Five Essential Career Skills For Middle Management Millennials: Build Your Network

This article was coauthored with Don Strickland, the The Millennial Advocate.

Our first experience in building a personal network begins at birth. We quickly develop a network of care givers that can be depended upon for food, clothing and shelter – our basic needs for survival. These early experiences become so deeply ingrained that they often remain the dominate motivation for building our personal network throughout our lives. As we enter the workforce, we begin to build a data base of contacts, accept LinkedIn invitations and engage in social media interactions, which form the core of a professional network whose purpose is to help us get a job, identify prospective customers, or help with a myriad of other goals. For most people, only a small fraction of our network contributes anything of real value. The rest of the network “just happened to us.” The number of contacts may look good on LinkedIn, but they don’t add real strategic value in advancing our career.

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This article is about Wow Factor No. 1, understanding the fundamental principles of how to build a strategic network. If done correctly, your network will become one of the most valuable assets of your career. As we will see in later articles of this series, your network is an important success factor for other Wow Factors. Transforming a personal network into a strategic asset starts with setting strategic goals and then following the Five Key Networking Principles.

Setting Strategic Goals

The first step in transforming a personal network into a strategic asset starts with setting goals based upon your career objectives. Start with an analysis of your own organization and industry. The goal is to understand how your organization works – how decisions really get made, who are the key opinion leaders, who are the subject matter experts, who really understands your company business model, who seem to oppose change, etc. Next extend your analysis to identify your company’s key suppliers, competitors, and customers. The core skill to develop is learning how to connect and harvest contacts both within your company and externally that can help achieve your goals. Your strategic goals will change over the course of your career so review and modify them on a regular basis.

Five Key Principles For Developing And Managing Your Personal Network

Now that you have a list of strategic goals for your personal network, transform your personal network into a strategic asset by following the following Five Key Networking Principles.

1. Identify key network members – The first step is to put down names of specific people you think have the knowledge to help with each of your strategic goals. If you don’t know specific names, identify navigators who can help you find them. Your qualified list of people you want to add to your network should be selected for a specific reason focusing on how each candidate can add value. Also, ask yourself why they would want to be part of your network? How does your own network create value for them?