Networking Should Never Be Forced

This post originally appeared on the Forbes website on April 17, 2013 and was co-authored with Lisa Chau.

To many professionals, networking seems like a painful chore. When marketing and PR professional Lisa Chau’s TED-Ed lesson Networking for the Networking Averse went live, it garnered over 15,000 views during its first week. One viewer’s follow-up question was emblematic: “Do you have a hint how I can force myself to keep networks up? Not every network partner is a good friend I would regularly contact on my own.”

Here are four quick ways to make networking more gratifying – and successful.

Change your mindset. Sorry – if you approach networking as a forced chore, you’ll sabotage your efforts.  People will be able to sense your negativity, and hesitate to help you.  Don’t ruin your chances of connection because you have the wrong attitude. Instead, think of networking as an opportunity to meet people you’ll want to talk to and learn from professionally. And don’t overwhelm yourself by thinking you need to contact everyone in your network all the time; it’s about focus.

Start slow. Choose only three people to start your networking with at first (over time, you can add more). Two should be in your current or desired industry – people you admire whom you think would be receptive to you. Don’t get discouraged; this step may take a while because people are busy and not always available for expanding their list of acquaintances. Just keep trying (you can send periodic invitations for lunch or to join you at industry events) and be patient. The third person you focus on should ideally be a “bridging” connection – someone in a different, possibly unrelated industry that’s doing something you find interesting. You never know when a fresh perspective or social network could be valuable. And a genuine friendship outside of your industry can indirectly lead to fruitful outcomes.  Sometimes it’s good to let life organically develop.

Build a schedule – but stay flexible. Schedule a regular time to check in with your network. Maybe you want to contact your three people at the start of every month, or you might prefer to talk to one person per week. Do what’s most comfortable for you – and recognize that people’s priorities, schedules and circumstances change. As you expand your network over time, you may discover that the group you keep in close touch with this year may look very different two years from now. Allow people to fluidly move in and out of your core group, but don’t lose sight of them. Maybe someone you contact on a monthly basis becomes someone you contact once every three months; that’s OK and normal. The key is staying in close enough touch so that they don’t forget you.

Add value. Networking should never be all about the value you can extract from others. You should ask how you can contribute to their lives. When Lisa was traveling to Hong Kong for business in February 2011, she used aSmallWorld.net’s GeoLocator to connect with Pierre-André Montjovet, currently the Strategic Development Director for People Care. She didn’t have a specific reason to meet him beyond the fact that their trips overlapped. They shared a dinner and have kept in touch via email in the two years since. Lisa recently tapped him to contribute a quote to an article she was writing about the evolution of relationships in the digital age.

Lisa and Pierre-André’s story is a perfect example of the power of networking, as it didn’t start out with a specific, calculated intention (“I’m going to meet him so I can get a job at his company”). Instead, she embraced serendipity in connecting with him in a foreign city, and let the conversation play out, to see what they had in common and could learn from each other. They kept in touch casually – not enough to be a burden, but just enough to stay on each other’s radar. And when she had the opportunity, she did him a good turn, quoting him in a media article (and now sharing their story here).

Networking should never be a “forced,” painful activity. Approaching it with the right perspective – as a low-pressure way to connect with interesting people – can yield unexpected and gratifying results.

Co-authored with Lisa Chau at Dartmouth College. Lisa has written about professional development, social media and leadership for U.S. News, Huffington Post and Forbes.

Dorie Clark is CEO of Clark Strategic Communications and the author of the forthcoming Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). She is a strategy consultant who has worked with clients including Google, Yale University, and the Ford Foundation. Listen to her podcasts or follow her on Twitter.

Do Male Leaders Need to Think More Like Women?

This post originally appeared on the Forbes website on April 15, 2013.

The world is getting sick of male – or least “masculine” – leadership, according to a survey of 64,000 people in 13 countries that underpins the new book The Athena Doctrine: How Women (and the Men Who Think Like Them) Will Rule the World. As authors John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio discovered, 66% of adults agreed that “the world would be a better place if men thought more like women” – including 63% of men worldwide and an astounding 79% of Japanese males. Yet men, of course, continue to dominate corporate leadership and power structures.

That disconnect, Gerzema told me during an interview last month at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference, is a potential source of competitive advantage for companies that take heed. “Most companies are still very masculine in their approach – very rigid,” he says. “But feminine values are the operating system of 21^st century progress.” So what are ‘feminine values’?

Gerzema and D’Antonio’s study showed a strong public preference for selflessness, empathy, and loyalty in their leaders – traits that respondents identified as feminine. Meanwhile, aggression and independence (which respondents coded as masculine) were leadership turn-offs. “People want leaders that care more about others than themselves,” says Gerzema. “Having leaders who have a lack of capacity to relate to others is such a dangerous thing in today’s social world. You want people who are leading because they want to change something, rather than because they want to ‘be somebody.’”

Embracing feminine values in leadership doesn’t mean being weak, Gerzema notes. He and D’Antonio did in-depth interviews with 80 successful leaders, both male and female, who exhibited a balance of masculine and feminine styles. “They were tough and fierce,” he says. “They don’t say, ‘I’m a feminine leader,’ but their actions showed respect [for others], collaboration, and compromise, and they did it with vision and drive.”

