How do you set and achieve your networking and mentoring goals and expectations?

This speaks to one’s emotional intelligence—being self-aware, understanding the needs and concerns of others, and articulating your vision for win-win results and relationships. Simply writing these thoughts down and sorting them by long-term/short-term or high impact/low impact will help one accelerate this process.

Networking should be a give and take relationship. Learning happens when everyone offers a perspective. When networking, think about not only what you need, but also what you can offer. Some of the best ideas can be sparked through collaboration and thought partnership.

Identifying your goals will be helpful as you begin to connect with other individuals. It is possible to have a large network of acquaintances with informal connections while building fostering relationships for mentoring purposes. Both groups can exist simultaneously. Knowing your goals will help you determine your connection with others. Do not discount an informal acquaintance as I have found them to be valuable resources from time to time

As a new employee, it can be helpful to ask your immediate colleagues for their recommended lists of key organizational stakeholders, to use as guides for building your network of connections.

Some industry leaders joke around and say there are 1.3 degrees of separation from anyone in healthcare leadership. This may be true in some cases. Healthcare is a large, but small industry…particularly for healthcare management professionals. LinkedIn is a great resource to research and follow up with professionals. You will most likely have a mutual connection or interest, which are building blocks to developing trusting relationships.

Much of medicine today, just like most other fields, is about having the right, accurate, and specific information at the right time. It allows physicians to make the best decisions for patients and enter the right orders into patients' chart. Given this, it is essential and extremely helpful that your contacts be in your particular medical speciality / subspecialty and ideally have a good deal of practical and real-world experience in that specialty. It's a guarantee you will come across situtions and cases where you will need help and outside perspectives. Even physicians do this, call in the help and perspectives of other physicians on difficult and complex cases. This is best-practice in practice. Build your knowledge network.

One thing I've found helpful in face-to-face conversations, is to acknowledge and emphasize the significance of body language and eye contact. Demonstrating attentiveness to non-verbal cues and maintaining proper spatial awareness are essential aspects to consider during networking interactions. By being mindful of your gestures and respecting others' personal boundaries, we can establish a conducive environment for effective communication. Moreover, establishing and sustaining eye contact for a brief but meaningful duration throughout conversations fosters a sense of connection and conveys a genuine interest in the exchange of ideas.

A mentor-mentee relationship is like any other connection that is a priority in your life: it needs transparency, respect, and most importantly time. Time is one aspect we are all limited to, and can never get back. To make the most of your mentor-mentee meetings, be prepared with agenda topics and share with your mentor prior to meeting. This will give your mentor time to give thought to the topics. As well, both parties should be engaged in all exchanges. If your meetings are virtual, be present in the moment to have engaging conversation. Otherwise, the meetings are half-hearted and can be sensed by the other party that the meetings are not helpful, and may end with mentorship/menteeship concluding on poor terms.

Building your network and the natural evolution in our careers to mentor others is something that is not always intuitive to every employee, yet a network is built on support, trust and accountability in everything we do. Mentorships can be formal or informal and often, some of the best and strongest mentors are those within our teams who have a strong grasp of the current culture, mission and goals that always encourage and support others which creates employee retention and satisfaction. From my experience, in order to build strong and lasting networks, you must be willing to contribute as much to others as you ask of them in return. Checking in during meetings or offline recognition of promotions, birthdays, etc. goes a long way.

In my experience, finding a point of connection that can sustain moments of silence between conversations. This has helped to get back into communication with acquaintances after being’ busy’ or ‘ away.’ In order to connect successfully, being transparent about I am in a process creates a healthy boundary for myself and gives others room to adjust their expectations. So that getting back in touch does not destabilize me mentally or emotionally.