. The best networkers do exactly the opposite: They take every opportunity to give to, and receive from, the network, whether they need aid or not.

A network lives and thrives only when information technology is used. A skilful way to begin is to make a simple request or take the initiative to connect two people who would benefit from meeting each other. Doing something—anything—gets the ball rolling and builds confidence that ane does, in fact, have something to contribute.

Stick to it.

Information technology takes a while to reap the benefits of networking. We have seen many managers resolve to put networking at the top of their agendas, simply to exist derailed past the first crisis that comes forth. One case is Harris Roberts, a regulatory affairs adept who realized he needed a broader network to achieve his goal of condign a business unit of measurement manager. To strength himself into what felt like an "unnatural deed," Harris volunteered to be the liaison for his business schoolhouse cohort's alumni network. Merely half-dozen months after, when a major new-drug approval process overwhelmed his calendar, Harris dropped all outside activities. Two years after, he found himself out of touch and still a functional manager. He failed to recognize that by not taking the time to attend industry conferences or compare notes with his peers, he was missing out on the strategic perspective and information that would make him a more bonny candidate for promotion.

Edifice a leadership network is less a matter of skill than of will. When get-go efforts practise not bring quick rewards, some may simply conclude that networking isn't among their talents. But networking is not a talent; nor does it require a gregarious, extroverted personality. It is a skill, one that takes do. We accept seen over and over again that people who work at networking can larn not only how to exercise information technology well merely also how to enjoy it. And they tend to be more successful in their careers than those who neglect to leverage external ties or insist on defining their jobs narrowly.

Making a successful leadership transition requires a shift from the confines of a clearly divers operational network. Aspiring leaders must acquire to build and use strategic networks that cross organizational and functional boundaries, and so link them up in novel and innovative ways. It is a challenge to make the leap from a lifetime of functional contributions and easily-on command to the cryptic process of building and working through networks. Leaders must observe new ways of defining themselves and develop new relationships to ballast and feed their emerging personas. They must also take that networking is i of the most important requirements of their new leadership roles and continue to classify plenty time and effort to run into it pay off.

A version of this article appeared in the January 2007 effect of Harvard Business organisation Review.