Conrado Morlan

This is a guest post by Conrado Morlan, the Smart PM.

Dear Smart PM…

I am a new hire at the project management office of a large corporation. I had been working in project management for several years as a freelancer. Although I consider myself to be a good networker, I found difficulties networking within the organization. What can I do to build long lasting relationships with the project stakeholders? – PM Lost in Corporate World.

Dear Lost in Corporate World…

Your networking skills as a freelancer should be transferable to the new permanent workplace. In your new position it is important for you to learn what your company does. Speak with the experts. For example, if you work for an accounting firm, talk with accountants. Knowledge about your company will also be helpful while networking within your personal network.

As a project manager it is important for you to have a solid network and build strong relationships with stakeholders. With the help of your manager and peers, identify the strategic functional areas and select a couple. Understand their role in the organization and select two or three people in each one. Focus on people at various levels of responsibility.

Networking within the organization doesn’t have to be a complex process. At a coffee break, go to different break rooms, bring your favorite mug, and introduce yourself. It is always a good idea to leave your desk and scout the building.

Company events may be a great opportunity for you to meet other employees. The environment is usually relaxed and fosters camaraderie. Since you are a new hire, this may be the best “ice-breaker” and would help you to be welcome by other employees and learn more about what the company does. Check for other available activities that will help you to expand your internal network.

Consider including administrative assistants in your internal network. They usually are the “gate-keepers” and having them on your side may be a good strategy to get access to project stakeholders when you need it most. Keep close contact with them and make sure you send birthday and greeting cards for special occasions.

Related posts:

1. Networking for networkers Denise Best from Oxford University’s Careers Service has written an interesting article on networking, pitched at IT students, but for beginner networkers like me, I...
2. Networking (part 1) I’m not that good at networking at conferences and seminars. You know, standing around making small talk with people you are unlikely to meet ever...
3. Networking: how do you do it? This month, on my mission to turn you all into Office Goddesses, I spoke to Heather White, CEO of The Magic of Networking Ltd, a...

The Summer of Books 2010 continues with this review of Fast Track Networking.

Lots of books talk about how to ‘do’ networking, and I’ve written about it in the past.  The thing I liked best about Lucy Rosen’s Fast Track Networking: Turning Conversations Into Contacts book is that it does actually tell you the answers to the things that really matter like:

• Where to stand in a room (near the door to greet newcomers)
• Who to talk to (get the attendee list in advance and target people)
• How to start a conversation (with a compliment or any one of five other conversation starters)
• When to hand out business cards (only if asked)

It’s very practical – and I like practical.  It also goes beyond what you’d expect in an article and manages to fill a whole book on the subject by including topics like setting up your own networking group if you can’t find one that suits your needs.

Rosen hasn’t aimed her book solely at women, and she quotes the experiences of many men.  She has tried hard to be inclusive but as she is founder and president of Women on the Fast Track, a women’s networking group, there is a bias in the text (almost by default) towards helping women network more effectively.

As women, we also tend to downplay our abilities and we’re not quite as comfortable as men in talking about our skills.  We may be uneasy about highlighting our talents and when first starting the networking process, we may undermine what we have to give, thinking we aren’t valuable enough, we don’t know enough, and we just aren’t enough.  That’s far from the truth, of course.  But because women often operation on an emotional level, this is how we often feel about our capabilities and skills.

It’s fine by me that Rosen’s implied reader is female.  I’m female, after all.  Male readers will get a lot out of the book, but their experience of reading it will be different to mine.

There are lots of topics in here that both sexes will find of use, like networking when unemployed, a short bit on social media and online profiles, and how to organise all your contacts and business cards.  Importantly, there is also a section on what to do once you’ve met a really great person that you want to follow up with.  Too often people focus on the initial contact and forget about the long term goal which is to find people with whom you can work.  This book explains what makes a successful follow up and how to make sure you choose to develop relationships with only the people who are good choices for you.

Finally, there’s a good resources section at the back.  Many of the websites have global reach, but as you would expect with a U.S. published book, there’s a heavy focus on U.S. sites and groups.

Buy on Amazon.co.uk
Buy on Amazon.com

Related posts:

1. Networking for networkers Denise Best from Oxford University’s Careers Service has written an interesting article on networking, pitched at IT students, but for beginner networkers like me, I...
2. Networking: how do you do it? This month, on my mission to turn you all into Office Goddesses, I spoke to Heather White, CEO of The Magic of Networking Ltd, a...
3. Networking (part 1) I’m not that good at networking at conferences and seminars. You know, standing around making small talk with people you are unlikely to meet ever...

