Our final post on professional relationships will be about your network. These are all the people you know but rarely interact with. 

Why have a network?

There are two key reasons for expanding your network: 

1. Being able to build great multidisciplinary teams and getting invited into other people’s teams.
2. Early access to great opportunities and key information shared by people in your network. 

Growing your network to (and beyond) the point where these two features start working for you is a great investment. 

Old-school networking

The world needs great teams, but many of the best potential team members are poor networkers unlikely to ever find each other.

Thus, if you’re a social butterfly, there are many people who could really use your networking skills. In fact, networking could become your superpower. 

I’m no expert on this topic. But I do know this: good networking events are relatively infrequent and expensive, so it makes a lot of sense to learn to use them properly. Here’s a nice place to start. 

Luckily for those who dislike old-school networking, there are plenty of other options. 

For those who don’t like networking

If you don’t like crowds and small-talk, rather focus on building a couple of high-quality relationships with highly connected people.

Naturally, this should be a win-win relationship, so you need to ensure you can give something in return for the other person’s networking capability. 

There is also another attractive option:

Online professional communities

Many options are available for different professions. Find yours and patiently build up your online presence. 

It’s essential that this community can form part of your online track record.

A good online professional community will offer ways to share and archive your work. The ability to quantify the impact of your work (e.g. how many other people have viewed it) is also very useful. 

Just don’t spread yourself too thin. While writing this, I’m realizing that the five different online communities I actively contribute to might be a bit too much. 

This also brings us back to the old saying: quality over quantity. Even though the world (and your ego) will often push you toward maximizing quantity, this is a bad strategy. 

Find your place

There is a type of networking out there for everyone, even for those of us who hate networking.

Find yours and do your best to consistently give more than you take. You never know what opportunities it may bring!