To succeed at Business School, and in your career, it’s not just a question of hard work – in fact, many would argue that networking is just as important a factor to business success. Julie Eccleston finds out how to use your exclusive network to your advantage
The action of deliberately building, reinforcing and maintaining relationships with others to further your goals, is something that cannot be overlooked in a professional capacity.
While hard work is a pre-requisite for MBA students and graduates, a crucial opportunity provided by MBA programmes is the chance to develop powerful networks. In fact, this is something that is increasing in importance as concepts such as the sharing economy start to take up huge shares of the market, and peer-to-peer recommendations become more ubiquitous in our decision-making than ever. In order to be successful, MBA students of the future will have to develop, manage and grow their personal networks. But how can they do this?
More important than ever?
The growing importance of powerful personal networks, and subsequently, networking, all comes down to trust. Trust is currently at an all-time low in a number of areas of our society, especially in traditional institutions.
Recent polls have shown that only 12% of people have trust in the press, 14% in the banks and just 16% in politicians. In this vacuum, the premium that is placed on personal relationships and networks is growing. The increasing use of peer-to-peer recommendations in consumer decision-making illustrates this.
Reviews of products, places, and companies such as those seen on Amazon, TripAdvisor, and Glassdoor are all becoming key factors in how consumers and businesses act. Clearly, people are more likely to believe peer appraisals than those with a vested interest, and this is something that translates into personal networks.
MBA students are in an extremely privileged position to be on the beneficial side of this trend, as they come into constant contact with a wide range of professionals from many different walks of life, all of which they may be able to use when hiring or looking for opportunities in the future.
Benefits and requirements
Having a large, high-value network can help with career
advancement, along with numerous other benefits: good networking will allow you
to be the person others think of when a certain job crops up, and give you
access to knowledge, people and skills from across the entire business spectrum.
For example, many senior jobs are not advertised, and are only opened up to
decision-makers’ networks, so to be in with a chance of getting that internal
promotion, or taking a step up somewhere else – you’ll have to use your
network.
By utilising those who most intimately know your capabilities, you are also more likely to bypass any potential bias, allowing you to secure a new senior position on merit alone. The fact that your network can open up greater opportunities than the ones you pursue yourself was also reflected in our own company research, as we found that an overwhelming 95% of people stated that they would be more likely to apply for a role if it was recommended to them by a peer rather than a recruiter. Furthermore, networking is often expected as part of a job. Even if your role isn’t explicitly to bring in new business or to market the company, you are most likely expected to meet new people, understand the market place, and be active on social media as part of your responsibilities. Therefore, it will pay dividends for MBA students to start now!
How is it done?
With the potential power of personal networks so obvious, then, the next challenge is actually building them. For MBA students, ensuring you connect with the many individuals you encounter daily is certainly a step in the right direction, but there’s so much more that can also be done. While I always encourage traditional networking, such as attending events and functions solely designed for this purpose, or being active across social media platforms, there are many different suitable approaches. What’s key to remember is that no one method is perfect. For instance, actively reconnecting with old and existing contacts can be powerful because you already have a relationship in place. This can be done in a number of ways, be it through picking up the phone, email, or social media.
Other interesting approaches are ‘career drafting’, asking someone you admire if you can help with any overflow they have. Finding a professional one or two steps ahead in your industry and letting them know you’re prepared to do this is an extremely powerful method of creating connections that could later help you.
There are also methods for those who claim to be ‘too introverted’ to network. Contrary to popular belief, introverts can be very good at networking, bringing a refreshing and underutilised approach to the table.
Professor Karl Moore, from the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, has written numerous articles on the subject. He describes introverted networking as sometimes far more effective than the normal extroverted approach, which rarely delves beyond surface level interactions. He recommends that introverts getting into networking should focus on sincere one-to-one interactions, rather than attempting to be the ‘’big personality’’ that plays the room. From this, their communications will be based on quality, not quantity, allowing more detailed conversations to flow, and actually helping them cultivate relationships that go beyond the superficial and potentially last well into the future.
It’s all about your mind-set
Whatever your method, what’s crucial to your chances of success is the mind-set that you approach networking with – namely that you are not just doing it for the sake of it. Networking should be something ingrained in your approach to business, allowing you to create relationships before you actually need them. By engaging with people constantly, you will learn to network as a matter of course, and open up more connections than you would by pursuing a purely targeted approach. Developing genuine relationships, and looking to offer people help and support whenever you can will make it far more likely that you reap the benefits in the future.
Too many people view networking as transactional, with an ‘I scratch your back, you scratch mine’ mentality. However, doing things simply with the expectation that you will be ‘owed’ something in return is the wrong approach. Share your knowledge and contacts. There’s no point holding back the very value that will make people want to approach you in the future. Once you remove the transactional mentality from the equation, networking will becomes a lot more natural. Finally, another change in attitude that needs to take place is to not limit your networking to situations where you believe it is ‘suitable’ to do it, but to know that it is possible at all times.
The importance of this mind-set to successful networking is a notion backed up by numerous studies, for instance, in new research by Patrick Reinmoeller, Associate Professor of Strategic Management at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM). Reinmoeller’s research has shown that, while well-orchestrated networking events can be incredibly effective at encouraging and stimulating innovation, they will only work if participants leave their ‘salesman attitude’ behind, and instead adopt a mentality of sharing ideas and information first.
Nothing holding you back
Clearly, tapping into the power of networks is becoming more important than ever, and as the world becomes more interconnected and reliant on peer-to-peer trust, this does not look like abating. MBA students especially stand to gain massively from actively engaging and networking with those around them due to the large number of like-minded individuals they are coming into regular contact with. This is actively reflected in certain Master’s programs.
For instance, CEMS – The Global Alliance in Management Education, is a program built to ensure networking between students, alumni and corporate partners, connecting institutions ranging all they way from the University of Cologne to Keio University in Japan. This program actively encourages business graduates to create networks and stay in touch throughout their career, showing just how useful it can be for MBAs to take advantage of networking immediately. There’s really no room for complacency here, and simply by adopting some of the small changes above, you can begin to build your contacts. By creating your own network of professional peers and using this to help yourself and others, there’s no limit to what can be achieved.
Juliet Eccleston is Co-Founder and CEO of talent crowdsourcing platform, AnyGood?
