Here, you can see a diagram with the idea of how many people should I be networking with anyways? Well one wrong answer is no one [LAUGH]. The other wrong answer is everyone. So, clearly it's somewhere in the middle, but where is that sweet spot for you? So a couple of ways you might think about is, yes, stay open minded. The people who currently or in your network are great and you should keep them. But then also where you want to head in your life might be different than it was in the past, right. For me my twenties, my thirties, my forties were all very different and I'm guessing my fifties will be even more different, okay. Yes, diversity helps. There's a lot of research that shows that you want to have different kinds of people in your network. So, if you're a marketing person, do you only want to have marketing people in your network? No, you might have a lot of marketing people in your network but it's going to be very useful to have manufacturing, sales, R&D, IP people in your network as well. For myself, I have a lot of consultants, ex-consultants and MBAs in my network, is that bad? No, but it's also not very diverse. So, do I have any artists in my network? No, do I have any musicians in my network? No, so our ability to think about our life and our career a little bit more holistically is probably a good thing. Also, everyone in your network doesn't have to be a best friend. You can have very meaningful weak ties. They might be people you just email once a year say, hey, I noticed that your company had a great successful quarter, congratulations. If there's anything that I can do to be of help to you, let me know, right. So just touching on people every once in a while and being authentic, don't be cheesy, don't be fake, but just touching on them and saying, hey, this is what's going on in my life. Let me know if I can be of help to you. That's not offensive at all. And most people would appreciate, right. Even if they don't respond, they probably appreciate. Number four, we want to be smart with our time, we talked about how it's very difficult to become excellent at something. You have to invest thousands of hours of practice and you can't do that if you're wasting your time [LAUGH], right. So, we don't want to waste our time or their time. So, when you network, when you interact with them, let's make it very rich. Let's have a short agenda of what we're going to talk about. Have pre-prepared a couple of questions. Do some research on that person. Don't ask them questions that are silly that you can find online or you can Google. Not useful, so we just want to be smart with our time. The last thing I would say is almost common sense, right. It is better to have three or four really close strong relationships than have 30 weak ones, right. One way you might be able to test yourself, let's say you have something a little bit urgent. What percentage of your network on LinkedIn or that you have phone numbers on your cell phone. What percentage of your professional network would set up a 30 minute ZOOM call with you in the next 3 hours? Hey, I know it's kind of last minute, but do you have about 15 minutes for me? I had a couple of questions I want to bounce off of you, right. How many of them would set up time for you in the next 3 hours or 3 days even? Or how many of them would be there for you if you wanted to talk to them after 8PM tonight. I know that's a little bit extreme. But it's also a question of how relevant you've been to these people over time. If they've never heard from you over the last 5 years and basically you haven't been generous first, the chances of them paying that favor back is very low. So, another way to think about it is network with the people that you want to have in your life. This is a core consulting skill and I'm not asking you to reach out to people that you don't like. So think about who do you respect, who do you want to learn from? Who can help you and who can you help? Right, this quote here at the bottom, I love from Golda Meir. And she was one of the kind of the grandma founders of the state of Israel. But she said this very deep thing at the bottom, which I respect, she said, "trust yourself," I love that already, "create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all of your life." So think about networking as nothing more fancy than you surrounding yourself with people that you respect, that you like, that you can learn from and that you can help. So, networking takes time. I said earlier that you don't want to first talk to somebody when you're asking for something that's very ugly, right. You want to have been useful to that person many times before you ask for a favor. So, really great relationships and networks over years and decades, I'm always very envious of people who have relationships that have lasted 20, 30 years. It's a beautiful thing. And so think about it this way, right. It's talking about reciprocity, helping other people with the idea that if you super help somebody several times they want to help you [LAUGH]. So it's never a bad thing. So, the opposite is, if you're asking a favor from somebody who doesn't know you or doesn't know you well or doesn't even like you, you are doing networking incorrect, right. Sometimes I like to call that you're like a relationship spammer, right. You're just sending out requests, creating a lot of noise, not creating relationships. So here at the bottom, you can see from the size of the blue chevron on the right, networking is about generosity and time. You cannot bake this cake in five minutes. So think longer, be more patient and get ahead of it, right. You want to network ten years ago [LAUGH] start today. One question you might have, which is relevant. John you talk a big game about being generous, what does that even mean? How am I supposed to be generous? So, here's what I'd say, if you are the green cap here, and on the left hand side, you're a new hire, you're somebody who's new to the business. It can feel a little daunting because you're the youngest person in the room. You may have a sense of insecurity or an imposter syndrome