But just as 1980s fashion encouraged women to dress like men, replete with shoulder pads, today’s business environment often rewards masculine thinking. “In the corporate workplace, women are conditioned to think that the way they think isn’t valued as highly,” says Gerzema. “But it’s men that have got to adapt to a world that’s far more feminine, social, and collaborative. Feminine values are a form of innovation. If men start to champion the essential skills we saw the innovators [we interviewed] practice, it’ll drive profits and get better results.”

Do you agree that a dose of feminine values would enhance corporate life – and the bottom line? How is your company adapting?

Dorie Clark is CEO of Clark Strategic Communications and the author of the forthcoming Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). She is a strategy consultant who has worked with clients including Google, Yale University, and the Ford Foundation. Listen to her podcasts or follow her on Twitter.

Grad School May Not Be the Best Way to Spend $100,000

This post originally appeared on the Harvard Business Review website on April 15, 2013.

Over the past decade, I’ve taught hundreds of executive education, MBA, and undergraduate students at half a dozen top universities. To put it mildly, I’m a believer in the importance of higher education and graduate studies. But I’m also concerned that some executives view grad school as a panacea — a universally applicable fallback and a sure-fire ticket to promotion, the way teachers still get a union-mandated pay raise if they get their master’s degree.

In a world where the value of even a college education is coming under increased scrutiny (see Andrew McAfee’s recent HBR post, Michael Ellsberg’s book The Education of Millionaires, and entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s controversial fellowship that pays a cadre of teenage overachievers to skip college), it’s worth asking: what about grad school?

There are obvious cases where a graduate degree is mandatory; you’re not going to get very far as a doctor or lawyer if you haven’t done the requisite schooling. But what about everyone else? I often get inquiries from executives looking for advice about whether they should go back. Would an MBA, a JD, a doctorate in organizational psychology, or a journalism degree give them that extra edge? Often, the answer is no. There are a lot of things you could do with $100,000, and going to school because you aren’t sure what to do with yourself, or because of received wisdom that an extra degree is always helpful, could be a colossally misguided move.

If you’re taking the plunge, it’s essential to think through how the graduate experience will benefit you, and know in advance what you hope to get out of it. Joel Gagne, an executive I profile in my book, Reinventing You, completed all the courses for a master of arts in government. But in the midst of running a company, a couple of cross-country moves, and a new baby, completing his master’s thesis just didn’t make the priority list. “I don’t want to say those classes were worthless, because they weren’t,” he says. “There were one or two nuggets. But as far as directly affecting my professional life, graduate work has not had the type of impact necessary or given me the business skill set I need.” Instead, he’s found more success taking targeted classes, on subjects like business writing and goal-setting, that speak directly to his needs.

If you’re doing a graduate program just to get the degree on your wall, or if only a handful of classes excite you, it’s far better (and cheaper) to take adult ed or extension school classes. Here are a few other reasons why you shouldn’t go back:

Because you aren’t sure what you want to do with your life. Yes, it’s a better alternative than moping around if you’re unemployed. But it’s also expensive — and that means you need to treat it like an investment, which means you’ve done your research and really thought about how you can extract the most learning and value from it. If you’re not even sure what your ultimate goal is, you’re wasting your time and money. Go travel instead, or start a blog, or keep doing informational interviews until you get clarity.

Because your career is stalled. It’s the script we’ve all heard from our parents: education is the answer! But let’s be clear: you won’t be promoted because you have a graduate degree. You may get promoted because of what you learned in graduate school and how you apply it at work, which is very different — and unfortunately requires a lot more insight and effort.

Because you got in somewhere. There are great professors at many universities, and you can undoubtedly learn a tremendous amount from them. But the reality is that if you’re going to make a six-figure investment, you should demand even more value — and that comes in the form of a powerful alumni network. A while back, an ambitious young man named Scott contacted me for advice; he had been a junior staffer at an organization where I consulted. He’d applied to business school and now had a choice between a small state school where he could easily afford the tuition, or a “name brand” MBA program with a storied history, but an expensive price tag. What should he do? I’m no fan of debt, but the answer was obvious. If he was going purely for personal edification, he could probably get a wonderful education at the cheaper school. But if he was going so he could take his career to the next level, it was worth investing: a marquee name on your degree and connections to the nation’s powerbrokers are worth it.

The truth is, graduate school isn’t for everyone. It’s simply too expensive, and requires too much time and effort, to take a “why not?” attitude. It can be exactly the leverage you need if you’re an ambitious, thoughtful learner who knows what you want out of the experience. But if you’re thinking about going because you aren’t sure about your direction, or because your career isn’t advancing the way you’d like, it’s important to realize: a master’s degree isn’t a magic pill that will solve all problems. It’s more like a targeted therapy: it works hard (and gets results) when you do.

Dorie Clark is CEO of Clark Strategic Communications and the author of the forthcoming Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). She is a strategy consultant who has worked with clients including Google, Yale University, and the Ford Foundation. Listen to her podcasts or follow her on Twitter.