The Challenges of Networking as an Executive

I’m always on the lookout for articles about networking. Here are a few snippets:

Look online at any of the thousands of articles available on the challenges of networking for a job, and you’ll find that 100% of them give advice on how relatively junior professionals can network “up.”

But surprisingly little advice is available for senior executives, who experience a different but equally challenging set of networking hurdles. That’s a problem, because knowing how to reap networking’s full benefits is crucial for people at the top of the pyramid, especially a time when CEO turnover is at a record high.

In this article, we’ll identify common hurdles that they often struggle with when it comes to career networking, and we’ll provide some guidance on how to get over them.

1) Reluctance to ask for help

Networking for a next role means asking for help. Research in social psychology shows that people with high status are more apt to feel pressure to maintain an image of strength and competence and to value self-reliance, all of which can make them reluctant to seek assistance. They fear rejection and worry that asking for help might expose perceived weaknesses, potentially undermining their status, position, or reputation. This is ego-driven reluctance, and we see it frequently. As one of Herminia’s students put it, “I give help — I don’t ask for it.”

One way around this tendency, which is a natural one, is to start your networking process by reaching out to lower-risk (and lower-yield) contacts — ideally, executives who you know well, who have done their own networking, and who can share not only how they approached others for help but also what they got out of asking for it.

You can probably do this with more people than you realise: As the Stanford social psychologist Xuan Zhao has found, people regularly underestimate others’ willingness to help, because they don’t realise how happy it makes those others to do so. Low-risk warm-ups and rehearsal practice — what Spish calls “hearing the dreaded words come out of your mouth” — will help you fine-tune your message, defuse your emotions, and experience success. And having a few positive experiences under your belt will make your later, more-challenging calls and emails easier.

2) ?Prioritising secrecy

The more senior an executive, the more likely they are to want secrecy, especially if they’ve been laid off. One of Spish’s clients, for example, asked: “How do I go out into the market without letting the market know that I’m looking? I’d like to reach out to people, but I don’t want them to know that I’m interested in looking.”

Such worries limit your exposure to others, which is a problem in its own right. But they also force you to be secretive as you work on networking and career change — a process, according to Herminia’s research, that often takes far longer than people expect. That burden of secrecy, carried for a long time, can exact a significant psychological toll.

Limiting your exposure to others can be especially pernicious when it keeps you from stepping back and exploring broadly what you would really like to do next. And try as you might, you won’t fool people by obfuscating. At senior levels, it’s a small world: The people you talk to can figure out what you’re up to, perhaps by making a call to a source in their own network, or perhaps just by doing a search online. If you do succeed in concealing your story, it’s likely to tax your nerves and cost you a lot of energy to get the same result that just speaking honestly and directly would have gotten you. With rare exceptions, honesty is the best policy.

3) ?Unrealistic expectations

Because they’re reluctant to ask for help and don’t want word to get out that they are in the market for a new role, senior executives typically want to get their networking done fast. Or they simply assume that because they’re senior, the process won’t take very long. Unfortunately, the more senior you are, the more time you’re likely to need to find and align on the right fit. In Spish’s experience, the shortest possible search is about three months, and the longer ones can take as much as 18 months.

Not only does effective networking take a long time, it also involves a great deal of work, stamina, efficiency, and patience. There are three primary reasons for this.

First, as both of us have found, only a small percentage of people looking for their next role know exactly which handful of companies they’d like to work for. Because they don’t know enough about the market or what they really want to be able to come up with a targeted search, they have to start with research and very general exploratory networking. That all takes time.

Want to know more? Head on over to the full article here for more ideas and perspectives. Afterwards, why not drop me an email to share your thoughts at [email protected] ; or call me on 0467 749 378.

Thanks,

Robert