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2013-11-20 13:15:42
Chana R Schoenberger
Ambitious career women are working harder than ever to reach top jobs but
getting ahead these days means rethinking how they network and carefully
crafting their group of contacts.
The power of networking is a lesson women executives have learned from their
male counterparts. Networking is enormously important, said Sallie Krawcheck,
the former head of Global Wealth and Investment Management for Bank of America
and former chief financial officer of Citigroup. She recently bought the global
women s network 85 Broads. Women tend to recognize this later than guys do.
Experts have long believed that men and women network differently, which can
have an impact on their career progression. And academic studies have found
that one crucial difference between how women and men manage their careers is
how they form their professional networks.
Men s networks are widely dispersed, while women tend to form their
professional networks in the same way that they form personal networks, said
Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski, vice president of global academic and research
relations for academic publisher Elsevier BV.
In turn, women s tighter networks are built for personal support, but they
often lack the wide reach of men s networks. Women s networks also are
typically based on trust and first-degree knowledge, with contacts including
old friends, former colleagues and other mothers from their children s schools.
Often, many people within a woman s network know one another, she said.
That insularity can stop women from extending their reach outside the people
they already know and also reduces the number of people who can attest to the
quality of a woman s work performance. That presents problems for women who
want to expand their profile beyond their current job or company.
But more and more, savvy women executives are recognising this and learning the
male-specific nuances of networking, allocating time to meet new people, and
looking up from their daily responsibilities to take advantage of formal
networks set up on their behalf.
Expanding the spider web
Networks are most useful when they re large and involve many people who don t
know one another, Krawcheck said. If everyone in your network already knows
everyone else you know, your ability to hear about new jobs or ventures is
limited.
A business opportunity is more likely to come from a loose connection than a
tight connection, Krawcheck said.
Her own rules for getting ahead: each month, deepen a connection with someone,
and try to add a new person to your network. Those people should be at all
levels, both junior and senior to you. Ignore the conventional wisdom that only
people above you in the corporate hierarchy can be useful.
And maintain contact with friends, former colleagues, and others in your field
but outside your company. Those people can provide a welcome outsider s
perspective on what s going on in your own workplace, Krawcheck said.
The old model of networking for short-term gain to help you find that next
job, for instance can yield immediate financial returns, but there s a new
model that will pay off in the long run, said British networking expert Julia
Hobsbawm, whose London-based company, Editorial Intelligence, holds
conferences, salons, and other events to introduce interesting people to one
another.
Stop trying to leverage [people] and start trying to learn from them, said
Hobsbawm. You lose the certainty of the sales-based network, but you gain more
meaningfully from apparently tangential connections.
What more and more women executives are realising is that formal networking, of
the sort that both Hobsbawm s and Krawcheck s companies offer, is an important
counterpart to organic networking, which feels more natural to many people, say
experts. It s easier to form a human connection with someone on your team at
work than with a person you met at an industry reception, but that more distant
person might be good to know as well.
Chantal Glenisson, Sallie Krawcheck, Julia Hobsbawm.
Chantal Glenisson, Sallie Krawcheck, Julia Hobsbawm.
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85 Broads, the group Krawcheck bought, started out as a group of women who
worked for global investment bank Goldman Sachs and has expanded to include
women who are graduates of leading colleges, universities and graduate schools
worldwide. Its 37 regional chapters host events and speaker panels and student
members organise women's networking programmes on university campuses.
In academia, where Falk-Krzesinski spent the past two decades as a biology
professor before leaving Northwestern University in Chicago for Elsevier a year
ago, this matters a lot, for people who can write letters of recommendation
for promotion and tenure and who can say this person is the best in the field.
Male academics are more brash about approaching senior professors at
conferences and within a university and tend to know far-flung professional
counterparts more than women do. This means they often have an easier time
finding recommenders, which translates into better chances at new jobs and
tenure, Falk-Krzesinski said.
To combat this problem, Elsevier is now working on an online network for women
in the science, technology, engineering and math departments at four
Chicago-area institutions: Northwestern, the University of Chicago, Argonne
National Laboratory and Fermilab. The network includes profiles of each of the
female researchers along with details of their published research, and shows
how they are connected to one another by mapping their research collaborations.
The goal is to help women researchers find one another and make new connections
in their field.
My LinkedIn network tells you who I know, but it doesn t tell you how I know
them or how well I know them, Falk-Krzesinski said.
Elsevier is adding entries for patents the women researchers hold and grant
funding they ve been awarded to the profiles, and the company is in talks to
extend the project to the University of Illinois, she said.
Looking beyond the day-to-day
While these types of formal networks are taking hold in several fields,
including medicine and science, women executives are often too busy to take
advantage of them.
Oftentimes women are very focused on succeeding in their current job and
getting their job done well, but they may not think about who s going to open
doors for me to that next opportunity, said Elissa Ellis Sangster, Executive
Director of the Fort Foundation, a nonprofit organisation in Austin, Texas,
which encourages women to pursue business careers.
Fort , which has awarded some $45 million in scholarships to women to get MBA
degrees over the last 10 years, runs conferences and networking events for
young women, in conjunction with the 30 large companies that are its partners,
including Bank of America, IBM, and Intel.
The lessons Fort events try to instil in its 50,000 members: Personal
branding, storytelling, being bold and confident about those opportunities to
network, Sangster said. It s all about how networking advances your career .