Networking summons up images of mingling over canapés and awkwardly exchanging business cards with strangers. It is a chore most people approach unwillingly and many actively avoid.
“There is quite a lot of nervousness about [networking], especially among the British,” says Zella King, an executive coach and author. “Partly it’s because people don’t want to appear to be self-serving or manipulative.”
King, an executive fellow at Henley Business School, compares the British to Americans, who are much more willing to approach strangers, introduce themselves and launch into conversation. “They are perhaps a bit more driven by a belief that everyone is ultimately there for themselves and have a more self-reliant mentality.”
A reserved Brit herself, King says she dislikes the part of networking that involves peering over someone’s shoulder to see if there is anyone more useful in the room. In Who is in your personal boardroom?, she and her co-author, executive coach Amanda Scott propose an alternative approach, which encourages people to focus on a few key relationships instead.
“I felt too much focus on ‘networking’ with new connections distracts people from investing in close, purposeful relationships with people on their doorstep,” she says. It is these few, key relationships that King says we must nurture, building what she calls a personal boardroom.
In the book, King and Scott lay out the steps to building a strong and strategic personal boardroom, made up of the individuals that can most help someone succeed in their career.
The first step involves identifying six to twelve individuals, she says. These could be friends, acquaintances, colleagues and other work contacts, or even people you barely know. Then it is a case of assigning these people roles. King and Scott split the roles into three groups related to information, power and development.
One example is the “navigator”, described in the book as “someone who can tell you who you need to know, who does what and how things work”.
Another is the “challenger” who challenges your decisions and helps you see your errors and blind spots.
It is not enough to simply assign these roles in your head. King says you must then go and have conversations with these people “with purpose”. “What we mean by ‘with purpose’ is that you approach people with a particular role in mind.”
She says asking people to engage in a specific role tends to work better than asking them to be your mentor. “People get spooked by open-ended requests, when they don’t know what they are being asked, the support that is being asked of them.”
Cynics will say that the “personal boardroom” is just a new label for something people have been doing for years. King argues that viewing your network in this way provides structure that people can use to understand the range of resources and the different roles they need among their sponsors.
“What we find is people tend to overemphasise one type of role over the others. So they can be really good at gathering information, but not so good at getting access to people who are influential; or they will be really good at working with influential people but don’t pay attention to development and how to get better at what they do.”
The personal boardroom, she says, creates a framework to think about how to balance the entirety of your network to get the full range of help and support that you need.
This is a crucial but often neglected part of building a career, King says. “No one loses sleep over their network but you might lose sleep over the fact that you’re not paid enough, or your boss is an arsehole, or you want to do something different with your life. Your network could be an answer to any of those things, but it’s not the network that keeps people awake at night.”
King has a corporate background, having worked as a consultant at Accenture and an investment banker at Schroders, before quitting to do a PhD in occupational psychology. This led her to a career in academia.
It is her new business, however, that occupies most of her time these days. As well as the book, King and Scott have launched a consultancy to work with businesses to help their leaders develop constructive networks. Personal Boardroom has so far worked primarily with executives in companies ranging from Emap to Hertz.
But King says it is an approach that will work for anyone with an interest in furthering their career. “The group for whom it could be especially useful is those in the early stages of their career, when you are encountering the reality of how organisations work.”
She warns that you do need a degree of maturity to understand how relationships work in business to make the most of it. “There’s a balance to be struck between being really good at what you do, and making other people aware of that, and soliciting help from other people.”
It is an approach that will appeal to introverts and other career-minded people who balk at the self-promotion increasingly required in business. By carefully building a small support network, people can remove the feeling they must attend mass networking events to “put themselves out there”.
But it does not get over the discomfort many have with networking; that you are simply making and nurturing connections to further your career. King accepts this but says she does try to emphasise the need to help others in their career progression.
“It doesn’t take away the idea that you are using other people for your own gains, what it does do is to locate that in a bigger picture of each of us helping each other,” she says. “And we try to convey the idea that people can be part of a community, offering help to people around them.”
It will not always be possible to reciprocate directly with help to those who agree to be in your personal boardroom, she says, but rather we should “pay it forward”.
Most of us do not recognise the value we have to offer others, King says, which is part of the reason we are so unwilling to engage successfully in networking. “By thinking of it as a one way street, where it’s all about take, take, take, we feel awkward.”
Again we come back to that peculiarly British trait: a feeling of awkwardness impeding our careers. Happily King does not ask us to give it up, but instead offers ways to work around it.
Sign up to become a member of the Guardian Small Business Network here for more advice, insight and best practice direct to your inbox.