Earlier in the month I attended a womenintechnology event about the business value of social media – something I’m particularly interested in, given the topic of my forthcoming book.

The evening was held at the Intellect offices on Russell Square, and the room was packed.  It was a pretty small room, in comparison to some of the WiT events, but there were still a couple of hundred people there, all feasting on wine and cheese before the speakers.

Eileen Brown (@eileenb) gave a general introduction to social media and some of the dangers of participating on Facebook and Twitter without understanding the community rules (and getting fired in the process).  I realised how much I knew about social media when she finished her talk and I hadn’t learned anything.

Euan Semple (@euan), on the other hand, spoke about how he felt that the terms social media, enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 gave the impression that this movement was different, discrete and expensive when really it is an extension of the changing workplace.  Again, all concepts I have researched for my book, but he was a very engaging and interesting speaker.

“I think there is something ‘female’ going on,” he said, describing the move away from the ‘male’ approach to hierarchy and status.  Semple explained that the evolution of the workplace gives us more choices about where and how we want to work.  “I have to decide not to work 24/7,” he said.  The evolution of technology helps this – Semple said that it was naïve of companies to ban access to Facebook when many employees carry a phone capable of accessing the site anyway.  Managers who worry about people wasting time on social media sites should worry less.  Relationships are based on trust and “that is why inanity matters,” Semple explained.  Sharing small, non-work, confidences and comments is how relationships grow.  And everyone needs successful, strong relationships in the workplace.

The value of social media in a workplace setting was highlighted by how Semple explained organised networks.  We all know the official networks in the company – groups of interested professionals, or perhaps ‘the women’s network’, and the corporate hierarchy.  But we all know that there are other networks in organisations too – people who lunch together, play golf, have their children at the same schools.   Social media allows individuals to connect into those “viral networks”.

“Management is about tidying up,” Semple said, and making things look organised is not one of the spin-offs of a social media initiative, so the two approaches can seem at odds.  “Much of the organisational function of management is becoming less and less needed,” he said.  Instead, organisations will want middle managers who can see patterns in perceived disorder and help other see those patterns.

Social media initiatives at work may not be easy to get off the ground.  Semple advocates the Trojan Mice approach – small steps and an incremental deployment, convincing users through word of mouth and by making the tools intuitive.

Much of the resistance to corporate social media deployments is about the fear of losing control of the information channels.  “Did you have it anyway?” asked Semple.  Just because you think you had control of the communication channels doesn’t mean you actually did – social media tools make it easier to notice that you don’t.  However, embracing the social media approach to working gives management (and individuals) greater influence.  And influence is far more practical today than control.

You can download the slides from the event from the womenintechnology page about it.

Related posts:

1. Event: Social Media for Project Managers I’ll be presenting to the APM’s Women in Project Management SIG on 10 June, and you are invited. We’ll be talking about how project managers...
2. 25% off Get Started Using Social Media on Your Projects If completing the social media survey has made you think about how you could be using social media tools on your projects, then Get Started...
3. The Social Media & Project Management Survey returns This year I am once again running the Social Media in a Project Environment survey. This time last year lots of you completed the survey...

I have been almost permanently hungry since Saturday and I have no idea why, but it’s not one of the symptoms of swine flu so I’m not too worried.  I knew that I wouldn’t be getting dinner until late last night as I was going to the Gurteen Knowledge Café, hosted by the BCS as part of Alan Pollard’s “BCS in the Community” programme which forms the theme for his Presidential year.  BCS events normally have refreshments but on arrival it’s tea and biscuits: you have to wait until the thing is over before they bring out the sandwiches and cakes.

A Gurteen Knowledge Café is the opportunity to sit around and discuss ideas with other people: kind of a facilitated coffee morning.  There was no capturing of notes, no action plans, no outputs, which for a project manager was very unsettling.  There was also ‘speed networking’: David Gurteen, the knowledge management consultant who set up the Cafés, blew a whistle, we had to find someone to talk to, and then we moved on to another person when the whistle blew again.  By my third person I was getting bored of hearing myself explain my job but I did end up paired with an interesting lecturer from London University in very green trousers and a bow tie.

