Well, it could be. It could be. I mean, it depends also on what conversation comes first, but if we're looking at building a network outside your organization, if we're thinking at the conversation we were having around men at work and men not feeling comfortable being themselves at work and, yes, not being able to express some of the stuff and how damaging actually that can be that we haven't, the study doesn't go into that, but if you could see it being damaging actually, one of the personal strategies for dealing with something like that, whether you are male or female, is by building a network outside of your organization. So maybe we could talk about that.
Absolutely. It's interesting when I went to a fancy private school for high school, and one of the things that we talked about was the old boys network, this idea of a network. So in my mind growing up, networking was always this idea of someone who could call on to get you a job or they'd grease the wheels for you or something. I didn't feel like I experienced that a lot or that even didn't really want to ask for that or try.
So for me, networking is always a bit of a dirty word from that regard. But once I started to find myself in positions across struggling and isolated, the understanding of a support network, of having a network, basically like friends or acquaintances or colleagues or people outside my organization who I could help, who could help me, where we were of benefit to each other, became really valuable to me. And so network is something that I really love now, but it's quite different to how I previously perceived it. Yeah, I think a lot of people have issues with the word and it just conjures up exactly the scenarios that you're saying about networking as and going out to find clients in person or whatever, rather than building a network, building a space with common threads with people where you can even call it a safety net for some time.
So listeners, welcome, welcome. We're here at the management cafe. We're going to be talking about, well, we've heard networking outside the organization will be here for about 20 or 30 minutes. These are getting longer.
We are stopping them at some point, though, as in we do leave some conversations that we could continue having, but just for coffee time. So my name is Mila Ortean with me today as always is Tim Burgess, my co host. So you're saying you enjoy it? Yes, I, very interesting.
So we're thinking about this, this topic. And I was thinking, wow, I used to network a lot. I never called it networking. I actually built my network precisely through trying to get work, by which I mean, a lot of my network was built by asking people if they knew someone I could pass the way for my services.
Yes, but then I just enjoy talking to them. Like I never called someone up twice, I didn't enjoy talking, even if they could be like a massive client or whatever, like I just can't. So, you know, the two things have been linked, but the benefits of building those networks to try to get work have actually been a lot better and a lot more long lasting, actually, and more fun. Yeah, that's fascinating.
My path's been a little bit different, I guess that when you're founder of a company, you have a certain amount of interaction anyway, like it just comes with a job. You're out there a little bit and stuff gets pushed to you, so you become like the point of interaction for the company. So there's a bit of that happens. But at some point, maybe it was three or four years ago, maybe a bit longer.
I came to a realization actually that helping people make me feel good. I enjoyed it. And that was all I needed to get out of it. And so I thought, you know, someone reaches out to me on LinkedIn or someone sent me a cold email or whatever, I'm going to try and help.
I try and help because I enjoy it. And it's like a little switch that I've fixed inside somewhere. And I go, that's who I am now. I'm the person who wants to give it a go.
And it's happy to maybe invest the time talking to someone just to see what's up with them and see if I can be helpful in some way. That for me was like a form, a big type of form of networking, I guess, in that I, you know, it just dramatically broadened the number of people who I'd come into contact with. And some of those people turned out to be really valuable people for me to, you know, people I really enjoyed knowing and being around. I think what's coming to mind is the fact that depending on where we are in our career and in our lives, we're going to get different things from going out and meeting new people.
And not just meeting new people, of course, because actually for me, networking is a lot about sustaining those relationships. Yeah, I'm not so good at that part. You see, I think it's key. I think that for me has been a real because if I think about like sources of support and stuff, like people from, I went to a very small school.
And so we were quite tight in that school and I've still gone back to my friends from school for all sorts of things. And then at university, I also hang around with quite a small group. I had a small network. And again, in fact, someone, one of my friends there was my first client when I moved into corporate training.
And she's still one of the people that I just have all these conversations with. So it's really interesting. And I've mixed my like my theatre people have also been. But I think that for me, it's been more about sustaining.
Once I meet someone, I actually enjoy keeping that relationship going. That's the other thing. I like that. I like that a lot, which sometimes, you know, with friends as well, as someone you let go because their relationship has run its course or whatever.
But I like that. And one of the, so just one of the things that I did early on when I was networking in the online space. So when it was 2015, 2016, I started to meet lots of people online. And that was great because of course, I never went to many events.
So you don't, so you know, you can meet a few people at an event online. You can meet a lot of people. So what happened with Lisa and I when we were podcasting and we started networking at the same time, we had lots of people that we'd met. But we didn't know where to go and find them because LinkedIn wasn't as much fun.
