You’ve just been promoted to project leadership. How do you keep your professional network strong?

As a professional project manager, the connection with your former peers is not just about maintaining friendships; it's an invaluable resource for potential collaboration, mentorship, and referrals. These are the people who understand your strengths, challenges, and aspirations. Keeping in touch ensures a continuous exchange of valuable feedback, advice, and support. Don't let your new role be a reason to lose touch; prioritize regular catch-ups to share insights, challenges, and seek opinions. Consider inviting them to collaborate on your current or upcoming projects, or even recommending them for other opportunities. The relationships you build can go beyond friendship—they can be key to professional growth and success

As a professional project manager, staying connected with your former peers and actively expanding your network within your organization is not just beneficial; it's a career-enhancing strategy. In your role as a project leader, you have the unique opportunity to collaborate with diverse teams, various departments, and stakeholders within the organization. Seize this chance to broaden your network and glean insights from a spectrum of perspectives and experiences. Proactively reach out to individuals engaged or interested in your projects, introducing yourself, sharing your goals, and seeking their input. Foster strong relationships by being respectful, and collaborative, and acknowledging the contributions of your colleagues.

It is a) vital and b) necessary to continuesly boster your network within the organisation. It makes your life easier when due dates are hitting to know where to go, who to ask. This also goes the other way around. The people you depend on will work more efficiently if they know you instead of you only approaching them when you need something. Put yourself out there. It is like marketing, you dont have an instant ROI but for you create awareness for yourself, your projects and in the end will succeed.

Staying humble in general is a personality trait that I admire and that I expect from myself. Staying humble inevitably contains exercises like sharing and learning. Both are fundamentals of reminding yourself that life is a journey and that you are not done. Neither are your peers. Sharing your learnings is of great help for friends and colleagues. Respecting and listening to your peers' learnings in turn offers the opportunity to not making the same mistakes. If our fellow students, colleagues, friends or partners are showing you what their experiences are, appreciate it. Their opening to sharing their learnings, mistakes and successes are real-life advice and an invitation for you to do it better than they did. What a gift that is!

Points to addd the part of feelings and compassion in cultivating veritable collaboration. It emphasizes moving past shallow associations to center on engagement and common development openings. Inner cross-functional collaboration is prioritized over outside engagement for upgrading development and information sharing. extend administration includes more than fair inspiration, requiring proficient arrangement and struggle determination aptitudes. Persistent learning is supported all through the venture lifecycle for adjustment and optimization. Leveraging different points of view and collective bits of knowledge is esteemed for driving significant alter and cultivating a community-driven approach to proficient advancement?.

Besides staying humble, this is the most important thing. Authenticity and being genuine is going to be the traits that determine your long-term success. People will find out if you are genuine, and they will base their actions on that. Even if they dont actively know that they are. They will protect themselves if you are ingenuine, but they will go out of their way to support you if you are a genuine person. Being genuine is more or less the default of being authentic at the end of the day. With all the fakes and AI, people admire and value authentic and genuine actions. It goes a long way, trust me.

In my experience, a project leader should do two things to maintain a strong network. First, establish a strong network of internal and external peers for support in your new role. Second, establish a network of leadership support with a mentor, coach and /or sponsor to help provide guidance, support and coaching to help create a 90 day plan with goals, objectives, and vision to measure and gauge progress and improvements for growth and reflection. Project leaders should look for ways to engage inside and outside their organization to help shape their leadership journey.