The theme of the evening was ‘imagining the knowledge technologies of the future’.  Knowledge management is all-important to project managers: we create a shed load of artefacts during a project which then all have to be handed over to operational people at the end of the project.  On top of that, there is all the project management information, plans, reports, etc etc that we need to organise and be able to lay our hand on instantly (and in my team we’ve been having discussions just this week about sorting out our our project management information system).  So I was interested to hear the views of the speakers and what the other attendees would say.

Alan Pollard wasn’t able to attend as he is at HC2009 so he had recorded a message saying his view of the way technology should be going is towards minimising the devices and software required to run our lives.  He also pointed out that at some point we are going to have to ask the question: “Do we want to be always available?”

Conrad Taylor, who manages the informal discussion network on Knowledge, Information, Data and Metadata Management (KIDMM), also spoke for a couple of minutes.  He broke down approaches to future knowledge technologies into three categories: science-fiction (embedding a chip in your neck), the future of the home PC (like a roll-up display screen to increase the amount of stuff you can see at a time) and magic versions of current processes (automatically interfacing one set of inputs with another through technology).

Chris Yapp, an Executive Technology Strategy Consultant with Capgemini UK, was the final speaker.  He said that social networking sites don’t give you collaboration.  While I agree that I don’t collaborate on Facebook or LinkedIn,  I don’t agree with that as a statement: within project management there are many people making a success out of collaboration by using social networking-type techniques (like LiquidPlanner).  He presented for his five minutes very passionately and put forward the argument that it’s not software per se that is the challenge for the future but search algorithms, which are especially poor at the moment for video and music content.

After the three chaps had spoken we sat on our tables and discussed our ideas, wandering from accessibility, one hard-drive type device that could plug into multiple interfaces, the backlash against being ‘always on’ and whether children should be out making mud pies instead of playing computer games.

As something to do it was an interesting evening and I came away thinking of other things I should have said or points I didn’t get a chance to raise.  The concept of forced networking in a loosely structured environment hasn’t won me over yet.  However, I think it is one of those things that I will start to see the value of once I have had a chance to mull over the experience some more.  So I might go along to another Knowledge Café if I get the chance.
Read more about the evening and some of the other discussions on Matthew Rees’ blog.

Related posts:

1. PM Knowledge: tell us what you know! Keith O’Shea, an Australian project manager I met online when I was writing my book, is doing some research into project management knowledge areas for...
2. New Knowledge Base tool Knowledge Base from The Projects Group (TPG) has been up and running for a month now and it is a very impressive tool. It works...
3. The Future 500 I was recently awarded with a place on the 2009 Courvoisier Future 500 list of innovative business brains and creative talent. Courvoisier The Future 500...

This month, on my mission to turn you all into Office Goddesses, I spoke to Heather White, CEO of The Magic of Networking Ltd, a coaching, training and consultancy firm packed with experts in corporate and career networking.

Networking is often something women find especially hard to do.  I mean, what’s the point?  It’s all chewing the fat and having drinks with people you don’t really know – much better to get out there and be excellent project managers and deliver stuff.

Unfortunately, building a successful career is as much about who you know (and who knows you) as it is about doing a good job.  Here’s what Heather had to say on the subject.

So Heather, why should we care about networking?

Tell you what, before we get started let’s do away with the word networking and replace it with something like, your developing your career or developing key relationships ….well any relationship come to that.  So why should you care about networking, well because I assume you care about your career and the people you need to be connected to.

You see the art of networking is nothing more than simply keeping people informed of what you do, what you are good at and how you can help them.  It is a two-way street, your boss and others need to know about you…but more than just doing a good job.

What’s the value of long term relationships?

Would you agree everyone has a career journey which spans over 40 years?  Most people spend about 80% of their careers in the same field i.e. project management etc.  which means you will end up mixing in the same circles for most of your careers.  Your reputation and theirs are on the same journey.  By having the mind set of developing and nurturing long term relationships with these people will help your career no end.  This is where trust, reputation and brand come from.

So we also need to network externally, not just with the people in our own companies.  What’s the difference between networking internally and networking externally?

The ‘act’ in of itself, there is no difference.  Your focus should be on what you want networking to do for you.  All networking should include external networking NEVER just internal networking.  The balance is wrong.  You need external contacts for your career development, personal development, profile, knowledge, competitor intelligence, customer intelligence etc.

Drop me an email (heather@magicofnetworking.co.uk) and I will send you a brilliant article written in the Harvard Business Review about how leaders network and it includes a networking structure, strategy if you like that will be useful to anyone networking not matter your status.