Twitter hadn't really flown yet. And so we said, oh, let's put everyone in Slack. Let's invite everyone into Slack. And the main and my main aim for that was not to meet new people was acting to keep the people I'd already met and to know where to find them and have access to them.
So yeah, that was interesting that that was something I did. And I'm doing something similar now, but I'm not sure if it's going to work because I went to a course to write a mystery novel and quite a nice group of people there. They were about 12 of us were small, but everyone was really nice and very everyone was a very good writer. Someone put the idea out there or show we stay in touch and I was like, yes, what else did it wasn't me?
And then now I'm trying to keep them as an online community. But I'm struggling because I'm not sure how much I mean, we're talking writers as well as a very different dynamic. So I'm now seeing, okay, how I'm now seeing how do I keep these people that I like together so I have access to them. And I can get this is more of a help community like, I can talk about writing mysteries with.
Yeah, that's that's interesting. You put a lot of thought into this. The keeping it going is is a different based, I think that's I've been lucky in that I've sort of fallen into some communities where that sort of comes with the territory. You know, if you join into a community and that's I guess one of the benefits of that sort of trying to be helpful approaches, generally, if you if you go into a community and you're not trying to get anything out of it, you're just trying to contribute, like people generally nice to you and they have like communities need people who contribute.
So so you get a good role there and you have a purpose for being there. But where I think it goes wrong, and in my mind, I associate this with early career, but maybe it was just my early career experience is that when we feel like we're networking in order to get to a certain outcome, you know, I'm trying to be, you know, I want to network with this person because they work at that company and I think that they might be able to get me such and such. Those, I don't like that sort of transactional networking. I don't find it comfortable and it hasn't worked for me, you know, on the time set up, like way back when I've tried it.
But but it does work for people, like, no question. But what I've found is that where you're meeting people in order to sort of explore shared interest or where, you know, where you're trying to find a way to assist them in some way or support them or help them move forward in reality, what is created there is like you've helped them in some sense, in some psychological sense, then they feel they owe you something doesn't mean you have to call it in or whatever else. But but there's a bond that gets created there. And if you put a whole lot of those bonds out into the world, then then you build like a network of support and going back to what we were talking about at the very beginning, as a manager, as a leader, it's so helpful to be able to talk to people going through the same stuff in a different context.
I've been in a ton of different communities and the really great leadership one, Rand's leadership slack. And there have been times in there where I have been in absolute agony at work with a situation that I can't really talk to anyone at work about because they're in it. And I'm getting in my own way and I you know, can't come ahead, the thought straight, and I'm so caught up in my own emotions and can't get any perspective on it. And being able to go to a group of people who I trust and respect and say, this is what's going on with me, can anyone offer some insight.
And there's such a slack community. And you know, I'd go to sometimes I'd post it like a lot of them are in the US, so I'd post the 10 o'clock at night my time and then I'd wake up the next morning. And there's you know, there's like six or seven responses from people who are at my level, people who are further along with me, people who've seen it in different ways, some of which resonated, some of which cut me to the core, some of which I found really challenging to read, but incredible, incredible insights. And it's hard to get by without that stuff.
It makes the journey a lot easier. And I suppose that, well, what that made me think was that we might not always be needing that support, but it's really good to be nurturing or finding the space where we can get that support when we need it. Because what's really difficult is when you are going through a tricky situation, suddenly you go, who do I talk to? Let me go find someone and then you've got to stop building the relationship.
But to be in a space where you can actually get that support when you need it, it takes a lot of work beforehand, like all relationships. Yeah, it's like a rainy day thing. You're just saving for a rainy day because the rainy day is going to come. But because the other thing here is that often it's just being able to go to somebody and then going, Oh, I know, that's the worst.
Oh, that just sucks. They might not have a solution. But that feeling that you get of not paying a loan, the feeling of companionship is huge. It's huge.
What is it? A burden shared is a burden half or something? Yeah, I'm not sure about that. There's two schools of thought that's saying that sometimes there's three laws coming from it.
Yeah. I'm also thinking that from the point of view, we think about learning and development. I think organizations should have budgets so people get some kind of learning through their own networks and their own ways of looking for stuff because I think that there is one is the peer support in such a way that when we need something we can turn to people outside the organization. But I'm also thinking about being able to look at the world as a wider place, saying how do we get information about what else is going on outside of our organization.
And that's something that I don't know, I don't know. For someone, I am really shy, but for someone who's really shy, I think I did so well, I just ask people to introduce me to people. And that's how I do it. And it's, of course, like I said, it would be great if that person could become a client, but sometimes that's not the main thing.
