Weaving your Work Web

While I generally find seminars and classroom training programs a drab affair, I recently attended a 3 day training program where a few concepts were implementable. The trainer spoke about the complexity of the informal organization and how important it is to build your own network inside as well as outside your organization.

While this might sound obvious, its easier said than done. And the more difficult part is to track and understand how big and strong your network is. Adapted from “How to Manage” by Jo Owen, there are certain role definitions for each member in your network. Classify your contacts as follws:

Informers – Sources of vital information, trends and developments. They know what is going on, so you ought to have as many as possible.

Connectors – Open doors and connect you to others. These are people who know people. These may come from your business as well as social network.

Sponsors – People with power and influence and can be relied upon for support when required. Essential for leverage.

Promoters – are your supporters and increase your visibility by advertising your strengths

Advisors – provide guidance and feedback on your development plans (both business as well as personal).

Experts – People with specialist expertise to complement your own and can provide argument in your own area. These can also be useful when you need to get buy in from groups with a specialist background different from yours.

The classification is not as easy as I thought it was and found that there was a lot of overlap in terms of one person falling in more than one classification. However, try and keep away from one person appearing more than once.

Use the following circle to understand your own web network. This will give you an idea of who are the people you hang out with and where all you need to develop in terms of making a more intricate web of people.

We will need 3 different colored pens :

- Put your name in the centre of the circle
- Use a red line for someone who is not very critical in your web ending with the name of the person
- Use an amber line for someone who is critical to your web ending with the name of the person
- Use a green line for someone who is extremely critical to your web ending with the name of the person
- The length of the line denotes the strength of the relation you share. A name close to the circle denotes a close relation.

Once you are through with this exercise, your web might look something like this. I have omitted the names for clarity and put an initial as an example:

This gives us a clear idea of the following:

- The uniqueness of our network and the areas where we need our network to develop
- Which are the relationships that we need to work upon and are essential for our long term success
- The relationships that we take for granted and understand their criticality in our success.

Your network can be reviewed every 6 months and updated to see what progress you have made in developing your own work-wide web.

For me, my first insight was that I hardly had anyone in the Advisors box. And I have started to work on developing some of them for myself. And I also made a few calls to rejig my old boys’ network…:D