that I have nothing to add. Everybody in here knows more than I do, right. A couple thoughts, first baseline do great. If somebody gives you task A, B,C and it's easy and you do it poorly, not good. You're not being generous with your effort, you're not being respectful of them coaching you [LAUGH]. In Star Wars talk you're a Padawan, you're learning, but you're a bad Padawan, right. So the first sign of generosity is being a respectful student, doing a good job, being very reliable, giving that person some satisfaction that they taught you and they taught you well. Number two, take the boring, administrative, unfun things off of your manager's plate. If you make your manager jobs easier, more enjoyable and help them to look good, who doesn't like that, right? Number three, more than likely in a consulting context, your ability to help on proposals and win more business is a beautiful thing, right. In consulting, you're either delivering work, doing great work for clients or finding new work. So your ability to help them to find new work is useful. And then the last two, I'd say there are things that you as a young person are going to be better at, than the 65 year old, right, absolutely. So whether or not that's your savvy with working with social media or coding or being able to research things. Or there's a lot of ways that you are different and consulting firms pride themselves on hiring a very diverse set of talent. So find out what it is that you're kind of uniquely special at, do more of that, get famous for that and then be generous with those types. And then finally listen and ask great questions. So, you don't want to be the one who's asking the same question again because you didn't write it down, you're not learning, you're not a good student, okay. So those are all being generous as a new hire. So what happens if you're on the more experienced side? What does that look like? Well, first thing is show a little compassion and care [LAUGH]. New people are scared. A lot of work nowadays is remote and they don't have a chance to come to the office and meet people. So, it's a little intimidating. They don't have the network that you have, so reach out to them, right. You have a new hire, just joined, send them an email say, hey, I saw you just joined, you went to the same school I did. Let's set up 15 minutes of time. I want to find out a little bit more about you, what you're interested in. All these little small things and find a way for you to plug in the organization. Think about this, welcoming the new kid to school. It's a nice generous thing to do. And frankly, they will not forget. We all remember the first person or the first couple of people who made you feel welcome at your job or at your school or in your neighborhood, be that person, okay. Generosity looks different. So, find something that fits you. Don't force it. Once again relationships it's all about being yourself on your best day, right. So find that kind of spot of generosity where you can build the network that you want. So a couple of key takeaways starting out with the green cap to the new hires. So, what I would say is as a younger person, let's say you're in your 20's. You have the opportunity to make friends, colleagues and clients that will last 30 or 40 years. It's you investing in Amazon or Google at the beginning, right. These people that you're interacting with even though they're 20 years old and it looks like they're trying to figure it out too. If you invest in those people just by being generous with your time, being helpful. When those people are vice presidents in 20 years. Those are exactly the people that are going to hire you as a consultant. Now I'm not telling you to be so calculating that you're you know you're calculating who to talk to, who do not talk to. Not like that point is life is a long time and a lot of the people that you're around are going to be successful and I know multiple consulting partners who built their career with two or three key client contacts, client gets promoted, hires the consultant, they moved to a different company, they get promoted, they hire the consultant. I know clients that have hired the same consultant five or six times at five or six different companies. So you can see how consulting like most professional businesses. It's all relationships and it's all word of mouth marketing, we all know who is good. For the the internal consultants represented by the blue corporate ladder. My my call to you is to evaluate your network both internally, of course with other departments, but also within your industry and specialization. If I gave you 10 dollars every person outside of your company who knows you and how good you are at your work, how much money would that be? You might say, that's kind of, that's kind of humbling john because I only know five people outside of my company who would say that I'm good at what I do, right? Or what happens? You're like, hey john, I'm glad you asked because I know a 150 people who think I'm really good at what I do, right? So think about it as a way to gauge your reputation for excellence. The brand that you've created for the red airplane, right the solo entrepreneurs, I'd say we, for those of us who are a little bit more experienced, you know, a couple things, we have some stories, it's time for us to be more generous and I'm talking about myself too, right, need to help more people who are coming up because frankly other people helped us. Right, So we're kind of paying it forward a little bit. And 2nd of all this is a business development tool, us planting generosity everywhere. Now it is a slow approach. You're not going to have people calling on you immediately just because you were nice to 10 people last month, right? But over time you giving pointing people in the right direction, giving advice, sharing some of your best practices. You know, for me personally, I blog at consultantsmind.com, and that's been my Kind of small source of generosity over the last 10 years, and frankly, it's been a great return on on time for me, and it's something I might even encourage for you.