So I use everyone like I've used my mother introduced me to some people. My mother introduced me to someone who's in charge of civil train civil servant training in the Netherlands. And it was so nice that she took me around the Hague and we did stuff. And I just got to learn what I got to learn what they were doing, what they were training how and I got to learn so much from that.
And I think and I've done that so much. I look back and I go, my God, I used to do that all the time. Just ask for people's time. And that's made me go back to your point.
That's made me now actually, if someone wants something now, I'm there, you know, because I've taken so much time from strangers. Exactly. So we get back. Yeah, yeah.
And similar, similarly, you know, I, I've often done like just blind outreach, you know, on, on LinkedIn or email or whatever. And a lot of it just goes nowhere. You know, but every now and then, every now and then, someone would respond. I do what you were saying before about doing things digitally.
That's actually been really helpful for me on a couple of levels. One is I'm in Australia, which is a very small place globally and isolated. So being able to talk to people through the internet has been massive because there's a much wider pool of people to talk to. But also, if I go to a conference and you put me in a room with a bunch of strangers, I, you know, I will go straight to the wall.
Yeah, we do. And hope the wall and pull my phone out. And you know, I don't like, I don't like introducing myself to people. I don't know if I find it difficult.
But something that I have been able to do here now is like, I'll, I'll go, oh, so who else is going to the conference and I'll try and reach out to them beforehand and say, Oh, hey, you know, you do this. I do that. Maybe it'd be interesting to catch up. And because if I go somewhere where I know three or four people, or I have a reason to talk to three or four people, like it's totally different experience for me.
You know, if I'm warm, I feel very comfortable. And so I've found that technology and online communities and things like Zoom and Donut calls have been really helpful for me because it helps me break that ice, gets me past that point of discomfort and widens that scope. And I think one of the reasons why we're talking about this was I think I'd mentioned, you know, I've been on a Donut call with someone. Yeah.
So I do that in two different communities in RANS and in the running remote one. We used to do it in Shield internally as well. So it's just a, it's just like a bot, a slack bot, you know, some app that you add into Slack that just randomly pairs people up. And it, you know, puts you in a little channel and says, Hey, you too set up a conversation.
And I love it because every week I will talk to a new person and there is every way, well, because between the two of them, you know, I think RANS I do to a four, two a month. So maybe it's three weeks, I have four. So maybe it's not every week. But I bet they're normally there's someone who comes into my office somehow.
So basically every week I'm talking to some totally new person that there's no way in the world I would ever have come into contact with this person, except through through this media, you know, they're in a different country, they're working a different industry, they have a totally different job. And I find those conversations are absolutely fascinating. Like I always get something out of it. What do you say?
What do you do? Well, you get used to it. Yeah. Sometimes it's what normally you do a little bit of googling beforehand.
So there's normally I can find something to talk about. Yeah. But you're already part of that same space. So there's already like a license, it's already a common, yeah, you already have lots of things in common or at least it looks like that.
So that's great. That's what I know the conversation is going badly. If they're like, so how did you join this community? How about you?
That's a good starter. That's a bad conversation. No, but you have to start somewhere. You do have to start somewhere.
If that's all you do. And you're reminding me that KLM, the Dutch airline used to have something where you could, I don't know if you had to be first class or business class or something. And you could see the other people you could choose who to sit next to or something like that. That's like the height of networking.
That was a long time ago. But yeah, yeah. Well, we met in an online community. We did.
We did. And I think that, you know, it's interesting we've come at it from these two different sort of viewpoints, you know, your focus on sustaining those relationships is actually really important. That's something I would love to be better at. And one of the things that I've really appreciated about our friendship is that there've been times where you've created little groups and brought them together.
And that's a really interesting dynamic. You know, there were those conversations we had during COVID, which were coffee around the corner. You're all they were great. That was so good.
That was one thing to be reading the news and going, what's going on in all these different parts of the world and it's totally different to be talking to people in real time about it. Yeah, that was good fun. Yes. No, I love it.
I love it. Yes. And I think the other thing, the other thing, the last thing I was going to say is, you know, for anyone who's listening around the table, I would have a very broad interpretation of what value you get. I'm not going to call it networking from meeting people, new people, and sustaining relationships with them.
You know, where there's some form of like professional connection, you know, even if it's just curiosity or whatever, the value that you get will come at you in various in all sorts of curious ways. Yeah, it's worth it. It's worth the risk. The small, very small, rich, especially if it's online.
And we'd love to hear what else you do. Listen, do you do you deliberately go outside to network or actually maybe your job means that you're meeting people outside your organization all the time. So what do you do with those relationships? Do you value them?
Do you nurture them or just part of your job? We'd love to hear from you. The email is managementcafepodcast at gmail.com or managementcafepodcast.com for the contact form. So coffee is over for us.
Now it's over to you.