A lot of relationship building takes place at events where there are lots of people.  What’s your top tip for working a room?

BIG question.  We have just launched an eBook called How to Work a Room, and it has over 300 top tips on exactly how to do this.  Drop me an email and I will send you a free copy (heather@magicofnetworking.co.uk).   To give you one top tip is a mighty ask.  If I said for example be relaxed and enjoy yourself, those of you who hate attending events will just laugh at me and say “yea right”.  And those who are very skilled at networking have completely different needs.  Best to just download the eBook and take what you need.

OK, will do.  But in that case, can you tell me what’s wrong with just handing out business cards?

Nothing’s wrong in the right context.  Handing out your business card is absolutely the right thing to do.  What you need to consider though is when NOT to do it.  In short never hand out your card if you haven’t established a positive/good connection between you and the other people in the group (or the person you are speaking to).  Otherwise you might be seen as superficial, pushy, sales-like etc.  What you MUST avoid is leaving the wrong impression with people.  If you haven’t connected with them I can almost guarantee where your card and brand/reputation will end up…in the bin.

You obviously know how to do all this.  How did you learn your networking skills?

Having been sacked from my last job in 1998 (that’s a different subject though) I had to learn how to network or starve.  It was a simple as that.  I had to get out there and find a way of making it work.  I made heaps of mistakes but I am resilient and persistent, I never gave up…still don’t.  Because I realised the importance I made networking my friend.  I hate cold calling, always have, and networking is a much softer way of developing good relationships.  I engaged with the complexity of networking i.e. working with people and set up a system that works for me.  You see networking is unique to the person who decides they need to do this.  You set your own rules, standards.  What I did do is let go of my very negative preconceived ideas of networking and instead do it in a way that demonstrates my values, what I stand for.  I realise that through people I get to hear, learn, discover, play and win stuff that I never knew existed.

What’s the best networking story, that you’ve come across?

Great question and there are lots of stories I could share.  But this one sticks out in my mind.  This chap comes to one of my networking training programmes and I could tell he was already pretty advanced at networking.  You can often tell just by the confidence someone projects and the way the he was with people.  Curious, helpful, interested, interesting etc.  Anyhow we both ‘connected’ and later we met up for a coffee and chat.  He introduced me to a very influential network which lead onto a great connection with another person.  A few months later he calls me and asks if I have any connections with Bill Gates.  He never made any assumptions that his contacts would not be connected.  Anyway I was flattered that he thought I might have a connection and of course it is always lovely to be asked to help someone.  We got chatting on what he could do and I made a few suggestions.  Later I found out he had gone round to all his contacts asking the same question…he was relentless.  Then he struck rich.  One of his contacts was about to fly out to a very senior event, changing the world type of event, and Bill Gates was going to be there.  He jumped on a plane that day, his contact did the networking for him, and he met Bill Gates.  All this took place within 48 hours of his phone call to me.

What I love about this story is a couple of things.  He took the time to ASK, he was relentless, he took the time to build up long term relationships so that he became a trusted person so that when it came to it his contacts had no hesitation to introduce him to the right person.  Now that is great networking.

Wow.  Is there a difference to how women and men network?  Maybe courage is part of it…

The outcome for both men and women on when to use networking is the same.  Our approach is of course different, its bound to be as we are different people anyway.  Just take the success of the books such as Men are from Mars, and Women are from Venus etc which illustrates this in bucket loads.

I don’t try to compete with men’s style, I focus on my own style instead – that’s what makes me different, stand out, approachable etc to that of my male counterparts.  I would strongly suggest don’t worry about how men do it, focus instead on how you want to do it.  What would work for you?  Stay focused on what you want networking to do for you and just get on with it.  Become very curious about the different approaches anyone has, see what works and then adapted that to your way of networking.  In the end it all comes down to the same stuff – great results, great experiences.

Thanks, Heather!  Now I’ve got to put all of that into practice!

Related posts:

1. Networking for networkers Denise Best from Oxford University’s Careers Service has written an interesting article on networking, pitched at IT students, but for beginner networkers like me, I...
2. Book review: Fast Track Networking The Summer of Books 2010 continues with this review of Fast Track Networking. Lots of books talk about how to ‘do’ networking, and I’ve written...
3. Ask the Smart PM: Networking Within the Organization This is a guest post by Conrado Morlan, the Smart PM. Dear Smart PM… I am a new hire at the project management office of...