Page 151 - HBR's 10 Must Reads for New Managers

IBARRA AND HUNTER

Leveraging Your Networks by taking advantage of social
interests to set the stage for
Networking takes work. To lessen addressing strategic concerns.
the pain and increase the gain:
Example: An investment
• Mind your mind-set. Accept banker invited key clients
that networking is one of the to the theatre (a passion of
most important requirements of hers) several times a year.
a leadership role. To overcome Through these events, she
any qualms about it, identify a developed her own business
person you respect who net- and learned things about her
works effectively and ethically. clients’ companies that gen-
Observe how he or she uses erated business and ideas for
networks to accomplish goals.
other divisions in her firm.
• Reallocate your time. Master • Give and take continually. Don’t
the art of delegation, to lib- wait until you really need some-
erate time you can then spend thing badly to ask for a favor from
on cultivating networks. a network member. Instead, take
• Establish connections. Create every opportunity to give to—and
reasons for interacting with receive from—people in your net-
people outside your function works, whether you need help or
or organization; for instance, not.

into Alistair’s tenure, discussion about whether to take the com-
pany public polarized the board, and he discovered that all that time
cleaning up the books might have been better spent sounding out
his codirectors.
One of the problems with an exclusive reliance on operational
networks is that they are usually geared toward meeting objec-
tives as assigned, not toward asking the strategic question, “What
should we be doing?” By the same token, managers do not exercise
as much personal choice 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 job and
organizational structure. Thus, most operational networking occurs
within an organization, and ties are determined in large part by
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